"Write what you know" they say.

Even of what you know is benefits advice work and writing stories about it only pays enough to keep your colleagues in biscuits!



Sunday 31 January 2016

Fracking About

On Sunday morning, part way through writing chapter 2 of a new '4mph thriller', I abandoned Daphne Randall in the suburbs of south Manchester and set off for Hanley and a demonstration against fracking.  It was a miserable, drizzly morning and I would have been happier to stay indoors with the laptop, hot toast and another cuppa, but there are times when the right thing to do is to stand up for what you believe in - and to stand in the rain for it at that.  It's certainly what Daphne herself would do, though Daphne would have stayed longer and gone to the pub afterwards. 

Fracking - the extraction of fuel gases or oil from underground by the 'hydraulic fracturing' of rocks, particularly certain shales - is being promoted by its supporters as a route to energy security as North Sea gas supplies decline, with the added advantage of easier access to these on-shore underground reserves.  It's also promoted as relatively 'clean', though in comparison to coal, which is hardly a ringing endorsement.  On the downside, it's still a fossil fuel.  There's a risk of contamination of the water table from the chemicals used to 'frack' the gas out of the rocks and the liquid used for this is itself then toxic waste requiring safe disposal.  One speaker at today's event raised the unpleasant possibility of some of that being shipped all the way from the USA to Middleport for specialist treatment. 

Middleport is a district of Stoke-on-Trent still in the throes of regeneration, most famous right now for its pottery, location for the Great Pottery Throwdown and a pet project of HRH The Prince of Wales.  It is less famous as the place where my fictional heroine first sees her future home, chugging along the Trent and Mersey Canal in a decidedly rusty state, in this short story. Either way, it seems a particularly unsuitable location into which large quantities of hazardous chemicals could be transported.  A heavily-populated urban residential area sitting alongside one of the country's major Inland Waterways - what could possibly go wrong?

The proximity of the Trent and Mersey Canal to a zone through the Potteries earmarked for coal-bed methane extraction set me thinking about the potential impact on the canal network more generally.  Around here, I would have thought anything that further destabilized land honeycombed by disused mineshafts was a spectacularly bad idea.  Friends of the Earth's map shows licences covering areas including large stretches of the T&M, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Shroppie and Llangollen, as well as the Kennett & Avon further south.  I had a look for any public policy on fracking from the Canal and River Trust and the Inland Waterways Association but, disappointingly, there appears to be nothing from either body.  The Inland Waterways Association of Ireland appear to be a step ahead: this from 2012 -
 
"The threat of Fracking is causing the IWAI much concern; it is proving to be an a country wide issue.  The Government see it as a benefit to employment growth, together with the advantage of the development of a natural energy source, while the public see the harm and devastation that it has reputably caused in other parts of the world where this mining method has been used.  Paul Garland has been appointed as the “Fracking Liason Officer” for the Association, and will be responsible for developing a policy and designing a strategy to manage the IWAI’s interests."

- though there appears to be no sign of what happened next on the Internet!

So I appear to have some lobbying to do.  I also may have a good plot to work into a voyage across the Leeds and Liverpool Canal for our Daphne!

Thursday 14 January 2016

A Striking Similarity

Men at Work - Dad, plus 'Second Man', in the cab of an 'ED'
From my 'serious' blog, The Ragged-Skirted Philanthropist, which usually concerns itself with the details of Social Security policy, but occasionally branches out...
  
Until he retired, my father worked as a train driver.  A heart attack in about 1992 took him off the main line and into the 'depot' for the last few years of his employment, which had seen both the advent and the demise of British Rail.

Even before the heart attack, Dad's work had brought him into fairly regular contact with the NHS.  There were frequent trips to the old Southampton Eye Hospital in the early years of diesel propulsion, as the new locomotives chucked out tiny fragments of metal in their exhaust, which then required specialist removal if they got into your eyeball and rusted.  That the same machines made such an unholy racket now means regular fitting and tweaking of hearing aids and, on several occasions in the last few years, he's been back in the Coronary Care Unit - most recently for the fitting of his second Implantable Cardioverter Defibulator.

Dad's working life and that of the doctors who've kept repairing him have always had one thing in common - a necessity to work unsocial hours.  Recently, however, I've noticed another.

