Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

I identify myself as a believer in capitalism, free-enterprise and free-market economics. I also have a strong affinity for the Conservative party. However, I don’t agree with a number of Conservative policies, be they ideological or just ill-thought out. Indeed I find that I want to nationalise the railways, increase funding of state schools and take away the tax breaks on independent ones; as well as reform and create a strong NHS.

Education is close to most people’s hearts, be it from our memories of our school days, or the wishes of parents for their children, the human resource of the future, to do well, get ahead and have a strong foundation for the future. It is in this background that David Cameron’s attacks on grammar schools were arguably his most misguided move, apart from WebCameron; it doesn’t look good when an Eton and Oxford-educated man denounces grammar schools which I see as a key proponent of social mobility. The defence of which was a key Conservative policy.

It is no wonder why school standards are falling under a Labour government that prefers comprehensive schools completely forgetting the point that education needs to be universally accessible: giving everyone the chance to make the most if their god given gifts and it needs to be uniform.

The creation and protection of selective schools is not a discriminatory policy for the privileged. It is not an example of ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Grammar schools are a key method for the bright, but deprived, to reach higher grounds. Education has always been a tool out of the vicious cycle of poverty, and frankly, now it is gone or in decline.

There has been so much panic in recent months - that is before Labour’s poor showing in the local elections and the Crewe and Nantwich byelection - the fact that our future economy is going to have a shortfall of well-educated graduates in the labour market. This of course is a direct consequence of poor educational standards in schools.

It is not a huge jump, therefore, to look at the school rankings and notice that the independent schools and the grammar schools dominate the top of these charts. It is not the fault of independent schools who have always been well privately-funded and have maintained standards. It is a loss of our valuable assets in state schools of grammar schools across the country, bar the home counties and a various spattering around the country.

Just like the NHS, education in our schools is mortally important for the country. Just as every NHS Trust needs to be up to standard across the country so does every school. Those that oppose grammar schools speak of the unfair, undue pressure put upon the shoulders of 11-year olds and talk of it’s crippling psychological damage of being labelled a ‘loser’ by themselves or others. They fail to realise in this analysis that there is the 12 and 13-plus exams if they don’t get in the first time round. there is also the case of appeal, which a significant minority win. Finally there is also the choice of school for sixth form.

Why cripple social mobility? Why ruin our children’s chances? This is the state of our politically correct, but ignorant government. In my eyes, David Cameron not only joined the government on this failure of policy but has forsaken the likes of Margraret Thatcher and Edward Heath who are grammar-school educated. It is he, who is clearly discriminatory in his command as Leader of the Opposition; having 13 out of ~20 shadow cabinet ministers from Eton is akin to the problem that the Labour party has with Scots in the cabinet. I’d say Cameron’s cabinet problem is the greater.

How do we pay for all of this? Well the Conservative party say they believe there is at least £7 Billion of waste in the government’s various departments, how about you look at the waste that’s been going on in the NHS computer system which adds up to Billions alone. £50 Million to fix a computer program that was speaking in German. We’ve got to make people accountable again.

David Cameron’s speech was delivered very well. A great fuss is being made by his delivery without auto-cue. It’s certainly turning into something of a race of personalities in this election that is not yet to be. Whether Gordon Brown will call one or not, is anyone’s guess.

However, a complaint often levelled at David Cameron is “What does he stand for?!”. I think this finally answers it. He brought forward his policies on emigration, his thoughts on the NHS, the Army and foreign policy focus on Afghanisatan. Already the Shadow Chancellor’s promised reforms on stamp duty and inheritance tax are near election winners in my vote. And they’re justified, the finance is backed up.

There were some big corner stone pieces of policy unveiled in this speech, completing an otherwise empty dossier. He downplayed his family values points. However with stamp duty and a clear push towards national citizenship service as well as discpline in schools and over-arching power to headmasters shows the kind of things he will be doing in a push towards greater family values and therefore logically, one would think, a stronger community.

I applaud the idea to strengthen border controls and control emigration instead of introducing ID cards. But the recognition that it is something has made this country great.

What I am scared of is his talks of keeping jury trials, something that is taken as a given in my mind but apparently something Labour are trying to scrap. Repealling the Human Rights Act is a bit suspect, I’d have to look further into the issues at hand to say whether that’s an informed move or not, but I agree that sometimes the Human Rights Act is stupid - protecting terrorists. There must be checks and balances however. You can scrap police paper work etc. and push for more local control by schools and zero tolerance policing and what not, but what happens in the case of the guy who’s innocent or needs help?

I strongly applaud the move to let the NHS decide it’s own future more, to not hinder public sector with targets, something that has even impacted myself. We need a strong NHS.

I disagree with getting rid of the ’state monopoly’ on schools. Education isn’t a business, it should be nationalised and standardised.

