Summer Blogging

Regular readers will have noticed that posting has been light over the last few days, well, actually non-existent! The demands of business (not to say boating, cycling, orienteering, walking, watching cricket and any other activity that is likely to lead my wife and I ending the day's activities over a drink or two with friends) mean that this is likely to remain the state of affairs during the summer. There will, I am sure, be more than a few instances though, when the ineptitude of our revered leaders combined with the vagaries of life will move me to put hands to the keyboard. Do keep checking during the summer and I shall be back in full and invigorated flow when summer's lease runs out.

An ill wind ....

Shivering in the cold gloom of the January morning, Jake closed the kitchen door behind him. Friday at last he thought. There had been no wind for a few days which meant no electricity. No hot drink or toast for breakfast. Only one house in the road showed any lights. It was where the Community Observation Officer lived. It was very dark, all street lights had long been abandoned. The posts were all still there though as many of them carried cameras.

He opened the garage door to get his bike out. One good thing about the lack of wind, he thought, was that it meant his fifteen mile cycle to work was easier. He sensed the camera across the road turn towards him. He assumed that it had night-vision lenses fitted, and wondered who was watching his departure. The guy in the house with lights almost certainly. He made sure that his panniers were on the bike as his wife had asked him to do some shopping. Using so many carbon credits last weekend precluded the use of the car for shopping for a week or so.

Jake and his wife Mary had considered moving nearer his job. But they counted it good fortune that the village house they had bought cheaply ten years before because of its proximity to some council houses meant it was classified as being in an area of deprivation. It should mean that there was a much better chance of their older son getting a place at a decent university. The trouble, Jake thought ruefully as he pushed hard on the pedals up the slope to the main road, was that a degree counted for less and less now that so many had one.

He pedalled hard for just over an hour before he arrived at the secondary school where he worked. He chained his bike in the staff bike shed. His last bike had been stolen. He even knew which pupil was now riding it, but a report to the principal had merely brought the response that nothing could be proved. Notifying the police had been useless. For the last six months they had been undergoing investigation themselves. Although the investigation was officially reported as 'administrative irregularities' word had it that they had falsified their gender equality audit.

Only half the lights were on, making his office gloomy. It brightened up a bit when he switched on his computer. He still missed being able to check his favourite sites before starting work, but the only outside site he could visit was the Department's. He checked his emails. There were the usual requests for information from the Department. He always left them as long as he could. Very often they would get forgotten when a new initiative was announced.

The office window looked out onto the kid's entrance. Some were starting to drift in. They all did the same, pulling faces or making gestures to the cameras as they put their hands into the fingerprint scanner which operated the automatic door. Two private security guards stood ready to ensure that the children only entered one at a time. The guards had stood there ever since the drug dealer episode last year. He had managed to crawl in beneath the camera's gaze after his brother, who was a pupil, had opened the door with his fingerprint scan.

It was only by chance that he had been discovered by a cleaner, running what amounted to a daily drug stall in a storeroom. The cleaner had sold her story to the local press before notifying the head, who was dismissed. Jake wished the old head was still there. One of the old school, he had always put the kid's education first and had been popular with the staff. Paying for the subsequent security had meant that the staff numbers had been reduced to stay within the budget.

The sacked head's replacement was a Moslem. The staff muttered that she had only been chosen to hit the ethnic target. Jake wasn't so sure. Few had applied for the job and most of those had withdrawn their applications when they had visited the school for their first interview. Most of the white parents accepted her appointment with sullen resentment, although nearly erupting into active protest when she proposed to celebrate Ramadan equally with Christmas. The governors however had prevailed on her to see sense and things had gone relatively quietly since.

Jake's morning went smoothly. One or two of the secretarial staff dropped by with bits of paper, mainly invoices for payment. He was the only member of the administrative staff who could understand the school accounting software and was duly treated with some respect. The head had meetings all morning and had left him alone as well. Her understanding of his job was even less than that of the other staff. She merely got irritable when he told her that there was no money in the budget for any of the well publicised government initiatives.

He felt a bit sorry for her in some ways. She actually believed the PM when he announced to press and cameras the latest scheme to improve education. The truth was that funding followed results. A school such as this was damned from the start because of its catchment area. Bussing in pupils from out of the area had been tried in an attempt improve the raw material. All to no avail. Ambitious parents soon got wise and either appealed incessantly or just moved away into the catchment area of a better school. Quite a few moved abroad.

Jake decided to go shopping in his lunch break rather than delay his arrival home by going after school. He walked the few hundred yards to the local Tesco. Banners outside announced Tesco's new partnership with the government. It was the first time that Jake had been shopping since the 'Fair Food for All' campaign had been launched under the guise of a government and private enterprise partnership. One of the national dailies had suggested that the supermarket chains had been forced to co-operate by the threat of withheld planning permission for new stores. The editor of the paper was accused of sexual harassment a couple of weeks later and forced to resign.

Jake got a trolley and walked into the store. Have your ID card ready, the signs admonished. New barriers had been erected. 'Insert your ID card' said the sign beside the barrier. Jake put his ID in the slot. The barrier didn't open straight away. After the short delay his card was returned along with a ticket the size of a till slip. It carried the instruction that he had to include at least one item of fruit and two of vegetables for every £10 that he spent. Jake didn't mind too much, it was mostly vegetables he was after. He walked round picking the items on his list, adding a couple of packs of beer and a bottle of wine. They wouldn't be going out over the weekend and it would be a bit of a treat he thought.

He went and queued at the check-out, noticing that the operator had a new scanner near the till into which she placed each person's ID card before starting to check the items through. There was a delay when the woman at the head of the queue had an argument with the operator. Jake paid little attention, patiently waiting his turn. When his wait was finally over, the checkout operator asked for his ID card. He passed it over, not expecting any problems. The girl started processing the contents of his basket. The last items were the packs of beer. As she passed the first pack across the barcode reader there was a buzz from the box where his ID card was sitting and a red light flashed.

