Peter Rhodes on terrorism, smart meters and land 'ripe' for building
The BBC has been under fire for refusing to describe Hamas terrorists as terrorists.
So what's new? After repeated complaints of anti-Israel bias, the BBC in 2004 commissioned the 20,000-word Balen Report. I bet it makes fascinating reading but, alas, we licence payers never got to see it. Auntie Beeb has allegedly spent about £330,000 in legal fees keeping it secret.
Meanwhile, I found a 2019 BBC report describing the Birmingham Pub bombings as “the worst terrorist atrocity on English soil”. So slaughtering 21 Brits is terrorism but slaughtering 900 Israelis is not? Curious.
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Never has a party conference been upstaged quite so dramatically as the Labour Party's, overshadowed this week by events in Gaza. Even so, enough leaked out to cause some alarm. As when Shadow Chancellor Rachel (“Build, build, build”) Reeves promised “no wholesale building on the Green Belt” but supported building on “areas that are ripe for development”.
Who decides what “ripe” means? A meadow that some profit-hungry builder considers ripe for houses may be regarded by others as ripe for rambling. I bet money will talk louder than sentiment.
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I appear to be almost alone among columnists in supporting the idea of teachers showing young pupils how to use a toothbrush.
It's the nanny state? Well, so what? Some of us have happy memories of days when schools gave us free milk, free orange juice, free lunch and free nit nurses. In my infant school we even had little fold-away beds for a mid-afternoon snooze. It may have been a nanny state but she was a kind old nanny.
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The man from E.on came and installed our new smart meter, with an in-home display which is now so small that you could mistake it for a mobile phone.
He gave me a quick tutorial, his fingers flying expertly over the touch-pad: “See? Main menu, daily budget, export icon, history, real-time data, settings and screen brightness. Got it?”
I made the mistake of nodding. “Yeah,” he added. “It's self-explanatory, really.”
A week later I'm still waiting for the display to explain itself. Unless, of course, I've got it mixed up with the mobile. Hello? Hello . . . ?
