The Sunday Ishmael 12th July 2020

"Chunks of the civil service to be moved out of London", says Michael Gove  
"I think it is vitally important that decision-makers are close to people

I think it is vitally important that the strength of the UK Government is displayed across the whole of the United Kingdom and that we distribute opportunity, jobs and investment fairly.

We’ve already got civil servants in Scotland, who are working for the Department for International Development, and in Wales, working for the Department for Transport – but we can do more.

It’s good for the Union, it’s good for equal opportunity, it is good for what we call levelling up.

But my own view? I think that, if people were to see Parliament closer to different parts of the United Kingdom, then I don’t see there are any reasons why we can’t have more operations of the UK Parliament in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Our UK Parliament is a parliament for everyone in the United Kingdom, so making it more accessible, and we can discuss how, is a good thing.
I will  ensure that the Government publishes data showing who applies for and wins a place on the Civil Service’s prestigious 'fast stream' graduate scheme.

   I’ll go back and look at making sure we can be as transparent as possible. I think we should publish figures on the background of people who apply and the background of people who succeed in getting into the Civil Service.  I’ll look back to see if it was the case that we dropped or edited that information, then I’ll ask and see if we can do even better.
One of the ways that the civil service can be more representative of the UK is by having a broader geographical spread of decision-making in the UK. It doesn’t have to be the case that you feel you have to go to Oxbridge and to London to have an opportunity to be a decisive voice in shaping the future of this country.”   

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that 22,000 civil servants would be moved out of the capital by 2030 in his March budget statement.
Neither Mr Gove nor Mr Sunak confirmed where in the UK the jobs could be relocated to. (It's York, though. It's not Bradford)
The Government has been planning a shake-up of the civil service for months with some Government figures said to see Whitehall as set in its ways. 

Mr Gove is getting on with overhauling parts of the civil service. Last month he called for the Government to “be less southern, less middle class” and “closer to the 52 per cent who voted to Leave and more understanding of why”. About time, too.

Black Lives Matter 

mr ishmael on multi-culturalism, murder and the rights of women to be ignored:

I worked with a guy once, well, I say worked, I mean I was part of a small army of people supervising and assisting Jaghinder with his resettlement.  He had done six years of a life sentence passed on him for murdering his teenage daughter;  somehow, in Alum Rock, Birmingham. She had integrated a bit too much, or been insufficiently Sikhish, and upset her father, this beardy bloke  in a turban.  He'd brought her to Brum but he expected her to behave as though she was in Amritsar. What can a poor bloke do, you know, if it's your religion or your daughter, well, you gotta sharpen up the sacred knife and do your  duty to Shiva or Kali or whichever  six-armed, fuck-mad, nonsensical deity is in charge of  child murder.  He was an utterly charming man, aside from being a rotten, cruel,  fucked-up, heartless bastard who needed dragging  up and down Washwood Heath Road by his fucking beard.  Jaghinder Singh Gill, they're all called something like that, aren't they, those Sikhs. Mad as fucking hatters. Live in some sort of Terry Pratchett world, don't they? Anyway, this was in the 'eighties and the Lifers' Department at the Home Office decided that because this was a cultural murder, the six years would be enough and Jag could go back and pick up the reins as a well-repected community leader and that's just what he did, used to come into my office and tell me, in achingly precise Empire English, how in the short time he'd been away,  things on the street had turned to shit,  the young people, he complained, had little or no respect for their elders.  This is all true, honest, not invent.  No respect for their insane, homicidal elders.

The authorities'  extraordinary view of this kind of crime resulted from  a  multi-culturalism/racism awareness/equal opportunities industry which at that time rampaged through the public sector,  damning all as racist, plundering training budgets  and making tidy careers for the likes of Darcus Howe.   The average life-term, then, was about twelve and a half years, just as long as you admitted the crime and expressed remorse, even if you hadn't done it.  Jaghinder, of course, saw no crime in his actions but they let him out anyway, sending a cheery invitation to other would-be  righteous, vengeful destroyers - Kill the bitch (it's always a female, offends the Gods) and you'll be out in no time at all, your cousin can run the Cash 'n' Carry in the meantime.  It was as though the official wish to smooth the path of citizen-incomers extended to there being a parallel criminal justice system, it never applied to what we came to call the Afro-Caribbean community, the blacks, but it was certainly noticeable - and socially counter productive - as it applied to  Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.

