Go forth and nick something

Some obscure priest of the Church of England has grabbed the headlines by asserting that shoplifting is morally defensible. If you are in need, the argument goes, and society has failed you, you can feel morally justified in helping yourself to something without paying for it. This he opined on behalf of God was a better option than breaking into someone's house or mugging some little old lady at knife point. And presumably the bigger the organization the less the crime - stealing from a company trading in a high rent shopping mall is much less reprehensible than shoplifting lower down the High Street.
This moral relativism is not new to the church. My grandfather used to observe with some wry amusement that both sides in the First World War invoked the help of the same Christian God before going ahead and slaughtering each other. If you won the battle you could thank God for the victory; nobody stopped to explain why God abandoned the other side to defeat.
Some historians might trace the beginning of the decline of the church in Europe to moments like these. Now, almost a century later, the pews are empty and the leadership is woolly-headed. The only time anyone pays attention to the church is when someone comes up with a vaccuous idea.

Clearing out the Christians

Tony Blair likes it to be known that he is a Christian now that it is politically expedient for him to be so. He was not overtly a Christian during the days when he was controlled by Alastair "We don't do God) Campbell. We will never know whether or not he was guided by his Christian principles when he decided to invade Iraq; nevertheless, the decision has been a dire one for Christians who have been living relatively unscathed for 2000 years.
According to a Times news report this morning, Christians face extinction in the country that Bush and Blair tried to transform into a cradle of democracy. They are being persecuted and driven out of their ancient homeland by various factions. I wouldn't blame the various groups who are responsible for the persecution, but I would blame those who deliberately invaded Iraq for their own narrow purposes and de-stablized a society that was functioning well.
I am not even sure that mr Blair even knew that he had fellow Christians living in Iraq, or if he knew he didn't care. He was probably far too self-absorbed to concern himself about such matters.
He now has the advantage of secretly confessing his sins to God and being absolved.

Not worth the paper it's written on

The signs were there a few days ago when Gordon Brown decided to arrive early to present himself as a world saviour. At that moment the talks were doomed. It did give us moment of light relief when he self-importantly steered Al Gore into a cupboard.
For presentational purposes we have a sort of deal which allows some money to flow to poorer countries - which probably would have happened under normal international aid programs.
I am cynical of course. This expensive publicity stunt allows politician to go home and justify tax increases.

Blair on manoeuvers

We can probably divide the world into three camps:
1. Those of us who know exactly why and how Blair led us into the invasion of Iraq.
2. Those who have a vested interest in defending their involvement in same.
3. Those who don't give a toss.
Groups 1 and 3 will probably greet Blair's latest venture onto the airwaves with a huge yawn. We have heard it all before and we know what he is up to. There is no denying that Blair is a skilled political communicator and he is clearly limbering up for the Chilcot enquiry. And judging from the reaction of the media (most of whom fall into Camp 2) he will succeed. The outcome of the Chilcot Enquiry is predestined and the exercise is a prelude to the application of the stockpiled whitewash.
The problem is how to orchestrate the right words to present to the public. Enter Anthony Blair.

No hope left?

On balance I have respect for Alastair Darling. Throughout his ministerial career he has been competent and as the Americans might say there is no "side" to him. So it was with some disappointment that I heard his ludicrous PBR on Wednesday. The hand of Brown was obviously upon it with heavy ink scratchings out and scrawled vote-catching insertions. Insider revelations of the last few days confirm that view and it is now clear that his attempt to produce a responsible budget was scuppered by the thuggery of Balls and Brown.
I suppose it would take a stronger man than Alastair Darling to stand up to the menaces of that pair when they came round to hammer at his door late at night.
The PBR is now a completely worthless document. Attempts by Darling to steer a moderate course have been strangled and in their place a ragbag of ill thought out and hastily implemented moves for short term political advantage.
My wife say that the public are not stupid and will see through Brown's crass manoeuvers. I do wish I could believe that.

The Global Hot and Cold Mixing Tap

There must be something in the air. Since I posted this morning Coffee House referenced an article by the FT which highlights some serious research that raises questions about the present orthodoxy.

But new research now seems to be backing up Svensmark’s theory. Dr. Svensmark and his team undertook an elaborate laboratory experiment in a reaction chamber the size of a small room. The team duplicated the chemistry of the lower atmosphere by injecting the gases found there in the same proportions, and adding ultraviolet rays to mimic the actions of the sun.

Result: a huge number of floating microscopic droplets quickly filled the chamber. These were super-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules – which are the building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei - that had been catalysed by the electrons released by cosmic rays.

The point? The research experimentally identified a causal mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the production of clouds in Earth's atmosphere. This does not disprove the existence of greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect. But it does challenge the “man-only” theory, and suggests that the IPCC should consider the effect of cosmic particles in examining climate dynamics. Or, at least, accept that there is a long way to go before we fully understand climate dynamics and who plays what role.

So the jury is out - as it should be, but we should make a careful assessment of the science before we allow our politicians to make bonehead decisions, such as Gordon Brown legislating for the compulsory use of bio-fuel at the very moment it became apparent that this is a social and environmental clanger.

The corrosive impact of environmental dogma

Go over to Devil's Kitchen to read some truly astonishing stuff. HERE
My bullshit detector has been signalling for a while now - probably triggered by Gordon Brown's discovery that green issues could be a great tax generator - but these leaked documents appear to show that the data is being manipulated to fit the theory, namely that Global Warming is man made.
Like the majority of people I simply don't know enough to pretend to any serious knowledge on this subject. What I do know, however, is that there was a significant global warming during the Middle Ages and that there was global cooling during the ice age followed by global warming and so on. None of these were caused by human population. I also grew up during the years of the smoke stack economy when huge amounts of carbon were being pushed into the atmosphere. No global warming then.
My own view now is that we should be responsible in our treatment of the environment. We can limit waste and air and water pollution and we should do everything we can in this regard. Talk to most people and they will find this reasonable. Ask them to wear a hair shirt, live in unheated homes, pay so-called "Green taxes" and you will get a different answer.
And this is more likely to be the answer when zealots overstate the case. We are not saving the planet. The planet will save itself. What we want to do is to save our lifestyle - that is, we want warm and air-conditioned environments, personal transport, easy access to good and services, choice of family size. If that requires some adjustment, we will adjust. But don't expect us to adjust on the basis of fraudulent theories and dodgy data!

Out of Afghanistan

The withdrawal, retreat if you like, starts now. Brown on Sunday and Milliband yesterday came up with a form of words which they presumably hope will persuade us that they intend to get out of Afghanistan. All done in an atmosphere of electoral panic. The next step is to sit back and hope that the Americans will find some face-saving formula for withdrawal.
I was in favour of going after Bin Laden. I was not in favour of staying in Afghanistan to establish democracy - whatever that means. The moment to have pulled out was after setting up Karzai's government. But we didn't. We forgot about our original objective, got sidetracked by Iraq, then came back to Afghanistan with a view to somehow "winning".
Most people now seem to know the answer to that question. We can't win if we don't know what we are fighting for. Vague, warm and cuddly, politically correct objectives are not  much use when you invade a country and try to impose a government on its citizens. Invasions only work when you intend to rule permanently.
"One, two, three, four
What are we fighting for?"
Back, reluctantly, to the dismal Brown. He has spent several years trying not to take ownership of the Afghan situation, much as he did with Iraq, hoping, presumably, that it would just go away. Unfortunately for him, being Prime Minister requires that you take a leadership position. There are two choices here, both requiring courage:
1. Bow to popular opinion and pull out. Distance ourselves from American foreign policy and throw out lot in with Europe.
2. Stand one's ground. We are where we are. See the job through to the end.
What we get instead is a non-decision which will end badly. Peace without honour.

They are all at it!

I suppose the BBC employees got it right when they brought out the champagne on May 1 1997. They have benefited hugely from the change in culture that has allowed them to enjoy increased salaries and unlimited expenses. When Stephen Fry told us that everyone fiddles their expenses during the first week of the Telegraph exposure, I assume he was speaking from experience.
This culture of entitlement must surely come to its inglorious end. I'm sure it's going to be painful.
There are still some of us around who can remember when local government officials were modesttly but reasonably paid and when civil servants were slightly more modestly and slightly more reasonably paid. And indeed they spent entire careers in the job without abusing the system.
I am disappointed that it has come to this. The system has been corrupted. Officials help themselves to high salaries and benefits while seeking all the time to cover their tracks. They never fear getting found out because spin and lies can usually get them out of a tight pocket. And nothing seemingly can be done!
In 1824 Henry Fauntleroy, a banker, was tried for fraud and found guilty. His sentence - death!
We may have to recover this rougher justice if we are to correct our society

Institutional takism

At lunchtime today I listened to a senior executive from the BBC confidently assert that licence fee payers would approve the idea of production staff spending their money on a llittle junket to celebrate the end of a successful program.
What?
What prompted this example of talking down to the masses was the information that the crew of The Apprentice had dipped into BBC funds for £260 to have a little party. Yes, I know the amount is trivial but it does convey this assumption of entitlement of just about anybody whose lifestyle is funded by the public purse.
Should we now expect teachers to dip into school funds for a big bash after surviving an OFSTED inspection?
Should the police budget allow for boozy parties every time a team solves a case?
Should hospital teams anticipate a publicly-funded celebration every time someone survives a succesful heart operation?
Our governing classes have set the morally bankrupt standard in these matters and it is perhaps no surprise that BBC executives expect to trough with the best of them.
It won't do, and although the BBC believe they are teflon-coated there is a growing number of us who are fed up with this arrogance. I get better service from my local council - and they only collect bins every two weeks!

