Ding Dong

Posted: April 12, 2013 in Uncategorized
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Originally posted January 2012 as part of my Eastern Daily Press column reviewing the Oscar nominations:

iron_lady_ver7-325Which takes us neatly to The Iron Lady.

Don’t ask why I went. Perhaps we all have to face our demons. This is one film I sincerely hope doesn’t win a thing. Not that, subject apart, it’s a particularly bad film; just that it would be a shame for Thatcher to be celebrated in any way at all. I’ve got my own definition of the hagiopic (the biography of a saint, venerated, or divine figure) genre being claimed for this biography of the Blessed Margaret.

The Iron Lady has been criticised for spending too much time on the demented one in her luxurious Belgravia bolt hole and not enough on the history of her terrible reign.

Sure, the film errs towards venerating the victor of great British battles with bolshie bin men, militant miners, dying hunger strikers and arrogant Argies.

That said, briefly glimpsed re-enactments of her nation-dividing, chav-creating, war-mongering fanaticism were plenty enough to remind anyone with a modicum of humanity of her destructive 11 years atop the greasy political pole.

From its milk-snatching opening to poll tax and power protests and the cowardly death blows dealt the Belgrano my only wish was for the soaring soundtrack to switch to the Ding Dong Wicked Witch song from The Wizard of Oz.

Talking of which, I hear some of her fans are calling for a state funeral when her time comes. A Viking funeral to warm her up for where she’s going would be more appropriate.

Where there is discord let us bring harmony be buggered.

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2012

Why gissa job won’t get you one

Posted: February 7, 2013 in Society
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It’s 35 years since I first walked innocently into the maelstrom of opinions that surround regional dialects and accents in these parts. A colleague from Norfolk – let’s call him John – was the newly elected chairman of the East Anglian branch of a national editorial association to which I belonged, a role he saw as an opportunity to spread broad Norfolk wherever he went. Roger, another colleague, but from Essex in the outer reaches of greater East Anglia, was his vice chairman, an upwardly mobile estuary English sort of a man.

Roger didn’t have much time for John, being particularly critical of what he regarded as the intellectual denigration of the region every time – which was often – John Boy laid on his strongly accented dialect with a trowel when contributing the East Anglian perspective to any given national debate.

“The last thing our under-represented backwater of a region needs is the village idiot offering up retrograde opinions, jabbering in a language no-one can understand and leaving the impression that we’re all like that,” just about summed up Roger’s rather harsh judgment.

I warrant that the natural reaction around here – or maybe around anywhere – will be to empathise with John Boy. There he was, single handedly holding back a rising tide of homogeneity, thus endearing himself to the hundreds or maybe thousands of you who worship all things traditionally Norfolk, laud those who champion them and argue like billio – as dozens of you have done with incomprehensible passion in the lively correspondence adorning the EDP’s letters pages – about whether it’s boy, boh, bor or old partner.

But for the sake of balance, should we not consider Roger’s viewpoint?

You see, regional dialects and accents (and yes, I know there’s another argument to be had about differentiating the two but let’s not get into semantics) are a bit yesterday aren’t they? Curiosities that, their preservationist fans contend, add colour and glorious diversity where there would otherwise exist only similitude.

Or, I’ll contend, a barrier that is often deliberately applied to encourage insularity and exclude outsiders. Who, after all, hasn’t heard the apocryphal story of the Welsh corner shop wherein all the customers are happily gossiping in English until an Englishman enters, upon which the shoppers instantly revert to their native Welsh.

Despite what sometimes seems an almost universal love of nostalgia, the day of regional dialects is largely done. They continue to exist only as leftovers of isolation and all that is in the long term unsustainable about limited horizons and a geographically restricted gene pool.

Far from being constrained by economic hardship, unprecedented modern day opportunities for travel and betterment will only be enhanced by the mobility that is once again and increasingly necessary to secure gainful and satisfying employment. Even a century or more ago, my own grandparents left their fast disappearing occupations as colonel’s coachman and below stairs cook in search of pavements of gold down south. Fellow travellers resettled in the capital would recognise Nan’s twang and together they would go on to reminisce about the remnants of Dereham’s mutual acquaintances or Yarmouth’s golden holiday sands. But, thank goodness, no vestiges of accent survived even to my mother’s generation, let alone to me whose return to the county of pioneering ancestors who refused to be stick-in-the-muds was entirely serendipitous.

