Although I don’t necessarily think that Norman Lamont joining the board of Phorm is particularly sinister, thanks to Bad Idea for highlighting the activities of this interesting adware company. I personally have no problem with advertising-supported sites, provided they are upfront and there is a clear ‘opt-out’ option, but most adware is pernicious and far from transparent. In its most extreme form, which appears to be the business model proposed by Phorm and others, including, dare I suggest, established mom and pop sites such as Amazon and Google, internet user ‘profiles’ are established by aggregating and analysing browser usage, and internet users are then ‘targeted’ by email with blandishments to buy and view ‘complementary’ products. In essence, this is no more sinister than traditional direct marketing, where a list broker sells names and addresses of buyers of one type of magazine, for example, to another magazine publisher to canvas subscribers. The difference comes when an internet user is unaware or only partly aware that their browsing and viewing patterns are being saved and stored for sale to third parties. It becomes very worrying if data relating to searches made, for example, on muscle cars was accessed by an insurance company as part of their risk assessment profile of a claimant or customer.

While I don’t think Phorm should necessarily be singled out, the trend towards profiling is at least as worrying as government snooping activities related to the Utopian notion of the Panopticon State’s benevolent gaze, if not more so, because commercial organisations stand a much better chance of getting the enabling technology right, leaving them in a wonderful position to use the data to wreak havoc with unsuspecting folks’ lives. Simply because I know it works, Thus recommends viewing our site with the Firefox browser, which you can download for free and configure to clear all your data after every session. Firefox is an open-source package (but is actually supported financially because it uses Google as its search engine). If you don’t have spyware protection on your computer, you should, but it’s worthwhile making sure that the anti-spyware package really works. PC users suffer more than us smug MacUsers, so I can’t recommend a package, except to say that McAfee, Norton and Symantec have been around a long time. That much said, is recommending them a sort of example of adware in itself? 

So far nobody has offered, but as and when a sinister mega-corporation offers to sponsor this site, I willtake their cash, provided they advise visitors of their involvement by means of lots of garish, conspicuous banners and gratuitous advertisements, hopefully featuring scantily-clad girls smoking and drinking, admiring firearms and playing card games.  I doubt that this will happen, since I am obviously the wrong profile and so are you, probably, or you wouldn’t be looking at this site. I’m happy to consider offers of sponsorship from beard-stroking retired conspiracy theorists with a poetical agenda. I’m not prepared to compromise on the smoking, gun-toting card-sharking girls bit, however. 

Woolworth crash will decimate the music industry

The latest nightmare recession headline is that Woolworths is about to go bankrupt (again) with the loss of more than 30,000 jobs and 860 store closures across Britain. Have the government thought this one through? Where are we going to spend the windfall cash bonanza that Gordon and his elves have earmarked to save the economy this Christmas? The country needs us to buy dancing santas, 6 ft high inflatable snowmen, artificial trees that randomly collapse like Bradford and Bingley, showering glass bomblets to choke the dog, snow globes filled with fetid water from Chinese open drains, anorexic Barbie dolls, unplayable TV Tie-in board games, Selection Boxes, plastic fish that sing ‘YMCA’ if you’ve remembered to buy the batteries. Where will we source Etch-a-Sketch, not to mention ‘Now That’s What I call Music, vol 201?’ Boney M live at Guantanamo? What about the Beano Annual? Has anyone thought about the Pick n’Mix mountain? How will we provide leery passport pictures with the collateral shortage of Photo-me booths?

Hidden assets - an Eldorado of chocolate coins

Actually, like the War on Terror, this is largely playful scaremongering. We can source some, if not all of this oxygen of consumerism at the Pound shops festooning our tumbleweed High Streets and at car boot sales. But Woolworths have gone one step further. In an audacious attempt to outdo their rivals in tat, and a last demonstration of their fabled retailing nous they offered all 862 shops on a first-come, first-served basis (provided you can find a manned till) for a shiny one pound coin (or a packet of chocolate coins, provided they are of Woolworths origin). I’m no Philip Green (thankfully) but did this send out the right signal to a potential buyer? Whitehall’s Willy Wonkers should seize upon this golden investment opportunity and nationalise Woolies, saving jobs, preserving our heritage, restoring the much-needed feelgood factor and providing ‘fiscal stimulus’ in one fell swoop.