They have their own cute little ways, the screws,  generally fuck-ups themselves, with lance-corporalitis  they run an organised, criminal racket, far from scrutiny, successive governments terrified of upsetting the greediest, laziest, least productive  and most unreformed branch of the public sector -  Ah, these clever criminals, How do they get all these drugs into the most secure buildings in the country? How indeed, Home Secretary, how indeed? - and another way in which these all male, closeted  institutions discriminated between murderers was that the domestic wasn't really a murderer at all, he'd just topped his Mrs, you know what wimmen are like, she probably drove him to it.  Now it is a fact, or it used to be, that most killers are first offenders,  that most victims are killed by those closest to them and that only a fraction of one per cent of those released on license re-offend seriously,  the lifer system can be said, therefore, to both punish the offender, although nowhere near enough for skymadeupnewsandfilth,  and protect the public. But in the matter of the so-called domestic killer there is a terrifying, almost officially sanctioned culture of  misogyny,  I lost track of the number of times I heard someone say I only killed the wife,  the screws have told me I'll only do ten, twelve max.  The screws, obviously, most of them, from the same flawed mould as the Wiltshire Lads, Sergeant Andrews and his shift of  angry cocksuckers, collude with Joe Bloggs in minimising the value of his spouse's life, the slut, in an official and quasi-official trivialisation of half, or more, of the world's population.

GIRLS ALLOWED

When my business took  me to auction houses I was always amazed at how disparaged and undervalued was traditional women's work,  embroidery, knitting, water colours, Hearts and Crafts. 

Old boxes, on the other hand, rudimentary things, fashioned by joiners or carpenters in an afternoon, would fetch fifty pounds, I would renovate them and they would make two or three hundred, retail, maybe a bit more, they had been made to cart-about the meagre possessions of younger, working women: the itinerant herring gutters or the scullery maids  working in service to the thieving classes - I worked, briefly,  in  a big stately home, when I was a kid. Christ, you wouldn't believe the servility of the staff, the decadent, pampered luxury demanded by the owners; he, the Marquis, a screeching transcontinental fairy, she a giddy Guinness daughter, jumped-up neurotic prats, the pair of them -

 somehow, anyway, these items of working class luggage, which had originated in mediaeval times as kists for storing food and household goods, evolved into wedding - or dowry - chests, containing weddng goods and later were of portable use by those too poor to own proper trunks.  These chests became transmuted, by the chancers of the stripped pine trade, into "blanket boxes"  like what the victorian lady kept at the bottom of her bed, and although they were nothing of the sort, gullible wannabes bought them by the lorryload, even though they had long abandoned blankets for duvets. And sun-dried tomatoes.  I still have a few boxes, among my souvenirs.

pine boxes, made by the thousand by local men

this one, in mahogany, from the Royal Army Medical Corps, travelled all over the Empire

Hugely intricate sewing samplers, however, painstakingly crafted by girls and young women up until the early twentieth centuries,  over long, candle-lit evenings, then framed and glazed in oak firescreens made a pound or two, if that;  there was a time you couldn't give them away.

Amongst other things, mrs ishmael is a needle-person, a sewist and a student of fabric design, makes quilts, single-handed and in concert, so they are a feature of my life, arts and crafts traditionally associated with women. I don't sit-in or anything, I am just aware of it going on and of the finished product, although, as with my stuff, nothing is ever finished, just abandoned. 

 I guess an engineeer can say Right, this bastard's done, this pump pumps, this bridge bridges, this load bears;  a dressing chest, though, like this one, 


restored over Christmas,  is never done;  there are two or three things needed on this piece, a drawer runner here, a drawer stop there,  a couple of tighter screws in those mad rococo handles and I would do them in a coupla minutes if I was putting it in a shop window, just needs a bit of work doing but I am fed up with it now,  and even if I did do those jobs I would discover others, and if I completed them the whole thing'd be covered in finger prints and need rewaxing, it's crazy. And I  only really bought it because I liked the mirror, thick, deeply cut and bevelled  



and because if I hadn't bought it, someone would've covered it with a really out-there  but DoYou-Know-What tasteful gloss paint, cos they're worth it, and it fits their dynamic lifestyle, I'd rather it was burnt.

 Doesn't matter a fuck, really,  what happens to old bits of furniture, it's just that if I lose my link to the old boys who fashioned these things - which is actually a link to an empire which saw, arriving by sail and steam, hardwoods from the tropics and pitch pine from North America and which workshopped for the World - then I may as well join the NewPeople, worshipping bits of silicon, 
and myself. And LuvvinMyKids2Bits, Me-ing.

These contemporary worthies are  aspiring
 not to be something but to have something; 
and, deaf, dumb and almost blind, they are played like fiddles.

And actually, do you know what, now that we've signed to Amazon we probably won't have to pay any tax at all,  they don't.
The prime minister, no, he's a mate, we're neighbours in Chipping Sodom, yeah, with Rebecca, it's where the best people live.

