The Voice of a Nation

Last night saw the final of the UK version of singing contest "The Voice", won in the end by partially sighted Northern Irish singer Andrea Begley. The final had also featured the quirky voice of Leah McFall, the Salfordian answer to Garth Brooks in Mike Ward and Matt Henry, who can now look forward to a career as a Will.i.am lookalike if nothing else.

The show came in for some grief early in its run, when last year's winner and former holiday camp performer Leanne Mitchell saw her debut album fail to make much of a dent in the charts. Mitchell had been something of a middle-of-the-road ballad singer, the kind you would find doing turns in clubs up and down the country on any given Saturday night.

The same format worked this year for Begley, who looked at her most uncomfortable when asked to perform an up tempo duet with her coach Danny O'Donoghue and his band The Script. Give her anything slow and emotional though and she was note perfect, even managing to make an Evanescence song sound like something you would hear being played in the background of a Werthers Originals advert.

For a large part of this series, viewers had little input into who went forward to the next round of the show, with those decisions being in the hands of the coaches. Only in the later stages did the viewers get their say, and in the most part their decisions seemed fairly reasonable and sensible.

McFall in particular looked a nailed-on finalist from the early stages, with a spine-chilling version of Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You" a particular highlight. Perhaps on another show she may well have won, but those who seek success on The Voice seemingly need to appeal to a certain kind of market. It's something that seems to be a common theme running through a number of such shows.

The final of Britain's Got Talent this year was won by a Hungarian shadow theatre troupe, while X Factor turned out a steady stream of the anodyne - culminating in the eventual winner James Arthur whose tattoos and history of homelessness at least gave him some character that his personality couldn't.

The link between the three shows? Their time in the television schedule.

Both X Factor and The Voice make significant amounts of noise about finding credible, successful artists for the future. How realistic an expectation is that though, for a television talent show that relies on members of the public to pick its winners? 

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the audience for these shows and the record buying public, there would most likely be a very small area of crossover. The majority of "new" music is bought by a younger age group, who at 8:15 on a Saturday night are unlikely to be at home in front of their television, phone in hand and ready to vote.

So the acts which are successful in these shows are ones that appeal to a more mature audience, one that is more likely to be voting not solely on the basis of whose records they would buy, but on who they like as much for personality as for music.

In these days of Youtube, social media and music editing software you can run on a home PC, genuine talent will find a way to get out there, get seen and get signed by record companies. In the same way that there are very few talented young footballers missed by professional clubs, there scouting networks of the major record labels don't miss much in terms of young musicians.

Perhaps it's time television ditched shows like X Factor and The Voice which promise to make stars out of hopeful amateurs and exploit their emotions for our viewing pleasure and advertising/telephone revenues? Maybe. Or at least just drop the act that they are doing it for our benefit.

Justice For Sale

I know you're all good, law-abiding folk out there, but imagine this scenario.

You were assaulted in the street. In response, you turned around and gave your assailant a good hiding, at which point the police have turned up and arrested you despite your pleas that it was self defence.

You already have a solicitor that has dealt with your family for years on other non-criminal matters, knows you well and is suitably qualified and experienced to present the case for your defence in court.

However, you can't afford to pay him due to your present financial circumstances, and will need to claim legal aid.

Your solicitor is happy to do the work for legal aid rates. You're a repeat customer, he's got every incentive to work as hard as he possibly can for you in the knowledge you'll come back next time you want some legal work doing.

As you're claiming legal aid however, you can't use your trusted, respected family solicitor. Instead, you have to go through a subsidiary of a national haulage firm, which has won the contract to allocate clients to legal aid solicitors.

The one they allocate you to is 30 miles away in the nearest big city. You incur costs and spend a lot of time travelling back and forth to meetings. They don't know you, have no idea about your previous character or any interest in you being a repeat customer.

Not only that, but whatever your plea or the outcome of any court case, they get paid exactly the same amount. So if they can persuade you to plead guilty and thereby cut out the need for a trial, they have a bigger profit margin on the job.

All in all, a pretty unsatisfactory state of affairs wouldn't you agree? Well that's the future that awaits if the Ministry of Justice gets its way and introduces PCT (Price Competitive Tendering) for criminal legal aid work.

Legal firms will be forced to bid for a small number of legal aid contracts in their area. Any that are unsuccessful or choose not to bid will not be permitted to undertake legal criminal aid work. This is expected to reduce the number of firms available to do this kind of work from around 1,600 to as few as 400 for the whole of the country.

