We’ve just finished watching Goodbye Granadaland introduced by Peter Kay. I thoroughly recommend it – on ITV Player here. What an astonishing history of TV programme making that building has!

Granada put us up in Manchester’s prestigious Midland Hotel when we were participants in a quiz show, as I recalled in 2010:

On a personal note, I was actually on the Granada Call sheet for one day with the Coronation Street cast (in 1989). I was appearing with my dearly beloved in a quiz programme made at the same studios called “Perception” in the late eighties. I have a photo somewhere of me standing on the Rovers Return set (which at the time was temporarily in the basement by a corridor with not so much as a door protecting it). And the number of times I have cursed myself for not half-inching that Call Sheet at the end of the day are numerous!

From ABC news, here’s the transcript of the controversial section of a cent interview between Australian PM Julia Gillard and Howard Sattler, now ex-presenter on Perth’s 6PR radio station:

HOWARD SATTLER: Myths, rumours, snide jokes and innuendoes, you’ve been the butt of them many times.

JULIA GILLARD: Well I think that’s probably right. We’ve certainly seen that this week.

HOWARD SATTLER: May I test a few out?

JULIA GILLARD: In what way?

HOWARD SATTLER: Tim’s gay.

JULIA GILLARD: Well…

HOWARD SATTLER: That’s not me saying it, that’s a myth.

JULIA GILLARD: Well, that’s absurd.

HOWARD SATTLER: But you hear it. He must be gay, he’s a hairdresser.

JULIA GILLARD: Oh well… isn’t that…

HOWARD SATTLER: You’ve heard it. It’s not me saying it, it’s what people…

JULIA GILLARD: Howard, I don’t know whether every silly thing that gets said is going to be repeated to me now…

HOWARD SATTLER: No, no, no but…

JULIA GILLARD: But, you know, to all the hairdressers out there, including the men who are listening, I don’t think in life one can actually look at a whole profession full of different human beings and say: Gee, we know something about everyone of those human beings. I mean it’s absurd isn’t it?

HOWARD SATTLER: You can confirm that he’s not?

JULIA GILLARD: Oh Howard, don’t be ridiculous.

JULIA GILLARD: Of course not.

HOWARD SATTLER: Are you in a heterosexual relationship, that’s all I’m asking?

JULIA GILLARD: Well Howard, you and I have just talked about that, so now that is bordering…

HOWARD SATTLER: I want to…

JULIA GILLARD: Howard, just let’s just…

HOWARD SATTLER: I want to get rid of it…

JULIA GILLARD: Let me just, let me just bring you back to earth.

HOWARD SATTLER: I’m not saying it.

JULIA GILLARD: Right, well, let me just bring you back to earth. You and I have just talked about me and Tim living at The Lodge, we live there together as a couple. You know that.

Yes, on the internet, you know, there are lots of, you know, what I’ve referred to in the past as nutjobs, and I’m happy to use the expression again.

HOWARD SATTLER: Good!

JULIA GILLARD: People who peddle and circulate vile and offensive things.

HOWARD SATTLER: Awful things.

JULIA GILLARD: Yeah, absolutely.

My flabber continues to be gasted on a daily basis by the thoroughness of the work on Newbury’s A339 Railway bridge. At this rate it’ll be on the front page of Construction Week magazine.

The meticulous brickwork continues as my lower photo shows.

In the last few days, the site have taken delivery of a large number of concrete cast items (top) which are being formed to bolster the underneath of the bridge – presumably the “parapets” mentioned in the literature. (Or are these the “copings” mentioned? Answers on a postcard please….). They have been inserting the metal pins into the casts on site, with the aid of a cement injection device.

As with most people, one of my great hobbies is watching other people work, as you can tell from the detail of my descriptions above!

The whole project will cost £1.5 million and is scheduled to end in October.

With thanks to our wonderful daughter, Rhea, for a fantastic Dad day’s treat at Hotel du Vin, Henley Brewery, Henley-on-Thames.