“Can't have those”, said the checkout girl.

“Why not?” Jake asked .

“Dunno” she said, “I just do what I'm told. I get fined if I let anything through when that thing tells me not to. Could lose me job as well”.

Jake knew better than to argue. This was almost certainly part of the government's latest 'Beating the Booze' health campaign. He'd seen the posters going up over the last few days. Should pay attention to the news more, he told himself. Trouble was since the setting up of the England First news agency by the government, it had all become rather boring. Just lists of government achievements and announcements of the next campaigns. It didn't matter which channel you watched it was all the same.

A government spokesperson at the time had said it was necessary to ensure that everybody had equal access to the good news about the government's progress in the fights against ill-health, poverty, inequality and global warming. Jake wondered what the rest of the world thought about what was happening in England. At one time you could find out by going to American or Australian internet news sites. Since the setting up of the web regulator Intercom however he could no longer log on to them. One or two friends had hinted that there were sites where you could really find out what was going on. Jake was worried though that they may just be honeypot sites so that the government could discover its enemies.

Back in the office there was an envelope on his desk. He recognised his monthly pay statement. He took it out and checked it. The income tax was the figure it should be. He scowled though at the item labelled 'ORF'. It stood for Olympic Regeneration Fund. It had been introduced in 2010 accompanied by promises that it was a one-off and would be withdrawn after 2012. It was two years after the Games now and everybody was still having to pay it. The government was now promising that it would go soon. Jake was sceptical.

The afternoon went quickly. The school shut at three so as to conserve electricity and keep heating costs down. Jake had to work until four. Out of the window he watched the children drifting off. The teaching staff, who either walked, cycled or came by bus, always waited for the children to disperse before venturing out. There had been too many incidents in the past of stones being thrown at cycling teachers. He saw the head leave. She was the only one who came by car. Apparently she was disabled and received additional carbon credits. She always walked with a stick around the school, but Jake had seen her one afternoon as he cycled home and she had been walking perfectly well without it then.

Five minutes before he was due to leave, the premises executive came round and asked him to go. Jake seethed inwardly. At a higher level now than Jake, his job had been upgraded following the latest equality review. Jake gathered his shopping and went and collected his bike. He just managed to get all his shopping into the pannier bags. He cycled as fast as he could to get out of the area where the school was situated. You could never be too careful, he thought. Soon he had left the town and was out in the country. The wind had picked up during the afternoon and was now blowing strongly at his back. As darkness fell he saw lights starting to come on in the villages he went through. Jake's spirits lifted. If this wind kept up it should mean electricity all over the weekend. Hot meals and a warm house. He cycled on towards home.

Hair today...

...hopefully gone tomorrow. The most dispiriting thing about David Cameron's hair is not that it has attracted so much stupid comment in the MSM, but that the boy himself is so concerned with his own appearance.

House of Lords – why?

In the debate over whether the House of Lords should be fully elected, fully appointed or somewhere in between, other options have been largely ignored. Do the Lords actually have any function at all other than providing party leaders with a handy way of rewarding services rendered, or hereditary peers passing the time pleasantly just because they happened to get born in one bed rather than another?

Advocates of a 'strong' upper house point to the role the Lords plays in providing an ameliorating effect on the excesses and stupidities of government legislation. This is a function which is already carried out by parliamentary committees. It may be argued that parliamentary committees are ineffectual in this role, but that is a reason to reform the parliamentary committee system, not to maintain a second house.

Nor is there any history of the Lords successfully obstructing any legislation that has been passed to it by the government for rubber stamping. They may provide an irritant from time to time but little else. When the upper house consisted of all the principal landowners in the country they obviously wielded a great deal of power irrespective of a seat in the Lords. That situation no longer applies.

Accepting that the hereditary element is to be abolished anyway, do any of the other mixes really stand up to scrutiny? Any element of appointment of peers by party leaders is inevitably going to be corrupt. Further, appointing a peer for life blocks up a place even when he or she has become senile or just disinterested.

Any elected element is presumably likely to be elected for a finite period of time. If the election process for the upper house is conducted at the same time as for MPs, the peers that are elected would exactly replicate the balance between the parties in the lower house. In which case a fully or majority elected upper house could be expected to accede to the instructions of the government of the day.

If the election for the upper house was held between parliamentary elections, bearing in mind the almost inevitable mid-term swing against the government of the day, it is likely that the upper house would then be in permanent opposition to the lower house and adopt the role of trouble makers. Albeit to little purpose as the lower house has all the power.

It would mean also incessant political campaigning. As this is expensive it would lead to further calls for the political parties to be maintained from the public purse. This route merely hands the existing parties a mandate for ever and would block the emergence of new political parties or the growth of existing small ones.

Bearing in mind the minimal and decreasing engagement of the electorate now in anything other than parliamentary elections and even those, it is highly likely that more elections still would lead to even greater apathy.

Furthermore, the amount of power exercised by the Westminster government is dwindling by the day, with the majority of laws now emanating from Brussels. It will shortly be nothing more than a glorified county council. Why in that case do we need a second chamber to scrutinise legislation, when the role of parliament is itself becoming nothing more than a rubber stamping body.

You could make out a case for a body independent of all party affiliation to comment on, and even suggest, legislation. You are still left though with the problem of how it is constituted and selected. One way would be to allow bodies such as the TUC, the universities or the CBI, to nominate an agreed number of delegates, drawn from their ranks. This would at least stand a chance of being composed of people other than superannuated party hacks or career politicians.

All in all, however, it would seem that the best option would be to abolish the upper house altogether. Many other countries have done just that without falling apart. It would have the added bonus of saving money and streamlining the legislative process.

My guess though is that irrespective of the commons vote it is in the interest of none of the party leaders to have anything other than an appointed House of Lords. They are unlikely to willingly give up such a convenient method or rewarding friends and favours at the public expense.