The New Labour Woolworths empire might also include MFI, purveyors of white formaldehyde sofas, collapsing hardboard wardrobes and pouffes to the indiscriminate and the sub prime. For a modest fee to consultants and financed by one of the many government-owned banks, the new entity could be rebranded as GUM, after the highly successful USSR engine of supply-side retailing (now, ironically, a luxury outlet). Auto manufacturing could follow, had we not already sold Rover to clearly mechanically-illiterate Chinese communists, Nanking Auto, for an eyewatering £60 million in a cruel act of industrial sabotage. I’m amazed they didn’t buy Reliant at the same time.

British manufacturing hegemony may yet return

But all is not lost. This week brought the news that Yugo has conked out, a belated victim of the Balkan conflict. The government could indulge in a spot of liberal intervention and import Yugos for first-time car buyers caught in the trap of not having enough cash to buy a real car.

Of course, this is a riff too far. People who genuinely cannot afford a car can rush to Woolworths before it closes its doors for the last time and enjoy a driving experience in a Noddy car ride, or drive away with a plastic dashboard and steering wheel that makes pointless parping noises.

This week, in a move to cut bureaucracy and, in a grudging admission that vegetable tyranny is the unacceptable face of federalism, Europe decreed that misshapen fruit is OK again. “This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” said EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. 24 other fruits and vegetables: apricots, artichokes, asparagus, aubergines, avocados, beans, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflowers, cherries, courgettes, cucumbers, cultivated mushrooms, garlic, hazelnuts in shell, headed cabbage, leeks, melons, onions, peas, plums, ribbed celery, spinach, walnuts in shell, water melons, and chicory are now free to express themselves as nature intended.

But only up to a point. Several of the most popular items; apples, citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes remain rigidly standardised, as a sop to almost half the member states who still voted against relaxing the rule. According to EU spokesman Michael Mann, vendors will be able to sell deviant versions of the above as long as they are labelled as a “product intended for processing” or similar. The European Commission must formally adopt the changes which, “for practical reasons”, will be implemented from July 2009.

In theory, this should help to maintain or reduce prices, but in practice, supermarkets will probably try to pass wonky fruit and veg off as organic produce, which often carries a disproportionate premium. According to Supermarket News, rules for straight bananas are not affected.

Now I hate all the guilt and the wringing of hands as much as the next person, partly because I think it’s displacement activity, if we are not going to do something about it, then we may as well stop pretending and get on with enjoying ourselves. But there is an issue of political imagination in all of this. Every time we make statements about the planet, or about “life” or being human, we are also making statements on behalf of these people. People who probably don’t speak English and so don’t have any access to our elite discussions.

We depend upon these people, they make our cheap Chinese goods possible, and fuel the service boom in India. In many ways they manage inflation on our behalf, since they are, well, so cheap. Since we depend on these people, if we want to chart a political future for ourselves that is stable, then we need to take into account the realities of their lives. Take the food price crisis: How much have we spoken about the price of milk in Tesco? And yet how little have we discussed the possibilities of food riots? The last trade round fell on this point: The developed world just could not get their heads around the developing world’s insistence that their population had to eat, come what may.

In order to have an accurate political imagination, to help us chart our way through the turbulence of climate change, and avoid crunching on the rocks of natural resource shortage, we need to think beyond our discussions where we mostly talk about Us. We also need to get beyond the current war-time mentality where we think about Them as terrorists or usurpers. We really do face tests that are way beyond what our current mentality is geared up to. Thus we need a new political imagination that is beyond Them and Us.