Cobbett Rides Again!

2007-03-30T13:47:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-03-20T16:23:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-15T12:45:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-14T12:42:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-13T17:05:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-12T19:17:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-10T18:47:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-09T13:56:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-09T13:42:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-06T17:38:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-06T17:26:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-05T18:29:00.000Z

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!

2007-03-03T15:53:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-01T17:25:00.000Z

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.

2007-03-01T16:32:00.000Z

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 with equal intelligence or equal ability to apply the intelligence they do have, nor with equal dexterity. In fact the whole range of human attributes is subject to variability. We need an education system which can deal with this basic fact in a way which firstly benefits all children and secondly benefits society at large. Such a scheme was thought out during the days of WW2.

The 1944 Education Act was the brainchild of Rab Butler, a conservative politician. It called for a tripartite system of schools. Grammar schools, central or technical schools and secondary modern schools. Allocation of children to one school or another was on the basis of the 11+ exam.

The differentiation between them can be summarised roughly as follows. Grammar schools were designed to produce academically minded children who would be expected to go on to university. The central school was for those who would become technologists and engineers and the secondary modern schools took whoever was left and it was understood that these schools prepared children for apprenticeships in various trades.

It was accepted that there could be children who developed later than age 11 or that some may not thrive in an academic environment. There was therefore a system of re-assessment and inter-school transfer at age 13. Not all education authorities adopted this scheme. Many discarded the central or technical school, which left just grammar schools and secondary modern schools.

It should be remembered that this system was designed to be blind to any attribute other than the child's assessed ability in reading, writing, maths and an intelligence test. It mattered not a jot what the parents' income was, what the child's colour was, what the address was. If a child obtained 11+ results consistent with going to a grammar school he or she went to a grammar school. Results consistent with going to a technical school? The child would, or at least should, go to a technical school.

The major failing was with those local authorities who only had grammar schools and secondary modern schools. The limitation on grammar school, and complete lack of technical school, places meant that far too many children went to secondary modern schools, which then inevitably received a reputation for under-achievement, particularly from parents who may have expected their offspring to do better.

There was a further factor which impinged on school performance both then and now. Location, and specifically the propensity of left dominated local authorities, to build vast council estates during the 1950s and 60s. Inevitably secondary modern schools were built at the same time as part of the estate. This sowed the seeds for future problems

The tripartite system came under increasing attack from theoretical educationalists from the 1960s onwards. The accusation was that the grammar school/secondary modern school dichotomy was preserving and indeed promoting class divisions. The answer that was proposed, and subsequently implemented in many areas, was the comprehensive school. Children were to be forced into equality.

As comprehensive education was seen as the egalitarian holy grail by left wing authorities who were overwhelmingly located in metropolitan areas, the vast majority of children came to be educated in comprehensive schools. These selfsame authorities then lied to their residents. They broadcast the myth that all children would now receive the education that had previously been reserved for grammar school children.

The actuality was that children who should have been in grammar schools now received an education which was, to put it mildly, inappropriate. Horrified parents who had expected to see their children educated to the highest standards, who had looked forward to seeing young minds stretched in a quest for academic achievement, saw their beloved offspring treated to uninspiring, badly taught, undemanding lessons delivered by teachers who had become accustomed to accepting low academic achievement as the norm.

The answer for such parents was simple. They looked around to see where the best of the comprehensives were located. They were normally to be found in the middle class suburbs. Often they were schools which had previously been grammar schools. These same middle class suburbs were the targets also for speculative builders who built middle class housing for sale to owner occupiers.

These areas rapidly became magnets for any parents who were interested in the future achievement of their children. A solution not entirely overlooked by NuLabour politicians. Inevitably this has led to a heavy demand for places at certain schools. The situation has been reinforced by the survival of some grammar schools in what are predominately rural middle class areas. This is where we now find ourselves, and why there is a shortage of places in certain areas.

It is not plotting by sinister middle class elitists that has caused the problem, or some schools seeking to prolong selection by back door methods. It is a combination of the long term effects of socialist housing initiatives and socialist denial of the reality of human inequalities coupled with their hamfisted attempts to force equality upon all children, even if it is the equality of non-achievement.

The answer does not lie in lotteries for school places or any other harebrained scheme that the equality mongers may come up with. It lies in a recognition of the reality of humanity. It lies in a teaching profession who see their role as encouraging all children to reach the limits of their abilities, no matter if those abilities are academic, skilful dexterity, or a caring nature. It lies in a recognition that a well trained plumber is as useful, no, actually more useful, to society as a well trained NuLabour researcher with a degree in sociology from an ex-poly.

It actually matters very little whether this is brought about by selective schools or selective streaming within schools. The choice between the two should be made purely on the efficacy of delivering a suitable education to each individual child. The physical constraints of size and range of teaching subjects would probably mean that school selection along the lines of the tripartite system would be the easiest to implement. At least this would mean that children could have an education commensurate with their abilities and propensities, rather than their physical location or any other irrelevant extraneous factor.

2007-02-28T18:19:00.000Z

Independent ignorance

Just where did the leader writer in today's Indie get his education? He or she writes concerning the family

'It has come to be associated with a narrowly defined, Christian-sanctioned relationship. It needs to be reclaimed as something that encompasses gay, as well as straight, relationships. Married or unmarried. And politicians need to stop viewing it as a rose-tinted ideal that leads to the castigation of those falling short.'

Oh, so people only got married in Christian countries did they? It was only in Christian countries that a man and a woman formed a relationship in order to produce children? No matter where and when, throughout human history such relationships have been seen as a contractual obligation legitimised by ceremony.

The writer misses the point. Of course it is no business of society at large to value one human relationship over another. Society though does have an immediate interest once that relationship produces children. If children are not brought up within a child oriented environment involving two parents it produces results which affect both the well-being of the child – measurably in the case of educational achievement and the ability of the child to socialise normally with its peers as it reaches puberty and then maturity.

If politicians do not involve themselves in this who should? A correct analysis of the pitfalls of single parenthood is about the one thing which Blair has got right. Pity he hasn't had the gumption to follow it through.

2007-02-28T17:16:00.000Z

Trevor Phillips and the power of irrational thought

Today, Trevor Phillips' little money earner, The Commission for Equality and Human Rights, has published its long awaited, well by Mr Phillips anyway, grandiosely entitled, 'Fairness and Freedom: the Final Report of the Equalities Review'. I have yet to read the report in detail, but the foreword alone provides many indicators as to the worth of the rest of the document, which I will return to on occasions when there is nothing more interesting to write about.

Why is it that Trevor Phillips, who presumably either wrote or approved the document, appears unable to see the contradictions in the emotive and self-contradictory prose? Take for instance this paragraph,

'But a long-term vision for our society should be founded upon what it wants to be rather than what it is not. This Report is entirely about one of the – if not the – most cherished aspirations of the British people: to live in a society that is fair and free, and which provides for each individual to realise his or her potential to the fullest. At root, this is what we should mean by an equal society.'

Quite what percentage of the population actually worries its head about British society being 'fair and free' I don't know. Not a very high percentage I suspect. There are difficulties in the respective definitions of the two words. If somebody is 'free', it must mean that they are in a position to make whatever choices they like concerning their lives. This concept is quite obviously moronic.

Taken to its conclusion this idea encompasses the right of all 60 million of us to do exactly what we want. The most foolish among us, and even Trevor Phillips, should be able to see that this is utterly nonsensical. We all have limitations imposed upon our particular freedom by the freedoms that others wish to enjoy. As individuals we all have to compromise. There are two ways that such compromises may be effected.

The first is by the mutual agreement of all, or at least most, of society. This may sometimes apparently be imposed by the state, but is actually the state expressing the commonly accepted and expressed will of the people. For instance the side of the road on which we drive. Few would seriously suggest that this should be a matter of individual free choice. We accept the curtailment of our freedom to drive which ever side the whim takes us because it is in all of our interest to do so.

Other curtailments to freedom are both imposed and initiated by the state against the will of at least a substantial minority and most probably an overwhelming majority. One of the most fundamental of these freedoms is the ability to enjoy one's own property without fear of its being taken by somebody else. The state habitually takes chunks of my property against my will by way of taxation.

The amounts are quite arbitrarily decided in the course of the government's pursuit of goals upon which it decides and I, and nobody outside the government, have any influence. So, we are not 'free' and of course are never likely to be, although the amount of freedom any individual enjoys may well fluctuate depending upon who enjoys the ascendancy of power at any one time.

However, as the greatest limitations upon any individual's freedoms are imposed by the state, the obvious way to increase everybody's freedom is to reduce the power of the state to an absolute minimum. Possibly not what Trevor Phillips had in mind.

So, to move on to 'fair'. This word labours under a similar problem as 'free'. Who decides what is 'fair', and how should it be decided? 'Fair' has absolutely no meaning or relevance outside the perception of the individual observer. There is no great arbiter in the sky to hold the scales. Of course, many individuals may concur about what is fair in any given situation. These, however, will be the group who has the most to gain from that particular and specific definition. Mr Phillips, being utterly amoral, has, of course, no problem here. What is 'fair' is to be decided by him and his sidekicks.

Let us move on to Mr Phillips' pièce de résistance, everybody realising their fullest potential. This is social Darwinism red in tooth and claw. Its implementation would be beyond the wildest dreams of the most dedicated libertarian. I can't actually believe that there is nobody in Mr Phillips' commissariat with wit enough to have spotted the implications of this. It is saying that there should be no restriction on anybody doing to their utmost what they are best at.

Stealing, fraud, making paedophile films, bullying, drug dealing. Does the man have no scruples? Surely there should be some limitations on the degree to which individuals are able to express their own particular set of talents. What's more, it seems, the state should act to promote these freedoms.

Oh yes, of course I know that Mr Phillips didn't mean that. That is my very point. He doesn't have the faintest idea what he is saying or what it means. It is possible however to discern, dimly, just what Mr Phillips' vision of an equal society encompasses. His idea of free, his idea of fair and people allowed to do what he wants them to do and no more.

This was just para. 3 of the Foreword. There are approximately 170 pages to go. The report has been welcomed by that well known rational free thinker Ms Ruth, 'bring back the Inquisition' Kelly. Who else?

2007-02-28T13:24:00.000Z

Gore beaten by Bush, again!

Al Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' is, as we all know, going to be required viewing in all our schools. Let us hope that the whole truth regarding Al Gore's relationship with the environment is going to be told to our children. His home apparently consumes natural resources at something like 20 times the rate of the average American household.

So, are there any other Americans who can step forward, hold up their hands and say that they care for the environment? Somebody whose green credentials would make them the beacon that we should all follow. Someone who can provide our children with that guiding light as we all march forward in step into that green paradise promised by young Millbum?

Yes! Lets all hear it for George Bush! While Al Gore has been busy winning bits of tawdry tinware in Tinsel Town, Mr Bush has been quietly doing more than his bit for the environment. Not for Mr Bush the lame duck excuse of carbon offsetting so beloved of our own dear leader and Mr Gore, rather belatedly it seems. Mr Bush's house re-uses water, relies on solar and geothermal heating and is built of local materials discarded by others. You can't trust anybody to do the right thing these days can you.

2007-02-27T16:30:00.000Z

Marriage politics

Marriage, or rather the lack of it, is much in the news. Today, Alan Johnson is scheduled to deliver his expert opinion on the subject. Cameron has also been pontificating recently on the same subject along the lines of restoring the Married Couple Allowance within the tax system.

It is becoming more and more difficult for any politician to ignore what I highlighted here, that the lack of a resident father has a deleterious effect on the academic performance of boys. Politicians are a little more cagey though about getting to grips with some of the other possible social consequences of the lack of a resident father on the social behaviour of, particularly, boys and young men.

As always with politicians they fail to grasp the ramifications and repercussions of simplistic changes in policy and/or believe that the answer lies in adjusting possible monetary bias in the tax and welfare system. The issues are particularly complex.

