Guardian has a re-think

The Guardian posts an article on a 'student' protest against the scrapping of the EMA. In its original form it included a very revealing quote:

"I would have had to get a part-time job if I hadn't had the EMA"

Luckily, a commenter captured the text in a quote before the paper removed the original from the article:

What?

If working about 8 hours a week for £30 (even under 18) is too much of a distraction, the 'real' world is going to be a horrible shock.

I wonder why they decided to remove the original wording? Not the right message? There is also this doozy in the comments:

Cameron got EMA, our parents got EMA, Charles Dickens got EMA, but suddenly there's no need for it. What gives ?

Whut? Some history:

• EMA was piloted in 1999 and rolled out UK-wide in 2004
• Charles Dickens died in 1870
  
• Cameron was the qualifying age for EMA between 1982 and 1985
  
• Anyone born before 1980 cannot ever have qualified for EMA, so 'our parents got EMA' means that the 'parents' had their offspring at the age of 15 or less, even stretching the dates to their limits.

Some of the comments suggest (shame! evil Tories!) that the 'students' use the EMA for dope, fags, clothes and make-up, rather than attending to their educational needs. Seems they may be right: basic history and current affairs seem to have fallen by the wayside.

The comments as a whole demonstrate entitlement-whinging at exhibition level. As many of the commenters in The Guardian say, the EMA is a ruse to keep the jobless figures down, and a bribe to keep young people voting Labour.

I can accept that help with travel and meal costs for the disadvantaged might be a good idea, but £30 cash in your hand looks too much like an inducement.

Murderous thoughts

There was an interesting piece by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian a short while ago. He had been on a retreat and was musing on the quality of silence. A passing motorcycle annoyed him, and he commented:

He (I am sure it's a he) goes through the same noisy routine repeatedly as I meditate. It is insufferable. Why, I ask myself inwardly, doesn't someone from the Self Realization Meditation Healing Centre string one of the lanes round here with cheesewire? That would settle motorcycle boy's hash.

(H/t to Highwaylass.)

Well, it seems that his wish came true. Someone has gone and put a metal bar across the Taff Trail in South Wales and a young motorcyclist has lost his life. Visordown was the first to cover it, and the BBC haven't much detail. I don't know the circumstances yet, but it would appear that someone has left this bar across the trail deliberately. If that's true, then it's murder, plain and simple.

I like the countryside as much as anyone (I live there, after all) and like my peace and quiet. Sometimes, I find other people's noise irritating. But would I wish to murder them? I don't think so. What irritates me more than anything is the way thay the writer is so completely up himself about his meditation (peace, man) but then when this very Islington pastime is disturbed by some working-class oik - the champagne socialists see bikers as somehow common, don't you think? - then the mask slips and the hatred comes to the surface.

Or perhaps he thought that having violent thoughts, and writing about them in a national newspaper, was just some jeu d'esprit, and that no-one would surely think of him in the same way as some red-faced old Colonel banging on about 'young people today'. Still less that someone might take his casual comments seriously and carry them out.

The Left never did connect theory and real life very well.

Good Grief!

Courtesy of Al Jahom, an article by Simon Jenkins (Not every adult is a paedophile, a terrorist or a mass murderer) in The Guardian that I agree with, every word. That has to be a first.

There is now a widespread belief that the bonds of private responsibility that should tie together neighbourhoods and nations alike have eroded. This is put down to everything from the nanny state to benefit dependency, risk aversion, disrespectful youth, too much money and obsessive security. When the bossy Labour minister Ed Balls banned pictures of children in schools and vetted parents for sex crimes, the bounds of public sanity were strained. Yet no one stopped him. People muttered, "Well, you can't be too safe."

...

The public should be invited to reject the politics of fear, that sees life as a perpetual terror of what might happen and a perpetual investigation of what has. It should not be asked to regard every child as a victim and every adult a paedophile, a terrorist or a mass murderer. The government should stop spending stupid amounts of money on a security lobby now running amok through the public sector.

There is no such thing as safe. There is only safer, and safer can require the greater watchfulness that comes with taking risks, witness new theories of road safety. Removing risk lowers the protective instinct of individuals and communities, and paradoxically leaves them in greater danger. But there is no government agency charged with averting that danger. There is no money in it.

Go and read it. It should be required reading for our new coalition government, too. Light is dawning in all sorts of unexpected places. Perhaps it's the good weather.