Some say.  That Top Gear only worked because what they call my yobbish, loutish, thicko, racist, bullyboy behaviour had a little frisson, only because it was on the BBC, a bit like getting your cock out in church, not that I go to church,  and that anywhere else we'd just have been seen as what we are, a trio of desperate prats, not very bright but chippy. Chippy and short in Hammond's case.  Others say that post-BBC, on a shopping channel,  we will fall flat on our faces.
 Doesn't matter, we get paid. 
Whatever.

  That's my justification, anyway,  for the ash dressing chest on the top floor, and the mahogany  and the oak  and the red walnut ones, on the middle floor, and the inlaid mahogany one in pride of place and the sideboards and wardrobes and desks.  In their materials they connect me to organic Creation and their makers' hands link us to the first jawbone-as-saw, the stone cutting tool, the bronze, the iron and the steel ages which wrought our world.
Norman Mailer raged that This is what's wrong with our children, everything they touch is lifeless plastic, inorganic, no wonder they're fucked-up.

I may completely finish this chest  but it doesn't matter if I don't, it's near enough for jazz;   Harris keeps his winter clothes, his who-he-is and has-he-had-his-jabs documents, his brushes and balls and flea-powders in its drawers, and there's some hats and gloves, which aren't for Harris.

Most people, on seeing pieces like this, would, at the very least, admire the shine and some might look at the figuring and the joinery but most would walk right past a piece of lace or tapestry, like this one.

There is a partial explananation  for the low regard in which needlework and fabrics are held - unlike wood and metal, they  decay relatively quickly.  I saw a quilt a while back, dating from the American Civil War and it was ghostly threadbare, colours faded, such a shame, if you cried, you know you'd fill a lake with tears, the  sewer's hands  now coffin dust, her work ravaged by sunlight and use.  These old boxes, however,  cared for just a little, will last generations, I have an old, elm one, from the seventeenth century, just needs a bit of work. Abandonment, I suppose that's our gig,  abandoning and being abandoned.

My unease at how we value the past stems from my Zen-Presbyterian-Marxism, the anger at what we clumsily call sexism but is actually just one of Oppression's refinements,   race against race, worker against worker, gender against gender and the latest - generation against generation.  We, the BabyBoomers are now, somehow, cast as the enemy of striving, aspirational yoof, silly fucking bastards, wanting their lives away.

Only in my lifetime have women received equal pay for equal effort and it'll be a long cold day in Hell before GlobaCorp sees the essential work of Motherhood as anything other than an impertinent inconvenience, every governmental impetus is to mothers - or, indeed, fathers - abandoning their children to lowly-paid strangers, that they, themselves,  may step enthusiastically onto the property gallows,  feel the soul-extinction of permanent debt, habituate themselves to  the gnawing at the innards of insatiable consumerism.   How did this happen,  that working miserably down  inTesco - to pay a mortgage which will eventually go entirely to a private care home company located in Barbados and fronted by some cunt like Micky Fallon - is exalted above child-rearing, is seen, patronisingly as Doing The Right Thing,  even though it is obviously The Wrong Thing? 

How did these

supplant these

 with this?

Oh but mr ishmael, it hasn't supplanted anything, it's just about not discriminating against people over  how they have sex.  And why shouldn't gay men farm children, after all they've been through?

Aye, right. All freaks together, now. 
Celebrating Diversity.

Anyway, whilst wondering about the Maelstrom of Gender, I  was looking at some old, local  photographs, mostly from the turn of the nineteenth century but a few from the Nazi War and was struck by the very hard lives led by Orkney women at that time. Men were often away fishing and tasks still needed to be performed regularly -  but even when the men were home  everybody was expected to scratch at the stoney land for a living; motherhood, then,  was no excuse for not doing back-breaking work but it was a communal sort of labour, on the land, in the fresh air and it involved the family. 

The Industrial Revolution never really reached the far North, indeed, Orkney and Shetland were not on the national grid until the nineteen sixties, so patterns of rural working life, long replaced or mechanised  in the South are historically close enough, here, to be have been extensively photographed.

 I have recently read a short history of Caithness, outlining a similarly arduous life led by that county's womenfolk but as usual, a picture  can be worth a thousand words. I thought I'd share some of them.  They were taken by local photographers - rather than by anthropologists, as is often the case - we were talking recently about Alan Lomax's Library of Congress, WhiteMan  recordings of early Blues musicians.

mmr ishmael's essays this week were:

I worked with a guy once   drafted 12/09/2010
Girls Allowed                     drafted 10/08/2015