Firstly there is the decline generally in the number of contractual marriages, whether via secular or religious ceremonies or entered into here or abroad. Secondly, there is the age at which couples either marry or cohabit and the effect this has on the age of the mother at the birth of the first child and the size of the completed family. Thirdly we have the phenomenon of fatherless families, and whether these come about due to the breakdown of a relationship in which the father was present at first, or alternatively was never present at all.

There are also overarching factors in each of these key areas. What has caused the present situation, what may be the result we would wish to achieve and what role, if any, government should play in bringing change about. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly of all, the effects of government action or inaction on differing categories of couples, e.g. their location, income group, ethnic group etc., needs to be understood and accurately gauged.

The Guardian recently drew attention to a reported rapid decline in the number of first marriages during 2006. The same article also highlighted a rise in the age of first marriage in both men and women. There are two issues here. Firstly, is this decline in marriage numbers significant and if so how? Secondly, what of the increasing age of marriage partners.

The short answer to the first is that it is probably irrelevant. Marriage as we know it is and was merely a method for society to recognise a contract between two individuals. The interest of the church in this process was just one facet of the desire of the early Christian church to extend its power as far as possible in order to regulate individual's lives. Other religions also seek to do this.

What is important, however, is the milieu in which co-habiting couples produce offspring. Society at large has no interest, other than a moral opinion, in a couple who live together and produce no children; except to insure that if they part, the physical proceeds of the temporary partnership, house, furniture etc, are divided fairly between them.

The situation changes the moment that a couple have children. The rest of society then has a significant interest in the relationship insofar as a breakdown of the liaison is likely to deleteriously affect society at large, either in the cost of bringing up the children or in their subsequent behaviour, as well as the future well being of the children concerned. It is in society's interest that families stay together.

It is quite naïve to suggest that government should not take a standpoint on this issue. While the outcome for some children may not be affected by being brought up in a single parent household, for substantial numbers of children it is a significant negative factor. Furthermore, there is an additional financial burden placed on the rest of society if the state either supports the single parent in idleness, or forks out for child care so the parent may work.

Reconciling the interests of society and individuals in the upbringing of children is an area in which the state could and should act. The state is the only alternative due to the diminishing role of the Christian church and the need to deter possible bids for an enhanced role from other religious groups. The state has the power, although not necessarily either the will or the wisdom, to act purely in the interests of society at large rather than any special interest group. Acknowledging the interest of society generally does not prevent couples seeking further validation from any religious group whose approval they may wish to seek.

What of the increasing age of first marriage? As was pointed out here, this is of very great significance, not in itself, but in the demographic and social consequences which ensue from variations, not in the age of marriage per se, but in the age of the mother at the birth of the first child. In particular in the effects of differential age at first birth among defined groups within society. A fall in the mother's age at first birth in one group compared to another will relatively rapidly cause an increase in the numbers of the first group vis a vis the second.

As indicated in this report, all the signs are that overall the age of the mother at the birth of the first child is increasing. It is impossible, though, to draw any conclusions as to how this is affecting specific groups. All we know is that overall fewer people are bothering with a ceremony to sanctify, legitimise, or both as the case may be, their relationship. Nor do we know whether the age at first birth is increasing equally or differentially across all categories within society.

The problems associated with state action in this field are manifold. Conflict is inevitable over the degree and nature of state interference, notwithstanding that the state has been implicated in the situation we have now. Taxation, welfare benefits, housing provision, and no doubt other areas of national and local government action, in addition to increasing secularisation, have all had a negative effect upon the propensity of individuals to form enduring family units.

It is difficult to see that the state should actually have any role other than to create an environment which encourages binding contracts between individuals who start families, and actively discourages the formation of single parent families. It is very important that whatever regime is instituted should not favour any particular group within society.

We also have a situation now where the growing influence of Islam is stimulating the Christian churches to try to claim back some of the influence they have lost. Inevitably there will be conflict as different religious groups jockey for position and influence. Marriage is one of those areas where just about everyone has an opinion.

The range of actions required demands co-ordinated research and remedial policies across many government departments. It is difficult to see any current or prospective leader having the strength of will or the vision to bring this about. The outcome is more likely to be governmental paralysis or piecemeal tinkering rather than considered and effective action. I suspect the problems will worsen.

2007-02-22T10:45:00.000Z

Global warming rationality

It has always seemed to me to matter not a jot whether the present, apparent, warming of the climate was due to carbon dioxide emissions or not. The reality is that sooner or later the oil would run out. In any case, burning fossil fuels, whether in power stations or motor cars, is basically antiquated technology. Guaranteeing continuity of supply is also going to be dodgy politically unless you are sitting on top of lakes of oil or mountains of easily accessible coal.

It is also, in my humble opinion, irrational to generate electricity in a limited number of centralised plants, and then waste a large percentage of what you produce in distribution. Equally stupid is the current fad for boasting that bio-diesel or ethanol will make up 10% or so of your company's fuel use as both M & S and Tesco have recently. This is just a bit of green window dressing in order to promote a caring image.

I don't know the figures, but the percentage efficiency of growing and harvesting a suitable crop, transporting the harvested product, processing, which would require pressing to remove oil or fermenting and distilling to obtain ethanol, combining the result with diesel or petrol and then distributing the result again must be abysmally low.

I can remember, probably 20 odd years ago, coming across some research that looked at the surface area of all the buildings in, I think, Leeds. A calculation showed that even with the then solar power technology that was available, it would provide all the power needs of the city.

The problem has been, and still is, that the capital cost of generating electricity via solar power is too high. For my own purposes I calculated whether the cost of installing solar panels on my roof would provide savings greater than the amount I would receive in interest if I invested the money. It was very apparent that I would be much better off putting my money in an average building society account rather than lashing out c. £18,000 for the solar installation.

I was grateful to have my attention drawn to this item in the Telegraph. It is to the shame of the paper that this item appeared in the money section rather than on the front page. It would appear that the time frame for solar power technology to become competitive in terms of capital cost is shrinking rapidly. The rising costs of fossil fuel based technology due to political uncertainty is likely to hasten this process. The website of the firm involved is here.

Hat-tip to Ric for drawing this to my attention.

2007-02-21T19:55:00.000Z

Climate change - a new explanation

Regular readers here will be familiar with my cynical stance on global warming. Not that I deny that the climate may be getting warmer. My cynicism derives from two basic standpoints. As a historian I am well aware of climate change in the past.

The northward expansion of the Roman Empire has been linked to a warming of the climate, as has their abandonment of Britain as the climate worsened and the province lost its agricultural and therefore economic significance. The following so called dark ages were noted for a worsening of the climate accompanied by poor harvests, disease and a switch in Britain to animal husbandry.

I am also aware of the Medieval Warm Period. There is well attested evidence of crops being grown further up hillsides than subsequently, as well as a marked shift from animal husbandry to arable even on poor and exposed sites. This came to an end in the early 13^th C, followed by a series of poor harvests and malnutrition so severe as to leave the population of Europe weakened and susceptible when the Black Death arrived.

The Medieval Warm period was followed by the so-called Little Ice Age when the Thames froze over on several occasions. So, any theory of global warming has to take account of these climate fluctuations. Something which anthropogenic CO² driven scenarios signally fail to do.

I also raise my eyebrows slightly when politicians discover useful external threats. Such a threat, especially one that threatens the whole human race, is particularly useful when diverting attention from miserable failure on the home front. To a self-obsessed seeker after lasting glory like Blair, climate change is a godsend, a real 'send for my white charger' opportunity.

The problem with CO² induced warming is that it was only after the industrial revolution that CO² was discharged into the atmosphere in any great quantities. It therefore fails to account for previous warming and cooling cycles. The gung-ho environmentalists deal with this little problem by just ignoring it. Not really adequate in my book.

Now it looks as if an explanation may be emerging which explains all the recent episodes, and not so recent as well, of warming and cooling. It was mentioned briefly in the Times last Sunday I believe. You can read the whole story here.

2007-02-21T19:11:00.000Z

David Lammy, slave trade and axeheads

It was announced with great aplomb yesterday that culture minister David Lammy had placed a temporary ban on the export of a neolithic axe-head. This was, said the press release,

'a last chance to raise the money to keep the axe-head, which dates from before 4000 BC, in the United Kingdom.'

Apparently the axehead is being sold off at an asking price of £24,000. The export ban was the result of a recommendation by the

...Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The Committee recommended that the export decision be deferred on the grounds that the axe-head is so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune, of outstanding aesthetic importance and of outstanding significance for the study of Neolithic Britain.

Now I don't know about you, but I have to say that this axehead has never directly impinged on my life at all. Nor, I would imagine, on any but a very select few who are interested in neolithic stone axes. Nor is it directly concerned with 'our' history. Nor is it of the slightest relevance to the study of these islands during the neolithic period.

Once it has been discovered, photographed etc. the actual physical object is of little consequence. Given also that there are a hundred other examples of similar neolithic axeheads, it is difficult to see why the government is getting involved in preventing the owners in freely selling what is theirs to sell.

We are, however, informed that this particular artefact is of greater consequence still as it was originally part of the collection of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, who is rather gushingly described as

'one of the fathers of British archaeology.'

Pitt-Rivers is deservedly known for his introduction of systematic dating of archaeological finds. So far so good. He devoted the last half of his life exclusively to the collection and cataloguing of archaeological finds, made possible by a massive inheritance from the Rigby branch of the family. The Rigby fortune derived ultimately from the slave trade. Not so good.

So, does this mean that acceptable consequences may derive from unacceptable origins, Mr Lammy? Will that be taught when the politically correct version of the slave trade as specified by Postman Al becomes du rigeur in the history curriculum? I suspect not.

2007-02-21T13:27:00.000Z

John Hills and social housing: strictly for the birds

My wife single-handedly runs a major welfare benefit scheme, which distributes the necessities of survival to countless local residents. At 8.00 on a late winter morning, our garden is the prime destination for every hungry bird in the village. It is a frenzy of avian activity of Hitchockian proportions. I always half expect to see Tippi Hedren cowering in fear behind the shed.

Late winter is a bad time for birds. As hedgerow berries become exhausted, worms cower in the soil's depths and few insects brave the inclement weather, starvation and subsequent death always threaten. By putting out food, my wife maintains the local bird population at an unnaturally high level.

This achievement is not without its downside. Every morning now, as the daylight hours grow and thoughts turn to nesting and mating, at least four male blackbirds may be seen squabbling over territory. Just who is going to build their home in that prime site in the thick hedge at the back of the garden with a food supply to hand?

Bird and animal populations ebb and flow, borne along on a fluctuating tide of food supplies and suitable habitat for nesting or burrowing. The study of the relationship between both animals and plants and their environment is known as ecology. The word, it was coined in the late 19^th C, is derived from Greek roots and means 'housekeeping'.

An individual deploying an understanding of these processes would be an ideal candidate to investigate the relationship between humans, jobs and housing. What we get however is Prof. John Hills, who has just delivered his report entitled 'Ends and Means: the Future Roles of Social Housing in England'. John Hills is an economist. An economist, what's more, who is inextricably mired in the slough of state intervention in the market forces of supply and demand. You can read his CV here.

I rather suspect that a couple of years working as a commission only salesman selling 'right to buy' mortgages to council house tenants might have taught him more about the housing market, as well as more about himself and life generally, than all the years he has spent formulating academic theories about social exclusion. When Kelly commissioned the report she described it as independent. Heaven knows what a biased one would look like.

The supply of housing has many repercussions on society of which John Hills seems blissfully and blindly unaware, although I suppose we should be grateful for his revelation that perhaps employment and housing should be considered together. Not difficult mind you, these are after all merely the human equivalents of suitable bird food and nesting sites. So, what is the relationship between housing, employment and what effects may this relationship have on social behaviour?

In the last half of the eighteenth century, when agriculture provided a living for most, the typical age at which a couple married was about 29, with the birth of the first child following a year or two later. This was because the supply of cottages and land was limited and the acquisition of a property, invariably rented, required capital for a cow or two, other stock and basic farming implements. Hence a decade or more of paid employment was needed to save the required amount.