Taken around 5am. Suggests a nice day, but it is now clouding over a tad. The forecast says we’ll get five minutes of sunshine with our elevenses.

From the Sunday Times (£):

TWO of the Liberal Democrats’ biggest donors are being lined up for peerages, plunging Nick Clegg into a “cash for honours” controversy.

Rumi Verjee, a multimillionaire who brought the Domino’s pizza chain to Britain, is top of a list of seven names compiled by the Lib Dems who are expected to be awarded honours within weeks. He has given £770,000 to the party since May 2010.

Sudhir Choudhrie, whose family has donated £650,000 to the party since 2004, has been placed on an internal party list of future peers. Until three years ago Choudhrie, who has personally given £95,000 of that sum, was not domiciled in Britain for tax purposes.

Clegg, who has campaigned for a crackdown on offshore tax-avoidance schemes, faces embarrassment because businesses operated by both the Verjee and Choudhrie families have links to foreign tax havens.

It should be noted that Rumi Verjee is already a Commander of the British Empire. He was one of the Asians slung out of Uganda by Idi Amin and given a home in the UK. During that process he and his family lost “90 per cent” of what they owned. He has built up his commercial empire from those days, first with Domino’s Pizza (can’t stand them myself) and now with Thomas Goode and Company of Mayfair. He has an impressive history of philantrophy with his Rumi Foundation.

I am not sure who Sudhir Choudhrie is. Googles for the name return a colourful mix of items and I can’t quite work out if the items refer to one person or several.

As a Liberal Democrat activist, I tend to prefer the “attend twenty conferences and get a free ermin coat” route to peerages (as noted by Simon Hoggart). If you can sit through 50 LibDem debates on standing orders and goldfish sales at fairgrounds, then you deserve some light relief and a bit of a snooze on the red benches.

In passing I mention that the party has a distinguished connection between its peers and fast food chains. Lord Jacobs was a very distinguished peer for the party (from 1997 until he resigned from the party in 2011), as well as having many conference attendances under his belt, and ran at some time Spudulike. I remember him from conferences as a very nice cove, who made impassioned speeches, if memory serves. Some wits called him “Lord Spudulike”. Presumably, in the event of a peerage Mr Verjee will be known as “Lord Half and half”.

Regarding pizza, the party, of course, has a long association with the rather more upmarket Pizza Express.

Important note: none of these attempted bad jokes have appeared on Liberal England at the time of writing.

Although I tend to read the Guardian online as my first port of call, my usual dead tree read now is i newspaper. Excellent paper. I sit there in Costalotta and read it and do the occasional tweet and look-up on t’internet (via Cloud) of some of the stories. Maaaarvellous.

Article of the day has to be Robert Fisk’s piece about the decision on the arming of the Syrian rebels by the US. It’s a must-read:

As the US wants to arm ‘nice Syrian rebels’ we must remind ourselves that weapons are not just guns. They are about money

Tosh! That’s the only sane reaction to the White House’s announcement that America the Brave is to arm the Syrian rebels.

The US doesn’t plan to send weapons to the horrid rebels, mark you – not to the al-Qa’ida-inspired al-Nusra Front whose chaps film themselves eating Alawites for YouTube videos, barbecue the heads of captured Syrian troops and murder 14-year-old schoolboys for blasphemy. Only to the nice rebels, the Free Syrian Army deserters who are battling the forces of Assad darkness in the interests of freedom, liberty, women’s rights and democracy.

Anyone who believes this knows nothing about war, killing, barbarity and, especially, greed. Because weapons are not just guns. They are currency. They are money.

You can read the article in full here.

From CAMRA newspaper, What’s brewing.

A closed pub listed in CAMRA’s National Inventory of Heritage Pubs has been ravaged by fire. The Rising Sun, Kirkstall Road in Leeds, which served as a furniture store in recent years, was famed for its gin palace interior, which the current operators had kept, more or less, intact….

 
Admittedly, the headline doesn’t beat “Far-right extremists chased through London by women dressed as badgers“.