No apprenticeship for me m'lord!

I am now bored with "The Apprentice". The first series was great fun and I bought into the idea that the contestants were all serious young(ish) business aspirants. The producers of the second show included some freak show contestants and in my view it has declined further with every series. So it is with no regret  on my part to hear that the next show has been postponed until next June when I will have better things to do. Apparently the BBC has now started to worry about it "impartiality" - in other words not doing things which demonstrate it customary bias towards the government.
There only remains the minor amusement of watching the contestants calling Alan Sugar "m'lord" instead of "Suralan". That will take two minutes, so I will not be adding to the show's ratings next year.

There are places where the sun don't shine!

Suddenly we are all getting very sniffy about The Sun. Poor Gordon Brown, getting beaten up by a newspaper that was once counted as New Labour's friend. Remember when The Sun got access to scoops detailing Saddam's ability to annihilate us in 45 minutes?
Short memories oil the wheels of the spinner's news machinery. The very same people (Whelan and Campbell for starters) who are aghast at The Sun's current crusade, were not the least flustered by the harrying of John Major 13 years ago. And it was only a few months ago that Damien McBride was dishing our all kinds of scurrilous dirt on behalf of his now-beleaguered master. What they really fear, as Guido pointed out earlier today, is that The Sun really does have influence. The spinning wheels of Downing Street must be in panic mode.
We can note that opinion is divided:
On Brown's scratchy letter to a mother who has lost her son -"Shockin', i'nit?"
On The Sun's pounding of Brown - "Shockin', i'nit?"
The middle classes, who don't buy or read The Sun appear to be equally divided amongst those who believe that Brown has brought all this on himself and deserves the opprobrium and those who are now feeling sorry for him.
Next week, it will be out of the headlines. Next month we turn our attention to edible turkeys rather than the Prime Ministerial kind, and before too long this fuss will become a vague memory - to be filed with Gurkhas and clawing back awards to injured soldiers - and The Sun will be shining its laser in some place that we cannot see.

Call Buckingham Palace

It has occurred to me more than once during this latest furore over Brown's ineptitude that a call to HM would have been useful. After all she has had more experience than most in sending letters of sympathy to people she does not know and I have heard no complaints over the last 50 years.
There is obviously a knack to this, getting the words right and the presentation right and not seeking any personal or political gain. I doubt if the palace guard would let anything out that was inappropriate or had not been double and triple checked, and I sense that the Queen is always open to advice.
I'm afraid Gordon Brown is not in this camp. The letter, although sincerely intended no doubt, betrays haste and an absence of input from someone less impetuous. Is there anybody left in Downing Street who has the courage to say: "Er, excuse me Prime Minister.......

The fall of the wall

When the Berlin wall came down 20 years ago we who lived on this side of it had freedom of expression and freedom of movement and, on the whole, governments that had some respect for the will of the people.
Fast forward to today. We have a government that spies on us constantly, personal expression is restricted, parents are not trusted to bring up their children, fat people and smokers and old people are subject to discrimination, elections are rigged by the governing party where they can, mindless bureaucracy increasingly dominates our lives and corruption among the elite is commonplace.
What really happened?

Beyond outrage

I'm sure it was not that long ago when a billion pounds seemed like a lot of money. Today our government chucked another 30 billion into the open maws of two of our banks. I feel sure that this will not be the last handout.
The real shock is that nobody appears to worry about any of these figures any more. Only lat year an annual deficit of £40 billion was thought to be about as much as this economy could handle. Now these numbers are treated like a £40 parking fine.
Keep calm and carry on!

The New Papacy

Everybody seems to be getting excited about Tony Blair becoming EU President. I think that possibility was torpedoed yesterday by Gordon Brown's clumsy support.
But surely the real concern is the office itself. We are assured on one hand that this is merely a President of the Council - no more than a Chairman of the Board - while Blair's people are clearly campaigning for a bigger role closer to that of the President of the United States, and one thing we can all be certain about is that over time this will be the evolution of the European Presidency.
Now I am not necessarily against this. I am no clinger to the pretensions of Britain's imperial past. I am not a little Englander. There are clear advantages to a federation of nations particularly in this so-called global economy. My concern is the evolution of a profoundly undemocratic system of governance. European nations have, after centuries of struggle, developed systems of government which take some account of the wishes of the governed whereas the EU has steadfastly set its face against consultation. Thus we end up with a constitution with no popular mandate, a European Parliament with no influence and now a President who is to be chosen by an effective College of Cardinals.
Black smoke or white smoke a President will be imposed upon us. The mediaeval Papacy returns!

Time to move on indeed

I listened to Tony McNulty try to explain himself at lunchtime. He convinced himself, although not me. Apparently he did everything within the rules, the investigating committee changed the rules, he was happy to comply with the committee's wish that he should pay the money back, he was sorry for whatever it was he should be sorry about, now was the time to "move on".
I don't think my jaw was the only one to drop to the floor. Our present crop of politicians are oblivious to embarrassment and impervious to shame. And even more incredible, we are being subjected to arguments that if we don't offer good pay and perks to prospective MPs we will not attract the best candidates for the job! Words fail me! They really do! McNulty, let us remember, was a minister, presumably one of the best and brightest the current system can offer the voting public. And what does he represent? A certain skill in presenting himself to the Westminster media and an unshakeable belief that everything his party thinks up and does, however misconceived and benighted, is good for us.
It is time to move on - to a new parliament and a new government.

Getting on yer bike!

I listened to Digby Jones this morning observe that unemployed people in England are reluctant to move away from home to where the jobs are. Apparently this is never a problem in North America and may suggest why they recover from recessions more easily. Yesterday I was talking to a man from Yorkshire who had relocated in my home town - he was surprised to observe how many families he encountered who could illustrate three and four generations of residence in the area.
Two random observations on the same phenomenon. However, in the case of Wolverton it was not always so. In 1838 the manor had a small rural population not much above 200. The new railway works was forced to, and di, reruit from all over the country.The early censuses illustrate this with many coming from Scotland and the North East together with representatives from all across the country. As the century moves on the second generation, those born in Wolverton, were able to find work in the expanding railway works, and so this went on for a third and fourth and fifth generation.
Wolverton was fairly lucky in that the Council, anticipating the decline in the railways, made efforts to attract new companies and the later development of Milton Keynes meant that there was plenty of work. Men did move in the fifties and sixties to Coventry and Luton to take high paying jobs in the car industry, but in the main the population remained settled.
There are however many parts of this country where work is scarce and, if Digby Jones is right, many parts where there is a shortage of workers. Government policy over the past decade or so has been to provide welfare for the unemployed in high unemployment areas and to bring in immigrants where there are labour shortages.
Can this continue to make sense in a weak economy? Perhaps we need to reprise the circumstances which led many of our nineteenth forbears to leave their ancestral villages and find work in the new towns.

The public stoning of Nick Griffin

Griffin is clearly an inadequate man and to my mind fits the profile of wannabee politicians who can't or won't make their way in the mainstream parties. Better, they believe, to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a small one in an ocean.
Even so, last night's roasting on Question Time was hardly edifying. Dimbleby, all the panelists and the selected audience all lined up to take pot shots at Griffin and a kind of mob mentality prevailed. In a normal question time the news issues of the day (postal strike, Afghanistan) are the topics for questions and each panelist is invited to offer their views on the subject. In my view they should have stuck to that format. Instead all these issues were ignored so that the panelists and the audience could tell us what a venomous lot the BNP are.
Let's calmly take stock of the situation. The BNP are picking up votes from (probably white) working class labour voters who have got tired of being taken for granted. They have been patronized for a decade or more, patted on the head and told not to worry about immigration because it was good for the economy. In the mean time they read tabloid stories about illegal immigrants, lost records, the inability to deport criminals, queue jumping for council accommodation and so on. Even if none of this is true (as we are told by government) there is a perception that it is. And perception is everything in politics.
The BNP has the tiniest toe-hold in the body politic. It has taken the Liberal party 60 years to go from 6 seats to 60 and it took the labour Party a very long time to become the dominant party. British politics changes at a glacial pace.
I know there is the example of Nazi germany, but both Germany and Italy were barely 50 years old as countries in 1920 and the instability of the post WWI period made them ripe for a struggle between the communists and the fascists. Both were fighting for a totalitarian state. The fascists won that round, but in the end the totalitarian state could not survive in Europe - a didn't. However, we all had a nasty scare and a lot of blood was shed. Too much to ever want to go through that again.
I would agree that we need to be ever vigilant, but I am not sure that Nick Griffin is worth the effort that the establishment has expended in the last few days. he is nowhere near as powerful as Oswald Moseley was and is really a political pygmy, in my view.
Did this public stoning do any good? I suspect that the Question Time viewers were never likely to consider a vote for the BNP. I for one have not even bothered to find out what their policies are. They are not going to represent me. I am simply not interested. However, the ones who do vote for them are unlikely to be Question Time viewers and all they will get out of this isthe reporting prior to the event and today's news stories. Will this change their mind?