The industrial revolution was accompanied by a massive and rapid rise in population. Why? The mechanism was famously uncovered by Messrs Wrigley and Schofield. It is called nuptiality. Basically, it means that men and women started marrying earlier. Earlier marriage firstly produces more generations in a given period, and secondly extends the socially defined, as opposed to biological, reproductive life of the woman.

In the Leicestershire coalfield in the early nineteenth century, the age of marriage among miners fell to around 22 and the age of the wife at first birth to 23. They were now producing four generations a century instead of three and adding 25% or so to the completed family size.

The reason for this was simple. The mine owners, anxious to attract fit young men, built cottages for them to live in which were rented out at relatively low rents. Guaranteed housing and well rewarded work was a recipe for early marriage. This happened in all the centres of industrial production, whether extractive or manufacturing. The population soared.

The reverse process can be seen happening now. As the price of housing has risen and its availability fallen, particularly in the South-east, it has meant that couples who wish to own their home have to wait longer before they can start a family and establish a family home. Once again, the age of marriage, or co-habitation, has risen and the age of women at first birth has risen along with it. Left to its own devices, society generally adapts. It is a looped feed back system. It is not, please note, the consequences of feminist agitation for workplace equality encouraging women to follow careers.

However, this system is not enjoying universal deployment. It is applied differentially due to intervention by the state or local authority. In particular, this applies in the area of housing. If the state or local authority chooses to provide housing to rent, and then subsidises the rent, it is encouraging family formation where the need almost certainly does not exist. The consequences are easy to see.

The availability of subsidised housing, reinforced by the benefits system, means that household formation has become easy even for non-working, single, teenage girls. It is the reason also why the rate of unemployment is so disastrously high among council estate dwellers. The state is encouraging family formation where the means of sustenance, i.e. suitable employment, does not exist. Ms Kelly herself mentions that half of the families of working age living in social housing are economically inactive. The problem is reinforced due the difficulty of moving elsewhere.

This withdrawal of normal market constraints on human activity has repercussions throughout society. It manifests itself in behavioural problems, such as have been seen in south London as well as criminality generally. It produces and promotes welfare dependency. It favours population increase in one sector of the population, while applying a brake on population numbers elsewhere.

It also distorts the housing market, although the planning system bears the greatest guilt here. The more social housing is provided at non-economic rents, the greater will be the negative pressure applied to the private rented sector. This will cause a reduction in the amount of privately rented property. While the statist social engineers would be happy to see this no doubt, privately rented property is much more flexible. It does not trap individuals in one location from which they dare not move, which is what social housing does.

I see that Ms Kelly has formed a panel, containing Prof. Hills, to advise her. Beats taking action any day. She should come and talk to my wife, who although generous and considerate in times of winter hardship, is wise and realistic when the supply of natural food increases once again. The provided bird food is progressively reduced as the weather warms. A helping hand in times of hardship. Not an induced dependency for life.

2007-02-19T20:02:00.000Z

Twisted minds on the left

Watching the intellectual contortions of various members of the left yesterday and today has provided some fascinating moments. One of the unforeseen consequences of the programme of council house building undertaken, principally but not entirely by Labour controlled councils, during the decades after the end of the second world war has been to provide a breeding ground for crime.

In the article 'Violent Childhoods', which I wrote on Saturday and posted in two parts then and on Sunday, I drew attention to the way in which the Caribbean community was affected in such a way as to lead to the inter-gang gun warfare which reached something of a crescendo last week.

Of course, it was not just the Caribbean immigrants and their subsequent offspring who suffered. A high percentage of anti-social behaviour and drug related crime among the white community has its source also in the social disintegration which ensued from the incarceration of residents in what is normally termed 'social' housing. Un-social housing would be more apt.

Labour is in a bit of a fix over this. Post war Labour administrations and local authorities really have just three defining legacies. The first is the system of comprehensive education, the second is the NHS and the third is municipal housing. It is to Blair's credit that he was aware of the shortcomings of the first two, and, for all I know of the third also.

His enduring legacy will be his abysmal failure to get to grips with any of them. I suppose that having jettisoned clause four, it would have been too much to expect the party membership to accept that these three icons of left wing thought were just as useless as nationalisation. Anyway, Blair funked it.

So, when it comes to discussing last week's spate of killings, he dodges discussion of where the problem lies. A realistic assessment of the problem would demand firstly an admission of the unwanted social effects of council housing estates, and secondly a course of action to deal with the fundamental problem, i.e. pull them down. So we have to lay the blame elsewhere

'It is about a specific problem, within a specific criminal culture to do with guns and gangs'

is his prognosis.

Blair's answer is more laws and more young black men in prison. Great, they already form a far greater proportion of prison inmates than would be suggested by their actual numerical position in the population.

Will Hutton, in Comment is Free (I assume it appeared in the Observer) on Sunday actually accurately defined the problem, council housing estates. He says

'Step forward the real villain: the council housing estate.'

Which is a pretty impressive admission for a Guardian writer and Labour apologist like Hutton. Ah, you see, but the estates are not really Labour's fault. No, it was though pesky communists,

'Britain was never communist, but all round the country, there is a physical tribute to communist thinking. This is the country with the one of the biggest concentration of vast council housing estates in the world, rivalling even the former Soviet Union and China in the sheer scale of the dismal concrete sheds in which we collectively house the poor.'

Pretty neat eh? Nothing to do with Labour then. Lumps Leicester, Sheffield, Lambeth et al in with the cities of the former USSR and China.

Here's another little foible that can be laid at the door of Labour's social housing. It was also gerrymandering on a giant scale. Leicester will do as an example. In the years following WW2, the Labour council conspired to prevent any private housing development within the city boundary. The entire city became girdled with what is almost one vast council estate. Virtually all private housing development had to take place outside the city.

It delivered rock solid Labour majorities on the Council for decades. This meant that the citizens of Leicester were effectively denied any democratic debate about issues that affected them for forty years. Every single issue was decided behind closed doors within Labour's ruling clique. It also delivered a series of safe Labour parliamentary seats. Patricia Hewitt for one is still reaping the benefits. Can't see NuLabour destroying that little heritage in a hurry.

Ms Kelly has also been doing a bit of kite flying recently about council housing, suggesting that residents should be encouraged to purchase stakes as small as 10% in the houses they occupy. Angela Philips in today's Guardian smells a rat. Our Angela has been a Guardian writer for thirty years and her profile boasts of her feminist heritage. Her economic credentials though seem to be somewhat questionable.

It's those buy-to-let landlords who are causing the shortage of housing and driving prices upwards.

'Flooding the market with low rent housing might also start to undermine the buy-to-let market which is currently fuelling house prices...'

I have to admit to an interest here. I too, with my wife, own a property we rent out. We took this step after the decimation of our private pension funds by Gordon Brown's grand theft to finance NuLabour schemes. However, that's by the by.

House price inflation is not of course anything to do with buy to let properties, which make up a minuscule proportion of the housing stock. It is an effect of high demand due to a rising population and restriction of house building mainly due to the planning laws.

Still, her wacky little idea of flooding the market with cheap, subsidised housing to reduce prices would be interesting if it ever came to pass. There's nothing more guaranteed to get voters looking at the alternatives to Gordon than the merest whiff of an idea that house prices are falling. You can just imagine how Gordon would feel about going to the electorate with hundreds of thousands tumbling into negative equity and re-possession orders falling like confetti on floating voters. Go on Angela, you tell it how you see it. You could turn out to be the best friend Cameron ever had. I know his knees have gone a bit wobbly about Ms Toynbee recently, but you could really gee him up.

2007-02-17T16:23:00.000Z

Violent childhoods - 2
(part 1 below should be read first)

Under normal circumstances, such a group would have tended to gradually disperse among the indigenous population and finally, after several generations, intermarry and eventually disappear into the general population. Various factors have acted to prevent that happening in south London. The first being those wretched council dwellings, the effect of which is to virtually imprison the inmates who cannot move elsewhere. The whole idea of council housing being predicated upon life-long occupation, notwithstanding the fact that the average occupation time among owner occupiers is around, I believe, seven years.

This meant that the black Caribbean population was forced to stay where it was at a time when employment opportunities in the area were declining. Then, another rather nasty little trick was played. Some ~~dotty~~ visionary educationalists decided it would be a great idea to play around with education and see if they could do a bit of social engineering. Schools were therefore rearranged into comprehensives consisting of a thousand upwards pupils spread across various sites. A depressing aura of under-achievement and limited expectation settled like a miasma.

Just to stir the pot a bit more, there was a clamour of voices telling the black community that their predicament, stuck in rotten housing with poor job prospects, was not their own fault, which was true. It was, the voices of equality and multiculturalism said, the result of discrimination on the grounds of race and colour by the rest of the white population. Which it wasn't. This had the effect nevertheless, of alienating still further a black community which had, mainly by circumstances beyond their control, become ghetto bound, welfare dependent, and housing estate incarcerated.

There is a book which should be required reading, nay, should be learnt by heart, by every politician, meddling multiculturalist, town hall bureaucrat, equality-mongering theorist, government agency do-gooder and well meaning amateur. It is entitled Kinship at the Core. It was written by an anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern, who used the techniques she had learned studying the society of Papua New Guinea, to examine an Essex village called Elmdon.

In particular, it examines in great detail the effects of a number of new migrants to the village in the period, if my memory serves, after WW2 when numbers of Londoners moved out to the country. In it you will find described all the exactly similar responses by an indigenous group towards newcomers as immigrants to this country, on a larger scale, have found. The newcomers in Elmdon, however, were not exotic strangers. They were white, co-religionist and English.

What is glibly referred to as racial discrimination is a normal response among human societies the world over to strangers, especially strangers in any number. The reactions to Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Indians etc. are exactly the same as have been displayed by the population of these islands to, at various times, the Irish, protestant French, eastern European and shiploads and planeloads of other immigrants.

Of course, the situation in south London has now gone beyond being solved by uninvolved understanding of how the problem originated, but it is at least a start. The situation has been aggravated by a tendency among some members of Caribbean communities to form themselves along matriarchal rather than patriarchal lines, i.e. no resident father.

Natural human responses do not cease just because the accepted means for their expression are curtailed. Young black men are just as anxious for economic success and leadership prowess as any young man of any race anywhere. If the educational and employment route to prosperity seems to be barred, for the reasons described, is it any wonder that the rewards of the illicit drug trade should beckon so alluringly.

Illegal capitalism, as was made abundantly clear in Prohibition America, does not sort out its market leaders in the normal way by competing on quality, and price. Market leadership in the drug underworld is gained through violent victory. Of that other method of capitalist competition, innovation, there has certainly been plenty.

Gangs form to protect their area of distribution. Inevitably, the gang comes to be seen as a surrogate for family. It provides a sense of belonging and peer approval which would normally be provided by marriage and job success within an acceptable and respected organisation. Gangs consisting of older members will quickly become aped by youngsters. That's what boys do. They follow the example of older males.

So that's how it happened. Can it be solved and if so, how? Well, believe this, solved it will be. But if it is not solved relatively peaceably it will inevitably be resolved violently. So where to start. Honesty from politicians and others in authority is as good a place as any. For thirty years they have been peddling lies. Tell the truth. The only two possible outcomes are either assimilation or permanent isolation and alienation. That fact has to be understood by all, white, black, brown or sky blue pink. The only equality which can be offered is equality before a commonly accepted law, equally applied.

There are no fast tracks to the top on offer, no routes to success via positive discrimination. No legs up because our ancestors profited from the slave trade. Taking this path hands a willing franchise to the racists. Personal success can only come from personal commitment, talent and hard work. After thirty years of hearing mendacious platitudes this approach will be hard for the black community to embrace. They need something in return.

If there is one area which is crying out for the dumping of comprehensive education and the reinstatement of grammar schools, under whatever trite nomenclature Blair chooses in order to save face, it is south London as well as similar areas throughout the country. Educational success followed by economic success by black men will provide a different guiding star to that provided by the drug dealers and gang leaders. Black sportsman already provide an alternative model but sport alone is not enough.