The photo shows a “gin palace” style pub which is not the RIsing Sun in Leeds (before or since the fire), I hasten to add.

I tend to swim against the tide of opinion on the issue of businesses not illegally and ingeniously getting around the tax laws.

There is nothing more ridiculous than Margaret Hodge railing against the likes of Google and Amazon. Perfectly ridiculous. Her party had over a decade to change the tax laws as they pleased and to change the rules by which HMRC operate.

It is just stupid to hector the companies. Really stupid.

For starters, this debate gets framed in the wrong terms. The message gets through that companies x,y and z pay no tax in this country. That is how Jo Bloggs gets the message. Of course, it is utter poppycock. They pay national insurance for their employees, part of their employees’ salaries go straight to HMRC via PAYE, they pay business rates and they pay their employees salaries and their UK suppliers’ invoices, all of which whirls round the economy creating more revenue for HMRC.

They don’t pay a great deal of corporation tax on their profits. That is what the issue is. But they are doing nothing illegal and it is the basic duty of a company to maximise profits for its shareholders through all legal means. We live in a global cyber economy with international rules of taxation laid down in the 1920s.

Parliament is at liberty to change the tax laws and the government is at liberty to direct HMRC to tighten its rules. Governments across the world are at liberty to revise those 1920s rules. It’s no good berating companies. Get on and change the laws and the rules, politicians!

Professor Prem Sikka of the University of Essex is calling for reform of the international tax laws. He has proposed:

…a redesign of the international system for taxing corporations. The proposed system would tax companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon) as single economic units. In other words, each subsidiary would not be treated as a separate taxable unit, something that encourages companies to shift profits through spurious techniques.

The profit of each company would then be allocated to each country based on the variables that generate profits. These are likely to be sales, assets and the number of employees. Since companies in tax havens have very few sales, employees or assets, they would not be able to book profits there. Thus companies would not be able to avoid taxes.

Simples!

Nicolas Crane has been doing some great programmes in his Town series. I was particularly enthralled by the one on Huddersfield. What a very proud, independent history that town has! It seems the Luddites were emblematic of a rebellious streak in the town, echoed down the years with the establishment of the Rugby League at the town’s George Hotel.

But, IMHO, there is no greater claim to fame for Huddersfield than it is the birthplace of Harold Wilson. When I had my long cosy chat with him, he very proudly announced that he came from “‘Uddersfield”.

In his programme on the town, Nicolas Crane dressed up in the local rugby kit for a run out and chat with some of the players from the Huddersfield Giants at their impressive stadium. Crane then gamely offered himself up to be “smother tackled” by two large players. As he writhed on the ground after this, he weakly asked where the nearest hospital was.

My contact “Oop nawth” informs me that one of the two players was a giant of a man with a distinctive long shock of hair who rejoices in the name Eorl Crabtree. My nawthern rugby lass informs me that he is Big Daddy’s (Shirley Crabtree’s) nephew.

It’s no wonder that the wiry Nicolas Crane was winded by his physical encounter with Mr Crabtree. Eorl Crabtree is 18 stone 6 lbs and 6 foot 6 inches.

Not a man to be messed with, I would suggest.

Photo of Eorl Crabtree: Some rights reserved by Richard Sunderland

It’s hard to think of a sorrier episode in the party’s modern history. That a liberal party that stands for equality should be the one that has its reputation dragged through the mud for failing to deal properly with serious allegations of sexual impropriety is wretched.

Stephen Tall, Liberal Democrat Voice.

We should note that Lord Rennard vehemently denies any wrong-doing.

Despite being a general report on the party’s procedures, the Helena Morrissey Independent report, issued today, covers the handling of the allegations against Lord Rennard in great depth, particularly from pages 36 to 46.

You can read the report in full here.