It was The Sun's stories about "Moet Medics" that triggered the deja vu moment.  Of course I hadn't seen them in the actual paper - I wouldn't so much as wipe my backside on that rag - but I had laughed at the Junior Doctors' clever Instagram/Facebook parodies mocking allegations that they led the high life on inflated salaries. One of the joys of Social Media is that you can instantly strike back against the media establishment if you are misrepresented.  In 1982, that wasn't so easy.

I mention 1982, because that was the year that Dad and his colleagues got the "Moet Medics" treatment from The Sun.  There was a dispute in progress between BR and the drivers over something called 'flexible rostering'.  Most people outside the industry thought this must be something quite positive, like 'flexitime' for office workers.  For the drivers, it was a fundamental attack on their terms and conditions of employment since their work patterns were already pretty 'flexible', with the starting time of a shift able to be moved up to two hours between one day and the next.  So a week of 2am shifts might start at that time on day one but at 00.01 the next night, back to 02.00 after that and then 03.50, depending on requirements, with the next shift's start time advised at booking off from the one before.  If he was on nights, Dad would leave my mum a note when he came home and before he went to bed, to say what time he was due at work the following night and, on that basis, when he was likely to be up and about and what they could therefore do during the day.  

The pay-off for that flexibility was, if the right guy was 'running foreman', a degree of goodwill in letting staff go home early if there wasn't work for the latter part of their shift and there was a bit of emergency cover.  During the summer holidays we might get an odd day at the beach on the basis that Dad had been allowed to 'slide off' and so got a longer early morning sleep than usual.  The same was true when booked on 'spare' - to cover for unexpected absences and emergencies - when some of the crews might get to 'slide off' early if everything was quiet.  That goodwill was repaid by the drivers with great enthusiasm for their job and commitment to their industry, despite the diabolical hours and conditions - for example, many diesel locomotives cabs were so poorly insulated that old newspapers had to be rolled up and stuffed into the gaps and cracks to stop the draughts.  No fun at 100mph on a cold winter's night! 

'Flexible rostering' meant further uncertainty, allowing the basic hours of a shift to last between 7 and 9 hours of standard time, rather than the basic 8.  Operationally, you can see the sense of this; few shifts could be devised which neatly used eight hours work.  However, with drivers' income heavily dependent on an arcane system of overtime and anti-social hours payments ('time-and-five-eighths' being one rate - train drivers were impressive mental mathematicians on payday), 'flexible rostering' threatened both their income and that last little bit of predictability in their working lives - a guaranteed eight hour day.  That disputes like this were lost is arguably where the road to the 'zero-hours contract' begins.

In 1982, the train drivers - and their 'militant' union ASLEF - were very much a part of the 'Enemy Within' to the Tory establishment and it was therefore necessary to undermine their cause as thoroughly as possible.  So when two young 'second men' from Dad's own depot were prepared to sell their story - of 'sliding off' to go to the disco in work time - to none other than The Sun, it did the drivers' cause no good at all.  At no stage did any of the mainstream media properly explain the dispute and even the left-leaning Not the Nine o'clock News sketch-show couldn't resist a reference to the 'disco' story.  By no means a communist, the only paper Dad said gave the drivers' case a fair airing was the Morning Star.  (We had quite an eclectic mix of newspapers in the house when I was growing up, depending on what Dad found left behind by that day's commuters). 

All this was going on when I was in my last year at sixth-form college and had a massive impact on my political outlook, not least through trying to explain the reality to fellow students who thought it was funny to ask if they should look out for my Dad at the disco that night.  I saw how difficult it was to get fair coverage for your case and how quick politicians and the media were to condemn the 'selfishness' of workers supposedly 'holding the country to ransom' over something as trivial as fair pay and decent working conditions.
Today, I'd like to think it would be easier to fight back, with send-up Instagram pics of train drivers on the picket lines in their flares, open-necked satin shirts and medallions, and 'I'm in work, Peter'* Facebook posts.  In some ways, though, looking at how meekly much of the media take the Government line on the current Junior Doctors' dispute, I fear it would be much the same.  I can't help noticing that it's always "The Doctors' Union, The BMA" from our newsreaders these days (because Unions are a bad thing, of course, and God forbid that the general public mistake the BMA for anything legit), though we're never introduced to think-tank spokespeople as, for example, "Jack Slyme from The Centre for Social Justice, founded by Iain Duncan Smith to promote his personal agenda on Welfare."

