Ever, for some reason or another, had to give someone a number and pretend it was yours? Whether for brushing off telemarketeers, filling web forms or getting rid of people you just don’t like, you can use one of the phone numbers reserved for drama purposes (like 020 7946 0000), and not only will you get rid of them, but you won’t piss off anyone totally random (unless you’re just evil and like doing that kind of thing).

For the next 8 months or so, I’m going to conduct a little experiment: I will try and live exclusively off credit cards. I’m not going to clear them at the end of each month and see how large a debt I can amass.

Actually, if you read this guy’s weblog entry in full, it does kinda make sense - scrounge of those 0% introductory rates and put the money you save aside to get the interest, pay it off at the end. I’ve been doing a similar thing myself, happily running up my 0% graduate account overdraft while paying my salary into a better alternative, until I got nasty “you didn’t read the fine print” phone calls from the bank a coupla months ago. The only downside is that, especially with credit cards, I can see it totally fucking with your credit record.

Simon Hughes, Lib Dem candidate for London mayor, has launched a competition for a flag for London (I shan’t sneer about the Lib Dems being irrelevant this time, I promise, especially as I quite like Simon Hughes as a person).

I don’t think London really does need its own flag (after all, it owns about 99% of the rest of England), and given the multitude of identities and races in London it would be quite hard coming up with one that unifies all. But with flags for Devon, Cornwall and now the North-West, I can see why you might want one for London too.

Hughes’s own designs are, well, a bit crap. The first is a mish-mash of various things (tube sign, football, a pigeon), which would look terrible from a distance, while the second and third don’t really get away from the English flag very much - that and the arrowheads in the centre kinda form a Nazi Iron Cross, which is never good. The fourth is vaguely palatable but not particularly striking in any way.

My recommendation is a bold, simple symbol that says “London” unambiguously - why not the congestion charge logo? Everyone will recognise it…

David Goodhart, editor of Tribune, has written a couple of articles (here and here) recently on the so-called “progressives’ dilemma” - how to deal with the Left’s ideals of both welcoming immigrants, without destablising the labour market and threatening the poor in our own country.

This is of particular pertinence, as the EU is to accept 10 new member states on May 1st, and there has been costernation in the right-wing press over mass immigration from the Eastern Bloc. Speaking of my own experiences in the Baltic states last year, a number of people I spoke to did dream of moving to Britain and Western Europe, dazzled by the supposed riches and benefits - to them there was no downside, no poverty or deprivation to consider here (I failed to correct them out of politeness, maybe I should have). To be honest, I’d expect a number of people from the new countries to attempt to move here.

But there is no “progressives’ dilemma” here. The former Eastern Bloc is peaceful and (relatively) democratic, there is no evil forcing them to leave. The only “push” and “pull” reasons are to do with the market, rather than any higher moral or fraternal obligation (as was the case with the influx of Commonwealth immigrants such as my own mother, which in any case was tightly controlled). Here, the social security system here could not cope with a sudden influx of new EU citizens claiming benefit, the labour market here might not cope too well either with an uncontrolled influx, and the countries they leave behind could not cope with the sudden loss in (mostly young and skilled) workers. It’s common sense, and the “right thing to do” from the Left’s perspective, to implement some sort of migration control (and I don’t mean total barring, just controls which sensibly deal with the domestic demand for labour) at first, which benefits both this country and the new ones joining the Union. In time, as the other countries catch up, the disparity eases and we can ease the restrictions.

However, Goodhart’s articles touch on a more dangerous philosophy:

The best summary of the dilemma [is]: “If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state.”

and:

[My previous essay] did say that there is evidence for a negative correlation between ethnic diversity and generous welfare (at its most basic consider American welfare versus Scandinavian). And it did say that if we are not to wake up in 30 years’ time and find we are a US-style society with sharp ethnic tension and a weak welfare state we need to be careful…

Apart from the erroneous fixing of some sort of arbitrary spectrum of social cohesion versus racial mix, ranging from Scandanavia to America without considering the special circumstances surrounding either case (geographical isolation in the former, the legacy of slavery in the latter), this quote on diversity goes against his main argument that he was merely against “mass European white immigration” into the UK. It taps into the nationalist feeling that if you’re not one of “us”, you should not contribute to nor take any benefit from our society - in effect, you do not belong. His argument is especially insulting given (as pointed out by Trevor Phillips in an excellent rebuttal) the great contribution immigrants have made working for state institutions, including the NHS, education and public transport, over the past 50 years.

Goodhart crams in token kind words for Britain’s existing Black and Asian population living in poverty, but has already made his case that state institutions cannot exist with diversity and that they are to blame for breaking it up. I don’t believe my presence and my different cultural values, nor anyone else’s, are automatically to blame for any current or future fragmentation of the welfare state or the NHS - people who do break off from their own social responsibilities are of all races and to pin it on ‘diversity’ - i.e. those who are different - is at best a cheap shot and at worst racist.

www.butlerreview.org.uk versus www.butlerreview.org

(via Bifurcated Rivets)

So come on Blair and Blunkett, enough of this faffing around with electronic tags. You need to divert Prison Service resources to sewing pairs of bollocks onto offenders like Carr so we can use them to string them up. These non-bollock-owners are making a mockery of our criminal justice system!

Well, it’s not really him, but it’s amusingly close to the real thing.

Details are starting to emerge of Sunday’s rail accident in which four men died. They were maintaining the track near Tebay, Cumbria, when a trailer carrying rails that had been running down a hill hit them. Now a Guardian story shows what a mess the situation was - there were five different firms contracted to work on the same site, there was little communication between the different teams, the helmets impaired workers’s hearing, the trailer was of a cheaper and less sophisticated road-and-rail type, and worst of all, it was only being held in place by a pair of wooden blocks before it started careening down the hill.

All shaping up to be yet another example of how shoddy the state of the fragmented, privatised rail industry is. Will any meaningful reform (both of the rail industry and our near-useless corporate homicide laws) from this horrible tragedy occur, or are we going to be fobbed off yet again?

An amusing glitch, and also quite revealing as to what technologies these guys use - though I suppose it makes sense for airport monitors to use something standard like HTML…