Now, after more than three decades here, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I am on Roger’s side; that speaking broad Norfolk is bad for us. We should give it up, and the sooner the better. Regional speech and, worse, writing, serve only to accentuate narrow social, economic and educational horizons that constrain ambition, opportunity and the ability to engage fully with the wider world.

Notwithstanding a determined effort by the BBC to overturn its historic bias towards the even more awful and thankfully even closer to oblivion plum- in-the-mouth aristo-speak by seeking out token Geordies to demonstrate its revisionist policy of employing linguistic diversity, a stigma of parochial and ill educated unworldliness sticks obstinately to those unable or unwilling to properly speak and spell the Queen’s English.

That apart, there’s also the question of whether or not dialects/accents are, in any case, acoustically  attractive accoutrements to the English language. In this, you might say, beauty is in the ear of the beholder but that is not quite so.

Most of us try to avoid talking to people in telephone call centres at all, but when we do, consumer research expresses a marked preference for listening to those who speak modern English as she should be spoken. A Scottish accent comes next in the popularity stakes, then Geordie, Yorkshire and Welsh.

Least appealing accents are Scouse, Brummy, West Country, Cockney and Mancunian.

Norfolk doesn’t feature. Must be something to do with isolation.

Let us therefore leave mangled language to the anthropologists, the collectors of curiosities, students of linguistics, hobbyists and members of the awkward squad opposed to pretty much anything progressive. When it has gone we shouldn’t mourn but celebrate its going as an indication that our region has matured into a more open-minded place known for looking forward rather than harking back. We may then have a little less colourful confusion in our lives but will be better taught, better thought of and better understood.

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2012.

When it snowed, it stuffed the taxman and the people cheered

Posted: January 15, 2013 in Business/economics, Society, Travel
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First published: 12 March 2009

Barely a month ago everything was white and I was sitting on the A14, the traffic and my day brought to a grinding halt by a jacknifedlorry.

Schools closed their gates, trains stopped running, flights stacked back at icebound airports and great swathes of industry and commerce, already under the cosh of the credit crunch, shut up shop. Councils across the country ran short of and then reluctantly, lest their jurisdiction should be next on nature’s hit list, began swapping salt.

Yesterday, the snow came again. Bucket loads of it. As the night time temperature dropped towards minus 11, hundreds of revellers from all walks of life and from many countries cavorted unhindered by heavy coats, woolly hats and weighty, multi-buckled boots, danced on tables and drank half price beer from bottles. This cosmopolitan crowd ate with white plastic forks free helpings of spicy pasta served up piping hot on white paper plates by Elvis in a white one-piece, celebrating like there was to be no tomorrow.

This is happy hour – four until six – an everyday celebration that stretches from December into April. This season everybody’s especially happy because it snowed longer and harder than for many a year.

The people here have good cause for celebration, for while the annual snows, and the isolation they endured as a result, once brought great hardship, they eventually brought a rare combination of wealth and happiness.

Just one and a half hours flight time and a (longish) coach ride from a place where snow brings chaos and misery lays a place where it brings riches and joy.

The lady on the weekly Inghams bus that winds its way up from Brescia’s little airport via Lake Como into the Italian Alps and to the fairytale town of Livigno passed the time by enthusiastically explaining why, even though there are no legal, logical or obvious geographical reasons, it enjoys tax free status.

Evidently, the reason why the litre and a half bottle of good Chianti that we will crack open with supper tonight and the litre of brandy that will round things off and keep the chill of the mountain out tomorrow each cost south of five Euros, is snow.

In times long gone by, related the lady on the bus who’s been looking after parties like us for more than a decade, the inhabitants of this idyllic valley were so isolated and the winters so harsh that they were unable to leave their homes. With the snow blown and piled up against their walls and doors they lived much of the winter, with their animals, indoors, sustained by what they had been able to grow, harvest and forage from the poor rocky ground in the warmer months.

As legend has it, tax collectors were frequently sent out from the city but invariably either went missing or returned empty handed, unable to penetrate a virtually roadless, often snow-bound mini state whose three now enjoined communities cover a linear valley measure of little more than half a dozen  kilometres. So rich has this duty free zone become from winter ski-ing, summer mountain biking and shopping, explained the lady on the bus, that a man who owned a mountain has become a multi-millionaire. And so the story goes, he still rides unpretentiously around town in a battered Fiat Panda, apparently little affected by his fortune. If his ancestors did for a tax man, there is neither record of it nor story about it – at least not one told to strangers.

