Good news! Capita, a name not unknown in these hallowed halls (posts passim) has been the major beneficiary of one of the Outsourcers of the Year for 2012 in Private Eye‘s Rotten Borough Awards 2012 for its wholesale takeover of £300 mn. worth of public services from the London Borough of Barnet for the next decade or so.
A honourable mention for Crapita. You deserve it, folks.
Well done, Crapita! You richly deserve the work, of course. As they say in true Private Eye style and as per the post title: “Trebles all round!”
How can local council services in London possibly be ‘delivered’ from Sheffield, Carlisle and Belfast? Answers in the comments below, please.
Government ministers are privatising and outsourcing ever more of our public services. Yet some of the companies taking over have a dismal performance record, while others have avoided tax, given suspiciously large political donations or even helped to write the policies from which they will profit.
False Economy’s shortlist currently comprises 10 outsourcing firms:
A4e
Atos
Capita Translation and Interpreting (posts passim)
Care UK
Circle
FirstGroup
G4S
McKinsey & Company
Serco
Virgin Care
False Economy gives a brief summary of the finer points of the rip-offs practised by all of the above.
These people are doing a poor job and trousering huge amounts of taxpayers’ money for the privilege.
Once upon a time the only place one would see anything “iconic” was in a Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Church. A gilded frame, copious amounts of gold leaf and a halo or haloes were usually involved.
However nowadays – much to my dismay – something just has to exist to be regarded as an icon: no veneration is necessary and the word has become hackneyed and synonymous with lazy journalism, as in this piece from today’s Bristol Post, where the undeserving victim is traditional British fish and chips.
In danger of losing all meaning after an average three appearances a day in the Guardian and Observer, employed to describe anything vaguely memorable or well-known – from hairdressers, storm drains in Los Angeles and the Ferrero Rocher TV ads to Weetabix, the red kite and the cut above the eye David Beckham sustained after being hit by a flying boot kicked by Sir Alex Ferguson. Our advice, even if our own writers rarely follow it, is to show a little more thought, and restraint, in using this term.
Turning to icon, the Style Guide lists the following objects which were described in the Guardian as “iconic” in a single fortnight in 2010:
Archaeopteryx
bluefin tuna
Castro’s cigar
David Beckham wearing an anti-Glazer scarf
Grace Kelly in casual wear
Imperial War Museum North
Liberty prints
limestone stacks in Thailand
Nigel Slater
Mad Men
Variety
the John Hughes films Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Weird Science
postboxes
prints of the Che Guevara image
Stephen Fairey’s Obama Hope design
the parliamentary constituency of Hove
the Brandenburg Gate
Bach’s St Matthew Passion
a community-owned wind turbine
Kraft cheese slices
salmon farming
the blue and white stripes of Cornishware pottery
Penarth Pavilion, Cardiff
the Norwegian church and Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay
a multimillion-pound arena in Leeds
a “rock-built engine house at Bottalack near St Just”
the Royal Albert Hall
wind turbines (“iconic renewable energy technology”)
Wembley Arena
the video for Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head
This abuse of language has gone on far too long. Let’s put icons back where they belong: in an Orthodox church, in a gilt frame and covered in gold leaf; is that too much to ask?
Take a look at the picture below, taken in Bristol on Monday 8th October. Fairly unremarkable isn’t it? What’s the most interesting thing about it? The digger perhaps?
No, the most interesting aspect of the picture is what isn’t there. However, before we come to that, a bit of history and context is required.
Lower Castle Street, Bristol showing the old alignment (cobbled) and the new alignment (asphalt)
As the caption states, the image shows Lower Castle Street in central Bristol. The cobbled surface near the foot of the picture shows the street’s old alignment hard by the moat and outer defensive walls of the now demolished Bristol Castle; the modern asphalt surface beyond is the modern alignment of Lower Castle Street designed to accommodate modern motorised traffic. The old cobbled bit of what was Lower Castle Street has been incorporated into Castle Park, which occupies the site of Bristol Castle and what was Bristol’s main shopping area until the Luftwaffe razed it during the Blitz in the Second World War.
Bristol City Council has recently commissioned some works in the corner of the park occupied by the old alignment of Lower Castle Street, as the picture shows. New flowerbeds or grassed areas (it is not yet obvious what they’ll be) have been laid out and the cobbles relaid. So far, so good.