A little learning

Because my birthday falls at the end of August I was always the youngest in my class. Fifty years later I learned that this had put me at some disadvantage and looking back I can see the truth of this. It took me until I was about 13 or 14 before I could fully compete with my peers.
However I did not feel especially disadvantaged at the time; I probably tried harder and I suppose I have been rewarded for that in the long run. Neither my teachers nor my parents knew about this phenomenon. My parents talked from time-to-time about my being a "late developer" but I wasn't really. I just developed later than the older boys in my class - in other words, at a normal rate.
My point here is that because nobody knew that there was a problem, there was no problem.
This morning I listened to Ed Balls reject the idea of raising the school starting age to 6 because "we have to identify problems early and intervene early". This remark seems to encapsulate the problem and my intuition tells me that early intervention often creates problems where none might exist, if children were simply allowed to mature at their own rate.
England leads the world in starting children at school early and it has to be said that the results are no better at the other end than other developed countries, and in some cases a lot worse. My children started school at the age of 6 in Canada and as adults they turned out just as well as if they had started at 5.
I remember reading about 40 years ago about the theory of "learning readiness" put forward by some educational psychologists. The concept was that at certain ages you could easily accept learning that had been difficult at an earlier age. So, for example, a boy of 8 could start learning to read and in two months would be on par with those who had been reading for three years. And these observations were made from a time when some children started school later.
We have become obsessed with add-on solutions rather than radical ones. We start our children in school too early, but rather than recognize the value of children being allowed to grow. There obvious difficulties with children coming into school at 4 or 5 so strategies that emphasize play over learning are developed. 40 years ago when infant school teachers discovered that children struggled with the letters of the alphabet developed the so-called Infant Teaching Alphabet so that children could learn vowels phonetically and then go on to learn the real alphabet when they were ready. I wonder what happened to that? Now there seems to be a movement to get children to start school earlier, give them piles of homework.
And what are the results? The evidence would suggest that there are more children who come out of school functionally illiterate than at any time since public schooling was made compulsory in 1870. Government figures have been manipulated to demonstrate otherwise but the empirical evidence clearly shows that we have significant issues.
I don't want to romanticize my schooling. In those days schools were poorly resourced and under-equipped. Lighting was only turned on in the afternoon in the darkest days of winter because to leave them on would be too costly. Paper was very scarce. However, we did learn. I remember learning multiplication tables by rote in infant school and learning to read but not much else. It was a stern establishment and play was only allowed in the yard at "playtime". We presumably consolidated this knowledge at Primary School for four years where we had no homework. Homework only began for me when I went to Grammar School and for my contemporaries who went to Secondary Modern not at all. If I were to judge by results none of this mattered. Of my friends and contemporaries who went to the Secondary Modern School, one had a career as a newspaper reporter, another became a senior police officer, another an insurance agent, another a hotel manager, another a printer and another a successful artist. Others took on apprenticeships and followed these with trade careers. Some filled ordinary unskilled jobs. I don't remember any of them unable to read and write at a functional level at the age of 11.
Something, or perhaps many things, have gone wrong since those days. We should perhaps look at the intervention of well-meaning control-freaks. Children are now controlled and organized at school and at play. Parents are controlled at every level of activity. Schoolteachers are subject to controls that disallow any professional initiative. Cui bono?

Pay up AND resign

This would be my message to MPs who have abused and fiddled the system. The present (frankly unbelievable) outcry that the "rules" have now been changed by Sir Thomas Legg and that it's "unfair" to MPs just won't wash. I am fed up with them, and I suspect that I am one of millions. This is by far the worst, sleaziest, self-serving bunch of MPs in my memory. Don't forget we still have serving ministers who have fiddled their expenses and an Attorney-General who has broken the law and several Lords who have manipulated legislation for quite substantial under-the-table payments.
I refuse to listen to any more whining. Pay back what you have filched from the taxpayer, then resign! That's my message to all MPs.  And if they think they can get away with it by fillibustering until the next election I say go after them, just as HMRC resolutely pursues taxpayers who default. Give them no peace until they pay the money back. I hope then that this will be the last we hear of any of them

Calling MPs to account

I just flew in from Amman this afternoon to discover headlines about MP's expenses. The committee that Gordon Brown has hurriedly set up has apparently called it as it is rather than find ways of excusing MPs. No further honours for Sir Thomas Legge then.
What is astonsihing about today's story is that Labour MPs are going around complaining that they are not being treated fairly! Because they did everything within the so-called rules that they happily manipulated and are now being judged by a proper standard the word is that they now feel affronted.
Expect some protests that everything they claimed was in good faith!

The Wannabee Peace Prize

My immediate reaction on hearing that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was "What for?" It appears that everyone else has had the same reaction.
The Nobel Peace Prize has had some pretty dubious recipients but most, if not all of them had done something in order to merit consideration and not always very nice things either.
Obama has made some good speeches and has a good rhetorical style but his first few months in office suggest that he is still learning on the job. Give him time and there may be some worthy achievements but this award is premature and frankly debases the prize. Obviously the Nobel Committee are anxious (over-anxious?) to jump on the Obama bandwagon. However, it is very poor judgement. Expect the Nobel Prize for Economics to go to Gordon Brown.

The deal is done. Let's live with it!

After the Irish vote the EU Constitution known as the Lisbon Treaty is pretty much a fixture. It has been imposed from above and I suspect that in time the people who were never consulted at any stage will have questions and some serious reaction. That time is not now. The majority will never find the inclination or time to reason through all the possible abstract outcomes of a constitutional document. They are far reaching and often the outcomes are unintended. The Barons who drew up Magna Carta, for example, did not imagine that it might apply to the rights of ordinary people. More recently the drafters of the Canadian Constitution could not have anticipated that one of its first applications was to allow supermarkets unrestricted hours.
On the one hand our political leaders were right to assume that a constitution is a difficult document to explain, but on the other they were seriously wrong to leave their voters in the dark. There will be a price to pay when voters discover (as at some future point they surely will) that this treaty does impact negatively on their daily lives.
However the deal is done and I rather think we should accept it and get on with life. Most European governments have a lot to attend to in the restoration of the economy and this is particularly true of the British Government.
Which brings me to the ideologues, those in UKIP and the Conservative Party for whom nothing short of withdrawal from the EU will do. Having watched this lot reduce the Conservative Party to an ineffectual rump in the 1990s it would be particularly galling if, on the eve of restoring some half-decent government to the UK, that these ideological clowns became rampant again. Cameron's government will have a big task in cleaning up the irresponsible mess left by Brown. No voter will or should be interested in abstract arguments about the EU.
The deal is done. It was not by democratic choice. Let us now accept that and learn to live with it.

Health and Safety

Here is a picture of workmen at the Citadel historic site in Amman, Jordan. They were laying roads, paths and doing some landscaping. It was in effect a building site as well as a tourist site.

The Jordanians appear to take the very practical view that there was no need for work to stop on either front - the builders carried on building; the tourists carried on touring. Both groups sensibly kept out of each other's way.
How refreshing it is that the Health and Safety lobby has not had the opportunity to spread its deadening tentacles to this part of the world.

