At midnight on Monday 3rd May 1926…eighty years ago…our Trade Unions called for a General Strike and got one. Nothing of this is talked about in our schools. Few know that in the 1920s the fear of Communism was akin to the fear of Islamic Terrorism today. My father once told me that few ordinary working people ever trusted Winston Churchill again after he used his powers as Home Secretary to break the General Strike by sending in the troops.

I had the pumps going on the boat for the first time for seventy five days after getting my electricity reconnected over the holiday weekend…electric lights in the evening too. As an experiment in Voluntary Simplicity living without electricity is an interesting exercise. The biggest difficulty turned out to be how to charge my mobile phone. A couple of years ago I read that Siemens had a clockwork prototype…you just pull a chord.

After the mobile phone it was appliances like radios, CD player and my assortment of computer collectibles. None of these gadgets uses much electricity so I could almost run them off batteries…or install a solar energy rig as Roger Monday has done. MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte recently went public with a $100 wind-up laptop for the Third World.

But a more interesting reaction has been my instant dislike of BBC Radio 4. I have long been irritated by the BBC’s charter requirements of hourly radio news bulletins but it was more than this. I wouldn’t normally quote The Daily Mail…my Street Cred as a radical might never be the same again. Here is columnist Stephen Glover. Politically the BBC is Leftish and pro-European. Culturally it is progressive. This value system has sustained New Labour. After an hour or two of independence the BBC reverted to its traditional role of compliance after the Hutton Report.

However Stephen Glover is barely scratching the surface. After a long ten week absence with just the newspapers and no BBC what struck me was the Radio Four obsession with Westminster party politics. Now it is true that the mainstream media have a similar focus with pages and pages over the past week or so about Prescott’s dalliances, Hewitt’s arrogance and Clarke’s incompetence. But you can shut this off and not read about it. And the same is true of the paedophile stories and everything else designed to titillate, frighten or just sell newspapers. And this is exactly what I do. But the radio is intrusive. Shutting it off is different. It’s all or nothing. What I want is some bits…and I like to choose which bits. I am not the only one. But a shift is taking place.

Migration Watch has managed to get just twenty minutes of airtime on BBC Radio Four in the past four years. The reason? The BBC clearly regards immigration as off-message. It is quoted occasionally on the Today programme as part of an agenda setting collusion between the BBC and the Print Media…incestuously playing each other’s stories.

Digital Radio will not have its full impact until several decades hence but even now Listeners who can be bothered…and know how…can select their ear-food from any of the programmes broadcast over the previous week. Another development is RSS Feeds. Nowadays web designers are expected to provide Dynamic Content. They can do this with regularly updated RSS Feeds. At present these are limited to weather reports and stock market prices. But this will change as the way of setting up RSS Feeds becomes more user-friendly and content becomes more eclectic.

On My Yahoo! for instance I have set up my Daily Weblogs as an RSS Feed…alongside columnists from The Guardian. Anybody doing likewise will notice that the BBC and Print Media gradually lose their agenda setting role once this happens. Their right to decide what matters and what people ought to be thinking about each day is being taken from them by a very different voice...mine. My weblog gives them different Thoughts For Each Day.

Remember the Great Tsunami Disaster on Boxing Day 2004? Afterwards a Tsunami Alert System for the Pacific Ocean was installed. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Earlier today a massive earthquake rocked Tonga raising fears of tsunamis and tidal waves. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre went into crisis mode and issued its warnings fifteen minutes later. Tonga never heard it. There was a power failure on the island…you got there before me…caused by the earthquake. Hasn’t anyone heard of back-up generators? One victim of the earthquake might turn out to be Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV owned by the UK Sailing Academy. Last week the boat ran aground on a Polynesian atoll 1500 miles from Tonga. Nobody has heard from the rescue team since the earthquake.

The Mean Fiddler was ordered to pay the West Yorkshire Police £290 000 for last year’s Leeds Festival. They appealed and yesterday had it upheld by three Appeal Court judges because The Plod had not provided any special services. This has wider ramifications because Mean Fiddler also runs the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals.

In America some ambulance-shasing law firm would probably have organised a Class Action by the city’s tax-payers had the appeal been refused. This would have counter-claimed for the return of the £290 000 the West Yorkshire Police did not spend on policing the rest of the City of Leeds while the hoodies and other assorted criminal elements were going about their unlawful occasions at the festival instead of around town.