However, before Bristol City Council sent in its contractors to do the works, the old cobbled bit of Lower Castle Street held what some would regard a significant element of the city’s transport heritage: one of the last set of tram rails visible in any road surface in the city and, as can be seen from the picture, these have now vanished; this leaves just one place in the city where tram rails can still be seen set into the road surface – Bristol Temple Meads station, where the tracks are part of the former tram terminus between the ramp and the old station.
Perhaps the City Council thinks that ‘heritage’ is something that belongs in a museum. It doesn’t: it’s part of everyday life in a city like Bristol which has existed since Saxon times; and some parts of the city are even older than that. By its vandalism the City Council has shown it is not a fit and proper curator of the city’s history and heritage.
There’s yet one more place in central Bristol where a tram rail – a single one – can still be seen; it’s in the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe. During the Second World War a bomb exploded in a nearby street, throwing a rail from the tramway over the houses and into the churchyard, where it remains to this day.
(I am indebted to Pete Insole for information re Temple Meads.)
Yesterday, the last day for responses, Bristol Wireless responded to the Department for Education‘s consultation on internet blocking in the cause of keeping children safe online. The consultation arose from a campaign called ‘Safety Net‘, run by Premier Christian Media and SaferMedia, and supported by the Daily Mail. The campaign, and now the consultation is about requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block adult and other content at network level whilst giving adults a choice to ‘opt-in’ to this content.
However, taking part in the consultation wasn’t easy. Consultees had to do the following:
Download consultation questionnaire;
Fill in questionnaire;
Upload completed questionnaire to Dept. of Education website.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t.
Here’s why. Ignoring the rhetoric on open standards coming out of their Whitehall neighbours the Cabinet Office, Education Department civil servants only made the consultation questionnaire available as a Microsoft Word file (Wot? No ODF? Ed.). The author of the questionnaire had also stuffed it full of Word macros; this made it very difficult, if not impossible, to open using alternative office suites, such as LibreOffice. Many highly experienced openistas encountered this: Alan Lord (aka the Open Sourcerer) mentioned on Twitter that he couldn’t open it, whilst Glyn Moody could, but found the questionnaire impossible to fill in! On the chief scribe’s, machine attempting to open the file either stalled to a complete halt or crashed the office suite! 🙁 Ultimately, the chief scribe was only able to complete the questionnaire as he had access to a copy of MS Office.
We cannot understand why the civil servants at the Dept. for Education couldn’t have designed the consultation questionnaire as an online survey. Bristol City Council has years of experience of doing online consultations in this manner – and they work very well indeed. Perhaps Sir Humphrey at the Dept. for Education should have called the Counts Louse for advice. As it is, out of 10 we’re giving this Education Dept. consultation a mark of 2. They’d better pull their socks up or it’ll be detention for them… 🙂
Update 08/09/12: It seems that the consultation did originally start out as an online consultation, but was rejigged owing to extremely embarrassing security cock-ups, as The Register reports.
The Register was first to reveal – within hours of the Department for Education publishing its parental internet controls proposal – that the DfE’s website was ironically exposing the email addresses, unencrypted passwords and sensitive answers submitted people who filled in the consultation’s questionnaire.
As a result of this additional information, we’ve now reduced the DfE’s mark to minus 2 out of 10. 🙂
For as long as I can remember, the BBC has always prided itself on the quality of its English.
However, I seriously doubt whether it deserves its reputation as a guardian of the English language any more.
My biggest disappointment usually occurs when listening to the news on Radio 4. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fumed at the use of the phrase “spoken through a translator”. It also annoys my fellow translators (and no doubt our interpreter colleagues too) to an equal extent. Such terminological inaccuracy does not do dear old Auntie any favours.
We linguists earn our crust on the basis of our precise use of terminology and there’s a real distinction between the work done by translators and that done by interpreters. Indeed one might go as far as to assert that they’re different skills, even though the outcome is the same: enabling communication between people who lack the capability to understand what another is communicating in another language.
For the benefit of passing BBC staff, here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.
That’s easy to remember, isn’t it? 🙂
Needless to say, my heart soars and a smile of relief crosses my face when Auntie gets the terminology right and I hear the words: “(insert name of prominent person), speaking through an interpreter, …”.
Furthermore, the geek side of me groans inwardly when the likes of Radio 4’s You and Yours and Woman’s Hour regularly ask listeners to email the programmes involved ‘through the website’, but that’s a matter for another post entirely (as are the manifold sins of Auntie’s TV programme sub-titlers). 🙂
