Sculpture and photo as always and for ever copyright 2008 Andrew Lucre
Green inquiry officer apologises for Tory slur
Police reveal failings in MP's arrest
Damian Green arrest 'like Mugabe's Zimbabwe'
Q&A: Damian Green arrest
More than 200 people attended a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the Clapham Junction rail tragedy, the last time such a memorial will be held.
Barclays boss: banks should say sorry in (Monday 22 December) Panorama: The Year Britain's Bubble Burst
Now let me find the The Sunday Times link to the 'cash for honour's Labour debacle to even up the odds for George Osbourne. Fair's fair.
Donorgate: 10 Labour bosses knew
However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:
Revealed: cash for honours scandal
Remember: author Ian Sinclair had planned to unveil his new book Hackney, That Red Rose Empire at Hackney Library. But the talk was cancelled by Hackney Council on the grounds that Sinclair had been critical of the London Olympics.
Toyota sees first operating loss ever since 1937 as sales slump
And as most major businesses seek government handouts and 'go on welfare' now's the time to re-cap New Labour's policies that will see some needy probably die over the festive season. That'll reduce the numbers nicely: the government recently announced its “revolution” in welfare reform. The DWP's technology strategy is one of the government's largest and most complex. The Employment Support Allowance, which is to replace the Incapacity Benefit, will go live at the end of October - and with it the £295m technology programme to run it.
James Purnell MP, and Work and Pensions Secretary outlined his ‘vision’ on BBC TV’s The Andrew Marr Show: transcript, (there’s also video of Conservative opposition leader David Cameron on Tory tax plans).
James Purnell's reforms of incapacity benefit are inspired by a US company with vested interests and a murky record. Now, that's really sick." (The Guardian, March 2008). "In the US, Unum claims management had been coming under increasing scrutiny. In 2003, the Insurance Commissioner of the State of California announced that as a matter of ordinary practice and custom, it had compelled claimants to either accept less than the amount due under the terms of the policies or resort to litigation. The following year, a multistate review forced Unum to reopen hundreds of thousands of rejected insurance claims. Commissioner John Garamendi described Unum as, "an outlaw company. It is a company that for years has operated in an illegal fashion".
Purnell, Blair's true heir? (The Guardian,17/3/08)
Perhaps in these troubled times the Japanese film Love and Honour (Bushi no ichibun) (trailer)should get a ‘look-in’. It wasn’t widely praised by Brit crits on its release last week except for a relatively lone voice in the Sunday Telegraph review supplement that likened it to the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Worth considering geo-cultural boundaries too given that it’s director Yamada Yôji’s 79th film and that he launched in 1969 the world’s longest theatrical film series (48 films) Tora-san. But who he outside of the Japanese audience!? Love and Honour is the final film in his Samurai Trilogy – the first, The Twilight Samurai (2002) was Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Film. If Love and Honour were directed by Ken Loach, the Dardennes brothers or an up and coming ‘realist’ indy US director the film would be bestowed with far more ‘chatter’. These days the ‘West’ is so used to seeing ‘art-house’ martial arts movies e.g. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that a certain déjà vu has set in. But Love and Honour is a slow, simple, quiet, unadorned and restrained film much needed for these economic times both in Japan and the West. Mimura (Takuya Kimura) is a low-ranking food poison taster but this is his unlucky day when he goes blind after eating dodgy shellfish that accidentally found its way into his samurai boss’ lunch. Without spoiling the plot – and it is quite taxing watching the subtitles with crucial plot points easily missed- it centres around man’s desire and greed. It’s a shame the film’s ending didn’t retain more enigma and reflection but it’s the ICA’s Christmas offering and one for which many viewers will be very grateful.
Derek Jarman’s film (1988) of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem oratorio (released on DVD) is according to the film’s producer Don Boyd who supplies a gentle, informative audio commentary: “Jarman’s masterpiece – and I say that knowing a lot of his other films are great films and wonderful films that will last.” Jarman melds the words of the Latin mass with the verses of WWI poet Wilfred Owen and uses his unique visual style to create a “metaphoric cinema”. Boyd notes that the recent transfer from 35mm film to High Definition video creates “a clearer, crisp, constructed atmosphere” that Jarman would have loved. These scenes with silent actors (most memorably Tilda Swinton) are mixed with archival footage with one of the most harrowing segments edited by John Maybury who later also became a director (Love is the Devil, Edge of Love). The opening scene with the old soldier reciting Owen’s verse proved to be the great Sir Laurence Olivier’s final role before his death. Written by Britten (1962)for the post WWII re-building of Coventry Cathedral, a DVD extra documents the oratorio’s recent performance with an Anglo-German mix of musicians in Liverpool Cathedral as part of the city’s 2008 European Capital of Culture.