Break up the ghastly housing estates, offer financial inducements to move elsewhere. And finally, when all these other things are under way, legalise drugs. This will destroy the economic powerhouse which is driving the whole sorry mess.

2007-02-17T16:01:00.000Z

Violent childhoods - 1

Violence dominated and permeated every moment of my childhood. At the cinema, a constant stream of mayhem and bloodshed flickered before my eyes. Lawmen pumped bullets into a multitude of outlaws, while cowboys and the U.S. cavalry slaughtered more Red Indians than probably ever lived in total. Plucky British soldiers, sailors and airmen, against all the odds, blasted evil Germans, well Anton Diffring anyway, into smithereens as the mutilation and death of WW2 was heroically relived on the screen.

It was no different at school. From the age of five, brandishing improbably silver six shooters, my friends and I engaged in murderous battle for fifteen minutes at morning break and for a further hour after lunch. At weekends and in the evenings with the same friends, I roamed the local parks and the gardens of bombed out houses. Conflict here was a touch more realistic with air guns and catapults the weapons of choice. Those unlucky not to have such hardware at their disposal used stones and half bricks instead.

The locations where this appalling orgy of terror and aggression was enacted were the back streets of south London. I was a fairly average little boy, and, yes, these were the self-same streets where fifteen year olds are now shot in their beds. I tell of my boyhood because the un-named writer of this morning's Independent leading article has revisited the hoary old tale of how media violence fuels real violence. Well at least he, or she, does in half the article but discounts its effects in the other half. We have for instance

'Meanwhile, music such as gangsta rap has glorified violence, misogyny and homophobia. Many young boys regard its stars as role models. Some even go as far as embracing the gangster "lifestyle" themselves. There is a host of other malign influences on young people, too. Video games are often disgustingly violent, helping to desensitise children to the pain of others. There is also unease over the levels of casual and sadistic violence in film and television.'

Followed by

'It would be quite wrong to suggest there is a direct link here. If such influences were weeded out tomorrow, does anyone seriously believe problems such as youth crime and anorexia would instantly disappear?'

Which is all a bit confusing. The article continues in a a similar schizophrenic manner, finally calling for the purveyors of mass culture to take a more responsible stance. Fat chance when money is involved. Not that it matters. I, and as far as I know, all my childhood friends, have managed to live our lives without becoming immersed in drug dealing or murder, despite our ~~ferociously aggressive~~ typically normal childhoods.

My news feed has just alerted me to another gun related killing as I write. So what is going on in south London, can it be solved, can it be understood and who or what is to blame? Well, to take the last question first and be absolutely basic, the blame initially falls on London Transport, British Rail as was, and the NHS. The migration here of workers from the Caribbean started, as we all know, with the Windrush in the late 1940s, although numbers arriving were relatively small until the nineteen fifties. Initially they were almost exclusively young men.

One of the areas where they congregated was in an arc of south London from Clapham and Brixton round to Peckham, New Cross and Lewisham. Two factors caused this. Firstly employment. They filled the jobs unwanted by the indigenous workforce. Usually because the jobs didn't pay enough and there was more to be earned elsewhere.

British Rail and London Transport were struggling to find personnel to fill low paid vacancies on trains, buses and the tube. They were very happy to take on the newcomers who therefore congregated around the depots of these two organisations. From Clapham Junction, to New Cross tube depot and Lewisham bus garage, the area of south London in question was littered with such centres of employment.

The second concentrating factor was accommodation. There were plenty of large old and crumbling Victorian houses which were ideal for splitting up into single rooms to let to the young men.

The NHS too was struggling to find suitable staff to fill roles such as cleaners, cooks and ward orderlies. This then started a wave of female immigrants from the Caribbean. In the selfsame area of south London as the transport depots there was a similar concentration of hospitals. The result was obvious and inevitable. If you put lots of single young men and women in close proximity they get together and children ensue.

There was a conjunction of forces driving this group into public housing. Firstly, the wages they earned were relatively low and secondly, even if they did earn enough to make the payments on a mortgage, lenders were reluctant to lend them money. Here starts one of the myths of discrimination on the grounds of colour. Lenders were reluctant to lend not because of their colour, but for fear of a possible rapid departure back to the West Indies if the payments got a bit much. Lenders, then as now, wanted to be pretty certain they would get their money back. Lenders like quantifiable and controllable risk.

The allocation of public housing during the fifties, sixties and seventies was on a point scoring method. Living in cramped conditions in a run down house in multiple occupation with children, earned lots of points and moved you to the top of the list. So, as at the time London's boroughs were locked in deadly competition to see who could build the largest and grimmest multilevel housing developments, that was where large numbers of the immigrants ended up, and where their descendants, together with more recent arrivals from Africa, still live.

Part 2 will appear tomorrow.

2007-02-16T18:19:00.000Z

Truth and lies

I rarely comment on the BBC, as those good folk over at Biased BBC do such a good job. However, there was an item that I covered last week that was subsequently picked up by the BBC. The item in question, which you can read here, was posted last Friday. The BBC ran it on Tuesday. Possibly that visitor to this site with the BBC web address was responsible.

The piece commented on the abolition of normal play activities in the school playground that involved children touching each other as this supposedly led to bullying. The BBC reports that such games as kiss chase and tag had been banned. It also stated that 'new games chosen by the pupils' had been substituted.

Now I don't exactly know how many of the little boys at the school may have nominated skipping or hopscotch as their favourite games, but I would bet it wasn't very many. Nor I suspect, did the BBC carry out a survey of the children's attitudes to various games, although they do print one child's comments that playtimes are now boring. What we are getting here is the view of the head, who no doubt drew up the list of games which the children could choose to play.

The BBC has also left out the head's rather bizarre ideas that all games should be 'structured' and should not involve touching. Missing also is the fact that children who may have carried out the heinous crime of 'touching' or playing 'unstructured' games had sanctions applied against them.

We most certainly do not get the views of either the parents or the governors. The original report in the Lincolnshire Echo had pinpointed the fact that the ban had been introduced purely at the whim of the head and had also highlighted that some parents at least were furious at the ban's introduction.

So easy, isn't it, to tell lies by not telling the whole truth?

2007-02-16T15:52:00.000Z

Missing the obvious

Chris Pond, the ex-Labour MP who now is now the chief executive of the charity One Parent Families writes today in the Guardian. He feels that what is required to get single parents working is even more state funded childcare. It may be seen as somewhat ironic that he should be writing this today of all days.

We have just seen the third murder in south London apparently associated with black gangs and the propensity of their members to settle little local tiffs with guns. There have been widespread comments pointing to the connection between a lack of fatherly presence and the disaffection of black youths.

Elsewhere, Mr Cameron, it is reported, is going to suggest that the state should intervene more actively in order to 'compel' men to look after their children. The BBC reports,

"We urgently need to encourage a culture of intervention. In a healthy society, children are the responsibility not just of their parents, but of the whole community," he will say.

No Mr Cameron, state intervention, and any indication that it is required, is the sign of a sick society. Mr Cameron's conversion to state compulsion is made quite obvious by his reference to other European countries where sanctions are applied to ensure fathers stayed with their families, although a worthless sop was thrown in the direction of traditional Tory belief by stating that marriage and families should be supported. Ideas that the care of children should be a community, rather than a family, responsibility have done enough damage already.

Then we have Alan Duncan, in an obviously co-ordinated pas de deux with Mr Cameron, who suggests that certain youths are living the plot of William Golding's novel 'The Lord of the Flies' for real. In some ways it would be nice if they were. At least we could take comfort from the fact that they had read the book. A task, I suspect, way beyond the ability, or range of interest, of south London's black youth gangs.

It has also been reported this week that the preponderance of girls over boys entering university continues, while this morning there was yet another report on the Today programme drawing attention to the fact that the highest academic achievers in schools are the children of ethnically Chinese and Indian parents. Indian, incidentally, does not include Muslim Pakistanis, whose priorities tend to lie with routes to paradise rather than routes to academic achievement. Still, they don't bunk off school so much which is at least one positive.

So what, if anything, ties all these disparate stories together? Mr Pond is the key. To say that Mr Pond is blind does a terrible discourtesy to those who cannot see. Now I appreciate that some children may only have one parent for various reasons. One parent could die, the parents could split up, or there may only have been one parent in the first place.

I believe I am correct in saying that the vast majority of people who marry and subsequently part, remarry. As the number of one parent families caused by the death of one member must be relatively small, we are left with the fact that the majority of single parent families are that way from the start. They are not the result of broken homes, they are the result of incomplete homes in the first place.

And what does Mr Pond see as the answer to this? Let's encourage it, he says, by rewarding single parent households with even greater amounts of other peoples money to pay for child care. Yes, let's do that Mr Pond, and if we really try our absolute hardest we could end up with all children being brought up in single parent households.

Now, offensive as it is to feminists and equality-mongers, it is nevertheless a fact that throughout over a million years of human existence the best way that humanity has found of rearing children is within a two parent family, with a woman, at least in the early years, providing full-time, or at least nearly so, the care that children need. This backed up by a father who provides the necessities of life for the family and provides additional care for the children.

This state of affairs, which was accepted as the ideal, has been undermined over the last roughly thirty years by a feminist critique of society which casts men in the role of wastrel, violent exploiters, backed up by a gospel of valueless equality which fails to distinguish worth between one lifestyle or another. It matters not whether a child is brought up in a single parent or in a traditional family. Both, it is screeched at us, are individual choices of equal validity.

The proponents of these bizarre ideas have infiltrated government, education, social charities, local authorities and the universities. Anywhere where they can find a way of warping society in the direction of their crazed ideas. We have benefit systems, which far from encouraging individuals to work, actually penalise them if they do. We have charities, such as Mr Pond's, demanding another billion or so of tax payers money to fulfill their dystopean dreams.

There is a causal chain which leads from destruction of the family to single parenthood to a lack of male role models in the shape of fathers and teachers. Along the way it promotes disaffected male youths to variously embrace drugs, guns, and antisocial behaviour or dismiss education as pointless. At best their heroes are footballers, at worst gun toting drug dealers.

It finishes with men who are bewildered as to what their role in life should be as they are not wanted for the one thing that men do well. Work hard to take care of women and children. All the time this awful progress of social destruction is being boosted by the financial reward of the behaviour which causes it.

Worse still, it acts as a positive feedback system. The fewer men that become good fathers, the fewer men that advance themselves through education, the fewer men that enter education as teachers, all of whom provide the leadership that boys need, the more single parent families will be brought into existence.

The family structures of the Chinese and Indians have yet to be infected by this cancerous gnawing at the fabric of society. That is why they tend to do better at school. They have two parent families who provide the stability, care and enthusiasm for education which the British once had. Even though Muslims may not share this enthusiasm for western secular education, they do at least have the social structures in place which mean that their children grow up in supportive but disciplined homes.

Addendum: King Lear's comment deserves to be read.

2007-02-15T18:22:00.000Z

Time to buy the candles

Greenpeace is having a wet knees moment due to the thrill of winning its action against the government over the nuclear power consultation process. Why was this gutless government having a consultation process in the first place. If they can't piss in the pot they should get off it. Governments are there to make decisions. That's what we elect them for.

If attention hadn't been paid to the environmental lobby, we might now be in the happy state that France is. Over 70% of its power is generated by nuclear means, with hydro accounting for most of the shortfall. France has the lowest cost for electrical generation in western Europe and exports electricity to Italy and the UK. All with no emissions, or pipelines that originate in Putin's little empire of free expression.

Greenpeace lives in a self-sufficiency dreamworld. The trouble is they would like to impose it on the rest of us. Note that they feel energy production should be local. No mention of the method of generation. The last time this country was able to totally feed itself without imports and use only sustainable energy sources was towards the end of the Medieval Warm Period. There were at that time about 6 million people living here. What I wonder do they have in mind for the other 54 million of us?

2007-02-15T15:31:00.000Z

Working all hours

The Guardian women are getting rather worked up about balancing work, leisure and family life. Last week we had Jackie Ashley, this week they've rolled out Jean Lambert. They both think that the government should intervene while the invocation by Ms Ashley of the Equal Opportunities Commission gives a hint of where she's coming from.