Micro-managing society

Today the media is full of (appropriately) the dreadful story of this poor woman with a handicapped daughter who was driven to suicide by constant harassment by yobs whom the authorities are unwilling to do anything about. The story behind this woman's desperate act is depressingly familiar and all day I have been hearing from the various agencies and politicians who excuse themselves from blame and insist that lessons will be learned. The politicians in the meantime think in terms of new legislation or new controls to address the problem as they see it.
I grew up in a relatively law abiding society. I am not romanticising this. Of course there were rough areas and there were ruthless criminals (the Krays would be one example) but the main stream of society was pretty well isolated from criminals and vandals. The police and society in general was on top of the job and society was orderly, if somewhat boring. As I look back I see this as a legacy of late Victorian social activism. They cleaned up the statute books, they introduced compulsory schooling, public health and a strong interest in the welfare of the poor. I think their activities worked and by the time I was born there was a balance between government's interest in regulating society and society's willingness to be regulated. Since that time the reforming zeal of the regulators has gone overboard. Every aspect of society must be controlled and regulated. God forbid that any citizen should be trusted to take responsibility for themselves!
Today in our village a  group of chattering schoolchildren appeared in the square with clipboards - presumably on some sort of field survey. They were accompanied by four or five schoolteachers who hd them well under control. The children all wore high visibility jackets each emblazoned with the logo of the caring sponsor and the tag "Keeping our children safe".  I said all, but not quite all. Two boys were without their Hi-Vi jackets - presumably there were not enough to go around. What, I thought, would be the outcome if one of those two were unluckily in an accidental encounter? How could that be explained? We are constantly being pushed into ridiculous situations. The teachers supervising these children were undoubtedly responsible professionals who could be trusted in their duty of care. Except that someone ha decided that they could not wholly be trusted and that Hi-Vi jackets could insure perhaps against some teacher oversight or negligence. Put aside for the moment the thought that once these children left school at the end of the day they would discard the Hi-Vi jackets and go home in small groups, swinging their bags, playfully pushing each other and generally fooling around without supervision. Where are they more at risk?
This idea that regulation and legislation will create a perfect society is pure madness. The evidence after 50 or 60 years  runs counter to the argument. This week, which has coughed up some random examples, has show us that two policewomen who have made mutual baby-sitting arrangements have now been advised that they are breaking the law. And to compound this absurdity, we are told that OFSTED (and why are they involved in this?) are investigating a further 450 similar cases! Of course there are worthy spokespersons are only too happy to make the argument that all of this is worth it if it saves one child. I never hear the parallel argument that this same level of controls and legislation to eating would all be worth it if it saved one obese person from an early death. But I may not have to wait for long for that argument if this craziness continues.
The insidiousness of this nanny statism is that it is all done with the best of intentions. It is difficult to argue that some things are best left alone, that too much control and regulation is counterproductive, that more is often less.
If you give people control over their own lives and the responsibility that goes with, most will rise to the challenge. If people have deficiencies in one area or another they will find partners, friends and community support. This in the end is what community is all about. Unfortunately the trend of the last two generations has been to distrust community to manage its affairs. In recent years this distrust has extended to teachers, to doctors and nurses, to the police - none of these can be trusted to perform their professional functions and have to be restricted by monitoring and targets. If there is a legacy from Blair's ten years it has been to replace a service culture with a target culture.
I despair because I don't think any or much of this legislative meddling can be unpicked. It will probably take a revolution and that won't be pretty.

Mandy does a Hezza!

How curious politics can be. Peter Mandleson, Lord High-Everything-Else, once despised by all Labour true-believers, becomes a Conference darling and the only one who can deliver a message of hope to the assembled faithful.

The Fightback Starts Here!

1. Baroness Scotland stays in the headlines. Her erstwhile cleaner goes public to state that she never showed the worth Patrician her passport, which in any case was outdated. The police have yet to find any evidence of forged documents. The day after the Baroness is exposed for claiming £170,000 second home expenses the government changes the rules so that she is not breaking any code. The public are reassured that the rules that apply to the rest of us don't apply to anyone in government.
2. Gordon Brown contrives to look desperate and pathetic in his repeated attempts to get a photo-opportunity with Barack Obama. Meanwhile Tony Blair is charging £180 a head in Toronto to anyone wishing to be photographed with him.
3. The government pursues its obsession with turning every adult into a potential paedophile. This time two police women who have been offering mutual support to each other in the form of baby sitting have been told that they are breaking the law.
4. Andrew Marr asks a coded question about taking painkillers in an interview with Gordon Brown. Brown doesn't answer the question. The Downing Street spin machine goes ballistic and stokes the story. The Guardian blames Guido.
5. Lord High Everything Else hints that he would not be averse to working with a Conservative government.
6. Tessa Jowell is asked a question about Labour's vision for the future. She doesn't know. She waffles.
7. Alastair Darling makes a speech about the economy. He is questioned about Baroness Scotland only paying her cleaner a miserable £6 an hour.
8. Kevin McGuire says the Labour Government looks shifty on the economy.
9. Get the bankers. Never mind that nothing has been done about bonuses in the time the government has been running nationalized banks. Let's do something popular for the conference.
10. Charles Clarke makes a few helpful suggestions.

Scotland campaigns for the Conservatives

Well, not really, but the Conservatives can hardly believe their luck in the past week. Baroness Scotland breaks the law and then dismisses the matter as a trivial oversight. Now put aside the fact that the law she introduced, to harry employers unlucky enough to hire one of the many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that this government encouraged, that many employers might be intimidated by threats of racial discrimination if they turned away many of these applicants, she has undoubtedly confirmed that there is one law for us and another for them. Furthermore she cheerily announced that her action was very much akin to overlooking payment of the congestion charge. For those of us who don't drive in London this has no meaning, but I suppose she means it's the equivalent of overlooking a parking fine.
But the Gordon Brown yesterday, interviewed on Five Live suggested that the worthy Baroness was misled. That certainly puts a different complexion on matters. This Tongan immigrant is obviously going around the country with forged documents, which means that the good Baroness should not have merely dismissed her but called the police to clap her in irons. So she is not only neglecting to apply the law to her own circumstances she is also failing to implement the law when she is a witness to wrongdoing in others.
Along with most of the population, I don't want this poor Tongan immigrant to be hounded to pay for the high crimes of the high and mighty. She probably entered the country knowing that our borders are open and the authorities would turn a blind eye. She probably applied for an NI number and was given it without questions asked. She is probably honest and hard working and if the immigration laws in this country re so loosely applied why should she be concerned? Indeed.
Once again our better, the so-called "Great and Good" are trying to eat their cake and keep it. Is the Labour Party now the Patrician Party, or should that be the Patricia Party.

Hope for the Liberal Democrats

I don't have a high opinion of Nick Clegg, but I have to say I have revised my estimate upward after listening to his speech this afternoon. Whatever one may think of the Liberal Democrat scattergun approach to policy-making and their determination to spend useless energy attacking the Conservatives when their target should be Labour this was a well-delivered speech, full of energy and rhetorical flourishes. If he conducts his campaign like this the party may not lose too many of Charles Kennedy's gains.

Scotland is free!

Apparently Baroness Scotland did not hire an illegal immigrant; she merely forgot to make a photocopy of the woman's papers and for this "administrative error" she has been fined a whopping £5.000, which of course she can afford to pay, having squirreled away £170,000 in dubious expense claims.
The spinners are at it again! The original crime was to hire an illegal immigrant, a practice that Baroness Scotland herself deplored and tabled legislation to punish the practice, but it now appears that this was not a problem. The real crime was the mistake of failing to take and keep photocopies of the immigrant's documents.
What is it about Gordon Brown that he fails to understand the situation. Baroness Scotland may well be  marvellous person with many good qualities, but she is Attorney General. She administers the law and must be seen to respect it. If she fiddles the law to suit her own personal circumstances she must go. And that't that!
Tony Blair sacked Mandleson the first time around because he had made a mis-statement on his mortgage application. It was not a particularly big deal and no doubt Mandleson, or one of his backers, was good for the money. But Blair made him go because of the propriety of it. Why can't Brown understand this?

New socks

Sometimes the best inventions are low tech. Yesterday I bought a pack of seven pairs of black socks - a routine purchase. But these had colour-coded heels and toes, so that while they look like black socks in your shoes, come wash day they can be matched up again.
Why didn't anyone think of this before?

Are we beyond outrage?

14 years ago some MPs were found to be taking bribes to ask questions in the house about developing legislation. Presumably the asking of the question meant that the issue of concern to the interest group was accommodated in the draft of the legislation. At the time there was outrage - ministers and MPs resigned; the Labour Party was elected to power in part on a promise to clean up politics.

Fast forward to the present day and matters have, if anything, got worse. MPs and Peers routinely fiddle their allowances and develop phantom mortgages; members of the House of Lords charge fees of £125,000 to clandestinely amend legislation in favour of a special interest group.

In the last week Baroness Scotland, who holds the office of Attorney General, has apparently been employing an illegal immigrant. Now we all know that an ordinary citizen caught in such circumstances would not be able to plead ignorance and action would be taken against that employer for breaking the law. And breaking the law it is and in this instance by an office holder whose sworn duty it is to hold up the law of the land. It ought to be the scandal of the decade, but it is not, apparently. Off hand remarks are blithely made about informing the authorities and the assumption is that this is a storm in a teacup and of no importance at all.

In other words there is no respect for the law from those who should uphold it.

And the more remarkable observation is that nobody else seems to care very much either.

Our society is beyond outrage.

Anyone but Brown

It has always been a curious feature of human psychology that people can persuade themselves of the absolute perfection of their leader despite all evidence to the contrary. When a number of televangelists came unstuck through their sleazy activities some years ago there were still followers who remained convinced that their leader was more sinned against than sinning.

So, no matter what, there will be those who continue to believe in Gordon Brown although that band will become very small. I noticed yesterday that the message of Labour investment versus Tory cuts had been modified by Lord High Everything Else to Labour's wise spending versus Tory attacks on public services - a subtle but important difference.