George Monbiot – not a scientist

The Guardian kept up its green offensive against Martin Durkin's Ch. 4 programme on climate change today with an article by George Monbiot. Monbiot criticises the programme for its lack of scientific rigour. He starts out with the following problem. Science proceeds by the dialectic resolution of conflicting theories seeking to explain observable data, and, more importantly, accurately predicting data which is yet to be observed.

Therefore, in order to explain accurately the present trends in the world climate, what is required is a variety of theories which fit the observable data. These may then be debated and used to produce a consensual theory which accurately predicts data yet to be observed . Debate, however, is something which Monbiot, in common with all left-wing crusaders, doesn't want. So, there's Monbiot's little problem. How do you stifle debate and still claim the scientific moral high ground.

What you do is to firstly point out that several well known historical figures challenged the accepted wisdom of their time. The accepted wisdom of our time, according to Monbiot's apocryphal gospel, being that man is to blame for global warming. So, challenging the accepted theory is good.

Well, err...no. The technique employed here is to rubbish Durkin, and by association anybody else who challenges Monbiot's views. So, he equates Durkin, and all other sceptics, with some zany Minister of Health in South Africa who believes you can cure AIDS with magic potions. Which merely proves, pretty much generally I suspect, that African governments are composed of self-aggrandising, self-enriching morons. It adds absolutely nothing to the scientific debate regarding global warming. This is literary sleight of hand, not scientific rigour.

He continues by stating that the main premise of the programme was that global warming is caused by sunspot activity in one way or the other, and that these theories do not fit the known facts. Cue another little literary deception. This was not the main exposition of the programme. Solar activity was certainly put forward as a more probable candidate than man-made CO² emissions, but it was not the main premise of the programme.

If anything, the idea which was given the greatest weight was that the science had been hijacked for political purposes. This of course is what Monbiot is doing. Having a hatred for western capitalist industrialism, he eagerly espouses any idea that will help his cause. If I was to use his methods, I would now list some of the crackpot schemes in which Monbiot has been involved. I won't, although they are easy enough to discover. I do wonder though just which individual has been editing the Monbiot Wiki entry with text lifted straight from the self-publicising Monbiot website.

Monbiot goes on to point out that some of the detailed ideas put forward by Durkin have subsequently been challenged. So they should be. That is the way that the scientific method progresses. However, the green religionists should realise that the reverse also holds true. That challenges to the man-induced global warming theory are just as valid.

The article continues with yet more literary jiggery-pokery. He invokes other, almost certain, items of quackery, and invites us to believe that the sceptical stance on global warming is analogous. His list includes 9/11 conspiracy theories, MMR vaccine and autism, homeopathy and others.

So what? These have nothing to do with global warming. The history of science is littered with ideas which have been disproved. Far more than with those that have been proved correct. Current orthodoxies are forever being overthrown. These are weasel words being employed by Monbiot to make his own political point. You could just as easily list other ideas that were greeted as heresy at the time and which have since been incorporated into the orthodoxy. It would prove nothing.

He proposes also that the programme was cherry-picking facts in order to make its point. This accusation is just as easily applied to Monbiot and his fellow-travellers. They ignore the bits they don't like, particularly previous warming and cooling episodes in the earth's history which refuse to reconcile themselves with the recent rise in man-made CO² emissions.

He finishes by rubbishing Channel 4 in general and its approach to science in particular. His accusation being that they seek controversy for its own sake. So they should. It is only by having all the facts in the open that debate is possible. Controversy, not burning disbelievers at the stake, is what freedom of though is all about. It is what moves humanity onward.

After examining the literary subterfuge which Monbiot employs to stifle debate, his sneering comment that Ch 4 cannot tell the difference between a clipping from the Daily Mail and a peer-reviewed scientific paper is more than just a little hollow. The article is intellectually dishonest. It employs sneaky methods to denigrate by association. Monbiot is most definitely not a scientist, nor does he seem able to construct a rational argument.

Patrick Mercer and a case of racial cowardice

The media last week was full of two incidents which were labelled, at least in most reports I read, as racist. The first was the sacking of Tory spokesman Patrick Mercer, and the second was the alleged attack by a policeman on a girl.

Patrick Mercer pointed out that less than complementary terms about individuals which included an allusion to their skin colour or hair colour were commonplace in the army. He also commented along the lines that some ethnic minority members used their status as a way of swinging the lead.

Now the jolly middle class intelligentsia might find it reprehensible that a person's physical attributes are utilised in a mocking way. Surely, though, no one should be under any illusion but that this is commonplace behaviour everywhere from the primary school playground to the university common room.

Hair colour, physical strength or lack of it, height, weight, success with the opposite sex or lack of it, intelligence, education are all pressed into service to distinguish insiders from outsiders. So from time to time will racial characteristics be used in the same way. This is the way that human groups behave. Why therefore is it wrong if a person points out that such things go on?

So what of Patrick Mercer's other comment? It would be surprising if, knowing the leverage that the term 'racist' can engender, some members of specific ethnic groups did not trade on it. Trevor Phillips, for instance, has made a successful and lucrative career from doing just that. Once again, Patrick Mercer did nothing other than report the reality of human behaviour.

The alleged racist attack by a policeman on a young girl was available for all to see. Pursued by a policeman, following a separate incident, she and he fell down some iron steps. In his attempts to subdue her he was joined by another policeman. The girl was punched on the arm in order to secure her co-operation in having handcuffs put on. The police did not intervene until after the initial incident.

In an interview the girl claimed to have some cuts and bruises following the incident. Which was likely having just fallen down a flight of steps. This was claimed to be a racist attack. The BBC found somebody to say just that, which you can see on the BBC report here. In the interview with the girl, it is quite obvious that she is not black but of mixed parentage.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown managed to use the incident as evidence that what she terms 'a tide of filth' i.e. racism, is sweeping the country. She apparently initially greeted the reports that a girl had been punched by police with disbelief, but then subsequently discovered that she was black. That apparently being sufficient to explain the policeman's motivation in punching the girl. That his genitals were apparently being grabbed aggressively presumably not providing sufficient reason. Try doing that to any bloke, Yasmin, and see what the reaction is.