She reiterates the feminist line that men should take an equal role in caring as women, in order to allow women to realise their potential. The last thing that parents need is either the likes of Ms Ashley, or a government in thrall to doctrinaire feminism, dictating to them how they should order their lives

The working pattern we have today is partly the product of a monetised, consumption orientated economy. Status within western culture is acquired and measured by the level of individual consumption, displayed for all to see. This requires participants who accept this cultural imperative to maximise their income.

At the same time, development of fixed time, employer supervised working is the direct result of union pressure to increase job security, maximise wage rates and separate individual output from individual production, i.e. payment based on results. Too often in the past, unionist agitation for reduced hours of work was a ruse to increase overtime working at enhanced rates of pay.

The ability to control the balance between hours worked and time spent in leisure has always existed, and still does, for the c. 20% of the population who are self-employed. They accept the trade-off. They balance the freedom to control their working lives with the acceptance of the risk of assuming responsibility for their own destinies. Self-employment, or payment by results, also enables decisions to be made on an individual basis whether to trade income levels against time.

As the situation we have today is either the result of union action or government legislation, you may think that further movement down the path of self employment should be promoted. Or, unthinkable of course to anyone who believes that the only course of action has to be via government control, individuals could actually be encouraged to take responsibility for their own lives and negotiate working contracts with employers which give them the time off they require. Now there's a novel approach for union negotiators to take.

Such initiatives would, of course, have to include payment on results to compensate for the lack of supervision. This also is anathema to statists and unionists who believe that everyone is entitled to equal shares irrespective of the value of their contribution. What such arrangements do provide, however, is a framework for individuals and couples to make their own choices as to how they want to order their own lives.

Messrs Ashley and Lambert however do not see individual responsibility as the way forward. What they want to see is government action to reduce the number of hours worked and/or enforce flexible work arrangements. This will have the straightforward effect of reducing productivity, and hence competitiveness in international markets. It will also further hasten the desertion of manufacturing companies to overseas locations.

2007-02-14T12:49:00.000Z

Road pricing, a last word

Just to clarify one or two points. I personally would be vehemently opposed to the present government's introduction of road pricing. Not because of the principle but because of their perfidious, controlling nature and utter ineptitude at managing any large scale project, especially one involving technology and computers.

Nor would I wish to see road pricing introduced as a measure for social engineering. However, any tax will have collateral effects apart from the prime purpose of revenue collection. In the case of road pricing I merely wished to point out that there were other possible benefits apart from the obvious one of controlling access to a finite resource – road space.

Charging the first two or three miles of any journey at a higher rate than subsequent miles is a true reflection of the costs involved. Every time a charging event, i.e. driving, occurs, it will engender a fixed cost. This is the cost of monitoring and then charging for the journey. It is a fixed cost, and will remain more or less the same irrespective of the length of the journey. Travelling more miles spreads this cost, diminishing as a cost per mile as it does so.

This will therefore tend to discourage very short journeys. In turn, this will cause a major reduction in the number of cars on the road, the principal reason for road charging in the first place, as well as encouraging greater physical activity. The lack of physical activity by a sizeable chunk of the population affects everybody else in so far as their likely subsequent medical care has, at present, to be met by the rest of us. The exercise element is a beneficial consequence, both for the individual, who will be healthier, and society as a whole whose costs will fall.

I made it quite clear that I personally was opposed to using road pricing as a means of progressive taxation. I mentioned it purely as one of the criticisms was that it hurt the poor more than the rich. My personal view is that road use should be charged at the same rate to everyone, except there would have to be obvious exceptions such as pensioners. I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest that an OAP should starve to death because they could not afford to go and buy food.

I note that Tim Worstall appears to share much the same view over road pricing as do I. (His link will eventually take you to this article here). It is a straightforward use of pricing to control access to a finite resource.

2007-02-13T17:46:00.000Z

Forward to the past

Iron age lake village could be built in Glastonbury

I rather thought the iron-age ended 2,000 years ago. Still, nice to see all those National Lottery millions being spent on forward-looking projects. Bloody fools. They should be made to go and live in it.

2007-02-13T17:06:00.000Z

Virtuous economics, democracy and road travel

I touched yesterday upon the subject of road pricing. It has generated a great deal of comment in today's MSM and I thought it worth returning to the subject in more detail. Firstly I want to look at the terms in which the debate is being conducted. Much of it hinges on the fact that 1m people have signed the No 10 petition. Some argue that this is the groundswell of democratic opinion and should be heeded by the government (The Telegraph & The Mail). Others think that this is merely a vocal and selfish minority who should be ignored (The Independent).

Opponents of the idea focus on government intrusion into personal privacy, the extra taxation or that it will hit the poorest hardest and the rich not at all (The Guardian). Others feel that 'we' have paid for the roads many times over through motoring taxes and should therefore continue to enjoy their use for 'free'. Proponents point to a decrease in road congestion and CO² reductions to save the planet (The Independent).

Many of these attitudes are somewhat peripheral to the main issue and I shall return to them shortly. What is at issue is very simple. How do you apportion access to a finite resource. There are only two basic ways this may be done. The first is via price, the second is through some method of state 'means-testing' and regulation. As I hinted yesterday, it is somewhat ironic that with regards to roads the price mechanism finds favour with a government which is notably reluctant to use it elsewhere, for instance in the case of the NHS.

As usual, commentators in the MSM are ready with opinions but short on researched facts, yet all the data to illuminate the concept and place it within context is easily accessible through the National Traffic Survey. Furthermore, many of the criticisms of road pricing assume that it will be an overall scheme applied to all roads. This is not necessarily the case.

Access only needs to be restricted to certain roads at certain times. To all intents and purposes the network of country lanes around the village where I live can be viewed at present as an infinite resource. The M25 in the rush hour is most certainly a very finite resource. It follows that you only need to charge a toll for access to the M25 and not to the lane outside my house. I would argue, however, that pricing access to all roads has the power to deliver many benefits.

So, what of of the opinions which are being articulated.

That the government will have a permanent 'spy on the dashboard'. This issue is not really about road pricing at all. It is about the perception of the morality of government in general and the Blair administration in particular. Blair and his cronies are largely to blame that the public generally is pretty well convinced that the government wants to involve itself in ordering the minutiae of individuals' lives.

There is absolutely no reason that universal road pricing could not be delivered in such a way as to deny government access to the information, or required a similar legal process as with search warrants before they did. In reality, via CCTV and number plate recognition the police can track the majority of journeys now.
Extra taxation. At present there are two methods by which car journeys are taxed, Vehicle Excise Duty and fuel tax. It would be very simple to discontinue both and balance road pricing income to exactly match the present tax take. Fuel tax is no use as a pricing medium to restrict usage as it does not distinguish between the different roads travelled nor the times of journeys, both vital, in this instance, to the rationing of the resource.
It will hurt the poor more. Not necessarily. There is no reason that the price paid per journey on a given stretch of road has to be the same for all. In fact, it would be relatively simple to ensure that, say pensioners in a village were charged nothing for using their small car during the day, while a regular morning and evening commuter from the same village in a large car was charged at a significantly high rate. It would even be possible, heaven forbid, to have a different rate for those in receipt of benefit. In any case price is used as the regulatory medium for access to most other things in life from caviar to fashion designer clothes and exotic holidays to mansions without any problem or very great outcry.
A million people can't be wrong. Well yes they can. Especially when, as now, their response is a knee-jerk reaction based on superficial understanding and a dearth of facts presented to them.

So, what of the benefits. The first is in health. According to the 2005 National Travel Survey, 25% of the population never walk anywhere. Only a third walk for more than 20 mins 3 times a week. A quarter of all car journeys are less than two miles. The number of hours that individuals spend in cars has been increasing over the past decade, the time spent walking or cycling has decreased over the same period. No wonder obesity increases.

Charging a high amount for car usage over the first couple of miles would strongly discourage car use for very short journeys and promote walking or cycling. It could remove up to 25% of the cars on the road at any one time. Such a charging regime would reflect reality. Every time a car was used, triggering a charge, there would be a fixed cost irrespective of the distance finally travelled. This would be reflected in the high price for short distance usage.

Secondly, road charging would promote the introduction of flexible and home working and car sharing. By enhanced charging for rush hour usage it would encourage individuals to seek work nearer home, employers to come up with innovative working arrangements to cut transport costs while hastening the introduction of technology to enable more to work from home. At the least it would encourage car sharing to reduce the cost to the individual. 85% of commuting car trips in 2005 were made by a single driver.

There would be a similar effect on car usage for ferrying children to school. The average trip for primary age children was just 1.5 miles, and 3 miles for secondary age children. These distances are eminently suitable for walking or cycling.

Finally, there has been one unquestioned assumption in the whole discussion. That is that road pricing of necessity falls within the government bailiwick. There is absolutely no reason why it should. The introduction of road pricing would be an ideal moment for the ownership of roads to be taken out of the hands of local and central government and given to either local not-for-profit trusts, or, in the case of motorways, a road specific trust. In the case of local roads there is no reason why such a trust should not be susceptible to local democratic control. The administration and collection of the charges could be in the hands of independent companies and subject to a tendering process.

You see, virtuous economics, democratic control and a positive feedback system, plus less congestion and pollution. What more could any right-minded libertarian wish for?

2007-02-12T12:29:00.000Z

Growing your own

The Lincolnshire Echo today, without I am sure any idea of what it was doing, has come up with an answer to the problem of disaffected youth. In one article it reports a call to legalise drugs such as cannabis, in another an initiative aimed at encouraging gardening as an antidote to anti-social behaviour. The answer is to put them together. Encourage kids to grow their own legal cannabis. That way they'll be either knackered, smashed or both. At least they won't be burgling and mugging though.

2007-02-12T11:18:00.000Z

Not joined-up thinking

Three items, utterly disparate and presumably unconnected, caught my eye this morning. Patricia Hewitt obviously feels that the withholding of treatment can be used to force individuals to conform to her idea of how they should live, by not smoking and by not becoming too fat. Never mind that they may well have been paying their taxes all their lives in the belief that medical treatment would be there when required. After all, nobody told them when they started smoking and/or developing an addiction to food and idleness that it would lead to them being abandoned by the NHS.

The Telegraph has a feature on road pricing coinciding with the news that there have been over a million signatories to the No 10 website petition against its introduction. The suspicion in the minds of the citizenry no doubt being that this is just another excuse for government to raise money in order to squander it elsewhere. They can hardly be blamed for thinking this, based on the current government's record of doing exactly that.

The third item is the idea that flexible working practices should be made available to all. This means for instance the right to compress one's working week into four or even three days if one chooses to work longer hours on the days that are worked. In a book commissioned by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Beverly Hughes argues that a right enjoyed at present by those with young children should be extended to all.

Just a little history first to put these subjects into context. Disease, at the time of the introduction of the NHS after WW2, was seen as pretty much either inexplicable or the result of random factors beyond the control of the individual. The major gains in the public's health had been the result of the provision of clean water and the eradication of insanitary living conditions.

Britain's roads until the last half of the eighteenth century were virtually non-existent. Minor routes consisted of rough tracks, from village to village or village to town, whose maintenance was the responsibility of the parish through which they passed. The great north road was reckoned in places to be a mile wide, as carters and drovers sought a passable route for oxen-hauled wagons and herds of cattle bound for the London market.

The introduction of metalled toll roads, principally post-1750, transformed road transport and gave us much of the current road network.. The observant eye can spot the relic toll cottages along most A and B roads still. The tolls collected from the traffic paid the interest on the construction loans and the continuing maintenance of the roads. Virtually all passed eventually into local authority control and tolls were abolished, costs being met out of taxation.

The introduction of the 'working week' is also comparatively recent and happened concurrently with the introduction of toll roads. It was the result of two changes. The introduction of factories, which replaced the home as the centre of much industrial production, and the replacement of predominately subsistence agriculture by a capitalist system with employed labourers. A process hastened by the enclosure acts, mainly, once again, during the last half of the eighteenth century.