The Derek Jarman Collection: Sebastiane, The Tempest, War Requiem (out on Reg 1 in the States)
The BBC’s 3-hour The Fallen about Britain’s most recent 300troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of the most moving documentaries of the year.
Watching Park Circus’ re-release of White Christmas(1954) makes you realise you’d never seen it properly in the first place – every Christmas on TV thinking you’d seen it all when in fact you hadn’t. Just another old ‘warhorse’ movie you pass over. And you forgot that’s it’s directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). And though not a film to stir as much debate as It’s a Wonderful Life, the script is good (Norman Krasna/Norman Panama/Melvin Frank) with terrific performances and musical numbers that still zing. Cine-cynics may snigger in the corner at the surprise party arranged for the old army general(Dean Jagger), but the the whole shebang can still bring a tear to the eye as cliché is always based on a truth. And Curtiz found that deep vein of humanity.
New York Times film critic recommends the Fred Astaire/ Bing Crosby pic Holiday Inn (1942).
'Don't panic' - comedy classic is restored
Walter's War a drama inspired by the life of Walter Tull who, after years in an orphanage, went on to become a professional footballer and then the first black commissioned officer to lead British troops during WW1.
War Stories is on BBC 2 17.20pm 27 Dec
If you still haven’t found a present for your quietly risqué grandparents then the Dear Ladies TV series out on Acorn DVD is at hand. First broadcast on BBC 2 in 1984, George Logan and Patrick Fyffe were the men who dressed in drag as Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket, denizens of a serene English country village. Scripts were written by Gyles Brandreth (who was a Conservative Member of Parliament in thye 90s amongst many other talents and even dressed in suspenders at the Edinburgh Festival) and the comic timing on view is superb if a tad dated. The sexual innuendo and small town shrubbery and prudery take on a new lease of je ne sais crois in the wake of the Pope’s comments on homosexuality.
Britten didn't think much of Puccini, though they shared a love of narrative/pychological orchestration, but the Italian opera composer’s 150th birthday anniversary is currently being celebrated and Axiom Films UK have just released a film version of his 1896 La bohème about the struggling lives and loves of mid C19th Parisian artists. Derek Jarman this isn’t and I half jested with the film’s publicist that it’d be fascinating to see a Wim Wenders version. But director Robert Dornhelm delivers a fairly enjoyable un-cringeworthy experience – and that’s not meant to be damp praise. The arguments over filmed opera are endless – how true to the stage experience should it be or not. And in Puccini’s case even more difficult because he was your man for verismo (real-life) opera although compared to Verdi’s ‘socialism’ he was considered a bit of a wealthy ‘toff’ (he enjoyed hunting too). Yet he was also highly critical of his own work: “All my music till now seems to me a joke, and I no longer like it,” he wrote when composing his final opera Turandot. La bohème is known for its lush soaring melodies and warm-hearted love in a cold uncaring world. In BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, the Royal Opera House’s music director Antonio Pappano describes how Puccini turned the orchestra into a dramatic protagonist and singers relate how 15 minutes of Puccini is more exhausting than a Verdi opera. (BBC Radio 3 have a Puccini season and Pappano conducts the great 1910 opera La fanciulla del West(The Girl of the Golden West) on Dec 27. Dornhelm’s film, though somewhat conventional, does possess this epic sweep as if the lovers are surfing the waves of destiny. And before Turandot, Puccini was planning an opera Fanny based on Dickens’ Bill and Nancy in Oliver Twist. In Dornhelm’s La bohème we get up close and personal though never embarrassingly so and with most singers decently lip-synching. And at the end of the day, most of us would rather die in the waves of Puccini undertow than in New Labour Britain’s social welfare state where the artist must be justified as a viable commodity or else.
'making of' on YouTube but only in German, TV trailer
BFI Metropolitan Opera live relays. Cineworld does them too, but well worth the money to watch opera live in crystal clear High Definition on the IMAX screen with great sound.
And lovers of the mad genius director Werner Herzog might like to know he directed Wagner’s Parsifal (normally an Easter opera) recently in Valencia, Spain.