It is more than a little ironic that Ms Alibhai-Brown should call on erstwhile anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain to step in and put the situation to rights, by 'slapping down' John Reid, who she blames for many of the present ills. As Sec. of State for both Wales and Northern Ireland Hain should at least be able to advise her that geographical accidents of birth and adherence to different branches of the same religion can produce exactly the same apparent symptoms in society as skin colour differences.

The rifts in our society are not based on differences of colour but on differences of culture, although sometimes colour can be a proxy for culture. Invoking racial motives when none exists is a recipe for further disaster. There is a forty year history of racial equality legislation. I agree with Ms Alibhai-Brown, it doesn't work. It takes more than a few well-turned lawyer's phrases to change a million years of human evolution.

Neither of these two incidents had anything to do with racism or even with race. Cameron's cowardly action in sacking Mercer was designed to alienate even more of his traditional support as he repositions the Tories into the woolly liberal slot vacated by NuLabour. He fancies himself as an intellectual. That the MSM should have given any credence to the attempts to draw parallels between the drunken girl in Leeds and incidents in Los Angeles shows cowardice too. A cowardly refusal to confront reality.

Global warming swindle – whatever next

Martin Durkin's film which was shown on Thursday night was the first real attempt by the UK mainstream media to put the other side of the debate. While it may not have proved what is causing the earth's temperature to recover to the levels last seen during the medieval period it did show that CO² is almost certainly not the cause.

It is interesting to observe the way that the two most ardent advocates of 'wicked westerners as the guilty culprits' have reacted to the programme. None have been more committed to this proposition than the Guardian and the Independent. Coming to terms with the possibility that you may have been in the wrong is always most difficult for those who shout the odds the loudest.

The choice is to stick to your beliefs come what may and ignore the evidence, commence equivocation, or embrace the new orthodoxy. As might be expected, the Guardian's ingrained belief that all the world's ills can be laid at the door of western market capitalism is hardly likely to predispose it to start doubting its own propaganda.

Hence we find Guardian writer David Adam, their environmental correspondent, yesterday boasting that he did not bother to watch the film as he knew what it would say. His profile states that he left the field of chemical engineering as he preferred to write about other's research rather than carry out his own. Probably a lucky escape for us all. With that attitude you wouldn't want him designing an oil refinery would you?

Actually, he seems to know quite a lot about Martin Durkin's film so probably did watch it. Perhaps he got his friends to lash him to the chair while he plugged his ears, put his hands over his eyes and peeped through his fingers. That may be why he seems to think that the programme denied that global warming was taking place. It didn't. Its point was that global warming is taking place, along with global cooling it has taken place in the past and the sun was a much more likely candidate as the causal factor.

His claim that the programme set out to prove that there was a conspiracy among journalists to proselytise the human as villains thesis was also wide of the mark. What the programme did do was show just how the conjunction of vested interests can result in the propagation of myth. A process of which historians are well aware.

The Independent I suspect is changing its stance from one of outright champion of the humans as villains theory to one of sitting on the fence just in case they got it wrong. Even before the programme was aired it carried a piece by Geoffrey Lean which rehearsed both points of view while reporting the revelation of Al Gore's electricity consumption.

Then on Friday, Dominic Lawson, whose dad featured in the programme, was given full rein to expound his agreement with virtually all of the programme's claims. Even more surprising, Deborah Orr has added her two pennyworth by expressing the hope that climate change will go away.

What I wonder will the politicians do if it is the sun and not man-made CO² ? Tony Blair of course probably won't have to worry as he'll be gone. It won't affect Gordon who will only need to find another excuse to put up taxes. While the programme's revelations about Margaret Thatcher's role in starting the greenhouse gas bandwagon give him a handy scapegoat.

Cameron on the other hand could be in great difficulty. What with cycling to work one day a week, putting up silly little windmills and toddling off to Norway to get sexy with the wildlife, his environmental colours are nailed pretty firmly to the Greenpeace mast. Plus there are some nasty folk among the Tory ranks who would welcome a good excuse to stick the knife in. I know how they feel.

Apologies!

The post below on gender should have appeared yesterday. Fate in the shape of our dog and my wife's ankle intervened. A dispute over which was going to stand on a particular piece of our local woods was resolved in the dog's favour with said wife's ankle bent at a very strange angle. Luckily the contretemps occurred near the road and both were returned home.

Great pain and an inability to do more than hop meant that a major, possibly life threatening, course of action was contemplated. With heavy hearts, a check of our respective wills and a quickly penned note to whoever might wonder over our whereabouts if we failed to return, the fateful decision was made. We set off on the 20 mile journey to the nearest A & E hospital.

Our initial encounter was not promising. The security guard was definitely wider than he was tall. His efforts to hold the door open for my wife, with me by her side in support, resulted in all three becoming jammed in the doorway. Still, it at least held my wife upright while standing on one foot. She got in one good jab with the golf umbrella she was using as a stick. I expected him to suddenly deflate.

The reception area held three other casualties. I went to queue in order to register. A barrier prevented more than one person standing at reception at any one time, while a sign asked visitors to keep back to ensure the privacy of the person currently giving their details. Unfortunately, the barriers erected to preserve the girl behind the desk from assault and abuse left only a minuscule hole to speak through.

In fact speaking was useless. All personal details had to be shouted as loudly as possible. A couple of hoodies were busy taking down the addresses of suitably local residents whose homes were certain to be empty for the next few hours. When my turn at the desk arrived we encountered our first major problem. My wife did not exist.

Name, date of birth, address, previous hospital visits, no detail, however intimate, was sufficient for the system to legitimise her existence. Same with her local doctor. He did not exist either, although we see him in the pub most weeks. Worse was to come. The town where the practice was located had also mysteriously vanished. It was with an air of sniffy resignation and muttered cursing regarding the system that the details were entered manually.