Still snowy, modern day Livigno boasts among the ancient, iron-hard wooden buildings that remain dotted along its winding streets, any number of cheap bars, cafes, restaurants and pizzerias.

Nothing, of course, is as cheap as it was before the pound’s value nose-dived against the euro – and just about every other currency except the Zimbabwean dollar. Nevertheless, credit crunch or no, the number of shops per capita remains one of the highest in Europe – more than 200 of them among a population of 5000 people, a total much swelled by the temporary residents of its 100 hotels. And credit crunch or no, the hotels and apartment blocks appear full, mainly with Italians and their families. These are the citizens of a fellow EUnation whose economy, some would have you believe, is either the permanent poor man of Europe (next to Spain – ironically anotherholiday destination with opposite attributes) or about to implode.

Strange then, there appears to be no talk of banking or sub prime mortgage crisis here. Maybe, because almost everyone’s on holiday, they’re burying their heads in the snow. I don’t know, but these seem like ordinary folk having a good time, not the diamond encrustedCartier glitterati of nearby St Moritz.

Livigno is a lesson in making the most of its virtues. The snow on the roof of the building across the alley is more than a metre deep but the roads are entirely ice free. The buses run every few minutes throughout the day, the kids go to school\and ski-school. The cogs, motors and cables of the chair lifts, drag lifts and gondolas whisking thousands of winter sports enthusiasts high into the mountains operate faultlessly from 8.30 in the morning to 5 in the evening, day in, day out. Soon after, the engines of the piste bashing caterpillars spark into life with barely a cough and head off to the hills to work, theirlights twinkling like faraway stars that have fallen to the high slopes, well into the sub-zero night.

It’s snowing again and all anyone’s thinking about is how good it will be ski-ing on the powder on top of the dutifully bashed piste tomorrow.

Given the UK’s  topography and temperature, the revenue raised from a million ski-lift passes happily paid over to the authorities who clear snow and bash pistes, is not, of course, available to your averageBritish council. But we do pay our taxes.

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2012.

Brought to a grinding halt by a jack-knifed lorry; again

Posted: January 15, 2013 in Business/economics, Politics, Society, Travel
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First published 14 January 2010

“I was sitting on the A14, the traffic and my day brought to a grinding halt by a jack-knifed lorry. Schools closed their gates, trains stopped running, flights stacked back at icebound airports and great swathes of industry and commerce, already under the cosh of the credit crunch, shut up shop. Councils across the country ran short of and then reluctantly, lest their jurisdiction should be next on nature’s hit list, began swapping salt.”

Sound like last week? Or 1962? Or 1984? Getting a feeling of déjà vu?

That was the opening paragraph to this column less than one year ago.

Okay, so the cold snap that ushered in 2010 has been longer and chillier than of late, but contrary to the impression created by city hall spokesmen the length and breadth of the country, what they might call, had they any alliterative imagination, a white winter weather event is hardly rare, let alone unique.

By now you may have had your fill of reading about the white stuff, but before shuffling off to suffer its slush, might we pause to see if a few lessons could be learned?

Talking of lessons, let’s begin there. I loved the thread from the Pink’un online forum (for the uninitiated, that’s our internet chat room where Norwich City Football Club fans, in the main, exchange views about, in the main, football). After the match on Saturdaysomeone who has adopted the handle Sir Ecat (everyone uses a pseudonym although why this one should choose to award himself a knighthood incelebration of the New Zealand government’s E-Commerce Action Team defeats me) posted the following: “A well deserved mention to all the Norfolk school teachers who so bravely ventured out today to watch the match at Carrow Road. It can’t have been easy having to dig yourselves out of your snow bound houses and we salute your sterling efforts.

Have a safe journey home and look after yourselves next week. We all appreciate how hard it is travelling in this weather especially when there are so few options beyond car, bus, train, walk. If any readers on this forum live near any teachers then do knock on their door to make sure they are coping OK and see if there is any shopping or essentials they need.”

As you might imagine, someone cried foul and a defensive flurry (sorry!) ensued.

“Schools close during the snow to help prevent school buses full of kids crashing off dangerous roads,” posted ‘Bethnal Yellow and Green’.