It will take a while to absorb the full detail, but here are some key passages:

Paul Brustow involvement

Conclusion:
The fact that no one wrote any of this down was a mistake right from the beginning – by all. This was a missed opportunity to investigate the allegations very early on. It also shows that no one really knew quite what to do in this sensitive situation. The Chief Whip is obviously a key disciplinarian in the Party and I believe that Paul Burstow genuinely did not think the women wanted him to take the matter further and that they wanted to remain anonymous. Otherwise, given the nature of his role at the time, I see no reason why he would not have explored it though the appropriate channels. However, even if that was his read of the situation at the time, given the seriousness of the allegations and Rennard’s role in the Party, for the sake of all concerned and as he subsequently realised, Burstow should have proactively taken the issue to the President.

Jo Swinson and Danny Alexander involvement

Conclusion:
The issues were ‘handled’ informally, principally by Jo Swinson and Danny Alexander, because that is what they thought the women wanted – primarily to protect their identities. While their actions were, I believe, in good faith, this approach was ultimately not sufficient. Informal handling of complaints is the recommended initial step but the serious nature of these allegations and the fact that a number of women had come forward from separate sources warranted a full investigation. Certainly, the issues should also have been escalated to the Chief Executive’s line managers, the Party President and the Chair of the Federal Finance and Administration Committee. While the circumstances were obviously sensitive, and will always be so if senior staff are accused of sexual harassment, no one is ‘above the law’ and an organisation has a duty of care to all employees (and volunteers) to investigate, in order to protect the interests of everyone – alleged victims, the accused and everyone else. In this case, the ambiguity now over whether all the women did in fact want to remain anonymous would not exist if a proper and prompt investigation had been instigated.

Complaint to line manager

Conclusions:
It was wrong that the line manager concerned did not follow up on the initial complaint.
Again, given the nature of the allegations, the Party should have taken on the responsibility to investigate in 2008, irrespective of the desire of some of the women to remain anonymous.

Baroness Scott involvement

Conclusion:
Again, there was no way of resolving these issues without a full investigation.

Rennard resignation

Conclusion:
The resignation from office of someone accused of unacceptable behavior does not mean that the issue has been resolved. The potential for further problems for the accused, the alleged victims and the Party was strong.

Was there a cover-up?

I have looked carefully at the media coverage in the week of the Channel 4 News programme in February 2013, which obviously coincided with the run-up to the Eastleigh by-election called as a result of Chris Huhne’s resignation. Again, I explored this for evidence of any deliberate ‘cover-up’. Classic ‘crisis media’ handling is to tell the whole truth right away. It will come out and any obfuscation at the start compounds the damage. In this situation, the Party was limited in what it could say as it had not conducted a proper investigation and did not know the truth. Nick Clegg was therefore not in a position to ‘cover-up’.

Overall

Conclusion
Overall, this is a salutary lesson in what can go wrong if due process is not followed. Unresolved issues fester and come back to haunt everyone. It is not fair on the women, not fair on the accused and causes great propensity for misunderstanding and further accusations. I do not believe that these mistakes were deliberate or malicious or that the leadership at the time did not take them seriously, but it is evident that much more could and should have been done. In particular, the addressing of complaints needs to be a higher priority for the Party and not just something to be dealt with in a crisis. There will always be something else competing for attention. Media interest will often peak when other issues are preoccupying the Party.

You learn something new everyday. This funny YouTube video alerted me to the existence of the International Boundary Commission, which maintains the border between the US and Canada – the border being a twenty foot-wide gap extending across two-thirds of the American continent. It seems that guys with chain saws spend their working lives walking along the border and chopping off errant saplings which threaten to muddy the Canadian/US border waters.

You couldn’t make it up.

…but then I am sad.

What happens if the Electoral College is tied? – from CGP Grey, whose YouTube channel I visited to watch the very popular Bizarre facts about the Canadian and US border.

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Councillor David Holtby today. My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr Holtby’s family and friends at this very difficult time.

On the numerous occasions I bumped into David Holtby he was always very polite and jovial.

He had quite a difficult task ahead of him when he took over as Conservative agent locally. But he obviously did a very good job of it.

He made a very large contribution to West Berkshire life, and I particularly remember his very strong and enthusiastic support for the armed services.