Clutching our little brown folder we set off to follow the yellow line to the double doors where we had to ring the bell. My wife hopped, supported by me and the golf umbrella. On our way we passed the waiting room. Arriving at the double doors and ringing the bell, a nurse said she would get a wheelchair, but in the meantime directed us back to the waiting room. My wife hopped back. Time passed. I went to find the nurse.

She told me with some indignation that she hadn't forgotten. I gave her the brown folder. Time passed and passed and passed. Still no wheelchair. Other casualties sat around, blank faces staring at walls festooned with admonishments to not insult the staff, stop beating their wives, examine their testicles, give up smoking, have a check for HIV. Where to get clean needles. All the usual stuff.

The only magazine to read concerned itself exclusively with the efforts of 'your fav celebs' to regain their shape following childbirth. I was a little puzzled as to why the before shots were always monochrome and taken at 7.00 am, while the 'this is feisty Martine stepping out a month later' shots were all in colour. One bored lad in the corner seemed to have started on the testicle examination to pass the time. An old lady on the back row was either asleep or dead. Finally my wife's name, or at least a reasonably close approximation, was called. Still no wheelchair.

The doctor ushered my hopping wife into the room and prodded and probed said foot. An X-ray was required. The requisite form completed and a wheelchair found we set off to the X-ray dept. The chair had a will of its own. We soon became jammed between equipment and wall. We were told the chair would only work when walking backwards. Bit like the NHS generally I suppose.

X-ray reception was closed. Signs told me variously to ring the bell, not ring the bell, only ring the bell if no-one else had rung the bell or only ring the bell between sunset and dawn. Confused, I rang the bell expecting an irate radiographer to appear and ask why I couldn't read the sign. I could even be reported for my felony

I just knew that the patrolling policeman who was prowling the corridors looking like an assault commando from Starship Troopers was aching for a bit of trouble to relieve the boredom and had me marked as easy meat. I needn't have worried. After half an hour we were told we were waiting in the wrong place anyway.

X-ray over I walked backwards to the waiting room, dragging my wife. Time passed. The lad had given up on testicle examination and switched to nose-pickings. The old lady was still motionless. I thought I should give her a poke to check for life signs but my wife pointed to the posters regarding respect for others irrespective of.....oh, haven't got time, the list was endless and written in fifteen languages.

The doctor came. It wasn't broken. It did require bandaging and some crutches would be provided. Someone would call soon. We waited. Time passed. Then some excitement. The cleaner arrived. I had never before realised just how detailed the specification in a cleaning contract must be. The cleaner, who pushed a metre wide mop in front of her, described a tortuous route around the waiting room. The manoeuvre was carried out with remarkable precision. In and out, she wove her way around the room, deftly managing to leave every mouldy crisp, discarded coffee cup and ancient newspaper untouched and safely in its accustomed place.

We waited. Time passed. I felt a bit like the becalmed Ancient Mariner, a painted person in a painted waiting room. Time ceased to have any meaning. Fluorescent lights bored down. The earth shook occasionally as another casualty arrived. Most injuries seemed to have been caused by failing to keep the centre of gravity of a distended body acting safely through the supporting legs. I picked up a discarded newspaper, open at Women seeking Men.

'Authoritative 50 yo GSOH seeks meek man for pos LTR'. There were some pretty formidable women in the room. I wondered if 50 yo GSOH had already scored and was sitting there. I looked back to the paper. 'Tracy, 22, seeks man, all activities, not fussy'. Blimey! Wonder if the lad in the corner knows her. We waited. More time passed. The old lady hadn't moved. I was seriously concerned.

Finally a miracle happened. The bandage was applied. The crutches found. My hobbling wife and I left. Jealous faces, hating us for our early release from purgatory, followed us to the door, doubtless willing my wife to fall flat. Suddenly, somewhat precariously, we were free!

Oh no we weren't. To exit the car park we needed to throw an offering to a ravening monster in the corner. I joined the queue. The machine hoovered up banknotes like autumn leaves disappearing into a road-sweeper. Free at the point of delivery? Maybe. Very costly at the point of exit though.

All the way back we discussed torture methods. The rack, thumb screws, that dog was going to pay somehow. When we got back he wagged his tail and looked crestfallen. Pangs of guilt immediately gripped my wife for abandoning him for so long. He was rewarded with special food and looked smug for the rest of the evening. Next time my son, next time, you just watch out.

Gender, inequality and reality

Gender, you can't get away from it. Today is International Women's Day. The date actually commemorates a strike by women in Russia during the political turbulence that culminated in the Revolution. It had previously been promoted as an idea during the Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen in 1911. The day is provoking a certain amount of soul searching among a couple of female writers. Deborah Orr in the Indie and Zoe Williams in the Guardian.

Zoe Williams bemoans the fact that a day which should commemorate her nominated women's issues has been hijacked by yoga, spices and animals in art. I can sympathise with that in some ways. I sometimes feel that the whole world is being hijacked by counsellors, aromatherapists and amateur psychologists. Anyway, she defines the agenda of real feminist struggle as

women in public life (access to the legislature, education and politics); women in private (health, sexual and other domestic violence); and the point of intersection between these two worlds (rape conviction rates, provision for victims of domestic violence, abortion rights, and government decisions about other health matters).

Astonishingly she fails to mention economic equality, the claimed lack of which has been in the public eye recently due to the self-justifying propaganda emanating from the Equality Commission. This is doubly interesting because the first three issues she highlights, access to the legislature, politics and education, usually claimed to be the result of feminist pressure, came about due to the growing economic influence of women. The result of technological advance and male labour replacement spurred on by two world wars.

What I do find puzzling is why the other issues have anything specifically to do with women. Is a woman's health somehow more important than a man's health? Is breast cancer, which I believe receives a disproportionate amount of the NHS budget, any less damaging, for either the individual sufferer or his/her partner than prostate cancer? The struggle should be to improve health care for all not just for women.

