When does nationality matter?

This man was attacked in his own home by burglars: 

The burglars were caught and charged. They were in court today and were found guilty. They are going to jail. It was made known afterwards - that's the law - you're innocent till proven guilty - that three of the four were habitual criminals with a string of arrests for similar crimes.

There's nothing unusual about this crime. It has happened often and never made it to the front pages of UK newspapers and news websites. So why did this crime become such a talking point? The convicted burglars are Polish.

Their nationality has certainly caught the attention of newspapers like the Daily Mail and websites such as ITN/ITV news.

Of course, it's a well-known fact that all UK citizens are honest and we never, ever export baddies - for example, British gangsters to the Costa del Crime, drug smugglers to Thailand and Venezuela. So when 'foreigners' come here and commit crimes, the right wing media are outraged. Or could it be they are looking for a scapegoat?

The media seem to have a quite clear hierarchy when it comes to filling their front pages: first on their shame list: people in receipt of benefits, especially the unemployed - scroungers the lot of them - and immigrants. Anyone who is foreign is here to steal our jobs. Asylum seekers get handouts of £65,000 a year and houses and send their benefits back home to support families of 10. It's all lies and, of course, it ramps up the temperature in a country that seems obsessed at the moment, not with the real issues like low pay, zero hour contracts - that is social justice and equality - but with finding someone to blame for the state the UK economy is in. And whatever the Tories want to tell us, it's in some state.

Posh boys...and girls

I started this off by writing about the posh boys and girls. The ones with famous mummies and daddies and the ones born into loadsa money who seem to have taken over the world of theatre, TV and movies in the UK in recent years.

Step forward the likes of Victoria and Giles Coren, children of the (rightly) famous Alan.

Or Samuel West, son of Prunella Scales and Timothy West.

I'm not suggesting these people have used their family to get on but it can't hurt to be known for having famous and successful parents - and they have made it known who their parents are. If they didn't want the connection known, they could have changed their names. That's not exactly unheard of in show business, is it?

Keira Knightley is an extreme case. How do I know her mother is Sharman MacDonald who is a playwright? Because every sodding interview with Keira reminds me of her antecedents. No, I don't know who Sharman MacDonald is either but the London-based media people obviously do and think it matters.

Now I've had to get used to a whole new set of posh boys and girls. Current hot tips for Oscars, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne start their biogs on IMDb by letting the reader know they went to Eton. 

Rosamund Pike (no, I'd never heard of her either till this week) went to Oxford and in their student days she was a bosom buddy of Chelsea Clinton. Her biog also tells us she got a 2:1 at Oxford - IMDb says this is summa cum laude in US terms and is suitably awed by this. (I also read yesterday that 70% of yooni graduates in the UK get a 2:1 these days. I wonder if IMDb know that.)

I don't in fact care how these people get on in life, although I think it's hard enough for folk trying to make it in show biz without this kind of unfair competition. I also think, sadly, the adulation afforded to these people is just another indication of how class-ridden and snobbish the UK media - and possibly UK society - are.

But I'm distracted by the accents these people have. They all sound the same. I seem to note a definite rise in the number of rp ('received pronunciation') - posh - voices I hear on radio and TV. I listen to Victoria Coren on Only Connect and think: Are you really as pompous and arrogant as that? Last week she was so rude to one of the teams, if she'd been sitting next to me on the settee I'd have punched her in the face. Then there's Kirstie Allsopp, posh and a proud Tory. I've given up watching anything with Kirstie in it. Her upper-class drawl and her self-satisfaction really rattle my cage. 

As for the actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne, I suspect there's a tendency to over-estimate how good these people really are because of their background and that accent. Benedict is good as Sherlock Holmes - but what else does he do? He was in the last Star Trek. Same accent. I couldn't tell you what Eddie Redmayne has been in except The Theory of Everything. Can he act? Same goes for Rosamund Pike, mainly famous for her role in Gone Girl, who always seems to me to be playing a version of Rosamund Pike. 

On the other hand, I have the utmost respect for Michelle Dockery who plays Lady Mary, the arrogant bitch daughter in Downton Abbey. Michelle is an Essex girl who says her Essex accent held her back at auditions for years. She has overcome this disability and has got the upper-class drawl off to a T. That, folks, is called acting. And also maybe taking the piss a wee bit. 

Same goes for Joanne Froggatt who uses a version of her native accent - she's from Yorkshire - in her role as the maid Anna in Downton Abbey.

