The historical photograph above (click on it to see a larger version) was taken by me back in September 2014; the reason for showing it now will become clear shortly. The survival problems of small local newspapers have been well documented over the last few years, including by myself. A lack of advertising, the migration of so much news online and the fact that so many stories are now covered by social media instead of by the traditional printed media have made the jobs of journalists much harder. Many have moved out of the industry and with the development of artificial intelligence, this is likely to become even more serious. A prime example of this is the News Shopper - a local paper I have covered on many occasions in the past. In running the blog, I have bumped into journalists from the paper on a number of occasions and found them to be pleasant and very professional. They have often not been long out of journalism school and I expect joined the newspaper in order to gain valuable experience before moving on. The problem now is that so much of the content of papers such as the News Shopper is gained from online websites, rather than by by going out and interviewing witnesses to events that very junior lowly paid staff are now hired to create content with very little value and often even less accuracy. This has proved to be the case in the last week, when an article was published in the News Shopper about the top five cafes within the London Borough of Bexley. The information was obviously gleaned from online reporting - in this occasion from Trip Advisor - but had not been properly fact checked. One of the five cafes mentioned was Mambocino located in Erith Riverside Shopping Centre. The main issue regarding this is that the independently run cafe has been closed since the beginning of January 2023 and has been repurposed as a Gregg's coffee shop and sandwich bar since. The junior member of staff at the News Shopper had not properly checked her facts and published the story to a deal of criticism from readers which, did nothing to reinforce her or the papers reputation for accuracy. You can read the original News Shopper story by clicking here.
As regular readers will be aware, I don't usually comment on national or international news stories as they are outside the remit of this blog, which primarily concentrates on local news, current affairs, and historical articles. There have been exceptions to this rule in the past, and this week is one of those cases. The article below was written by me at the beginning of last week before the news story became well known in the press. It concerns the intention of the government to introduce digital identification to all UK residents. Ostensibly to this is to reduce illegal immigration. I have somewhat of a unique angle on this story, as I was indirectly involved with the previous attempt to introduce a government ID scheme almost exactly 20 years ago. I thought that my perspective on this might prove informative. The aim is not to suggest the positives or negatives of the concept of an ID card within the UK, merely that the practicalities of introducing such a system without careful consideration and very methodical management could result in a chaotic, unsuccessful and very expensive deployment. Coincidentally, since I wrote the article, the story has become mainstream and well publicised with politicians and activists taking opposing sides. I am merely discussing the mechanics of any such system rather than the moralities of such an introduction. Read on and please form your own opinion. The UK government has once again last week raised the subject of compulsory identification cards - a subject which was last discussed in detail back in 2005 - 2006. On both occasions, people on both sides of the argument have got very annoyed and there have been numerous heated online and radio and TV discussions on the subject. Back during the last time the subject was broached in detail. I was working for a very large multinational accountancy and consultancy partnership which was one of the number of organisations hired by the government in order to research the subject to look into the practicalities of deploying it and the the technicalities and costs associated with administering it. I was not personally involved in any great detail, but I knew several people very involved in the project. I was told off the record (as there were huge consultancy fees involved) that a national ID card in the format the government was proposing was impractical and hugely expensive to deploy and likely to fail, citing a number of the criteria set for judging success. Several other countries, including the Netherlands and Estonia, have deployed digital personal IDs to their citizens, but their methodology was far different from that suggested for a UK deployment. In fact, one very senior person involved in the 2005 - 2006 feasibility study told me in a quiet and confidential chat over a cup of tea that the project was fundamentally flawed. The government wished it to be rolled out in a particular form, but it was never going to work. It would be exceedingly expensive, difficult to monitor and even harder to administer and likely to be the subject of widespread identity theft and financial fraud. As is often the case, whichever government happens to be in power at the time wishes to deploy new systems and projects in the cheapest way possible; ironically, in doing so it creates the greatest amount of expense and impracticality. The current disquiet over the new proposal has now come to a head. Seven campaign groups have written to UK prime minister Keir Starmer urging him to scrap plans for a mandatory digital identity system – a project that was announced last Friday, as part an effort to tackle unauthorised migration. "Mandatory digital ID would fundamentally change the relationship between the population and the state," write Article 19, Big