“Schools … close in adverse weather conditions because they are terrified of litigation should any of your darlings fall and hurt themselves on school premises,” countered ‘kilroysleftelbow’. “You seriously need to quit your job at Ipswich High School mate!” dug (sorry again) ‘NCFCfaithful’. Patrickhiggins added a sarcastic, “Of course, us teachers made our own decision not to work, it wasn’t head teachers who closed the schools following LEA guidelines,” but was obviously so cross that he forgot it should be “we teachers”. All good knockabout stuff.

However, it seems to me that this and much else (as ‘improperfraction’ pointed out: “What about all those other workers who don’t make it in because of the conditions.”) comes down to a culture engendered by the elves from elf and safety whose cheeks take on a glow more rosy than Rudolph’s nose as they gleefully shovel their snowstorms of bureaucracy into heaps of trouble. All the while, they’re cheered on by the no win, no fee ambulance chasers who hide their avarice behind a cloak of seemingly respectable advocacy. They are the “If you slipped on a patch of ice today, give us a call and we’ll find someone for you to sue” vultures that hover over the carcass of common sense.

I have reported on too many awful industrial accidents to eschew the need for proper precautions to be taken in hazardous workplaces but can we not insist on a modicum of rationality?

Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that the judiciary might send packing the unprincipled scallywags in the lower echelons of the profession from which they themselves emerged in their bewigged and red-robed glory? When asked to award damages in favour of someone who broke their toe tripping on a crooked paving stone couldn’t m’lud suggest the victims of such assaults pick themselves up, brush themselves down and stop wasting the court’s time and the ratepayers’money?

In the public sector, might it be possible for council workers to beat the weather by reporting to and in some way dispensing their particular skills at the nearest town hall, children’s home, hospital or school?

I have no love of supermarkets nor the socio economic model that causes shelf filling and burger flipping to provide Britain’s only job expansion opportunities – especially for those who might not have got enough schooling – but I do see the logic of their HR stance. They insist on lost shifts through non attendance at work being made up at another time or left unpaid. After all, without them how would we be able to fill our freezers with enough bread to see us through a snow siege?

And while I’m in the mood for handing out plaudits, what would we do without the orange triangle that fills our television screens to deliver the regular severe weather warnings that provide plenty of notice to clear the supermarket shelves before hunkering down for a welcome duvet day or two?

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2012.

 

Too many cars, not enough buyers

Posted: January 11, 2013 in Business/economics, Politics
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First published: 23 May 2012

I have of late been dutifully reporting a whole raft of positive vibes from the UK motor industry, most of them accompanied by pictures of a smiling industry secretary Vince Cable getting in and out of cars at the business end of a production line.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always reckoned myself to be a champion of manufacturing in this country; of honourable trades that make things that people want – the antithesis of shuffling bits of paper that don’t amount to much more than betting slips. I wish metal bashers, wood turners, assembly line workers, precision engineers, plumbers, potters and electrical whizzes well with every bone in my body.

But I’m flummoxed.

The thing is this; with Britain as the alleged epicentre of European car manufacturing and the Eurozone supposedly in financial meltdown, who is buying all the cars being made? And why aren’t the thousands of jobs being created making any impact on unemployment?

Last week, for instance, a big hurrah was rightly raised at the news from General Motors that Ellesmere Port in Cheshire will be Europe’s lead plant to build the next generation Vauxhall Astra.

As a long-time trade union supporter I wince at the “groundbreaking new labour agreement” that evidently sealed the deal and I fear that a vow to “improve flexibility and reduce fixed costs” amounts to working all hours and a pay freeze.

The labour agreement comes into force in 2013 and runs into the early 2020s. Manufacturing of the new model Astra is scheduled to start in 2015 with the plant running at full capacity on three-shifts making a minimum of 160,000 vehicles a year.

Still, the “safeguarding” of existing jobs and the “creation” of, in this case, 700 new ones is the prize. With the ink dry on the workers’ contracts, I hope the sale of all those vehicles is equally secure.

As I do for the half a million cars that will spill out of Nissan’s exemplary Sunderland factory each year creating, we heard just a month ago, an additional 1100 new jobs.

I even wish, against all my better judgements concerning Range Rovers and Land Rovers and the people who choose to clog our roads with off-road vehicles, that the demand for them that drove the March announcement of 1,000 new jobs at Halewood, near Liverpool, is sustained.