Both industrial and agricultural workers were at first paid on a piecework basis wherever possible so that the worker's reward and employer's costs were directly related to output. The shift to payment for time spent working was largely the result of union action. The growing middle class, white collar workforce, were paid for time spent rather than output. It would have been difficult to pay any other way.

The unifying principle, but not the only connection, behind the three items may now be discerned. It is how do you pay for the use of a finite resource, for health care, road use, or an employee's time. The case against road pricing is that road users already pay, via petrol duties and taxes, in direct proportion to their road usage.

This is to miss the point. Road pricing will, if properly applied, charge discriminatingly for the road being used and the time of day the use takes place. At present, the use of my car along 10 miles of country back roads is charged at exactly the same rate as its use along the M25 at 5.30 pm. The first represents nothing like the cost in terms of construction, maintenance and public disadvantage as does the second. It is, in my opinion, a rational economic way to pay for the use of what is a finite resource.

So, why is the same principle not applied to paying for health care? We now know that probably the majority, certainly a substantial minority, of NHS treatment costs are the result of individual life-style decisions. The decision to drive instead of walk, the decision to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, the decision to live on chips and burgers rather than salads and vegetables. Heart disease, lung disease and almost certainly diabetes are rarely the result of random chance.

If we applied the same principle as road charging, individuals would pay health care taxes on a differential rate depending on the easily ascertainable risk factors in their lives. This is surely more acceptable and fairer than having Ms Hewitt take arbitrary decisions on which individuals will have access to treatment.

The situation regarding employment is the converse of the preceding pair. An employer needs to know that the wage that is paid is in proportion to the output. Easy with piecework, not so easy on payment by time spent. The moment you move to payment for time spent, you are inviting in all the rules, regulations, supervision, threats, etc. etc. which employers commonly use to extract the maximum effort from employees, including expecting them to work additional hours free of charge.

You also cause traffic congestion. Because employers feel the need to supervise employees closely, we have the mindless situation of a tidal wave of humanity sweeping backwards and forwards morning and evening to their places of work. In practical terms, electronic communications methods are rendering this unnecessary. What needs to be changed is the mindset of both employees, and probably more importantly unions, and employers.

Employers and employees both need to realise that ultimately the payment that goes from one to the other is related to the output of the employee. If employers turned to a system of payment for work done rather than hours spent they would remove the need for supervision while at the same time employees would have the choice over when the work is carried out. Further, technology could deliver the ability to carry out that work at a place of the employee's choosing.

In so far as centralised manufacturing is concerned, a swap from say an eight hour day, five day week routine to a ten hour four day week or even a twelve hour three day week would presumably mean a more efficient use of machinery and facilities as they could be utilised for longer periods of time and would thus be idle for less time.

The joint introduction of road pricing, flexible hours and place of work, coupled with payment per unit of output could also deliver the reductions in NHS demand that Ms Hewitt seeks. Firstly it would deliver up more non-working hours in the week that would be available for exercise. Road pricing could also be used to encourage healthy living.

Charging a high premium for the first two miles driven would eradicate the tendency to jump into a car to make short journeys that could be undertaken by cycling or walking. It would also breath new life into village shops and local corner stores and hasten the expansion of far more fuel efficient delivery services by the supermarket chains.

More time at home at home would allow more time also for the preparation of fresh food. It is little wonder that people seek refuge in fast food and the comforts of the couch after two hours of commuting and eight hours of being shut up in a fluorescent lit box unable to direct their own lives. Children also are likely to benefit from the greater contact with parents.

Will it happen like this. Probably not. Needs some of that joined up thinking. I don't see much evidence that the government has joined these three concepts together.

2007-02-11T16:20:00.000Z

Student capers at Clare College, Cambridge

The house magazine of Clare College, Cambridge has published, in a special religious satire edition, a copy of one of the dreaded 'Islamic Cartoons' . Local liberal-minded Muslims are naturally up in arms about this. 'Shocking', 'dreadful', 'horrified' etc, etc. from the local Muslim community. Rather than worrying about teaching British history in order to make our society more inclusive, Postman Al could perhaps start by making sure that all children learn the meaning of the word 'freedom' as in 'freedom of speech', but not in 'freedom to bomb'.

Meanwhile, Clare College is convening a special disciplinary board for the student concerned. Lily-livered cowards. They should be supporting the student concerned for upholding traditional British freedoms, not kow-towing to loud-mouthed bullies calling for public apologies. The more we bend over to accommodate their twisted channel vision of the world, the more they will expect.

Monday addendum!

The Indie has a report on this today. Note how it leaves out the reported fact in the original article that the individuals protesting about the cartoon were Muslims. In the Indie article they have just become 'students'.

2007-02-11T09:15:00.000Z

Curriculum wars

There is an interesting item on the BBC website written by Mark Baker about the current tensions over the school curriculum. Mark Baker presents the debate as being between traditionalists and modernisers.

The traditionalists in this instance being represented by Postman Al while in the modernising corner lurks the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Well, there is certainly a bit of a tug of war going on, but it is not quite the way that Mike Baker presents it.

It has slowly dawned upon our esteemed leaders that the policy of multiculturalism, that all the proponents of regulation-enforced equality have been touting for the last thirty years, is not just a miserable failure, but actually leads to people being blown up by home-grown terrorists on one hand or embracing drug related crime as a career choice on the other.

So, the thinking goes, what we need to do is to teach British history more in an effort to embroil the rather more peripheral of the ethnically defined dissidents in the wonders of British culture. The problem with this is that British history, at a national level, consists mostly of a lot of ancient conflicts pursued by self interested rulers trying to enhance their tax take followed by a couple of hundred years of slaughtering and then subjugating those self-same ethnic minorities to British rule.

Ah, thinks Postman Al, if we incorporate the history of the slave trade, then we can show how awful our ancestors were to start with, but then, seeing the error of their ways and, in a spirit of sweetness and light, abolished it. Mind you, if taught properly this might have some unexpected results. Islamic traders were heavily involved in the slave trade and continued for long after its abolition by the British Parliament

In a parallel attempt to use the school curriculum as an adjunct of government policy, Postman Al is trying his hand at another subject. He wants to incorporate climate change, based around Al Gore's presidential candidacy advert, together with 'sustainable development', into the teaching of geography. While he also harbours the rather wild delusion that teaching cookery will provide the answer to the 'obesity crisis'.

It is probably hardly surprising that faced with failure on all fronts, the government should look to the indoctrination of children as a possible way out of their travails. After all, if the kids leave school thoroughly brainwashed with NuLabour's ideology it'll make them all into obedient voters come future elections.

Meanwhile the bunch of wacky theorists over at the QCA see the priorities rather differently. They are not so much interested in what is being taught but the way it is taught and have got all sorts of little ideas for mixing subjects which they would just love to try out. I posted about this HERE the other day. Mark Baker thinks it will be 'fascinating' to see the outcome of this little battle. God, how detached can you get. It will be fascinating in the same way as WW2 was 'fascinating' as long as you were a Martian.

The eventual result will almost certainly be a compromise. This could well lead to some interesting topics. Parents should prepare themselves for their offspring requiring help in the following cross-subject headings

Curry and the British Raj

The Brontës and climate change

Northanger Abbey - an early carbon zero mansion

Reggae perspectives on the slave trade

I'm sure readers can add some of their own inventive and enriching 'modernised curriculum' subjects for study.

Interesting that South Africa should be chosen as an example of how new subjects can enliven the curriculum. Teaching life skills has certainly delivered some thoughtful ideas on the Aids epidemic as well as an even higher crime rate than we enjoy here.

The current battle for the curriculum is not between traditionalists and modernisers. It is a battle between cynical, manipulative politicians and self-promoting, self-absorbed educational theorists.

2007-02-09T16:04:00.000Z

Feminism, the female femme fatale

I was intending to discuss some of the issues regarding the repercussions of the feminist movement, when up pops Deborah Orr in the Independent. In an article which seems a little disjointed and unsure whether to criticise the C of E or promote feminism, she opines

It's not feminism, but the failure to engage with it, that has undermined marriage

Is it now. Firstly, let's examine what she considers have been the the gains that married women have made from feminism. She says,

It's true that the rejection of marriage was an article of faith among feminists in the 1970s. But feminists rejected marriage because it demanded their subservience. Who would want to join an institution that not only disqualified one from having a decent career, but sanctified the right of a partner legally to rape and beat you? Who would want to join an institution that demanded you run the household and look after the children, but that you meekly handed over the phone when the bank manager called for the "man of the house". Marriage discriminated against women (and so did lack of marriage, which made you a "spinster"), which was why it offended so many of us.

Our ideas about marriage have changed, thanks to feminism, and the huge sacrifices women were routinely expected to make after marriage, are no longer taken for granted, or shouldn't be anyway. Marriage had evolved to make women and children into dependants, and feminism has inspired women to safeguard their autonomy, when they wish to, instead.

Firstly, what evidence is there that marriage demanded subservience? Individuals may demand subservience, both male and female, but not the institution of marriage itself. Undoubtedly there were, and are, bad husbands. Equally, there were and are women who are bad wives. It is not the institution that makes the relationship, it is the individuals concerned who decide on how a relationship works or doesn't work.

As I have shown over the last couple of posts on the subject, until the twentieth century, it was the physical realities of life that prevented many, but by no means all, women from having a career, not a male conspiracy. It was a combination of technology and historical accident, if you can call two worldwide conflicts an accident, that enabled women to have a career if they so chose, not any action on the part of feminists, who weren't around anyway in any numbers until the nineteen sixties, by which time most of the changes had already taken place.

Next Ms Orr casts men as rapists, presumably using marriage as a convenient cover for their activities. Where pray were the laws which sanctified the right of men to rape and beat wives? It may be possible to argue that the law was reluctant to become embroiled in marital discord. This stemmed, rightly, from the difficulty in passing judgement on situations where the protagonists were the only witnesses.

This is still a difficulty now and the principal reason why so few reported rapes end in convictions. It was also true that physical cruelty by husbands was one of the main reasons cited for divorce proceedings. If a wife wanted to remove herself from a physically abusive marriage the mechanism existed.

Marriage as an institution is once again castigated by Ms Orr as 'demanding' that women ran the household. It is true that for countless generations women did bring up the children and run the household. Once again this was the result of the normal exigencies of life as it was lived in the past. Also once again, it was technology and the social upheavals due to conflict which changed the situation for women, not any action by feminists.

Bank managers never telephoned for 'the man of the house' for any reason other than it was he that had the bank account. Bank accounts were to be had in joint names for centuries. As has the ownership of property. Mortgages which were in the name of the husband, were so only if he was the sole earner. Mortgagors were understandably reluctant to include in financial viability calculations any income which was susceptible to be lost. As so many women stopped working upon the advent of a child, predominantly quite voluntarily, it was financially prudent, in their opinion, to count the husband's income only. Ms Orr seems unaware of one little financial inequality from the past. Men were responsible for their wife's debts. The reverse situation did not apply.

It bears repeating once again, what has changed about the role of women in both marriage and society at large is the massive increase in the economic power at their disposal. It is the economic power wielded by women which provides their autonomy, not the arid landscape of feminism. Ms Orr commits the naïve folly of projecting back onto the past the concerns of the present. Marriage, and the customs and laws which surround it, has been an evolving institution for millennia in response to a wide variety of changing historical circumstances.

Ms Orr goes on to say

Even Iain Duncan Smith cannot be under the illusion that women on Glasgow housing estates, bringing up fatherless children, are living in state-sponsored poverty because they are feminists. Many different social pressures have led to today's predicament.

Absolutely correct, but also utterly irrelevant. The women bringing up fatherless children on estates everywhere are doing so largely because of mindless government initiatives and benefit systems which encourage such a situation. What is true, however, is that so often feminist ideas of equality have provided the driving force behind such government stupidity.

That feminists have had an impact upon marriage is undeniable. What they have done is to provide women with a double bind. If a woman chooses career over family as the feminists advocate, she risks being caught between guilt over denying any children she has the care they so desperately need, or remaining childless and facing a middle and old age saddled with an overpowering sense of loss for the children she never had.