I'll finish with a wee story about one of my heroes. Star of stage and screen, Albert Finney.

When Albert Finney went to London from Salford for his audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the 1950s, his mum went with him on the train and took sandwiches for them.

Yes, you do so know who Albert Finney is: he's been in the movie of Tom Jones and in Erin Brokovich and Miller's Crossing and in many TV dramas and stage shows.

Albert wasn't poor as a boy - his dad was a bookie - but he has no pretensions to being posh. He had and still has a Salford accent. Onstage he produces any accent the director wants. 

Rumour has it he turned down two awards from HM the queen because he dislikes snobbery and believes we should all just be 'mister'. 

I wish there were more like him in the UK. 

Health warning

There are large areas of the internet that should come with a warning: "believing this tosh can seriously damage your health."

At the weekend I saw an ad on the website of a usually respectable UK newspaper claiming there are three questions you can ask 'to find out if you have cancer.' Fancy that: forget the centuries of diagnostics - you can have the answer in just three questions. And your doctor will love it when you march into the surgery with your three questions and answers off t'internet. Or if you ignore real indicators there's something wrong because your answers to the three questions were okay.

Yesterday Facebook carried an ad claiming there is a herbal cure for diabetes. There isn't, of course. If there was a cure, herbal or otherwise, for diabetes, we'd all know about it, as would the half-dozen people each of us knows personally who suffer from this serious - and dangerous - condition. I hate the idea of anyone so desperate they'll swallow the herbal remedy and give up the meds and the diet recommended by the medical profession.

Today, it's this:

Yep, it's upside down yoga, as practised in Australia. It's not a fad, says a man who runs - and presumably makes money from - upside down yoga 'clinics' in Sydney. O yes, a fad is exactly what it is and a dangerous one too. As my yoga teacher used to tell us when doing any upside down posture: don't do this if you have a history of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure or migraine. 

And above all, remember there are people on the internet who really believe there's one born every minute. Don't be that one!

128 days to go?

I'm sure Eddie Mair just said on Radio 4 it was 128 days till the next general election. I shouted obscenities at the radio, the least offensive of them being 'bollocks!', and I then listened to a few minutes of lies and denial from various politicians before I switched off.

The trouble is I know the Tories are lying in their teeth not just in what they claim they are doing but in what they claim Labour are planning to do if they win the next election. So the Tories have not reduced the UK deficit 'by half'. They have somehow rounded up the correct figure (as stated by the Treasury) of about 35% to 50% so blatantly that even their pal Fraser Nelson on the Economist has noticed it and cried foul. And I know what they are trying to do with Labour is keep on talking about the economy because their spin doctors think Labour are weak in that area and will go on the defensive, as they did tonight on Radio 4.

The clever thing the Tories are doing is ignoring what people express worry about in the polls: jobs (job insecurity especially), the NHS and immigration (although immigration is only a problem because the Tories and UKIP say so). And these subjects are not getting much of an airing - and won't be heard of much before May if the Tories have anything to do with it.

However, my problem is this: I am very interested in politics and I think we have shown in Scotland that politics can get people passionate. I think politics in Scotland has changed for the better since the referendum. But the shake-up politicians got in Scotland hasn't reached the rest of the UK. The UK election is a complete turn-off: the Tories, Labour and UKIP are still 'fighting' - and man, I wish we could stop using battlefield terms in politics - as they would have done 40 years ago. It's like politics exists mainly for politicians and journalists. The public are only needed to cast their votes and only some of the public, like old people, need bother turning up at the polling station. We're not going to try to involve young people - well, we don't actually know how.

Some of my Labour friends still talk about 'the proletariat', heaven help us. Others are still banging on about New Labour. There are electors now who don't remember Tony Blair.

Some of the Tory Party obviously still think the electors will believe anything. I hear stories about the Tories wanting to turn the clock back to 1945 and do away with the Welfare State. In fact, I suspect there are quite a lot of them who would like to go back to the Victorian era and do away with legal aid (nearly there!), health and safety (access to industrial tribunals is already limited to those that can afford to pay upfront), social security, pensions (keep raising the retirement age and watch the lifespan of working people go down). In fact, as a taxpayer for 50 years (and still paying tax on my pension, remember) I'm starting to think maybe the Tories have forgotten that people who pay out expect to get something in return.

And there's 128 days of this stuff still to go...