It would be churlish to express anything but gratitude to the Japanese car maker Toyota for its decision to build new generation family hatchbacks – 85 per cent of them destined for export to Europe – at Burnaston in Derbyshire, “creating up to 1500 new jobs”.

For once, it seems, the media and the spinmeisters are aligned, the press releases and the headlines indistinguishable. No-one wants to rock the suspension.

“Manufacturing is now core to our country’s economy and the partnership forged between companies, employees, trades unions and government in the UK automotive industry demonstrates that the country is a globally competitive place to do business,” quoth the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders’ chief exec.

A bloke from the Manufacturing Advisory Service quango waxes his pleasure at “workers overwhelmingly adding their support to new pay and working conditions”.

Vince Cable is delighted for the exemplary workforces, managements and unions and praises Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, Ford, Honda, Toyota and BMW for their commitment to the UK.

How little time ago – not much more than a month – workers at BMW’s Mini plant in Oxford overwhelmingly rejected what unions called a strings attached pay offer raising the prospect of the first strike since 1984.

How little time ago—not much more than a year – when, in the first dip of recession, the so-called scrappage scheme offered carrots to drivers as an incentive to trade-in their old donkeys for new in order to stimulate any car sales at all.

It’s not that I want to pooh-pooh a welcome upturn in Britain’s manufacturing economy. On the contrary, how welcome would it be to hear some news about how the government might alleviate Great Yarmouth’s unemployment woes by stimulating, say, a bigger contribution to the fabrication and engineering of the giant windfarms that operate off its shore?

I’m just having some difficulty with the sums and assumptions. Just unable to reconcile a Europe in flames as the primary export destination for commodities that are, for most of us, the second most expensive thing we will ever buy.

And I struggle with the official monthly labour statistics that show unemployment continuing to rise.

And I can’t quite square the circle that bears the twin legends of a chronic skills shortages and growing graduate joblessness (and no, they’re not all qualified only in media studies).

For reasons I can’t fathom, none of it quite adds up.

No bent bananas in the US of E

Posted: January 10, 2013 in Business/economics, Politics, Society
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I have a confession. I think I’m coming to terms with understanding Europhobic passion.

If truth be told, we are much alike, me and the Europhobes. Extremists.

I regard your obsession about withdrawing from the EU to be so extreme as to be the politics and economics of the madhouse.

You, on the other hand, are likely to bluster red, white and blue before bursting Shrek-like from the union flag waistcoat of your John Bull outfit on hearing me say that the sooner we have a proper Federation of Europe, the better.

The difference is that you don’t think of yourself as an extremist even though you believe the masses of the great unwashed are waiting, muskets under the bed, to march with you against the tyranny of the Franco-Prussian axis. (I’m not entirely joking. I once met a UK exile living in Italy who claimed he was one of the founding fathers of Ukip. He told me he was in receipt of not infrequent letters from the muskets-under-the-bed-brigade and readily conceded that it worried him).

It may or may not be true that, led by a noisy centre right media, the great British public are known to be screaming for a referendum on EU membership. However, it’s still worth remembering the indisputable fact that people behave differently when taking part in a straw poll as opposed to when they’re asked to vote for real. Remember that Ukip attracted just three per cent of the vote at the last election and failed to elect a single MP.

I don’t mind admitting that as a federalist, I am likely to be in a similarly small minority, but a quieter one. If only my little three per cent – if it is three per cent, and I’ve no idea –strong band and I could persuade the Daily Mail to debunk the Euromyths, we would be in clover. We could jettison the jack, run up the Starry Circle and celebrate our place as the seventh of the United States of Europe.

Myths like the harmonisation of the temperature of whelk stalls, banning sweet shops from selling unwrapped gobstoppers, vetoing toy advertising on television; banning curved bananas and getting the pip with apples measuring more than 55mm across are, folks, all untrue.

In short, bent bananas aren’t the issue.

We wait with bated breath to see what our beleaguered Prime Minister can come up with in his imminent ‘big Euro speech’. Last time it was a toothless hint that the government would seek to “repatriate social and employment powers” in what deputy PM Nick Clegg dismissed at the time (it was in November 2011) as being an unwise “smash and grab raid” on Brussels.

Let’s hear it for the USE, I say.

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2012.

A dog’s dinner or a load of bollocks?