The public are not going to buy into this. The Times today announces a poll which establishes that a large majority feel that anyone but Gordon Brown would be a better leader. Precisely.

Drift

I heard on the news this morning that the decision to send in a force to rescue the journalist was made by David Milliband and Bob Ainsworth but that the Prime Minister was "informed". Come again?

You would be hard pressed to call up the name of a single Prime Minister, up to and including Tony Blair, who would not want to have the say-so on any military adventure that was likely to go pear-shaped, and be prepared to stand up for the consequences. If the action were completely successful then I suspect that we would have been told that the Prime Minister "approved" the rescue, but as it went slightly wrong the Prime Minister wants to distance himself.

This is pathetic; the man is afraid of his own shadow.

The leap from number 2 to number 1 is huge. I have seen several people in my time who have been excellent in junior and middle management positions who found themselves totally out of their depth when they finally got to the top. Usually they don't last. People find a way to move them on before they can do much damage.

But here we have a man who is the senior political figure in the country who can make vainglorious boasts about saving the world from economic collapse but is fearful of the consequences of any decision outside his comfort zone.

The word is out that Gordon Brown is now on a course of serious anti-depressants to moderate his spasmodic eruptions into uncontrollable rage. So be it, but does this not produce a rather more passive Gordon Brown, more along the lines of the ditherer, the one who hides when the political going gets difficult, rather than the hyperactive meddler in every detail of government? Neither extreme is desirable but it does appear that we get periodic doses of both.

Obviously those in and around Downing Street know what they are dealing with but is it not time to resolve the problem. As much as we might like the Labour Party to be severely punished for its disastrous handling of government I am not sure that our democracy is best served by demolishing a political party because of one man's madness. But somebody needs to do something. When George III went mad, the government of the day had the good sense to make arrangements to ensure the continuation of governance. In earlier times rulers were deposed or disposed of

Either way things were not allowed to drift.

Beatlemania revisited

For some unaccountable reason this weekend was a Beatles retrospective, and it was interesting to watch that footage when girls wore skirts and boy wore ties and suits. Beatlemania was a phenomenon. There had been nothing like it on this scale before and by comparison Frank Sinatra's "bobby-soxers" would have appeared no more shrill than a Women's Institute outing.

What was it about The Beatles that drew such a response? At the time I would have answered that it was their musical brilliance and I think I would make the same assessment today. Most of the performers of the day were largely ordinary - some had talent, some had sex appeal, some had a gimmick - much like any generation. The Beatles rose above all this because they were musically advanced and I put this down to the genius of John Lennon.

Yes, be careful with the word genius but without his drive and creative energy I doubt that the group would have become the phenomenon it did. Paul McCartney wrote some sublime songs during this period - all I think attributable to his vying with Lennon. And even George Harrison and Ringo were energized to raise their game. Each made important contributions as well as Brian Epstein and George Martin, but the two latter were only able to work with what was there. Lennon was the prime mover, the leader and the core.

People respond to genius even when they don't know what it is. No ordinary people in Einstein's time understood his theory of relativity but they responded warmly to him when he appeared on American television. Stephen Hawking in our time is universally admired without any understanding of his contribution to physics. Bob Dylan had one of the worst singing voices ever, but became astoundingly popular because people at the time instinctively acknowledged the genius of his music and lyrics.

So too with The Beatles. Musicologists may analyse the shift from major to minor key and the falling cadences, but the impressionable young minds of the 1960s heard original music which married instinctively with the lyrics. There was nothing else quite like it. Genius!

Cheers!

Imagination triumphs again! The legislative killjoys in the Scottish Parliament have forced pubs to keep their prices constant for at least 72 hours. This was intended to stop "happy hour" promotions. Some pubs have now responded by offering cheap drinks for three day periods - in other words continuous happy hours.

It does the heart good to read stories like these.

Another craven action from GB

In 1962 I visited the town of Wurzburg in Germany as a hitchhiker and youth hosteller. It was a pretty town with an interesting mix of architecture. I liked it. 40 years later I revisited the town and this time took the time to look around the museum. What I missed the first time because I was too impecunious to afford the admission was the quite shocking history of the last few months of WWII. Wurzburg was carpet-bombed by us and almost obliterated. Two models of the city, before and after, illustrated the tale. About 90% of the town was destryoyed, including the hospital.

Well, after the war the Germans rolled up their sleeves and rebuilt their towns, much as they were before this wanton destruction. I saw other examples on this trip through parts of Germany. If there have been cries for compensation for the victims then I have not heard them, and certainly they have not been reported in this country. Terrible things happen during war, but once the damage has been done, the only sensible thing to do is to rebuild your life.

However we now live in a compensation culture. No victim is allowed to get on with life unless they have been adequately compensated - even if it takes many years.

The victims of IRA bombings are innocent victims and I feel sorry for them. At the same time I have to ask what really can be done? The atrocity has happened. That fact won't be changed. Compensation can never make true amends.

In any case the compensation chasers end up with a distorted view. The men who detonated the bombs are to blame, but they have no money, the Americans who donated money to fill IRA coffers may have some blame but we don't know who they are, the Czechs who manufactured the semtex may also be blamed but they probably don't have deep pockets, but the people who sold the semtex to the IRA, the Libyan Government, apparently have lots of money, so maybe they should compensate the victims.

Into this moral morass steps one G. Brown. His first view, that nothing could or should be done about compensation was probably the correct one. It is not popular, it is not nice, but it is a realistic and defensible political position. Any leader worth his mettle would take this position in the best interests of the state.

But we unfortunately have a Prime Minister who will stoop to any craven political ploy to earn short term gain - in this case to get the Libyan situation off his back. Promises are made which cannot be kept and the victims will have their hopes temporarily raised only to see them slowly wither over time.

Libyan aftershocks

I have remarked before that Gordon Brown is a classic bully. He is very good at beating up and terrorizing those in weaker positions than himself but steers clear of anyone with the strength to stand up to him.

The Libyan negotiations, which are dripping out day by day, illustrate the downside of having a weak and bullying character in the office of PM. Qaddaffi has run rings around him and Brown apparently was afraid to raise the issue of compensation for IRA victims, according to the Sunday Times today. We should not be surprised by this revelation but it is a pretty poor show. Libya did not hold all the cards in these negotiations- they wanted trade and respectability with the latter probably being the bigger prize.

Any leader with any strength of character would have been able to deal on this issue.

Browndown

There was no sense that Gordon Brown looked rested and refreshed when he made his first appearance after an extremely long holiday. Grey faced and whey-faced he faced the cameras unenthusiastically in a robotic manner.

Several insiders have always made the case that Brown was bonkers and much of his public behaviour certainly betrayed some personality problems but this post today presents a plausible case for the theory that Brown is actually on serious medication to try to keep his behaviour under control.

Those who forecast that Brown might leave Number 10 accompanied by men in white coats may not have been too wide of the mark!

The Lonely Smoker

Smoking used to be a happy social activity. After a lengthy Sunday lunch my grandfather would go to his humidor and bring out two fat cigars to share with my father. Both pleasurably went through the rituals of rolling the cigar between thumb and finger, sniffing it, removing the band, cutting the smoking end and carefully lighting it with a Swan Vestas match. After dinner conversation was accompanied by the rich and not unpleasant aroma of cigar smoke.

Today I saw a lone woman dragging a few long puffs on a cigarette outside a hair salon. She was obviously in the middle of her hair treatment but needed a break, I emphasize the loneliness because it is common enough now to witness a small knot of smokers outside pubs, restaurants, courts, shops, libraries, fitness centres, sharing their comradely sense of exclusion from approved society. The lone smoker is perhaps rare but, who knows, may become more common.

As I was growing up, as I indicated above, smoking was an everyday part of life. Even school staff rooms exuded smoke during breaks. Smokers were mostly male, but in men it was an almost universal habit. Some women smoked but it was generally considered to be a masculine activity. Nobody pretended that it was good for you. Men joked about smoking coffin nails and were fatalistic about future health problems or shortened life expectancy. If it was going to be a short life the you might as well enjoy it.

Smoking was a social pleasure rather than a private vice. How times have changed!

British PM fooled by dictator

British Prime Minister learns that he has been fooled by an unscrupulous dictator.

September 3rd. 1939

or was that

September 3rd. 2009

Lies, more lies and Gordon Brown

This day had to come. For weeks now Gordon Brown has been hiding, hoping that the consequences of his ineptitude would go away. If anything it has got worse and he has to keep compounding lies with more lies.

Everybody knows what the situation was and there are times when realpolitik has to overcome nice feelings. Ok you do what you have to do and hold your nose. Every leader has to face up to this unpleasant reality from time to time, except, it seems, Gordon Brown, who seriously lacks courage.

Blair had to deal with a not dissimilar situation with the Saudis a few years ago. They were unhappy about close scrutiny of some of their dealings with British Aerospace by the Serious Fraud Office. Blair recognized the reality and canned the investigation. Not nice but realistic. And he did have the gumption to confront questions about the propriety of his move by emphasizing the impact it would have on British jobs. Eventually we all got off our righteous high horses and got on with life.