It will create wastelands in areas where there are no successful bidders such as rural locations. For speakers of minority languages it could leave them with no legal aid solicitor who actually speaks their language within a reasonable travelling distance.

Smaller firms will find themselves pushed into a "merge or die" scenario if they want to continue delivering criminal legal aid work. Stobart Solicitors, a subsidiary of the Stobart haulage group has already expressed an interest in bidding. No doubt the usual suspects when it comes to public sector contracting rounds - G4S, for example - will be submitting expensively prepared, professional bids from their experienced in-house contracting teams.

Are these the types of organisations you want representing you in court?

Those firms that are successful will be faced with no guarantees of work. What work they do get will be at a reduced fee per case. A successful bid could well end up crippling some firms. What happens then in terms of providing representation in that locality?

The Ministry of Justice would have us believe that the current UK legal aid system is bloated and is not providing "value for money". It cites as its evidence "lawyers earning hundreds of thousands of pounds from two or three cases", when in fact the average criminal defence solicitor in the UK earns between £20k and £45k per year and is often required to work weekends, nights and bank holidays for no extra reward.

Make no bones about it, if the Ministry of Justice manages to get these proposals through the consultation stage and implemented - there will be no phased roll out, no pilot schemes to evaluate its success, just straight from one system to the other - then it won't just stop at criminal legal aid work. It has already said as much. The civil and family courts will be next in line, with the potential for this system to be rolled out in other areas. How do you fancy having your GP chosen for you by a regional panel which has no interest in what is right or convenient for your welfare?

Much as I am loathe to quote her, Margaret Thatcher - never one to promote the public sector or the private - once said that ‘any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law’.

Putting out justice to the highest bidder is the first step in that process.

If you haven't done so already, please let the Ministry of Justice know how you feel about the proposed changes and the potential removal of your right to select your legal advocate. Sign the petition now at:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48628

Life's Ups and Downs

The debate has started again in rugby league circles about the merits of automatic promotion and relegation to Super League. The end to the football season, with all its last minute drama, delight and despair has no doubt stirred its believers into action.

There is no debate that do-or-die games, with something hinging on the outcome for both sides, create drama and draw crowds. The last one I can remember of the pre-franchise era in rugby league pitched local neighbours Wakefield and Castleford against each other, in a winner-takes-all showdown full of excitement in front of a large attendance.

There's one significant difference in the outcomes of promotion and relegation between rugby league and many other professional sports however, which presents a fly in the ointment to the automatic P&R brigade.

In football, if a team is relegated from the Premier League it drops down to the Championship. Clubs in the Championship are run in much the same way. They receive substantial - albeit smaller - television revenues. All their staff, both on field and off, are still full time and well paid. The rules don't differ in terms of how much they can spend on wages or how many overseas players they have.

The relegated or promoted clubs can essentially carry on doing business in the same way they had in the previous season. None of this applies to rugby league.

Revenues in the Championship are tiny in comparison to Super League. In most cases well below the level that is needed to fund a full time squad. Hence the reason that most of the teams at that level are part time. So any club that comes down from Super League finds itself having to make major changes on and off the field in the way it is structured.

Similarly, any club stepping up from the Championship to Super League needs to find the investment to recruit a large number of new players, revamp its marketing and commercial side and make the transition from a part time to a full time competition. Assuming they don't get to know that they are promoted until October and that the season starts again in February, that means four months to entirely change the nature of their business.

The current franchising system is not perfect. It will not provide a cure to the kind of poor, short-term management that plagues many clubs both inside and outside Super League. That's an issue that those responsible for running the clubs need to get their heads around.

What it will do however - and has already done - is encourage outside investment into clubs from owners who can be sure that for the next three years their major income streams are guaranteed. It will also ensure that they can invest in their infrastructure - stadiums, youth structures, marketing - safe in the knowledge that doing so will increase their chances of staying in Super League and not be jeopardised by a sudden slump in playing form.

On-field competition in sport is its lifeblood. It's the reason it exists. Yet despite that, sport is also a business. If it neglects the solid structures it needs to survive, what happens on the field becomes the least of its worries.

For rugby league clubs to survive, they need that solidity and certainty - not the knife edge existence that promotion and relegation brings.

Getting Britain Working

Iain Duncan Smith is poised to announce a radical new plan to reduce both the benefits bill and the NHS waiting lists in one.