Domestic violence has long been an area which has long been dominated by the feminist viewpoint. The underlying thesis being that women are somehow natural victims and men violent and brutal. That domestic violence is abhorrent is not subject to question. Most violence is. It may well be the case that some men in certain circumstances compensate for their inadequacies by the use of force.

But to argue that this is innate in men is as simplistic and unhelpful as to argue that women always compensate for setbacks by buying another pair of shoes. What we should ask ourselves is what features need to be changed in our society that are currently causing men to feel inadequate.

Low rape conviction rates, held by feminists to be the result of a sinister male plot, are a consequence of the specific circumstances in which rape occurs. Nearly always when only the two protagonists are present. Of course when there is clear evidence of physical force being used there should be a prosecution and subsequent penalty.

So often, however, this is not the situation we are talking about, but the case of sober, morning after, regret. What the feminists champion is a move to the man having to prove that assent was given – no assent meaning it must have been rape. You don't have to be crystal ball gazer to see the earning potential of that particular scenario.

Deborah Orr takes a rather different approach while still casting women as victims.

'Women are more vulnerable than men for a few reasons, but the main one in a neo-liberal society is because we bear children, and want to nurture them....Feminism has to exist because men and women are not equal, and never will be. Feminism is, or at least should be, about real sisterhood: thinking of, and promoting ways of protecting vulnerable women, because without help they are always at the bottom of the heap.'

Why, I wonder, does the fact that women bear children have to be a vulnerability rather than a strength? We're actually back to the question of economic equality here. The only area where women may be classed as more 'vulnerable' than men, other than the matter of physical strength and not always then, is in earning capacity. If a women accepts that there is a return in nurturing children just as great in its way as the return to be had from career fulfilment there is no problem.

The problem only occurs because feminists define female fulfilment in terms of money, economic status and the exercise of power. Of course women and men are not equal. They are different. It's feminists who constantly define those differences in terms of inequality. The real battle to be fought is to ensure that all individuals can make choices over the direction of their lives.

Curtailment of career or sporting achievement is often the price a man has to pay for a commitment to family life. It is up to individuals to decide what they consider their priorities to be and order their lives accordingly. They should realise, however, that the repercussions of their decisions should be born by themselves. They should not be seeking ways of shifting the financial burden of those decisions onto others.

Elsewhere, Ms Kelly was proudly announcing some meaningless, misguided and stupid regulations, concerning the protection of homosexual, lesbian and bi-sexual people from discrimination.

'The overwhelming majority of people in our country want a society where every citizen is treated fairly and with respect.'

she quoth.

Does she never think of what she is saying? Every citizen? Child-abusers, rapists, wife-beaters? She goes on,

'The principles behind these measures are straightforward. It cannot be right in a decent, tolerant society that a shopkeeper or restaurant can refuse to serve a customer because they are gay. It cannot be right for a school to discriminate against a child because of their parents’ sexuality or not to take homophobic bullying as seriously as they should.'

Firstly, all societies discriminate against some of their members in some way or the other. One of Ms Kelly's colleagues over at the Dept. of Health is reckoning on discriminating against would be clients of the NHS by refusing treatment on the basis of their smoking or being considered overweight. Ms Hewitt already discriminates against some sick people on the basis of the treatment they require being too expensive, or because they are considered to be too old.

The government discriminates among field sports by allowing fishermen to hook fish out of lakes, rivers and canals or shooters to blast various birds out of the sky, while denying others the right to chase after foxes. They presumably feel that a partridge doesn't mind being killed while foxes are very opposed to the idea.

In a few years time there is going to be some pretty massive discrimination going on. Various selection committees will discriminate against certain athletes because they can't run fast enough or jump high enough to be included in the UK (if it still exists) football team. Which reminds me that the government discriminates against me by allowing the residents of Scotland to vote for Scottish MPs who sit in Westminster, but not the other way around.

The examples she gives in the press release are too futile for words. I've yet to meet the restaurateur who puts sexual proclivity before filling an empty table. Bullying is bullying is bullying. It matters not a jot whether it is homophobic bullying, misogynist bullying or economic bullying. Mind you, with the government's ambivalent attitudes to obesity possibly that will be allowed.

Of course the examples given in the Kelly press release carefully avoid mention of the rights of various pairs of individuals to adopt children, also a part of this legislation. What matters most is the welfare of the child. Instead of defining by law who can adopt, it would be far better that anybody who can prove to provide an adequate and caring home for a child should be presumed to be a candidate, irrespective of their cultural or racial background or sexual proclivity.

The connecting threads running through all these narratives are the entwined concepts of fairness and rights as perceived by self-defined groups in society. This process is divisive. Government becomes the tool of whoever clamours the loudest or happens to chime with the latest fad of a self-proclaimed intellectual elite, desperately competing to prove their credentials. By pandering to such people the government is causing ever more and deeper divisions. It should be healing society, not dismembering it.

Al Gore and British education

As we all know, 'An Inconvenient Truth' is at this very moment winging its way to every secondary school in the country to enlighten our children about the catastrophes awaiting them. Well, here's a bonus. It can also be used in 'life skills' courses and business studies as well. Fantastic.

Mr Gore excuses his profligate use of electricity by carbon offsetting. But here's the educational bit. Self-serving publicity can also generate extra revenue. What an entrepreneurial champion the man is. It turns out that he is buying the carbon offsets from no other than..... Al Gore! Brilliant eh? I can see the year ten project now. Ten ways to profit from global warming in 1,000 words.

Blair & culture

There you are. Innuendo, accusations, nameless documents, emails that were either sent or not sent, information leaks by whom and for whom and to what purpose I can only guess. What does Mr Blair do? Toddles off to Tate Modern to talk about culture. Sorry, that should probably be Culture. Actually what he was really doing was defending subsidies to the arts.

He was talking to an invited audience. I know not who they were except that they will all have had a personal interest in the continuance of the government gravy-train. So, what are the benefits that government subsidies have delivered. Well, to start with there have been 42 million visits to 'free' museums and galleries.