Unfortunately Brown is so inadequate that he ha contrived a situation that has made the SNP look like international statesmen, made the Labour leader in Scotland look like a complete idiot, upset the Americans, undermined justice in this country and achieved a marginal economic benefit that could probably have been achieved through tougher diplomacy..

When will he go?

In praise of Derek Draper

When Derek Draper started Labourlist it was hopeless as a blog but hugely entertaining, largely because Draper picked unnecessary fights in order to promote the blog and. I suppose, himself. It was inevitable that he would come unstuck and so it proved.

Since then I have had occasion to read some of the blog and I have been generally impressed by the thoughtful contributions of a number of its contributors. Plainly they are concerned about the hi-jacking of what they thought was their party by a bunch of mountebanks and charlatans. They are Labour's grass roots, which the party has never much heeded.

But credit where credit is due, Draper did start up this enterprise and it is still there and it appears to be working as a blog. There are people out there who are very adept at starting new enterprises but lack the skills to sustain them.

Perhaps Derek Draper is one suc

Yes minister

Daniel Finkelstein makes the case in the Times today for Special Advisors. He may have a point but why do we always in this country develop complicated and probably unsatisfactory solutions instead of going to the heart of the problem.

The problem surely is that the executive heads of government departments are permanent secretaries - a wonderful idea in its time when continuity of management was desirable, but outmoded in a fast-changing world.

The answer is to change the executive head when a new government or minister comes in. There are hundreds of competent, experienced men and women out there who could fill that civil service role and who could also be chosen as someone who was in tune with the Minister's thinking. Thus change would have a fairer chance of being properly implemented as opposed to the present chaotic situation where Ministers battle with (and often lose to) their Sir Humphreys. We would more likely avoid half-baked schemes if the executive arm of government departments were committed to proper implementation.

And no need for the Damien McBrides either.

Profiles in courage

The evidence has been piling up over the years and after this week it is indisputable that Gordon Brown is a "fraidy cat". There are times in political life when you have to face the music and the freeing of the Lockerbie Bomber is certainly one of them, but again Brown is unequal to the occasion. In Scotland both McCaskill and Salmond have stood up to public questioning to make their case. Fair enough! But here the PM has even had to forgo the reflected glory of the Ashes victory because he was too afraid of Lockerbie questions.

Yesterday he made a compulsory public appearance because of the visit of Netenyahu and lamely insisted that this was a quasi-judicial matter for Scotland only. To my eyes he looked haggard and unrested even after 6 weeks of absence.

No Prime Minister in my seven decades has been so afraid to stand up to public scrutiny. They may at times have been fearful, but they all had the courage to face their critics. Brown's predecessor may well have concluded the same murky deal for the same murky reasons but he at least would have stood by the decision and earned some respect.

Gordon Brown is truly a most inadequate man.

The Scotification of the UK

Devolution of government is a good thing. I have long been an adherent to the "small is beautiful" philosophy of life. Government in this country has become too centralized and this is a large factor in explaining why nothing works.

However. . . .

But ...

There are some things states should not devolve - and foreign policy is most certainly at the top of that list. You could not conceive of a situation where the German Federal Government would allow Saxony to run its foreign policy nor would the US government cede its foreign policy to the government of North Dakota. What is our mindless goverenment up to.

If we allow the argument currently emanating from Downing Street that freeing the Lockerbie prisoner was entirely a matter for Scottish Justice (and I doubt whether anyone believes that) then we are in effect ceding foreign policy and international trade policy to a junior government in Edinburgh. Scotland may want to be a sovereign state but they are not there yet.

The whole affair should rouse the deepest cynicism in everyone. This has nothing to do with compassion or justice and everything to do with cutting a lucrative deal with the Libyan Government and at one level we can shrug our shoulders and be part of the real world. But once again we have Gordon Brown being too clever, too lacking in courage and too bound up in his own head to understand public concerns.

One suspect that Blair might have found a better way to finesse this one. The result may have been no different but he would not have created a situation where in trying to stick it to the SNP he would cede rights over foreign policy.

Undone by the Bank of Scotland

Why does being right make me uncomfortable? At the time of Lloyds TSB being persuaded to take over HBOS, I suspected, without any specialist financial knowledge, that it would go sour - and said so. This judgement was purely intuitive and largely based on my assessment that Brown was only interested in short term political advantage with no interest in a larger strategic vision.

And so it has proved. I don't feel good about it. A friend of mine, who has worked for Lloyds for the whole of her career and who took share options each year, saw her savings decimated by the takeover. And there will be countless like her. Ordinary people, not high flyers, who invested cautiously for their retirement, only to discover that a single buccaneering move by the self-serving Gordon Brown.

And who really cares for these people? Not the parliamentarians who have been absorbed in various expenses scams, not the BBC journalists who - likewise, and not any of the political journalists and bloggers who seem only interested in fine political point-scoring.

Harmania

We have been accustomed to pygmy politicians with pigmy brains - and I should apologize to pigmies at this point - so it is with a certain weariness that i listen to the reports of Haeeiet Harman's self-inflating comments over the past few days. You could always respect, even if you didn't agree with, the assertions of a Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, because there was an intellectual force behind their thoughts and writings.

Sadly, Harman doesn't even come close.

It would be an advance in our belief system if we acknowledged that just as individuals exercise different preferences, so do people from different cultures, so do people of different gender. We accept that North American born athletes are more likely to end up playing baseball or basketball, and that European athletes express a preference for soccer and Indian athletes re more likely to play hockey or cricket. I don't recall any move by the politically correct to campaign for quotas for American kids who might otherwise be denied the opportunity to play cricket.

And while we are on the subject of cricket, how about gender equality in this country. Is it not scandalous that women are not selected to plau against the Aussies? And if we are to aspire to true equality should we not expect each side to be made up by 5 1/2 men and 5 1/2 women.

Harriet Harman is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The battles have been fought long ago and largely won. Women have achieved high positions in areas where they choose to compete. But I would bet, for example, that you are more likely to find a woman as CEO of a successful company manufacturing lingerie than carburettors.

Politics is an arena where there are no good measures for competence. Arguments can always be made that it is someone else's fault and that one's mediocrity had no bearing on a disastrous outcome. So it is possible, for example, for people like John Prescott and Harriet Harman (was the office of Deputy Labour leader made for them?) to carry on for years without achieving anything or managing anything with competence.

Harman failed as a minister and was sacked by Blair. She then contrived to get a number of jobs which did not require any special accountability or competence. We can see a similar pattern with Prescott. He was given a significant ministry at the start of the Blair government. He screwed up and was thereafter given various non-jobs with important-sounding titles and the opportunity to play croquet at Dorneywood.

One wonders why these pople ar listened to at all.

Is there any point to this Iraq inquiry?

I think I've answered my own question. Any testimony the government is comfortable with will be heard in open court. If there is anything the government (or Tony Blair) doesn't want us to know it will be heard in secret, or not at all. In time (at least a year we are now told) some anodyne report will be published that nproves nothing, exonerates everyone and promises to learn lessons from some of the minor cock-ups.

Heigh ho!

Making a killing

- What can we do about these Taleban wallahs? We're being killed by all these bad headlines. Soldiers dying, wounded ... Can't we put a stop to it?

- More soldiers, more equipment?

- Not on old boy! GB has spoken! We need to find a battle we can win.

- Well sir, there is the court option.

- The court option?

- Yes sir, two soldiers have been given an increased compensation award on a court ruling. We could appeal that. We're bound to win in a higher court if we put enough resources behind it.

- How much s involved?

- Not very much sir, but there is a principle at stake.

- Principle! Of course. Yes I like that. We need more principled action around here.

- So you approve sir.

- Absolutely. Get the legal boys on it right away. A battle we can win. That's cheered me up immensely.

No surprise

Guido reports today that MPs have surreptitiously increase their subsistence allowance from £400 a month to £500. As before no receipts are required. Expect then to see reports next year of increased allowances for MPs. Obviously they don't care about public opinion. Obviously they don't need to care about public opinion because the electoral machinery of our so-called democracy has been stitched up to keep out potential renegades.

The lesson that might be learned from Ian Gibson's defenestration is that what really doesn't pay is to question the policies of party leadership.

The Left and Islam

Martin Bright appears to be held in high regard in media circles. I am not sure why because what I have read of his writing appears to be long on dogma and short on thoughtful analysis. He used to be editor of the once highly respected New Statesman - a weekly I read regularly in the 1960s - until he was kicked out for being too critical of Gordon Brown's government. He now writes a blog for the Spectator's Coffee House - I assume amongst other activities.

His place at the New Statesman has been taken by one Mehdi Hasan who apparently has this to say:

“The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Quran; they are described in the Quran as, quote, “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief - people of “no intelligence” - because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”

What is more dispiriting is Martin Bright's response:

What can I say? Nothing at all. I am speechless.