The Work and Pensions Secretary's new initiative will see the long-term unemployed being forced to consent to their organs being used for transplants, or risk having their benefits reduced.

Sources within Whitehall have expressed their concern at the amount of time patients are spending on waiting lists for organ transplants and the amount their ongoing care in the meantime costs the NHS.

A DWP spokesman told us, "It seems ludicrous that at a time when Britain needs everyone to be striving rather than skiving, that there are perfectly functioning organs being wasted in the bodies of those whose prime ambition is to be awake in time for Jeremy Kyle."

"It makes sense for those organs to be removed and put to work in the bodies of decent, hard-working British people so they can provide for their decent, hard-working British families."

"This will result in significant savings from the benefits budget as a result of the donors no longer being eligible - mainly due to being dead - while also reducing the amount of time recipients have to wait for organs."

"Those who refuse to have their organs redistributed in this way will face having their benefits reduced. While we appreciate this may lead to them dying of malnutrition or hypothermia, clearly this will have the unintended side effect of freeing up their organs earlier than we would otherwise have expected."

"In order to avoid placing undue strain on the NHS by increasing the number of transplants it performs, we will of course be contracting these operations out to private sector partners."

Response within Westminster to the leaked proposals has been mixed, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg describing them as "really not very nice at all", while UKIP's Nigel Farage has expressed concern that the organs may be taken by Bulgarians and Romanians who come into the country simply for the purpose of obtaining kidneys they can sell at a profit back home.

This Is A Commercial Presentation

(Scene: An idyllic summers day. An old, grey man walks slowly through a typical English flower garden, idly pruning as he passes. Songbirds provide the soundtrack. As he approaches the camera he looks up, smiles and begins to speak)

"Hello. My name is John Major. You might remember me from being Prime Minister, and sleeping with Edwina Currie. I know, me neither."

"In this difficult global economic climate, when you get to my age you start to worry about whether your loved ones are going to have enough money to take care of things once you're gone."

"That's where the Westminster 50-Plus Plan comes in. For a small monthly contribution of a percentage of your soul, we can ensure that when you do die your loved ones will have your entire funeral expenses paid for by the state irrespective of the cost involved."

"There are no complicated forms to fill in, no medical examinations to take. You just need to be a former Prime Minister with a successful military campaign behind you."

(Cut to video - images of Churchill's funeral)

"Contact us now for a no-obligation quote, and we'll give you a full military guard of honour just for applying."

"Don't leave it to chance that people will remember that you used to be Prime Minister and bury you accordingly. Take out the Westminster 50-Plus Plan today, and you too can be buried like that bloody woman."

(Man's wife enters from left, bearing a dish full of garden peas as voice over begins...)

Voice over man: "The value of your reputation as Prime Minister can go down as well as up. You may put a lot more into the job than you get back in terms of posthumous recognition."

(Ends)

An Easter Message from Pope Francis

Greetings, earthlings... I mean fellow peoples of the Earth.

Please excuse my inelegant translation into English. I come from a country of Spanish-speaking Catholics, mainly thanks to the Conquistadors. They were a little like those Crusades you English used to go on, except they were smart enough to wait until they had guns before they started trying to enslave an entire continent to their belief system.

In my first Easter message since my promotion to the top job, I want to try and get the Catholic church to reconnect to the youth of the world. Although some might say we've been getting a little too connected to the youth of the world, if you get my meaning! Still, as my predecessor might have said "Zey ver only followink zeir holy orders" - I'm kidding Benny, relax. This isn't Nuremberg.

There have been allegations made against a number of our brethren who were less than discrete, some of whom were kind enough to die before any of it could get all Lionel Messi in a court of law. Let me say right now that the Catholic church abhors the sexualisation of children. If you make them all look pretty, how are we supposed to choose between them?

Like any business, the Catholic church needs new customers in order to survive. Our congregations are dwindling and ageing, and the policy of banning contraception against procreation doesn't seem to be churning out as many new ones as it used to. That's why we need to reach out to the young people.

You know kids, Easter is about more than complaining because your Nan could only afford to get your egg from Poundland this year what with the gas prices going up and everything. It's a time when we remember the sacrifices of Jesus, who came from God to save us all and ended up getting happy-slapped by the Romans in a drive-by nailing.

Yet Jesus rose again, a bit like that Tupac hologram at the Snoop Dogg concert (draft note - do kids still listen to Snoop, isn't it all Little Mix and Beiber these days?) except in a more touchy feely kind of way. He came back, and then he was gone again. A bit like B*witched, but without the double denim.