If she takes the other route and places marriage, family and the nurture of offspring ahead of personal economic fulfilment, she faces the criticism, jeers and induced guilt from those who have chosen the career path and are anxious to sanctify their selfishness. You can see why men are reluctant to engage with feminism. It doesn't actually effect them very much. It is women themselves who suffer its greatest cruelties. Men look on bemused.

2007-02-09T11:44:00.000Z

CHILDHOOD ABOLISHED!!!

Children need to play. Let's just run through that startling revelation again shall we. Children need to play. Now we've got that haven't we. Anybody disagree? No, I thought not. Well, Ms Susan Tuck, the head of St John's Primary School in Lincoln does actually. This idiotic fool has banned all playground games which involve bodily contact. She is quoted as saying they are 'rough and inappropriate'. According to one concerned parent this includes 'pat-a-cake' or even putting a hand on a friend's shoulder. Offenders are humiliated, or given playtime detention as punishment. Susan Tuck reckons apparently that playtime games should be organised, peaceful and structured.

A parent reports that the rules were introduced without reference to governors or parents. With fascist tendencies such as this Ms Tuck is an obvious candidate for greater responsibility. John Reid is always on the look-out for suitable Gestapo agents. Go to it Tuck, your black leather overcoat and Walther P-38 await!

2007-02-08T16:41:00.000Z

Feminism - useless, dangerous or both? - 2

One of the principal characteristics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was increasing urbanisation. This also impinged on female economic activity. It certainly provided more opportunities for women to start and run retail businesses, which they did in profusion. However, the propensity of women to enter service, the main urban female employment opportunity, where they habitually stayed until their mid to late twenties, coupled with a high infant mortality and the need to nurse babies meant that once married they were effectively removed from the workplace.

From the mid nineteenth century onwards there was a growing demand for clerks. This was initially, for the reasons stated above, restricted to males, with the shortfall made up by males from overseas, particularly Germany. The advent of the first world war and the departure of men to the front opened up many new avenues for female employment. The advent of artificial baby milk, and the rapidly diminishing infant death rate due to an improved regime of public health released women from the shackles of constant reproductive toil. This was enhanced by the rapid spread of contraception which enabled the timing of childbirth and the size of family to be placed effectively under parents' control.

These technological advances coincided with others in the field of office machinery and further enhanced female employment possibilities. If a woman chose to follow a career rather than become a wife, there were now plenty of opportunities to do so. While it is true that rules which caused a woman to lose her job upon becoming pregnant may have truncated the careers of some married women, it did mean that greater numbers of young women gained experience as they filled the vacated jobs.

In manufacturing also, the introduction of more and more labour saving machinery meant that more and more women were able to enter the workplace. These changes received another major boost from the second world war. Once again the removal of large numbers of men from the job market opened up a wealth of opportunities for women.

Educational openings for women had been growing apace all the while and following the war growing numbers entered university. A process hastened by the post war foundation of new higher education establishments. The war provided benefits in other ways. It stimulated research and development into electronics, while many manufacturers following the war saw consumer goods as an ideal replacement for wartime government contracts.

These developments accelerated female participation in the workforce. Firstly, they provided a demand for labour on consumer goods production lines. Women who had become used to this type of work during the war slotted easily into their new peacetime role. At the same time, many of the consumer goods they were producing released women from more of the chores they had previously been used to.

The ability to store food for longer in refrigerators reduced the time absorbed by shopping. As did the development of frozen foods which also obviated the need for time to be devoted to the preservation of fresh foods. The introduction of full-time education for all children, initially until they were fifteen, also released women from the home, as did the provision of cooked school meals for all children. Washing machines meant that a day a week did not have to be spent doing the laundry while advances in fabric materials meant that they were easier to wash.

The planned economy of the second world war was continued and enhanced in the post war period. At both local and national level this drove an accelerating demand for office workers within a growing state bureaucracy. Shortages of labour generally during the nineteen fifties and sixties ensured that these bureaucracies were staffed to a large extent by women. Increasing levels of government imposed regulation drove increases in bureaucracy throughout the private sector as well resulting in more job openings for suitably skilled and educated women.

These trends continued and accelerated throughout the rest of the twentieth century. The decline in traditional mining and manufacturing industry allied to the rapid rise of the services sector further increased the career openings for women. Even greater bureaucratisation took place within a work environment more and more orientated around data capture and processing, the skills for which were independent of gender.

The foregoing, somewhat sketchy, account of female participation in economic activity shows quite clearly that the gender make up of the present labour force has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with feminism, and proceeded with no political intervention whatsoever. Indeed, the principal driving force behind women being able to take on virtually any role they wish is technological advance.

We are left with two areas, pay and politics. The so-called gender pay gap has been discussed in many articles by Tim Worstall. This one is probably the most useful in the present context. You will note that a gap did exist in 1938 between male and female manual workers. This however is totally explicable bearing in mind the far greater utility of male manual workers.

You would have had to be mad as an employer to pay the same wages to somebody who was not so strong, had less physical endurance and who would never repay training costs as they would most certainly leave to start a family. Due to the reasons outlined above, there was very little likelihood of a woman returning to work until children were off hand.

That the gap in pay has continually narrowed has been principally due to the massive change in the nature of work generally from primarily manual to almost totally intellectual and skill based. Such discrepancy as now exists can be explained purely in terms of a typical woman's working cycle.

Capitalist market forces are blind to gender, (and much else besides). The market place will always ensure that if there is a shortage, prices will rise until the shortage is satisfied. Thus in a job market which is constantly in need of intelligent and skilled workers, any initial gender pay gap would be rapidly eradicated as employers competed with each other to fill vacancies with the best applicants, male or female. Ironically, the one area where positive action over pay may have had some effect is the one where market forces do not operate, government and local government.

Women have been able to stand for parliament since 1918. However they stubbornly refuse to do so in sufficient numbers to appease the 'equality' industry. Feminist activist groups such as Fawcett like to blame this on a variety of factors. Selection committees, the demands of child care, lack of cash, an ingrained culture and lack of female confidence are all trotted out as reasons. The Labour party has the greatest proportion of female MPs, this, however, has only been achieved by the imposition of all-woman short-lists. A process flirted with by Cameron, but now apparently abandoned.

That there might be other factors at work is suggested by the situation in Local Government where around 30% only of councillors are women. This cannot be down to discriminatory selection procedures as there is a general shortage of candidates. Cost is not a factor either as the costs for standing as a councillor are negligible. Council meetings are usually in the evening so child-care should not prove a barrier. It could just be that women do not wish to take part in politics.

Feminism can thus lay claim to no victories. If it had never existed as a social force the position of women economically and politically would be exactly as they are now. Which is not to say that feminism has not had adverse effects on society. More on this in the future.

2007-02-08T12:24:00.000Z

Ruth Kelly announces new type of human

Ruth Kelly is concerned about local councillors. So she jolly well should be. Some are very peculiar indeed! According to the report from her department there are c. 20,000 councillors, of whom 69.3% are male and 29.3% female. This means that 280 councillors (1.4%) are neither male nor female. They can't be hermaphrodites as they would have been counted in both categories leading to a plus 100% figure. If anybody sees one of these new types of human perhaps they could photograph it, preferably, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, naked. Is Ms Kelly the prototype?

2007-02-07T15:57:00.000Z

The fingerprints of fascism

The BBC is carrying a report about the fingerprinting of children in order to automate further computerised registers and library loan records. So far so bad. The government is apparently going to 'encourage' schools to seek parental permission before doing this. Translated this means that the government will be encouraging schools to intensify and promote further the universal grip on citizens' lives our totalitarian minded leaders seek.

One school has already decided that fingerprinting can be used to control what pupils eat. Brumby Engineering College - no it isn't really, it's just a comprehensive under another name - in Scunthorpe is going to use fingerprinting in order to monitor exactly what children are buying to eat in the school canteen. Computer print-outs will then be used to identify who is buying junk food. The head apparently is of the opinion that the system will stop pupils' money being spent on junk food.

So, you were wondering what ID cards could be used for? The slippery slope gets ever steeper.

2007-02-06T17:22:00.000Z

Feminism - useless, dangerous or both?

I meant to write this last week and announced my intention of doing so. Unfortunately life in the shape of sport, orienteering and watching the six nations, rather got in the way. My apologies to anybody who visited over the weekend looking for it. As it promises to be rather long I will post it in two parts.

That there has been a change, principally over the last century and a half, in women's role in British and western culture generally is undeniable. For most, including myself, this is probably a welcome development in our society. The only caveats would probably revolve around the care and upbringing of babies and young children by working mothers. I personally would subscribe to the view that any individual should be able to exploit their economic worth to the limit without any hindrance if they so choose.

The credit for these changes is inevitably and universally claimed by the feminist movement. The shifts in the female role are characterised by feminists as a series of successful battles which have been waged to challenge and overcome male domination. A typical scenario would pinpoint men as having relegated women to a domestic role early in human culture and forcibly kept them there until the advent of the heroic feminist movement.

Feminists perceive and project these advances in political, domestic and economic terms. The campaign to extend the vote to women is normally taken to be the start of the road to female equality. It was not until around the nineteen sixties that a recognisable feminist movement started to agitate for change by calling for government action to enforce gender equality. Since then there have been various legislative moves to achieve 'equal rights and 'equal pay' irrespective of gender.

So were women condemned to subservience early in human history? Early death in either inter-tribal conflict or hunting is a universal feature of the earliest hunter/gatherer societies. It was a mathematically correct strategy to protect women from the dangers inherent in such a lifestyle. A woman can only reproduce once a year. If she is killed, her reproductive capacity is lost from the moment of her demise. If a man is killed he can be replaced by another.

What of the next human social strategy, that of the subsistence peasant family? It firstly makes sense from the point of view of the family's survival for women to be protected as much as possible for their reproductive capability, while the hard manual labour associated with such an agricultural way of life precluded women taking part to any great extent when encumbered with infants.

The role of women in the care of infants in such a situation needs to be scrutinised. Firstly, the death rate of infants was extremely high, so that it might require two or three live births in order produce an adult male who would be able to continue the family and also provide additional labour on the holding.

Secondly, in the absence of artificial milk, mothers were required to nurse children until they were weaned, which also precluded their taking a more active role in the work of the holding. This of course did not mean that they were inactive, but their activities were directed at the husbandry of animals near to the dwelling or the preparation and preservation of food.

If the peasant society of late medieval Britain is examined in this context, this exactly the situation which we see. It is true, however, that there are plenty of instances of wives continuing to run the family holding following the death of husbands. Such urban and commercial opportunities as existed also throw up examples in the records of retail businesses being run by women. It was not that men prevented women from taking such a role, so much as the nature of the enterprises themselves and the physical qualities of the world in which they lived that inhibited more from taking the same route.

That the educational possibilities open to women in medieval Britain were curtailed is certainly true. However, the fact that university education was limited to men was purely a function of the religious nature of all university education. There is, as far as I know, no record of women at the time challenging this situation. Even so, the circumstances were the result of universal doctrinal belief and not of any specific male conspiracy to prevent women from learning to read and write.

Education at that level was rationed purely on the basis of one's status in society rather than any specific sanctions based on gender. Plenty of female members of the aristocracy could count, read and write and wield considerable power as well.

From around 1550, the educational and entrepreneurial possibilities open to women increased rapidly. A growing interest in education led many women to open and run 'dame' schools in which the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic were taught. The start of a female role in education which exists still and is still weighted towards primary education.

A growing appetite for manufactured goods, most of which were produced in the home, also strengthened the economic power of women. As payment for such items as knitted hosiery was on a 'piecework' basis there was no differential in the income which could be realised by either men or women. If women wanted economic independence it was available without hindrance. Most of course did not and chose to use their economic power for the good of the family.

As manufacturing moved into factories, and the mining of raw materials and fuel gathered pace, there was no attempt to bar female entrance into any enterprise. There are for instance plenty of recorded instances of women working in coal mining. They may well have been paid less than men, but this purely reflected the fact that individuals of both sexes were employed solely for their muscle power. Men enjoyed an economic premium only because they were stronger and could perform a greater range of tasks to greater effect.