Posted: January 8, 2013 in Society
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I’LL MAKE no bones about it, I’m not a fan of dogs or, if it comes to that, the keeping of any other animals as domestic pets. Maybe the Blue Cross is right and we should cut off their balls.

When the kids were young, we had our share of rabbits, guinea pigs, budgerigars, hamsters, goldfish, cats and dogs. As is commonly the case, we kidded ourselves that the keeping and confinement of them in hutches, cages, baskets and on the end of uncalibrated retracting tape measures would somehow make the children better adjusted human beings. It would teach them the concept of care for red-blooded, breathing creatures (not the goldfish of course) that would later mutate and gift them with a greater tolerance and understanding of the foibles of their fellow man. And they would grow up with a healthily pragmatic acceptance of the concept of mortality.

Bullshit. The tearful pre-purchase promises soon turned to piecrust as boredom, conflicting interests and sibling blame games set in. So far as I know, their misguided sense of their own immortality matches that of most other people under 40.

Now let’s come to the real question. If using children as an excuse for introducing animals bred for the purpose into a household doesn’t bear examination, what possible justification might there be for pet ownership by grown-ups?

Companionship is commonly quoted. Which is a bit odd really, unless you want to contend that the 13 million UK households that are home to 67 million furry, feathery or scaly creatures are occupied by lonely people who have little option but to prefer pets to people.

Then there’s security. I have no idea – and nor does anyone else – of the number of burglars who are deterred by mynah birds who have learned to mimic Jack Regan with, “All right Tinkerbell, you’re nicked”. And I don’t know the exact number of dangerous dogs being kept to guard houses, but of the 14,000 postmen who were attacked by them over the past three years, 350 were bitten on the backside and 128 suffered bites to the bollocks.

And judging by the number of fat people in the Sunday market burgher van queue, a leather strap with a German Shepherd on the end in hand and a fag in the mouth, I’m not entirely convinced by the “it keeps you fit” defence either. Anyway, if you want to go for a walk, go for a walk at a time of your own choosing; perhaps when it’s not pissing with rain or in the daylight. And without wearing plastic bags as gloves to protect you from contracting all manner of worms and osis-es from a few million faecal coliform bacteria without denying your other senses whatever pleasure you derive from the pile of steaming dog shit you’re obliged by bye-law to clear up.

Not, of course, that everyone bothers. Around here, dog walkers seem more intent on laying an obstacle course of crap without bothering to offer prizes to those among the rest of us who succeed in collecting the greatest quantity in the cleats of our walking boots and wellies. One day, I’ll follow them home and shit on their doorstep.

The ‘loads of family fun’ argument stands up a little more robustly. Or it does if your idea of leisurely fulfilment is exercising your primeval instincts as man the hunter by chucking a stick as far as you can – preferably into a river, pond or the sea – and have your four-legged servant go through the motions of retrieving it and dropping it dead at your feet as it would a game bird you shot for the pot.  Extra enjoyment may be gained from looking on as your mutt gallops off to shake itself dry over the nearest stranger before thoughtfully wiping its paws on their freshly laundered trousers. The game determines that this is the stage at which you shout: “Don’t worry, she’s as good as gold; wants to be your friend.”

By way of a sporting variation, you can also engage in beach bull, a modern day version of long since banned pit bull fighting, wherein your dog lunges, snarling and barking, at someone else’s dog while you and they stand helplessly by yelling “Fenton!” or some such unlikely moniker. However, taking bets on the outcome is, having been outlawed in 1835, not permitted.

That is not to say that animal-loving Britons have entirely turned their backs on cruelty. Although swallowing a goldfish as a Facebook wheeze, microwaving a hamster or dumping a cat in a wheelie bin may be deemed to be at the more newsworthy extreme of human inanimality, the RSPCA investigates 100,000 mostly more commonplace cases of cruelty a year.

Financial hardship may be behind the abandonment of pets, it says, while the animal charity Blue Cross, which favours neutering as a solution to “epidemic levels” of unwanted pets, believes some seek economic salvation through breeding their pets for profit. Either way, it is surely weirdly contradictory for a country to spend £4 billion each year on its pets while suffering the shame of sustaining the poor among its citizens via food banks.

How strange that would seem to visitors from another galaxy. Unless, of course, they turned out to be subservient enough to be adopted as pets.

This material is protected by copyright Ken Hurst 2013.

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