What angers me about New Labour’s reforms is that if they were really serious about them (i.e. serious about helping people not just catching votes or outsourced contracts) they wouldn’t have allowed the often ridiculous medical assessments to continue. A couple of close friends who initially failed their assessments showed me the questions and ‘Yes/No’ boxes on their forms that bore little relationship to their problems. Here’s what just an hour on the internet dug up, so I guess my ‘Chomsky moment is in’:) Much of this information comes from the website Benefits and Work the encourages people to subscribe for a fee though a lot of their info is freely available. There are some sites that are there for the sole purpose of ‘scrounging’ but these guys seem very genuine about informing people, even going to the trouble of demanding government documents under the Freedom of Information Act. And for the government to say its hands were tied in contractual terms just doesn't wash. Their hands shouldn't have been tied in the first place.
Paris based French IT services company Atos Origin has been one of the fastest-growing IT operations in Europe, having been created by a series of mergers stretching back a decade. Formed from the combination of Axime and Sligos in France, it came together with Origin in 1997. At the time, Origin was owned by Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. They bought KPMG's consulting business in the UK and the Netherlands, and Sema, the Anglo-French telecoms and IT services group, which was previously owned by Schlumberger. That purchase left the group employing more than 46,000 staff worldwide, with almost 5,000 in the UK alone.
Otar Iosseliani’s film Gardens in Autumn (Jardins en Automne) took a 2year hibernation since its 2006 London Film Festival outing but its release this weekend is quite timely. French government minister (right wing conservative? though he could easily be New Labour ‘left’) Vincent (Séverin Blanchet) is booted out of office and we see him enjoy life, though he has to rid his apartment of its racially diverse squatter occupiers. Critics have likened the film to Bunuel’s bourgeois surrealist satire though it never quite goes that far. Iosseliani, originally Georgian and for the last two decades Paris based, is more an observer of human foible rather than its satirist. The protests we hear on the streets and see on the TV seem as energised and espritious as does Vincent rather than suggesting a political statement on class. When the homeless are ejected from his flat he joins them under the bridge on the Seine, “at that point their differences don’t count, they are mortals. They are not angry at each other,” said Iosseliani in an interview. Now, superficially, one could take this statement and the film to purport a ‘liberal right wing’ view of life. Rather, the director seems to be suggesting that we all have our obsessions, some seen by others to be essential some frivolous, but essentially they all boil down to a misplaced energy. “What is important to me is when I show the film to the Russians. They didn’t speak a word of French, and they understood everything, maybe even better than us who are fluent in the language.” If anything, Iosseliani is Checkovian (as in the playwright): Vincent stays in Paris after losing office but his new Paris suddenly seems as distant as are Checkhov’s characters from Moscow. Even to the point where everyone borders on the edge and round the corner and up the path from a wacky Michel Gondry film. (French star Michel Piccoli appears in drag as Vincent’s mother). Perhaps all this became more apparent on a second viewing: where given the current state of the world no one is quite one of anything anymore but like animals our instincts wed us to our burrows while our humanity searches for ‘the other’.
Julie Bertuccelli (assistant director) made a 2006 documentary Otar Iosseliani, The Whistling Blackbird. Be great if that were on the DVD - but it all costs money.
Mark Rowlands book - The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness
A BBC Radio 3 broadcast from April 2007 has historian Theodore Zeldin’s views on happiness.
In 2005 The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) awarded Atos Origin a £500m seven-year contract(originally signed by Sema in 1988, the company Atos bought for $1.5bn in 2003 from SchlumbergerSema) for the delivery of medical advice and assessment services (also to the Ministry of Defence Veterans Agency). The company had just signed a $400m application management outsourcing deal with car manufacturer Renault. Atos’s longer-term aim was to eliminate paper from the DWP system. The contract was extendedable by a maximum of five years under two separate extension clauses: the first for three years, and the second for two years. These took the potential total contract value to in excess of £850m over 12 years. The original deal SchlumbergerSema signed in 1998 was a five-year contract worth GBP305m ($588m) which was extended by two years in 2003.
“Atos Origin will also focus on the recruitment, training, and career development of the DWP’s medical staff to ensure that it retains and attracts medical professionals with the qualifications, experience, and skills needed to carry out such assessments.” The DWP refers over two million cases to Atos each year, and these result in over 600,000 face-to-face examinations.
Atos’s Sema acquisition
and the company’s annual report for that.
Atos has another lucrative contract:
Personal carbon trading goes real time (The Guardian,9 June,08) "Drivers filling up with fuel will, from today, be able to participate in a trial for the world's first real-time personal carbon trading scheme. Up to 1,000 volunteers will be able to use their Nectar shopping loyalty cards at any BP garage to record how much fuel they have purchased - and, as a result, create an electronic record of how much carbon dioxide they will consequently be emitting into the atmosphere." The software and computing infrastructure is being supplied by Atos Origin.