At least in their dispute over pay and conditions the Junior Doctors do still have overwhelming public support - not least because a lot of people, like me, owe their lives or the lives of people they love to their dedication.  I think most people understand that intelligent professionals don't take action lightly and that if they say this deal is bad for both their profession and their patients, they're more likely than a politician to know.  Sadly, the opposite assumption tends to be made of blue-collar workers who, when they aren't simply being 'selfish', are still rarely portrayed as better than the dull-witted dupes of their unscrupulous, politically-motivated 'Union Bosses'.  If you'd ever seen a train driver checking the sums on his payslip in his head, before quibbling with the pay clerk over whether he'd got time-and-five-eighths rather than time-and-three for the overtime last Sunday, you would never dare assume that blue-collar workers are easily bamboozled.

*Sir Peter Parker was Chairman of the British Railways Board in 1982.

Monday 4 January 2016

To tweet... or not to tweet?

More likely to 'tweet' than I am!
I've recently completed a series of short stories, deploying my best-loved characters (the ones I like best, that is, although hopefully they're also popular with readers) in a series of silly film parodies.  I'm saving Daphne's staring role (in Snakes on a Narrowboat) for a bonus chapter at the end of another novel with the redoubtable Geordie boatwoman at the helm.  However, even the chance to use a great punning title could not persuade me to write the role he most wanted for failed DWP investigator turned seedy private eye 'Fishy' Pike - Fifty Shades of Gary therefore remains unwritten, mercifully, not least because none of my female characters wanted any part in it!

I write because I enjoy writing - at least when I am motivated to do so and when my characters are active in my mind - although, as I have explained, I also write to redress the picture painted by the mainstream media of our Social Security system and of benefit claimants.  If the 'counter-propaganda' purpose of my stories is to succeed, they need to reach a wider audience than they do at present.  If this is to happen, I need to get better at promoting them to new readers.

I've seen quite a few articles expounding the virtues of Twitter as a marketing tool, since 'tweets', accessorised with the appropriate 'hashtag', can be read by anyone following that debate, not just your 'friends'.  Once you have 'followers' (presumably attracted by something clever and pithy you've tweeted) they will 'retweet' your words of wisdom or links to your work.

I've discounted it in the past for the simple reason that I can't imagine saying anything worthwhile in a mere 140 characters.  I'm not saying I'm always long-winded, but while I might tease my short-but-fearless-around-bloody-great-spiders husband about the probability of finding Samwise Gamgee somewhere in his family tree, I suspect if I get far enough back in mine I'll find actual family trees; I can be positively Entish about getting to the point.

As you will have noticed.

I quite like the idea of letting the Solent Welfare Rights Project have a Twitter account, not least because it would save me personally from having to fend off trolls who might glance at my photo and assume I'm Professor Mary Beard, though I have no idea whether there's any kind of protocol about fictional characters 'tweeting'.  Which of the gang gets to do the 'tweeting' could cause discord, though.  Martin would be good at it, though would need Hilary to censor him and a strict limit on time allowed online to prevent him spending too much time debating whatever bile-fuelled poison Katie Hopkins has vomited into the ether that day.  Tricia might manage a better balance of smart comment and professional decorum.

Anyway, to try to get a feel for Twitter, I've spent a few hours mooching about on it without actually signing up.  I'm still not really sure that I 'get it'.  I found a 'books' section with links to various newspapers' literary review pages and articles, plus dozens of tweets from Richard Dawkins, including one rather well-phrased one about the implicit misogyny of using slang terms for female genitalia as terms of abuse. If I put her in charge of the Solent Welfare Rights Projects' account, Hilary Carrington would certainly have retweeted - or did Dawkins actually retweet it from her?!  Astonishingly, I noticed that a mere 'good evening, folks' from E L James was 'liked' by over 300 people had scores of retweets.  I may be missing something here, but how is a standard greeting from anyone - unless it's someone terribly famous and previously assumed to be dead - worthy of a 'retweet'?  I may have to check that the author wasn't actually E. L. V I S!

Anyway, I think this old Luddite is going to need to sit down with a fellow human who uses Twitter and have her or him explain slowly and patiently what it's for and how to use it properly.  Only then, after a period of careful observation, might I let 'the gang' get to work, or even dabble myself.

In the meanwhile, I can always troll the DWP's Facebook page...