Liege

Those of you that knew me back then might remember that I spent a lot of the early nineties tour managing, ie taking British groups on tours around Britain and the Continent.

For complex reasons I won’t go into here, I spent a lot (and I mean a lot) of that time staying with coach groups in the very pleasant Belgian city of Liege. So for that reason, I was especially horrified to hear today’s news story about the shootings and explosions there. I know the Place Saint Lambert, where they took place, very well indeed. In fact I often went there to visit the Christmas Market which is on at the moment.

Of course, hearing about this sort of thing is always upsetting but when you know the place well, when you can imagine exactly where the reporters and witnesses are describing, it has a particularly disturbing resonance.

For most people, tourism in Belgium follows a well trodden and highly touristy path around the Flemish cities of Bruges, Ghent and Brussels. So working in Wallonia, the French-speaking Southern part of the country, was refreshingly different and I can to some extent thank the citizens of Liege for helping me to learn and to speak French, albeit with limitations!

Thus I’ve always had a fondness for the place, despite not having been there now for the best part of a decade I should think.

Chers Liegeois, je pense a vous.

Why in Birmingham?

By and large, I enjoy working in Birmingham very much. Actually, I enjoy it a lot.

It is my birthplace and it has pretty much always been my home. People used to think of it as some post industrial hell-hole but in the last 25 years or so there has been a tremendous transformation in the City Centre that always leaves visitors impressed and to be honest many of the suburbs, attractions and parkland have always been remarkably at odds with the perceived view. To see the greenery spread out, to realise the great things that happened here, to hear its distinctive and lovely accent and to find amazing buildings and stories in unusual places is a wonderful thing.

So it with some sadness that I've realised in recent months that it's becoming harder and harder to work in the place, at least doing City Centre walking tours. Why? Because of all the towns and cities where I do walks, this is virtually the only one where you can be guaranteed "interference" from unusual people while trying to do a walk.

This varies from the mildly abusive (shouting at groups in the distance), through the whole spectrum of "latching on and pulling faces", "telling drunken stories of their own", "people with 'issues' coming and staring in a way that unnerves both me and the group" right up to "threatened physical abuse".

Now whenever I mention this to anyone they always seem to think that this is an issue that would afflict any busy city centre, especially at night. But you know what? I have though I say it myself a pretty wide range of tour destinations and this really is a Birmingham phenomenon. I genuinely have no idea why.

I've thought long and hard about posting this. After all, it's not likely to do either the City nor my business much good if I say these things, is it? But in recent weeks I have not done a single walking tour without some sort of incident of this nature and one day I'll simply pack up the umbrella and go and do this somewhere else. It doesn't happen in London (and I include inner city places like Lambeth and Bethnal Green in this), nor Bristol, nor Reading nor Nottingham. Nor many dozens of other places.

Answers on a postcard please to the great question: "Why in Birmingham?"

The Death Penalty

Sad to hear today of the execution in China of UK Citizen Akmal Shaikh.

I am firmly of the belief that when in a particular country you should - must - obey that country's laws. (Indeed, part of my reasons for supporting Gary Mckinnon in his campaign not to be extradited to the Us is because anything he did, he did on British soil.)

This does not, however, excuse the use of the death penalty, to which I am always 100% opposed. Whether it acts as a deterrent, rids society of scum, thins out the prison population or simply provides society with revenge, taking a life is always morally wrong. I am sometimes in favour of life sentences, which mean lifetime imprisonment. If this was done more often then I don't think there would be the public clamouring for the death penalty that there is from time to time in the UK.

But it is always wrong to kill and China is quite simply wrong to do so. Even more bizarre to me is the way in which liberal, advanced democracies like the USA and Japan practice it.

The issue is moral, simple and just. Punish but do not kill.

The Enemy Within

I may well turn a few heads with this but I’m going to write it anyway because too often it goes unsaid.

No-one who read any of yesterday’s reports following the guilty verdicts in the Fairfield Post Office raid case can fail to have been moved by the testimony of Craig Hodson-Walker’s mother and fiancée. To hear his mother telling of how she saw her son shot in front of her eyes and to hear the fiancée Lisa say that her “whole world has collapsed” was heartbreaking.

How can anyone do this? Well, I can’t profess to understand why at all. However, perhaps a closer look at the defendants’ backgrounds might say something?

One of them had not only already raided a Post Office (in King’s Norton in 2002) but had been convicted, given a gaol sentence and was out and able to do it again. Another had three convictions, two for Post Office raids and a third for robbing a security van. So much for the system punishing, rehabilitating and protecting there, then.

They all came from areas on the fringes of Birmingham which are – effectively – vast zones where crime, both serious and minor, is accepted by too many people as “normal”.

It is a stark, unfashionable but unassailable fact of life that our towns and cities are surrounded by areas where the basics that much of society takes for granted simply don’t apply. Criminals may not be the majority of people in these areas but they are sure as hell a sizeable minority. The Frankleys, the Druids Heaths and the Castle Vales of Birmingham, Bristol’s Southmead, Newcastle’s Killingworth and Leeds’ Seacroft are all examples of places where decency and mutually-respectful behaviour is simply not a consideration for many people. You have only to see the way they keep their houses (and feel even more passionately sorry for the poor sods who live there and who do play by the rules and try to do things properly; life must be hell for them).

But the offensive, out of control, unorganised mobs that inhabits these places are terrifying. They give us the graffiti, the metal shutters on shops, the burned-out litter bins and the broken windows. Communities which look unloved and where such damage is caused by those who live there. And it can become more serious. Look at the case of Fiona Pilkington, who took her own life after yobs tormented her and her daughter in Hinckley. She called for police help 33 times, without any discernible effect. The police, it seems, simply accept this type of behaviour as normal for such areas.

Indeed, having mentioned these yob-rule areas in big cities, it’s worth remembering that the same applies in plenty of smaller places, too. In the beautiful, civilized cathedral city of Lichfield, Michael Eccles was beaten to death on his way home from a shop in the notorious Dimbles area. And you can find the same estates, effectively abandoned by their inhabitants and those in power, everywhere from Weston-super-Mare to Carlisle.

For most of us, like the Hodson-Walkers in Fairfield, you study, you get a job, you work hard and support your family and get some of the things you want in life. We all makes mistakes – me included – but for the feral shit which exists on the edge of of society, this normal life progression does not apply and is never thought of. We are now into second or even third generations who have never worked in the conventional sense and who don’t understand the work ethic that is the basis of our society and its achievements. “I want that, I can’t afford it, so I’ll take it anyway.”

Craig Hodson-Walker’s mother Judy described the raiders as “the dregs of society” and how right she is. These people do not have the values that the rest of us have and they could destroy our society as easily – if not more easily – than climate change or terrorism.

These people are truly the enemy within.