British IT jobs at risk as Euro merger draws closer (2005)
Atos Origin is the major IT supplier for London's 2012 Olympic Games. More deals include a five-year $99m contract to manage desktops for BNP Paribas and a $40m infrastructure hosting deal with Capita.
The minutes of an All Party Parliamentary Group meeting from 16th November 2006 discussing the illness M.E.
This was the last incarnation of welfare reform (the Welfare Reform Bill)headed by John Hutton MP (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions).
Outrageous secrecy as DWP protects multinational
details the government’s total confusion as to whether the intellectual rights to Atos’s software belonged to them or the DWP. ”The DWP has made the astonishing claim that it doesn’t have a copy of the software, used to assess people’s capacity for work, and doesn’t even know, except in the most general sense, how it works.” LiMA (Logic integrated Medical Assessment) is the computer programme introduced by SchlumbergerSema (now Atos Origin).” If most of the cost of developing the software had been borne by the private sector company, why would they give away the ownership?” asks the site.” SchlumbergerSema do not own the copyright of the software,” was Maria Eagle’s reply on behalf of the Secretary of State in Feb 2004.“Sema Group UK...has always held the Lima computer system copyright,” replied the DWP in another letter.
Furthermore on the Work and Benefits website, “DWP doctors are hired on a self-employed basis by a company called Nestor, who provide private medical staff for a range of companies. Nestor are sub-contractors to Atos Origin... what about incapacity for work personal capability assessments? These are carried out at Medical Examination Centres. According to Nestor, doctors have the potential to earn more than £300 a day carrying out examination centre work. They also explain that on average doctors examine 4 to 5 clients within a 3.5 hour period of work in the centres. So a reasonable estimate is that a doctor doing two sessions a day would see up to 10 clients in order to earn that £300. So that’s around £30 a time for incapacity medicals. But the faster the doctor can zip through them – the fewer questions they ask and the less typing they do – the more money they can earn.”
Claimants given mental health therapy by computers“A company called Ultrasis has won contracts to provide computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to claimants in Doncaster and Newham. Benefits and Work understands that claimants with mild to moderate depression, anxiety and schizophrenia will be offered the opportunity to get help from a computer terminal. The software programme, 'Beating the Blues', provides 8 sessions of CBT which uses animation and voice-overs to help 'motivate and engage the user'. According to Ultrasis the treatment results in an 30 additional depression free days in the six months after treatment.”
Tribunal chief slams 'absurdity' of computerised incapacity medicals21 incapacity benefit medical centres axed
“One of the issues that disability benefits campaigners are now particularly keen to explore is whether amongst the assets transferred to Atos Origin were any of the 21 medical centres that Atos is now seeking to close down. Unless the terms of the original contract are made public, the fear that the DWP may now be being asset stripped by the private sector will be difficult to dispel.”
Benefit discs missing for year
Government must learn to curb its enthusiasm
The real cost of contracting out: "Most large government departments have, in one way or another, outsourced large parts of their IT. That is not something you could say of anywhere else in Europe," said David Tait, an executive vice-president of IT services firm Atos Origin, last year. By comparison, Atos Origin was contracted to revamp, not run, France's VAT computer system.” "Whitehall spends just under £5bn on corporate and support services contracts. By 2009 this will have risen to £7.4bn. Some 42% of support services are outsourced, with central government spending £2bn on estate management contracts alone. Most security, portering, mail and catering are provided by private firms."
DWP reviews £4.5bn IT deals (The Independent, 2/7/08) “The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is looking for suppliers for up to £4.5bn-worth of technology deals to run from 2010 to 2015...The replacement of desktop and datacentre management contracts, which are currently held by EDS and BT and will expire in 2010, will be worth about £3bn. But the design and deployment of future applications may be worth up to £1.5bn, and the DWP is following the trend set by the Home Office's identity card programme with plans to sign up a small number of companies to a framework contract of standard terms and conditions, so that new developments can be put together more quickly than the traditional European procurement regulations enable.”
Mental health in parliament
Stand to Reason
Lunatics take over Westminster asylum
Living in England now seems to resemble the artificial life in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (now out on Blu-ray in the States). If the government told you the sun was shining you’d want to get a ladder and climb to the clouds to see if they were real!
The new Tony Towers: Blair buys £4million stately home after Cherie 'fell in love with it'
No comments:
Post a Comment