Fortunately most of Martin Bright's respondents are not speechless and most were able to provide good analyses of the state of affairs we have come to, whereby the left have unthinkingly embraced Islamic thinking because it is not Christian or not Jewish.

We have all grown up in ignorance of Islam. Most of us were taught about Christianity and Judaism as we were growing up and to a degree these religions have become thoroughly westernized. There were flirtations with Arabism 100 years ago by such as T E Lawrence but such interest never entered the mainstream, so now when we have to belatedly pay attention we are caught without any framework of knowledge to properly place Islam.

Most people on the left of politics in the 1960s could reassure themselves that the policies they were pursuing would make society a better place. There was an ideology worth fighting for. We may now look back on that period as the high water mark of state socialism. The inexorable trend to excessive central control, capture of programs by special interest groups has led to a gradual undermining of all those good intentions. Worse, many of these services are downright counterproductive. Almost everyone now realizes that, even at an unconscious level, and this has left many adherents to the left with an attachment that has been stripped of its core ideology.

Vacuums will always be filled and it is perhaps no surprise that those with highly defined viewpoints, like the IRA or militant Islam will fill open minds.

Hugh Stowell Brown

It is astonishing what you can find on the internet these days. I knew about Hugh Stowell Brown and his association with Wolverton but had hitherto been unable to access his memoirs. Fortunately someone has taken the trouble to put this online recently so I was able to read his account.

Brown was a Manxman and the son of a cleric. He came to England as a 16 year old, worked as a surveyor for a while and in August 1840 came to Wolverton as an apprentice fitter - for which he was paid 4s a week. He worked there for 3 and a half years before deciding to become a Methodist minister, eventually preaching in Liverpool and achieving a degree of fame.

His account of Wolverton is invaluable because he gives us a view from the shop floor. Other contemporary accounts that survive were from visitors who tended to be impressed by the wonder rather than the reality. Although the days were long the men found ways of slacking off when the foreman was not looking, therefore pacing their day within the unreasonable demands of the machine.

He is also highly critical of the incumbents of the local churches and poor church attendance - a view which contradicts our received picture of Victorian church attendance. He also notes, unsurprisingly, the amount of heavy drinking that went on.

One young man with whom he shared lodgings was Edward Hayes, who a few years later set up his own engineering company, first making agricultural machinery and then moving into the manufacture of yachts and tug boats. One of Hayes surviving boats is on display at the Milton Keynes Museum.

A spoonful of Sugar

I have no objection to “Suralan” Sugar as a businessman or even as a television entertainer. I have wayched and enjoyed the Apprentice series. I don’t even object to his appointment to the House of Lords - he wouldn’t be the first millionaire to be so rewarded for making suitable contributions in the right places.
But it does stick in my craw that the Son of the Manse should lecture us endlessly about his values and then appoint a man who is the avowed embodiment of the very opposite of these so-called values.
Once again the moral compass is spinning!

Reducing Shakespeare

My stock answer, when challenged as to the point of studying Shakespeare, went something like this. Reading is known to be a good way of developing one’s vocabulary and fluency with language. Shakespeare tells interesting stories and is generally acclaimed as one of the best writers in English of all time. So the study of Shakespeare can usually meet two or more objectives. Yes it is difficult and challenging but what do you think would be best for you - trying to climb a mountain or climbing three steps to your house so that you can flop on the couch?
It was with some surprise, even shock, when I was supply teaching at a school in Portsmouth some ten years ago, that I found they were teaching Macbeth to some weaker students by showing them a ten minute cartoon film of the story and asking them to write a paragraph about it. This apparently satisfied the demands of the National Curriculum to include Shakespeare at GCSE!
No dumbing down here!

School's out!

The social engineers are at it again. Not content with slowly wrecking an working education system over a generation or two they now continue to believe that the answer is more tinkering, more attention and resources for the unambitious and unworthy, more quotas, more dumbing down and more blithe ignoring of hard working students who happen to have parents who care about their future.
Whatever Mr Milburn may parrot from manifestos past the answer is surely not there.
Let me go back in time. I went to a Grammar School in 1953. They had been invented only a few years earlier and GCE only on 1951. The school had been there since 1908 when it operated as a County Secondary School taking students from North Buckinghamshire towns and villages either on a scholarship or on a fee paying basis. The fees were something like £10 per annum in the 1930s, according to my other.
When it became a Grammar School in 1946 it scarcely missed a beat. Most of the teachers had been there before the war and continued thereafter. Teachers did not move much in those days, unless to become a head. The school hierarchy was very simple - a head, a senior master, a senior mistress, and the rest were simply teachers.
The point here is that schools were stable institutions. An uncle of mine left the army in 1945, trained as a teacher, found a job in his home town, and stayed there for his entire career. he was not untypical of his generation.
The pass rate for the 11+ in my day was about 20-25% so most of my friends went to the Secondary Modern where they received a more rudimentary education. They had no science labs and they did not do French. They probably spent more time doing woodwork or domestic science and they were not burdened with homework. It did not compare with today’s curriculum.
What I can report is what happened to some of my friends and contemporaries who left school at 15. One became a newspaper reporter, one started as an apprentice butcher and eventually went on to become a hotel owner, one started as an office boy in an insurance office and retired as a millionaire, another now owns his own printing business in New York city, one joined the police and rose to the rank of inspector; several took up trade apprenticeships and went on to steady if unspectacular careers. Those of us who went to the Grammar School filled jobs in the Civil Service, Banks, Teaching, and middle management in industry. Since I didn’t hang out with rougher characters I can’t speak for how they turned out but what I have represented is a fair cross section of the middle ranks of society.
Have things really changed that much? We are told that the gap between rich and poor has widened, but that may only be because the rich have become very much richer. The broad swathe of people are still in the middle. On the other and it may well be that those members of society who are not interested in much beyond their immediate needs are still happy to use their disposable income in beer and fags.
In my day those of us who get to the Grammar School were generally grateful for the opportunity and made something of it. Equally, those who didn’t got on with life and made the best of the opportunities they did have. The idea that children were consigned to oblivion at the age of 11 was never remotely true and was usually asserted by well-to-do left wingers who had no experience of how most of us lived. That hasn’t changed either.
George Orwell came to the conclusion many years ago that revolutions are usually initiated by the well-to-do middle classes who massively resent the rich who have so much more. ordinary people are not much bothered and are more interested in getting on with their lives with minimal interference. So the revolution in education has been brought about by people who resent the Etons and Harrows while having no understanding of what most people want or need from education. Grammar Schools, which tended to model themselves on the better Public Schools, had to go.At the same time they decided to make schools larger and more unmanageable - misunderstanding the concept of “economies of scale”.
At each stage in this revolution schools and their masters happily took on every social issue and slowly squeezed out the one thing they used to do well - academic teaching. Tests were massaged, statistics engineered, money squandered as futile attempts were made to prove that the idea of the comprehensive school was the right one.
And there is nothing wrong with the Comprehensive school as an institution which draws upon its neighbourhood. Many countries do this successfully, but they haven’t built huge monolithic housing estates.
Far better to accept that this is England

Tristram Hunt and Karl Rove

You can't condemn Tristram Hunt for lack of imagination. In a Guardian article the other day he interprets Andrew Lansley's apparently unguarded comments about ring-fencing NHS spending and making budget cuts elsewhere in 2011 as a prime example of Karl Rove's school of "down and dirty" politics.

Let me see if I have understood the argument. Lansley says in an interview that ring-fencing NHS spending in 2011 will probably mean cuts of about 10% in all other departments. Gordon Brown immediately jumps in and hints darkly that cuts by the Conservatives will lead to shoeless children and little old ladies out on the streets in mid-winter. It turns out that Lansley was using the governments own figures. Undeterred Brown and his cabinet continue with the lie that there will be continuous investment under Labour and only the Conservatives will cut. The media for once are awake, as indeed are political bloggers. They examine the figures and find that the Conservatives are speaking the truth on this matter and that Brown is determined to carry on lying.

In Mr Hunt's mind this is an illuminating example of dirty politics on the part of the Conservatives. How very devious of them to expose Brown's lying and indeed to bring the media along with them.

Obviously we would all be much better off if the lies were allowed to continue and the media continued to behave themselves!

Parenting

Last night I was in conversation into the small hours with some young people. The subject veered at one point to Attention Deficit Disorder and similar syndromes. Some of the women there had young children of school age. I think I was mildly surprised that they regarded ADD as hokum. They all seemed to accept that children will misbehave and boys in particular will push the envelope and are often more difficult; however they were all of a mind that firm and consistent discipline (and patience) was the answer rather than drugs. They were all in agreement that some teachers tend to ascribe any difficulty to ADD and frequently refer them.

Of course I agree with their position. there is no substitute for good old fashioned "common sense" and tried and tested methods for rearing children. Why is it that all the accumulated experience of centuries must be tossed aside in favour of "expert" intervention and a (usually) chemical solution. These young parents are right to be concerned that their children may be subdued temporarily by chemicals when no one knows the long term impact of such intervention.