While we're on the subject of comebacks and history repeating, a quick hello to all of you on Las Malvinas. I haven't forgotten you're there, and I look forward to seeing you all sooner than you think.

So to summarise for you my children, remember the message of Easter. Don't fuck with authority, or they'll hang you out to dry and bury you under a rock. Remember that next time your priest tells you to keep something quiet, capiche.

This is P-Frankie, saying peace out.

I Condemn This Budget To The Bin

So, at 12:30pm George Osborne stood up in the House of Commons and told us all straight.

His target for reducing the national debt - missed.

His growth forecast - halved.

Government borrowing - up on one measure, only down on another due a freak underspend by Government departments.

Not a great start. Still, now these things are all out in the open we can get back to putting the ship back on course, right?

Apparently not.

Despite the cupboard being bare, apparently there was just enough left to play belated Santa.The rise in the income tax personal allowance to £10k has always been on the cards. It was a Lib Dem commitment at the last election and will lift a lot of people who are working part time out of tax altogether.

Based on previous rises in the personal allowance however, it will be accompanied by a lowering of the point at which the 40% tax rate kicks in. So while some will be taken out of tax altogether, others will find their take home pay falling.

Not those with income over £150k of course, who will benefit from the 5% lowering of their tax rate already announced, having already managed their income in such a way as to avoid the 50% rate.

There was also enough in the cupboard for the government to start underwriting mortgages and lending money for deposits. To cut the main rate of Corporation Tax to 20%. To put an extra £15bn into road, rail and other construction projects. To give tax breaks to the shale gas extraction industry, despite their dubious environmental credentials. To compensate those who lost money on Equitable Life policies.

Not everyone got a gift under their tree from George this year however. Most government departments are finding their budgets cut by 1% in each of the last two years. At a time when their fixed costs are rising (utilities, transport, consumables) these savings are going to have to come from more "efficiencies". It cannot be done without there being some effect on services.

The level of cuts in public spending is going to be deeper than originally planned, an additional £1.5bn on top of the £10bn scheduled. Again, how can this be achieved without an adverse impact on public services?

Public sector staff find their wage rises capped at a level well below the rising cost of living again. Those who we rely on to provide essential services are being denied the opportunity to earn a living wage.

Still, if you drive a car (which we're all supposed to be doing less of to be "green") or like a pint of beer (which we're all supposed to be doing less of to avoid putting strain on the NHS) then good news. The planned fuel duty escalator increase has been canned, and duty on beer has actually been reduced by 1p per pint - a decision that may find Osborne in conflict with the European Courts of Justice, who ruled in 2008 that treating beer and wine differently for duty purposes offers indirect protection.

From the outside, this is a budget that lacks focus. It's as if a whole load of different policies have been placed in a National Lottery machine, and the first few out have made it into the speech. Carrots have been dangled, sticks wielded but with not with the intention of getting the donkey that is the economy to go in any one particular direction.The acid test is whether in 12 months time when Osborne stands up again, he has the better news to report that the "independent" OBR forecasts suggests he will.

I won't hold my breath.

On The Origin Of Competition

Competition.

When you think about it, competition makes a lot of sense.

If I can only buy something from one particular shop, then that shop can set its prices at whatever level it feels like in the knowledge that I have no choice but to buy it from them. Particularly if that item is something that I really need in order to survive.

Competition is the reason our planet, and indeed our species, looks the way it does today. Over billions of years different plant and animal life has learned to out compete others, in order to make best use of the conditions and resources available to it. In terms commonly associated with (but never actually used by) Charles Darwin, it's survival of the fittest.

So if instead of being able to buy my gas from just one supplier, or use just one bus or train company to get me to work every morning I had a choice of two or more, it stands to reason that I would get a better deal, right?

These businesses are going to be competing for my money. They'll be falling over themselves to offer the best service at the lowest prices in order to get my business rather than have it go to their competitors.

That's the theory at least, behind a lot of economic and political ideology.

So why doesn't it work? Why have welfare to work programmes contracted for on this basis failed spectacularly to deliver? Why do utility prices continue to rise? Why do service standards and cost to the customer seem to be drifting apart in the wrong direction on public transport?

It's us. Homo sapiens. In particular, the first world variety.

We're greedy. That's not an insult. I'm not using it as a pejorative term here. It's our greed that has enabled us to survive and flourish as a species. We understand the value of having resources and keeping them to ourselves.