Brother Watch, Connected by Data, Liberty, Open Rights Group, the Runnymede Trust, and Unlock Democracy. "Although the current digital ID proposals are being considered in the context of immigration, there is no guarantee that a future government would not make digital ID a requirement to access a range of public and private services." The letter argues that mandatory digital ID is "highly unlikely" to help cut unauthorised migration and would instead push more migrants toward dodgy employers and landlords who ignore government rules. It says the mandatory eVisa scheme, which covers more than four million legal migrants, has suffered from inaccuracies and that those who are digitally excluded, disabled, or elderly "would be disproportionately impacted by these problems and risk being locked out from accessing essential services." They also point out that Labour said it was not planning a digital identity scheme in advance of last year's general election. "Introducing digital ID through the backdoor, particularly in the absence of parliamentary oversight or meaningful public consultation, would be both unpopular and undemocratic," the letter states. What do you think? As previously stated, I make no personal comment on the government policy in this case, merely the methodology. In other words, not what they do, but how they do it. Comments and feedback to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
The photo above shows the old Co-Op building that used to be on the site of what is now Erith KFC. The photograph was taken back in 1974, from the location of what is now Sherwood House sheltered housing accommodation. The Co-Op building was about to be demolished and replaced with a squash club, which was later then replaced with a KFC fast food outlet. The Co-Operative Society has strong roots in the Erith area. A co-operative shop was opened in Erith in 1868 by Sir William Anderson of Easton and Anderson engineering. The shop unfortunately soon failed, as it refused to give credit, and was patronised mainly by the emerging middle classes, for whom it was not intended. 1868 also saw a much more successful launch of the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society at Woolwich. By 1881 they had extended the delivery of bread and groceries into Erith. On the 30th March 1882, a co-op branch store, costing £1,225 was opened on the corner of Manor Road and what is now James Watt Way. A reading room was provided on the first floor by the society's education committee, and supplied newspapers and periodicals for public use. In 1887 this was extended to form a purpose built district library, with a budget of a whole £30 to purchase books. Over the years the trade increased with the surge in growth of the local population, to the point came where the building was not large enough, and new premises were constructed in 1893. It was not very long until this co-operative library fell into disuse, when the Andrew Carnegie sponsored public library in Walnut Tree Road opened in 1906. Records show that the co-operative library had some strange rules in respect of their employees. The first manager of the Manor Road based library was a Mr. James Hall, who had left school at the age of eleven. He was soon promoted to General Manager on the condition that he got married within three months of the appointment! He eventually got spliced four months after his appointment, but this was deemed to be near enough for his employers. Hall eventually rose to become General Manager of the RACS from 1902 until his retirement in 1918.
Did you know that Crayford pub The One Bell has a plaque located outside to commemorate the fact that back on the 21st June 1844, the pub was the location of the founding of the Chartist movement? The Chartists were a group of men (no women’s suffrage back then) who wanted electoral rights for the working classes. The central tenets of the Chartist movement were:- 1) a vote for every man over the age of 21 who was of sound mind and not undergoing punishment for a crime. 2) All ballots to be held in secret. 3) No requirement to be a property holder for members of Parliament, thus enabling rich or poor to stand for election equally. 4) MP’s to receive a living wage – meaning rich or poor could represent a constituency. 5) Equal constituency sizes – enabling the same amount of representation for the same number of electors. 6) Annually elected parliaments – the theory being that a rich man might be able to win an election through bribery if elections were held every five or seven years, but if it was held every year, even those with the deepest pockets could not keep paying bribes to throw the result in their favour. Chartists were pioneers of social justice and equal rights for all; they were also opposed to any form of state sponsored religion. In many ways their aims were predecessors of the Labour movement, though Chartists and their policies were widely opposed by the ruling classes – in some cases leading chartist campaigners were arrested for treason after organising strikes and marches against what they saw as unfair treatment by big business owners and the government. The Chartist movement lost a lot of credibility in 1848 when leaders of the Chartist movement organised a petition to hand in to Parliament urging them to change electoral laws to bring in changes to comply with the six points on their charter. The problem was, they had said that they had gained over five million signatures, when in fact they had actually only got around a million. If this was not a big enough dent in their image, when the petition was examined, it was found that a large proportion of the signatures were forged. Names like “Queen Victoria” and “Mister Punch” cropped up with regularity. Shortly thereafter the group fizzled out. In the end, they achieved none of their original aims; they did however, lay much of the groundwork for the later trade union movement.