It is only two generations ago that children were corrected and punished if necessary. It wasn't always fair from the child's point of view, but it worked. I cannot remember an instance of a child in my own experience of primary and secondary school who could not be handled by a teacher. Now it appears that there are many in today's schools who cannot be tamed by present day methods.

So, no consistent rules from split families, indulgent treatment from parents who feel guilty about spending too much time away from their children, a refusal to allow teachers to act in loco parentis in any meaningful way, a lot of hand-wringing from the authorities and we end up with a vacuum that is filled by self-appointed "experts" who are happy to prescribe any theoretical solution to a problem they have no personal commitment to.

And as with so many areas of life nowadays, the hard solution - in this case old fashioned parenting - is the one many people like to avoid.

One ray of hope however (and the women I was listening to last night are probably not representative) is that some mothers and fathers are still committed to oold fashioned parenting.

Life without Gordon Brown

I am in Edmonton, Alberta. The sky is cloudless (as yesterday) and this weather promises to continue. Last night I watched a baseball game with my son. I notice that the banks are properly regulated here and none has failed. There is no news of the UK except for that which I seek out on the web. I don't have politician's lie invading my space. Bliss!

Two fingers up to the public

As has slowly become apparent, our MPs, now recovered from the exposure and criticism of their expenses, are reverting to their old ways. The Labour members have made it clear now that they are more interested in scoring political points than electing a Speaker who can achieve parliamentary reform. Bercow clearly was not wanted by most Conservatives and they will see him as another Labour stooge. This will make working relationships difficult and it is hard to see how reform will happen in this environment. In addition, Gordon Brown is still PM, so meaningful reform is a non-starter.

It is also apparent that Mr Bercow likes the sound of his own voice. It won't take long for the public to find out what they have leading Parliament.

It was also interesting to see that Gordon Brown's and support and active whipping for Margaret Beckett torpedoed her chances.

Reform. What reform?

The expenses scandal continues; the government blatantly lies to us; things should change; nothing will change. It is dispiriting but I am increasingly coming to the view that we will limp along to the next election without any attempt at reform. The election will cause a change of government and the new government will have to concentrate on salvaging the economy. And that will be that.

Today we will get a new face in the Speaker's chair. Bercow, if he gets it, will be problematic because of his personality, but otherwise it will be same old, same old.... No reform can be expected from there.

The real issue is not the fiddling of expenses or members of the Lords clocking in to get their daily allowance but the actual function and purpose of Parliament. We have a government selected from members of the Houses of Commons and Lords, a lot of whom are given jobs that could be, and probably are, done by civil servants. Power resides in the hands of a handful of people. That's the real tragedy. Our parliamentary democracy has been surreptitiously hi-jacked and subverted over the years, almost without anyone noticing. MPs have little to do other than act as lobby fodder on the few days they attend the Commons and provide an additional Citizen's Advice Bureau in their constituency. The Lords, as a consequence of Blair's partial reform, ironically now have the time to do what MPs should be doing - namely debate and amend legislation. Some of them have not missed the opportunity to make money out of this.

One has to ask what is the point of having 640 MPs when so few of them are usefully employed? And the question will still be asked (and not only by myself) until efforts are made to change and improve.

What I would like to see happen (and I won't hold my breath waiting) is for a reform commission set up to spend a year travelling across the country genuinely seeking input, spend whatever time is needed to distill this into a report with recommendations, and finally (and crucially) hold a binding referendum to determine the next step. The referendum questions should put three or four models before the public and should include the option of leaving things as they are (the "don't meddle" option). I think too that a year of debate prior to the actual referendum would be required to ensure that all the options were fully understood and another year to prepare implementation of any change.

Constitutional change is a difficult and risky business, therefore it is right to spend four or five years on it, but at the end we would have a renewed democratic system. On the other hand, we might end up with the "no change" option, which would still be OK because we will have endorsed the status quo. At the moment we have no trust in anyone within the present system.

No election for the rest of us

MPs tomorrow will have the privilege of voting in an election - another dividing line between them and us!

The X Files

When I bought my Daily Telegraph today the boy behind the counter read the banner "The Complete Expenses Files. Is that like the X-Files?"

"Yes", I said, so quick I even surprised myself, "the aliens are ripping us off."

He looked at me blankly, but at least I got my own joke.

Lest we forget

The only MP who had the courage to appear on Question Time last night was Ken Clarke. Apparently over a hundred were asked, but declined. They have some sense of shame then.

You wouldn't know it from reading the blacked out expenses documents published yesterday. This must amount to monumental arrogance. The Telegraph has already published the uncensored version and they are in a position to make comparison with "the stuff they didn't want us to know"; yet they went ahead anyway. You couldn't make it up, as they say.

They must believe that after we all go away for a sumer holiday we will forget about this and it will be business as usual. This seem to be the thinking also behind the election of a new speaker, and they think they can get away with an unreformed house.

Message to MPs. We will never forget this one!

Speaking for change

Michael Martin's whining final speech which appeared to blme everyone else for the predicament he found himself in was a good illustration by itself of the man's inadequacy for leadership. There should be lessons to learn from politicizing the role as MPs did in 2000 but it now appears that they are all back to their old ways. The election of a new speaker hinges, we are told, upon Labour MPs voting en bloc for John Bercow, just to annoy the Conservatives and Conervative MPs voting for Margaret Beckett to stop John Bercow.

Whatever the result it will be unsatisfactory. MPs have obviously learned nothing from the exepnses scandal except that they should steer clear of Question Time.

The semi-detached PM

Two days ago I wrote about Gordon Brown's talent for being on the wrong side of every issue. This in the context of his announcement that the Iraq enquiry would be so completely closed that no chink of the light of truth would be allowed to enter. Apparently there is to be a climb down on that stance, but once again Brown has got himself into an unnecessary position.

The man is so completely out of touch. Look at his behaviour yesterday while the Speaker made his retirement speech, totally uninterested, rudely shuffling his papers because he had more important things to do. The rest of the house, although they may not have been fans of Michael Martin, had enough respect for the office and the institution to look as if they were giving him serious attention.

Yet another example of his lack of interest in people must be his hiring of Kitty Ussher ten days ago. Given all of the interest about expenses would it not have been wise to ask her if there was anything he needed to know about before she took the job?

For all the contact he has with reality he might as well have his office in the Orkneys. he might be happier. I know we would be.

Kitty Ussher

The highlight of this woman's career must have been her appearance on Simon Mayo's program this afternoon, where she lied and evaded answers to questions in order to defend her lying leader. Before that she must have been faceless and unknown outside Westminster. Now she can return to anonymity as she has now been found out for shameless abuse of the expenses system. Naturally, she "has done nothing wrong".

Goodbye!

Carry on lying

It's all so depressing! Brown has decided that he will spend spend spend and the Conservatives will cut. So whether or not there is actually money on the kitty or money to borrow, Brown's policy is to spend. Other people, including the unasked itizens of this country, may have other ideas. I was always true, is true, will be true in the future, that you cannot spend what you don't have. I accept that Brown, after a lifetime of spending other people's money, may not accept that but it baggars belief that Labour MPs and cabinet minsters keep refusing to acknowledge that the era of reckless spending is at an end and assert this unfounded belief that borowing more and spending more will get you out of economic difficulty.

Another tax

They are incorrigible! They've been happily wasting our taxes on personal home improvements and now they want to charge every telephone subscriber £6 a year so that three shepherds living in the Orkneys can get broadband access!

It's a tax too far!

Transparently opaque

I am now fully convinced that is pathological with Brown. The Iraq enquiry has now been set up to conclude, well, absolutely nothing. So once more we will go through another expensive charade for no good purpose other than to protect a few liars. Many of us knew the truth before the invasion began. We knew we were being lied to but a sufficient number of MPs chose to take Tony Blair's proffered fig leaf and so we got into something that we could not come out of with honour.

Brown could fairly claim that it wasn't his decision and most would accept that. He is therefore in a position to commission an open enquiry and let the blame fall where it should. In fact he could have done this two years ago and won himself some credit. But he stubbornly ploughs on, seemingly determined to be on the wrong side of every issue. It is pathological.

Practicing what you preach

I see from the Sunday Times today that Neil and Glenys Kinnock are doing very well out of state handouts. Glenys Kinnock collects a teacher's pension, a Brussels pension worth £46,000 pa, will be entitled to a further £19,750 pa related to her service as an MEP. Gordon Brown has just handed her an income of £83,375 for this coming year and she will be entitled to a pension based upon that. And to crown this little perk (to coin a phrase) she will be able to trough for years to come on the basis of her Lords' membership.

Neil Kinnock receives pensions from his service as MP and EU Comissioner totalling £112,000 and is also a Lord with all the additional benefits that that entails.

The Sunday Times article goes on to detail what some might consider excessive use of allowances and expenses and their habit of running this tax-funded enterprise as a family business.

Should I draw some comfort from the fact that people who have spent a lifetime preaching the benefits of state welfare should be among its primary recipients?