Once upon a time that might have been having the biggest stash of berries in the settlement, or the most number of goats on your particular farm. These days it's about having as much cash in your bank, or your pension pot, or on your company balance sheet as you can possibly get.

If you're a business, you do that by winning and keeping as many customers as you can. The best way to do that, so the ideology says, is to keep your prices low and your service standards high. Give people good service at reasonable prices and they'll keep coming back. Problem with that, is that it tends to eat into your profit margins.

If you're not making profits, then you're not an attractive proposition for those investors with the really big money to sink their capital into. Not Joe Public, who buys and sells the odd few shares here and there and fancies himself as a bit of a trader, but the pension funds and hedge funds who have billions to invest, all in the interest of making money for their own investors.

Drive down costs, keep prices as high as you can get away with and you'll have these big boys beating a path to your door in search of a quick return on their clients money. If you can get together with your competitors on the quiet and all agree to set your prices at a particular level, then there's money to be made for everyone and no need to really compete. Instead of struggling to get to the trough and having the weakest starve, just agree to build a longer trough.

So we've tried competition as a business model, and found it sadly lacking for the end customer in the utilities market, in train and bus travel, in telecommunications.

So why on earth does anyone in their right mind want to introduce it wholesale into the way we educate our children, or the health services required to keep us alive?

The Right To Publicity

Frankly, I'm a bit miffed.

I made a real effort yesterday to look nice, just for my own personal benefit, and not one picture of it has ended up on any media outlet anywhere.

I know how the Duchess of Cambridge must feel now. My right to a bit of personal publicity has been repeatedly breached by newspapers and television stations, both domestic and foreign.

I'm thinking of taking out a superinjuction compelling them to print photos of me in a bikini, or speculate about whether I'm pregnant or not. My Mum and Dad's house has issued a strongly worded statement condemning the lack of interest in my personal life.

A quick note to the seemingly lovely, yet apparently enormously naive about how the world works, former Ms Middleton.

You're famous. Expect people to be interested in what your baby bump, or for that matter your norks, look like. If you get them out in what are very public settings, there's a chance that someone might see them and take a photograph.

Either you learn to shrug your shoulders, deal with it and move on with your life, or you take to wearing a burkha at all times.

Just please, stop the incessant whining. It's creating an image of you as some over-privileged toff who wants all the rights and glamour of being a member of one of the most high profile families on the planet, but with none of the downside.

Time to woman up. If you think it's bad now, just wait til the third in line to the throne drops out of your womb.

The Sanctimony of Marriage

I'm married.

I'm also an atheist. When my wife and I got married, we did so in a civil setting rather than under the eyes of God in a church. Our choice.

While I'm an atheist, I also wholeheartedly respect the religious choices of others. If you want to believe in whatever your chosen deity wants you to believe, have at it. Live your life the way the scriptures of your particular religion tell you to. Shout your religion from the rooftops if you wish, and I'll respect your right to do so.

The minute you get a publicly funded career that allows you to directly influence the laws of the land however, park your religion on the lawn outside if you would be so kind. You're not in Parliament to follow your own personal crusades, you're there to represent (as best you can) the views of all the people in your constituency.

Sadly, this concept seems beyond the grasp of a number of Conservative MPs when it comes to the debate over gay marriage. What also seems beyond them is having the courage of their convictions to come out and say what they actually think.

If you believe it is wrong for people to be able to marry someone of the same gender, if you think it is somehow an affront to your god and to morality, at least have the balls to come out and say so. Take your position and stand by it. I'll regard you as a bigot not fit for public office, but I'll have at least a grudging respect for your forthright defence of your viewpoint.

Just whatever you do, please don't come up with some weasel excuse about it "not being a priority", or that the government has "other things it needs to be doing". You're fooling nobody with that one. If you're against it, just come out (if you'll pardon the pun) and say so. When it goes to a vote, which side of the fence you came down on will be a matter of public record so your stance on the matter will be out there for all to see.

It's not beyond the remit of even the most inept of governments - and this one is pretty close to the top of the charts in that category - to deal with both social and economic issues simultaneously. More than one piece of legislation is moving through the houses all the time. It has to be, otherwise nothing would get done.

If your MP is one of those who is trying to delay the vote (until such a time as they are out of office and won't get their bigotry exposed, presumably) and believe that everyone should have the same rights to be married irrespective of their sexuality, I hope you bear their actions in mind should they come up for re-election. Parliament is no place for racists or sexists, neither should it be for homophobes.