Although I support many of the Conservatives and in particular David Cameron’s newly revealed policies one must be slightly cynical. It is easy to question and jeer at this government’s achievements and failures but it’s obviously a hard task running a country. With a more neutral view a journalist made a good point - how is Cameron going to achieve some of these things whilst remaining in the EU, which is largely a good thing and I think definitely a beneficial thing for us here in the UK. It does however dictate much of our legislative power.

I fear there’s too much emphasis on the person and not the policies, what’s all this “authentic Cameron” and “He didn’t use an auto-cue unlike Brown, yesterday”. Simply bollocks. If the Conservatives gain power, which I hope they will as a progenator to change they must be kept true to mission, with checks and balances I fear some draconian and anti-civil liberty type legislation coming in further down the line. All under the banner of family values. As always in politics, it’s a mixed bag.

First and foremost, I’ve only tried this out twice. First time it seemingly would not actually download anything. The second time around the only program I wanted to watch, a piece on India’s independence wasn’t available at the time. What gives? However, the second time I just tried downloading The Real Hustle to test it out, it started downloading at a good spped 800Kb/sec and then dropped to under a hundred and then back up, in this willy-nilly fashion that bemused me. I’m presuming it’s using P2P as my upload was being maxed throughout (Which you cannot configure, or limit at present.) and I don’t think the BBC could pay their bandwidth bills either, especially in the light of ISP’s opinions.Why the proprietary? This was brought up in the LUGRadio podcast Season 4 Episode 22 (Sorry, you’ll have to scroll, I know I never mastered that particular HTML tag, but the LUGRadio people really should have, or created separate pages for each episode.) The BBC is almost wholly funded by the UK TV license fee, it is their mandate to provide resources to everyone who pay this license fee, they have been praised for their web efforts many times , although I find Click Online terrible. So why do they immediately make you download Internet Explorer 7, a security risk and Windows Media Player 11, an oft described as poor monopoly pushed media player. (See EU rulings on the removal of Windows Media Player.) This and a masive chain of DRM, a dirty chain that I’m sure will be broke. So the BBC is paying companies like Kontiki with our money, to keep us from our media. It’s one thing if proprietary works, it’s another if it doesn’t. How can this software have even got out of Alpha? Most importantly, why is this happening with our money? It’s wrong on so many levels, criminal even in my mind.

1. Openness. The Linux community has already complained, given that Mac was said to have an alternative in the works, leaving us other operating system users in the lurch. At least you need the Big Three, why adopt a non-cross platform solution in the first place, this was a known and easily predicted pitfall of the solution? I have to put it down to both Microsoft money that is clearly going the BBC’s way, something we’ve been suspecting since the availability of audio in WMA as well as Real. I also suspect it has to do with the proprietary DRM chain probably an ActiveX component, using Windows-only DRM toolchains, passing the media on to a Windows only program.
2. When will it work? As I was saying, I wouldn’t be as bothered physically and personally if it worked. It arrives late and sub-par, what more could we expect from the BBC, funded by us? Nothing else obviously. The hectic mix of web and classical application is confusing even to a relatively tech-savvy user like myself. There is a dearth of configuration options, using often technical terms that are unsuited. The GUI design is poor, and unaccesible in my opinion, using small fonts, dark colours predominantly black and pink. The web design is fair enough, but just as poorly put together. The back-end service obviously does not work well enough. A show should be available to download as soon as it has aired. I found that during it’s operation it sapped far more bandwidth that it should have (Why can’t we set parameters for this, limits, scheduled downloads? Bandwidth is money.) It exhibits malware like qualities leaving a service/process called ‘kservice.exe‘ that would not relinquish it’s hold from my system, and I have identified to be part of the DRM chain. It is not in the “Add/Remove Programs” list, nor is it a mundane process, it actively utilises all your upstream bandwidth upon starting Windows. This actually breaks the law if my memory serves me correctly, it’s akin, if not worst than most malware. One user read the Terms & Conditions and found no mention of this stealth, thieving service mentioned within.

I’m so angry, at this, infuriated. It pisses me off when people aren’t held accountable for wasting the public’s time and money on late, half-arsed projects that simply do not work and probably convene many UK laws. Accessibility laws for the disabled, data protection laws, computer misuse laws. If you do not immediately start working on a cross-platform, safe and accessible solution to the problem of allowing UK license payers to watch their paid-for television in a simple and accessible to all manner, you will pay for it.

Update: Using the iPlayer for the third time, I find that it slows down the whole system by presumably writing downloads to RAM first. This means I currently only have 200MB of available RAM out of 1GB. A situation that I don’t even see whilst playing games. It’s caused videos to stutter, Firefox web browser to become unresponsive and even hamper input output. What a poorly designed system. Although Khost.exe and kservice.exe do not seem to be inflating, they are almost certainly the cause. This project needs to be scrapped and redeveloped with community relations improved.