Sounds impressive, but is it? It actually works out to one visit per adult over the course of the year. Not so impressive. More to the point, would the numbers have been significantly less if it had cost for admission? I think we can probably assume that most of these visitors did not start their journeys from council housing estates around the country and most would have been by middle class visitors who could afford to pay.

The museums in question of course are publicly owned. If we want to see old cars or motor bikes, which reside in privately owned museums, we have to pay. Why should we get to see flint arrow heads for free? Is there some qualitative difference between a chunk of Anglo-Saxon pottery, which you probably routinely dig up in your garden without realising it, and a 1903 De Dion-Bouton? Of course not.

The past is already politicised by the perversions of the heritage industry, aided and abetted by the government and its control of the school curriculum. Subsidies reinforce this distortion by encouraging access to one class of artefacts while restricting access to others.

But what of the performing arts? A similar process operates but the effects are even more discriminatory. Take the theatre. The London theatres generate vast incomes, for themselves, for hoteliers, for restaurants. All, for the most part, without any government cash. Yet the government sees fit to subsidise regional theatres. The logic is simple. If sufficient people wanted to see their offerings they would go and be prepared to pay for the privilege. They certainly do in London, so why not in Nottingham or Leeds.

Ah, but there's the rub. Provincial theatres do not provide productions that the public might want to see. How do we know? Because Mr Blair tells us so. He says that regional theatres, without subsidies, could only exist on a diet of 'light drama'. What a patronising prig the man is. Who is he, or any government lackey or quango leach, to decide what is 'high' and what is 'low' art. What the public should, or should not watch. In fact the public make their preferences very clear. Observe what is most viewed on television, and it's not BBC4 or the Sky Arts channel.

He also tells us that some orchestras might have gone to the wall. So what. Why is tax-payers money being used to keep alive something only a select few want to survive. Popular music receives no subsidy. Pop music recording companies have to invest their own money. Young would-be pop musicians have to save to buy their own instruments. Apparently the music industry is worth £6 billion a year. How much do a few unwanted orchestras contribute to that figure I wonder. Yet the greatest innovations in music over the last forty years have come from the genre of pop.

I happen to like modern jazz. How much subsidy does that receive? So why do we subsidise Covent Garden or English National Ballet? The repertoire of these organisations was originally written because there was either a market for it or a rich individual decided to commission a particular work and sponsor its performance. If individuals now wish to see such pieces performed they should be prepared to pay the price.

What the subsidy of selected performing arts does is to preserve them for the rich. It is a way for an elite to distance themselves from the watchers of Coronation Street. It is criminal that it is those selfsame watchers of Coronation Street who are paying for that elite to enjoy their superiority. It is doubly ironic that it is a Labour government which is promoting such socially divisive policies.

Starting the week ......

A cornucopia of illogical whingers to reflect on. First up, we have Seb Coe in Comment is Free telling us that the 2012 Olympics are about more than just sport. Of course they are Seb, hubris, greed, profit, sponsorship deals, TV rights, profit, legacies, corruption, profit, backhanders, self-promotion, profit, deluding the public, additional taxation, sucking supportive funding away from truly amateur participatory sports, celebrity cults, oh, and err... profit.

It is a measure of the weakness of the case for the global TV-fest scheduled for east London in 2012 that apologists constantly harp on the supposed residual benefits. The Olympics have become nothing more than a stage for self-promotion by a bunch of celebrity athletes seeking to add another whopping sponsorship cheque to their bank accounts and jack up their appearance money in subsequent events.

Next Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Indie is complaining at the lack of black faces on the BBC and in the media generally. Well actually she is complaining about the lack of a certain very particular face on the BBC. Hers. Well it could just be Yasmin, that having seen the odd TV appearance by your goodself that the BBC has judged that you may not exactly help the viewing figures.

To take her general point though, that there should be positive discrimination in order to get the numbers right. Does that mean that all those black athletes that appear in GB vests should be sidelined and replaced with white athletes to get the right ethnic balance? Or strict ethnic monitoring applied to football team selection in order to make up for the deficit of white players? Or how about government funding for drug dealers in order to get that particular ethnic mix right.

The Indie offers up another hard done by sufferer of personal discrimination. Rowan Pelling believes that the reason she and her sister-in-law were fired from their jobs was due to producing children. She says that she went along with the loss of her job, which carried a generous severance package due to post natal exhaustion, a desire to spend more time with her child and guilt.

Just to gently point out, Rowan, job specifications rarely call for applicants to be ridden with guilt, in a state of exhaustion and desirous of extra time off. Your mistake was to believe the feminist propaganda that the only true way to female fulfilment is to prove your economic prowess. There are actually other ways.

The Indie again. This time the leader writer castigates Bush for promoting bio-fuels in order to quench the thirst of gas-guzzling American automobile behemoths. Switching to bio-fuels will not save the planet. Well no, I agree, but I don't suppose for one instant that that is G Bush's intention. More like reduce American dependence on imported fuels.

Back to Comment is Free for the real gem of the day. Roy Hattersley tells us, by way of recounting his personal odyssey from gung-ho nuker to unilateralist, that Clement Attlee was the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century. This was the man who was responsible for nationalising coal, transport and health care. Coal and transport ended up being run for the benefit of union bosses.

He bequeathed a planning system that has bedevilled housing in this country ever since. The NHS has been an appalling testimony to bureaucratic inefficiency for the whole of its days. Attlee finally fell from office when about the only policy he had on offer was the nationalisation of the sugar industry. What a record!

Around and around

Oliver James, a populist psychologist, has achieved some degree of public recognition due to the success of a couple of books. The first 'They F*** You Up, was about the effect that parents have on their children, its central premise being, I believe, that parental influence outweighs genetic inheritance in the determination of personality. More recently he has published 'Affluenza', a psychologist's view of global consumerism.