Last week marked the forty fourth anniversary of the first IBM PC going on sale in the UK. Looking back, the launch of the original PC was a real revolution in computing, but this all actually happened as a bit of an accident – IBM never expected the PC (the original model was actually named the 5150, but most people nowadays are not aware of this). It is fair to say that the IBM PC 5150 turned out to be one of the most influential computers ever invented, and its descendants are still used by billions of people on a daily basis. Not bad for a machine that almost never happened. The machine almost never happened as when it was first mooted that IBM was going to build a PC, a senior executive reportedly asked the simple question: “Why would anyone want to take a computer home with them?” But IBM at the time was struggling financially, and its leadership had not failed to notice that many of its competitors were already selling minicomputers, as well as microcomputers from the likes of Commodore, Atari, Tandy and Apple. IBM was late to the game and it knew it. It developed the IBM PC 5150 in just twelve months. It was widely rumoured that IBM did not expect to sell many of these machines, and it was reported in the media that IBM only ordered 40,000 machines to be made. The IBM PC 5150 proved to be a sales success, and it rapidly became the most influential commercial computer system of all time. Indeed, by the end of 1982 IBM was selling one PC every minute of the business day. That was despite a hefty price tag. Pricing in 1981 started at $1,565 (£1,209), which was the equivalent to $4,073 (£3,148) in 2025. On top of this high price, the machine was not exactly cutting edge. The 5150 boasted a 8088 CPU, 16K of RAM, expandable to 640K, and a colour graphics adapter. It included a monochrome IBM monitor, and also came with the option of a floppy disk or if you could not afford that, a cassette system. No hard disk drive was even an optional extra at launch – third party units became available (at huge additional cost) sometime later. Even by the standards of the early 1980’s, the original IBM 5150 PC was slow and expensive – but it had the badge “IBM” on the front, which counted for a huge amount – there was a contemporary saying “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” – and this proved to be true. On the upside, it was beautifully made, out of very high quality materials, and it was supplied with what many regard as the very best keyboard ever. It also came with unparalleled technical support and maintenance – something businesses then and now value highly. Due to IBM’s rapid development of the 5150, it simply did not have the time to develop all the technology needed for the machine by itself. So the development team therefore opted to build the new machine mostly from existing “off the shelf” components. IBM opted to make the IBM PC an “open architecture” product. It even published a technical reference of the system’s circuit designs and software source codes. This meant that other firms could develop software and build peripheral components, and this is what changed the computing world. And soon other companies such as Compaq, Dell, and HP began to offer complete ‘IBM compatible’ PCs. Thus, the IBM PC rapidly became the industry standard. Software developers concentrated on the most popular platforms, and this meant that the IBM PC became the computer with the greatest variety of software available to it. You may recall that this came at a time of a “perfect storm” – the release of the PC, and the creation of the World’s first personal computer spreadsheet – VisiCalc – also the first “killer app” – people would buy an Apple II or an IBM PC just to run VisiCalc. You can read a full account of the impact that VisiCalc had in the early to mid 1980’s business and academic computer market by clicking here. That decision was a doubled edged sword for IBM, as it effectively lost control of the market; over the next three decades, competition in the PC market was unrelentingly fierce, which eventually led IBM in 2005 to sell off its PC manufacturing division to Chinese computer producer Lenovo. The IBM compatible PC transformed the world. Certainly nowadays a lot of work can be done on smartphones and tablets, but in reality PCs (desktops or laptops) are still used for heavy duty work. Some industry commentators have suggested that we are now living in a “post PC” world, and while it is true that PC shipments are currently in decline, it is still a massive industry that continues to be the bedrock for most businesses. The advent of hybrid devices such as the Microsoft Surface Pro series also suggests that the PC is continuing to evolve. But the PC is here to stay. IBM didn’t invent the personal computer, but the IBM PC 5150 certainly heralded the dawning of the computer age in many offices and households around the world. Happy 44th birthday PC!
The end video this week is a short review of the camp and caravan site located in Abbey Wood, and it is surprisingly flattering. Comments and feedback as always to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