Is it so hard? I don’t know yet, having not studied economics or politics in depth but is it so hard to give not big business a break, not marginal concessions on stuff that doesn’t really matter, to actually not waste money to the best of the government’s ability, to be a bit more even handed? Obviously not.

The UK Conservative Party’s announcement of giving tax cuts to big business appal me, that is not what we need. Big business can certainly fend for itself or are the Tory’s so bereft of support and votes these days? No, they’re not, they’re perhaps very well placed against Brown’s new government but squandering opportunity with these silly non-clear cut policies is simply idiocy. The green band wagon, keeping the status quo, tax cuts to big business, increase of censorship of the arts (see Cameron’s speech at the British Phonographic Industry). I used to call my political views conservative, but I don’t believe in any of this, how could anyone? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Thank god we’re in a relatively liberal democracy. Again, how do you Americans live without a welfare state? If your taxes are lower, how are you paying for all that military expenditure?

Ok, I’m not saying I’m labour either, I don’t agree with plans for identity cards certainly so pushed through by Tony Blair, but things might change under Brown. Besides this is something that looks to be coming in from the EU and general world pressure, but it’s like searching my bag when I go into a pub, or a theatre… why? I know why, but why?! There’s got to be some other way than this blanket policy of “Everyone’s guilty until proven not so.” I thought it used to be “Innocent until proven guilty”.

Maybe when I’m older.

I’m too small a website to get much of a furore from a title like that, but I think there’s a large sect of the world that’s thinking the same. I’m a big fan of documentary film makers; Louis Theroux comes to mind as one of my favourite, but Michael Moore is also interesting.

Watching Sicko, his new film, really makes you wander how America can treat it’s own people so badly, coupled with the disasters of recent times and how Top Gear highlighted the fact that New Orleans is still ruined. Is that capitalism? Hell if that what paying for your own medical care is like, stuff that I’m a liberal not a conservative. A few thousand pounds here and there I thought. I’d put my full weight behind supporting the NHS and improving the NHS. It is right for there to be enquiries in to the NHS constantly, even though I don’t live in the litigation heavy society.

Change will only occur when this country that is so divided cares for each and every other person. It’s split in politics and religion, two things that go hand in hand in indoctrinating peoples. When we talk about Liverpudlians hating Mancunians, it’s a joke compared to the North-South divide that still exists in that country.

It’s very interesting to see. Compels me as a History student. Seriously, do something about it, elect someone for the right reasons, to better the country as a whole, not make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Stop labelling evil things that would do good for the common people “socialist” that’s so stupid in this day and age.

If I ever was a politician I wouldn’t accept money from lobbyists or the sort… that’s why I’d be a lousy politician. And I’m sure if I was, then this entry would come back to haunt me, no doubt trawled up by The Sun.

A cynical and cautious view.

• Arriva Buses should only charge adult prices when a child is nationally recognised as an adult i.e. 18
• Cinemas should only charge adult prices at 18 and above.
• Horses fouling the roads or pavements should be made to clear it up, or face a fine.
• Banks should not be allowed to charge for unarranged overdrafts on under 18s account.

Last night, in the early hours of the morning, I watched Patton the film about General George S. Patton Jr. portrayed by the wonderful George C. Scott. Firstly, I highly recommend this film to anyone, especially history enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, or perhaps not for Scott. He seems to be typecast, as he also played an erratic General in Dr. Strangelove.

This film brings up the interesting point of politics and war, namely how Patton was mishandled after the slapping incident. Why would his friend “Ike” Eisenhower, arguably jeopardise the war effort by reprimanding Patton so severely for what could be said to be a trivial and just act. Yes, “Old Blood and Guts”, by his affectionate ascription is a hard man, but he delivered results as seen in his leadership of the US 3rd Army in France.

Unbeknownst to me, this film brought to my attention that US Generals had to be approved by the Senate and possibly still do. I do not think this is wise, nor clever. Perhaps now, in these times of more modern warfare, but in a state of World War, I think it is utterly stupid to allow politicians to decide who is a good war leader and who is not. Why was Eisenhower promoted above Patton, even though Patton was his senior all throughout the pre-war period?

His rivalry with “Monty” the famous head of the Desert Rats, for glory and for gasoline is rather amusing. However, it brings up the question of the politics of war, yet again. Why should Patton have to argue for every gallon of gasoline? Because that is the price of alliance, Britain needed a hero as did America. Unfortunately for Patton, his eccentric attitude did not play well with the public. I am not in a position to say who was a better General, Montgomery or Patton, but I have heard it argued that Patton was superior, if he had only been given precedence over Montgomery for supplies, he could have achieved a lot more.

Churchill after the war saw a backlash against him, indeed he was removed halfway through the Potsdam Conference in 1945, for Atlee. People recognise the need for men like Churchill and Patton, men who get results. What I find bemusing is how quickly public opinion descented against these great men.