In a recent article in 'Comment is free', he gave an outline of his position. Briefly, his thesis is that runaway consumerism is diminishing the quality of peoples' lives. He dates the fall from grace to 1979 and Margaret Thatcher's accession to power. At that point be believes the post-1945 quest for an egalitarian meritocracy and female emancipation was discarded in a rabid scramble after material possessions. He believes that the current environmental preoccupations, engendered by climate change publicity, will dampen our enthusiasm to own ever more worldly goods while at the same time turning all men into true feminists.

No, I can't quite follow that reasoning either, but I haven't read the book. It would of course be a simple matter to argue the fallacy of this analysis, not least because Mrs Thatcher's success showed that a woman could rise to the highest job in the land on the basis of merit. But, hang on a moment. Was there any a major change in the drive for material possessions after 1979? If so, what motivated individuals to work before then? Is the current preoccupation with the environment, and a concomitant return to the simple life, unique in history, or have we been there before?

Consumerism, as it is understood here, stands for the acquisition of constantly replaced and updated goods as both a measure and a display of status. Its initial theoretical recognition came in the early years of the twentieth century. Thorstein Veblen published his 'Theory of the Leisure Class' in 1899, and Georg Simmel's 'Fashion' appeared shortly afterwards.

They accurately described and explained all the features of what we now recognise as a consumption driven society. So, although consumerism has been around for at least a century, and as we shall see shortly, for far longer, was there anything qualitatively different about the period immediately before 1979 that could cause that year to be taken as a watershed?

Not according to Christopher Booker. His 'The Neophiliacs' appeared in 1969. He saw a revolution in English life as having occurred in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Indeed, the litany of drugs, gun crime, obsession with fashion, gangs, desperate acquisition of cars and other technological hardware, preoccupation with and aping of frivolous celebrity, all of which Booker catalogues as the markers of this particular revolution, has an all too familiar ring.

It is possible to trace these themes further back. The industrial revolution was concerned more with the mass production of consumer goods by Birmingham metal bashers than ever it was with steam engines. Matthew Boulton probably made more money out of the manufacture and sale of buttons than anything else. Wedgewood owed his success not to the artistic elegance of his designs but his single minded pursuit of celebrity customers to act as pathfinders for mass marketing to the population at large.

As an illustration of innovative conspicuous consumption look at this well known painting by Gainsborough of Mr and Mrs Andrews. Note the way that the crop has been drilled in rows. When this was painted around 1750, Tull's seed drill was still viewed with great suspicion by traditional farmers. See the bench that the fashionably arrayed wife sits on. Its rococo styling displays the couple's commitment to modernity and fashion. The gun that Mr Andrews holds is the latest technology available.

This was the Mr and Mrs Beckham of their age proclaiming their status through the display of personally owned, up to the minute, icons of consumption. We could go back further to the 16^th century, and the period which W G Hoskins referred to as the 'Great Rebuilding' when Elizabethan capitalist yeoman farmers lavished money on rebuilding and refurnishing their dwellings as a sign of their burgeoning cash income. And so on and so on.

Yet all these episodes were accompanied by finger-wagging doom-mongers. The Ecologist magazine commenced publication in 1970, as a response to the supposed consumerist splurge of the fifties and sixties. In the England of the twenties and thirties, we can find Professor Joad bemoaning industrialisation and castigating the private car for its role in rural despoliation. Before him, around the turn of the century, we discover Patrick Geddes advocating that economics should take account of biology, physics and psychology while criticising contemporary definitions of wealth as being narrowly materialistic and devoid of any aesthetic component. His ideas chimed with the garden city romanticism of Ebenezer Howard.

We can go back further to Morris and Ruskin's denunciation of factory production in the mid-nineteenth century and further back still to the anti-industrial, anti-urban and mythologised rurality of Wordsworth's poetical propaganda of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The back-to-the-land self-sufficiency of the post civil war Diggers may be seen as a reaction to the capitalist exploitation of land which commenced with the later Tudors.

It is unnecessary to continue this retrospective journey. It is plain to see that the tense pas-de-deux between modernity and the traditional is played out in every generation. Why though do so many such superficial analyses of contemporary England as that of Mr James mark 1979 as the year of the fall from grace? Why does Mrs Thatcher annoy the left so much?

It is I think that she showed that a woman could wield power and yet at the same time repudiate and ignore feminism. She demonstrated that minimising taxation could deliver prosperity to more people than crude redistributive taxation and benefit provision. That less government involvement could provide services at least as good but cheaper. That no entrenched oligarchy, whether trade union or professional closed shop, could not be improved by liberalisation, competition and democracy. How long, I wonder, before that particular wheel turns again.

Climate change rationality

There are at last signs that the forces of reason are starting to gather themselves. There was a short article today in the Telegraph by Martin Livermore, but you can read the whole original publication here. Channel 4 is showing a programme next week, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ by Martin Durkin on Channel 4, Thursday 8^th March at 9pm.

Educational lottery

The decision by Brighton and Hove council to contract out the allocation of school places to Camelot or the Tote has generated a great deal of debate but little clear thought. Rather predictably, the leader writer in the Indie and Martin Wainwright in the Guardian welcome the idea of running a lottery for places at certain schools. No elitism to be found in their pages.

As ever, the Indie leader writer finds logical thought a bit of a challenge. Here is what he or she has to say,

'But it is worth raising our sights above the local ramifications of this decision to consider what the effect would be if such an admissions system were to be rolled out nationally. Yes, lotteries round the country for over-subscribed schools might prompt a greater number of wealthier parents to send their children to private schools. Yet the prize is worth fighting for: a more equitable state school system after 60 years of endless reforms and tinkering that have only served to widen social divisions in Britain.'

So yet more children going to private schools would lessen social divisions would it? Well, choosing Indie leader writers by lottery may provide a little, much needed, logical analysis. It may also provide writers, who even if ignorant, at least bother to carry out the modicum of research required to get their facts right. The Guardian writer would also like to see allocation by lottery extended into other areas and gives examples of when it has been used. None of which have much bearing on education in England in the present day.

Let us start with a simple stark fact. All children are not born