Next part should be here tomorrow.

2007-02-06T09:40:00.000Z

Armageddon - Mk 2

When the IPCC report came out last Friday, the end of the world seemed to be just around the corner. The Independent gave us a timeline which had humanity wiping out all life on earth with a veritable cauldron of global warming if we even started our cars up on Saturday morning. Three days later and our end is most likely to arrive via avian flue, which would at least leave everything else on the planet OK. Even the Independent has gone back to worrying over plastic packaging.

While we may have just had the warmest January for 90 years - remind me someone of what was causing global warming in 1916 - possibly heat from guns on the Western Front - across the northern plains of America temperatures have hit an eleven year low.

Another sign that global warming is just a little passe in the end of the world stakes comes from the EU, which has just given in to car manufacturers and gone for higher emission targets than originally planned. Isn't it amazing how rapidly self-interest triumphs over altruism when jobs and income are at stake. Germany was the fly in the ointment. Mercedes, Porsche and BMW have more clout than the hair shirt brigade.

2007-02-05T18:02:00.000Z

Hattersley blathering – again

There have been only two occasions in my life when I have felt with total certainty that the people I was with hated me. The first was in my youth and enjoying a minor dalliance with the daughter of an Irish politician who had a London flat. I visited her one Sunday morning to discover that a few young Irish gentlemen, wild of eye but reluctant to meet mine, had spent the night on her floor.

Their demeanour left me in no doubt that they would like to see all Englishmen dead, and that I would make ideal practice material to start the ball rolling. This was before the I.R.A. bombing campaign started and even before the troubles in Ulster. I often wondered after just who it was I met with that morning, and what may have been the results of their later actions.

The second time was just over a decade ago, in 1995, long before Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda became known to the world at large. In the course of some research for a book, I had been visiting and interviewing various religious groups. Hindus and Sikhs, Jews and Catholics, I had been received by all with hospitality either in peoples' homes or in their places of worship. The only anxiety they had was to ensure, as did I, that what I wrote was accurate and reflected their reality.

I then visited a Muslim 'Education Centre'. It would probably be described now as a 'madrassa'. Once again I had the same feeling of concentrated hatred I had felt all those years previously in that shabby London flat. I received no cooperation. No information was forthcoming. I asked if within the extensive library I had seen there were any books which might help me. It transpired there were not. Puzzled, I left as soon as I could and certainly not fast enough for my hosts.

I was reminded of these past events by Mr Hattersley's article in today's Guardian. Mr Hattersley is writing about the perceptions among the Muslims of his late Birmingham constituency of British people in general and the British police in particular, following the events of last week. Mr Hattersley does not like the way the police acted and feels that the Muslim resentment he discerns is collectively our fault, and also, more specifically, the police's fault. He objects also to the reasons for the police action reaching the public domain.

Mr Hattersley likes to consider himself, I believe, a bit of a historian. He should know that of all the various ethnic and religious groups that have settled in the UK, only one in the past has held out against integration and the acceptance generally of the common laws and culture of this country. This was the gypsies, who, as a result, still engender hostility and suspicion to this day. The question of religion, so long the major divisive force in British life was only finally dealt with by the tacit acceptance of all to ignore it.

Indeed, the only way the gypsies could maintain their integrity was by constantly moving from one place to another. Greeted with hostility by all, moving on when local tempers became inflamed. It is a fact of humanity that all communities and cultures are hostile, at first, to incoming strangers. It is also a fact that two cultures cannot peaceably inhabit the same territory without friction and eventual conflict. The normal way this eventual conflict is avoided is by adaptation on the part of the incomers, leading to tolerance on the part of the majority group

The only way that hostile communities can exist on the same piece of territory is by the ruthless suppression of one group by another, or on occasion, by both being suppressed by a forceful third party. From Rwanda to Ulster, from South Africa to Uganda, from the Thirty Years war to the massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, history and anthropology scream at us to ignore these facts at our peril.

Ignore them though, we, and in particular the Labour Party, of which during all the crucial years Mr Hattersley was a member and at times a serving minister, have done. The chief culprit in this, our present discontent, has been the policy of multiculturalism, spawned by governments, Wilson's and Callaghan's, of which Mr Hattersley was a member. It was the subversive product of minds more concerned with doctrine than with reality.

It was not only that all the evidence of the last thousand years showed quite unequivocally that it did not work. It was the false hope it held out to any group who believed the treacherous lie that was peddled. The inherent falsehood that laws such as the 1976 Race Relations Act, Mr Hattersley was a Minister at the time, could change the actuality of human behaviour.

You can see Hattersley's ethical double standard and intellectual contortions clearly in the following quotation

It was not until Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses that I understood how some of my Muslim constituents felt about their place in British society. My immediate reaction to complaints about its contents was the response of a proper western liberal. In a free country, there could be no restriction on what is said or written. Then a man called Saed Mogul asked me why, having been a friend of Birmingham Muslims for so long, I had allied myself to people who treated their most sacred beliefs with undisguised contempt. He said the fact that most Christians are casual about their religion is not an argument for insisting Muslims are the same. His demand was for understanding, not censorship. It was then that I realised that much of what is said and written about Muslim Britain carries a clear message. Live like us or risk being treated like pariahs.

Having patted himself on the back for being such a liberal thinker, Mr Hattersley then invites us to consider Muslims as worthy of a different standard. A standard they, with Mr Hattersley's blessing, wish to impose on us. And what 'free country' is this, where it is Mr Hattersley's beliefs which require to be imposed by government fiat in order to achieve the results he demands?

The majority of Hindu and Sikh Indians, and Caribbean immigrants as well, at least had a language in common with their hosts. While the Mr Patels and Mr Singhs worked at their jobs, moved to the best educational postcodes and plotted on buying their Mercedes, actions which chimed with countless ambitious English families, Muslims concerned themselves with drawing into enclosed communities delineated and barricaded by their own language, customs and religion.

We are now reaping the results. The finger that Mr Hattersley points at us and the police should be pointed straight at himself. Yes, he should be apologising to those old constituents of his that rewarded him and his fallacious promises by providing him with a majority, promises that it was not in his, or any politician's, power to keep. He should be apologising, above all, for his ignorance of human nature. When in Rome.......

2007-02-05T11:22:00.000Z

The worst job in the school

When my father became a deputy head, among the various tasks he acquired as part of the job was the preparation of the school timetable. This was done during the school summer holidays. It started out as notes on a single sheet of paper. Within a week, the dining room table would be covered with paper which required careful sorting as it was removed at mealtimes.

After two or three weeks, meals became a little more casual as the bits of paper became a table-wide chart. The chart remained until the last week of the holidays, with constant alterations, scratchings out, bits pasted in, all accompanied by a concomitant decline in tolerance and rise in irascibility. He reckoned it was the worst job in the school. It is now doubtless achieved by a computer programme which delivers the required framework with a single key stroke. Hmmm.

The one immutable fact was the division of the day. At my own school at the time, lessons were all delivered in 45min slots. Some came as double lessons. Games as 3 periods consecutively. Children knew exactly where they were supposed to be. When the bell rang to signify the 45mins was up, chaos reigned briefly, replaced almost immediately by silence as the next period started.

The school had no mission statement or publicised ethos. We all knew exactly why we were there. It was to learn in order to acquire GCEs, 'A' levels and a place at University. The school was extremely successful at doing this. Maths masters taught maths, French masters taught French. Kids like that sort of thing. Simple well defined, easily understood and easily followed disciplines.

However interested or not pupils may have been in what was taught during the lessons, they knew damn well that it was in the lessons that they learnt. It was most certainly not in the chaos between lessons as teachers and pupils alike scampered from room to room to sort themselves out for the next 45mins.

So, usher onto the stage Mick Waters. Now Mick must either be a bit of a card or utterly deranged. Mick is head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. According to an article in today's Times he wants to tear up the school timetable. He seems to be under the impression that learning is best delivered as an adjunct of chaos. Lessons could be anything from a few minutes each upwards. The boundaries between subjects are to become not so much blurred as invisible.

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if the PE teacher turned up in the history lesson to show examples of how great sportsmen through the ages had exercised leadership and control?”

he is quoted as telling the Times. You can see how much sport Mick has done anyway if he thinks great sportsman get there by any other method than total self-interest, self-discipline and a desire to beat others.

Here are some more 'Wouldn't it be lovely' ideas

Wouldn't it be lovely if power over how our kid's are educated was taken out of the hands of theoreticians proselytising personal dogmas and given to locally elected bodies whose remit was to produce results or get chucked out.
Wouldn't it be lovely if the sole aim of schools was to impart knowledge rather than be the platform for the delivery of politically motivated tripe about diversity, equality, multiculturalism or whatever other headline grabbing whim takes Tone and Postman Al's fancy.
Wouldn't it be lovely if training teachers was taken out of the hands of assorted feminists, Marxists, and other self-interested theoreticians. (see here and here for more on this)
Wouldn't it be lovely if NuLabour's inept politicians together with their fellow-travelling mutually masturbatory commissars left education alone.

2007-02-02T09:25:00.000Z

A very well hidden success

Mr Blair yesterday hailed the 'hidden success' of school sport. Apparently 80% of pupils now get 2hrs of 'quality' PE per week. Many years ago for sure, but my school week included 1½ hours a week of PE in a purpose built gym, plus 2½ hours of either rugby or cricket. What a success.

2007-02-01T17:26:00.000Z

As Thick as Thieves

So, there's these two dodgy geezers havin' a a bit of a do, right. One's got this charity scam thing going where he cons people into sending donations, the other's had 'is collar felt a couple of times by the plod over a little matter of supplying worthless titles as sweeteners for loans which don't get paid back. Add in a few showbiz 'angers on and what have you got?

A no. 10 photo opportunity is what.

Our Tone has been entertaining one Dan Morrell at home, together with a few showbiz peripherals. The occasion was a reception in aid of 'Global Cool', a sort of 'has-beens for saving the planet' organisation. Dan Morrell is the founder of 'Global Cool', and he wants your money. If you feel impelled to visit their website I suggest a tranquillizer or two first.

Now Dan, ex video-game importer, ex fashion retailer, ex night club proprietor, ex advertising middleman who now describes himself as a 'social entrepreneur' had a Paulian 'road to Damascus moment' and decided that it was ~~easier~~ more worthwhile peddling questionable science in return for donations. His first project was to set up 'Future Forests', which has since metamorphosed into the Carbon Neutral Company.

This outfit set out to flog trees in order to offset carbon emissions, a project rather precariously based on some rather dubious maths. Dan Morrell reckoned that it would require 10 trees to cancel out the CO2 emissions for one US citizen for four months. Let's assume that we British are not so profligate and that we only generate 60% of the average American. This would be 6 trees per four months or 18 trees per annum per UK inhabitant.

There are 60 million of us here in the UK, so to offset the carbon emissions of the total UK population would require the planting of 18 x 60,000,000 trees per annum. This comes out at 1,080,000,000 or more simply approx 1 billion trees per annum. An average planting density would be approx 1500 trees per hectare.

Therefore those 1 billion trees would require 720,000 hectares to be planted per annum. The area of Great Britain is 209,000 sq km. There are 100 hectares per sq km. Therefore the area of Great Britain expressed as hectares is 20,900,000 hectares. If we divide the total area by the area required for trees per annum we find that it will take just 29 years before the whole island is covered by trees.

Ah, you're saying what about food. Well obviously we would have to continue to grow our food, otherwise just think of the carbon footprint of all those food miles importing it from elsewhere. The area of farmland is around 70% of the total. So there would be less than a third available for planting trees. Most of which, if not already built on is unfortunately already planted with trees. Not much Future Forest to be had then. Not much of a mathematician either.

Dan no longer appears among the clique still running the Carbon Neutral Company, which has now branched out into such must haves as carbon neutral weddings and eco-friendly toilet descalers.

On the Global Cool website, Dan thoughtfully provides what I first thought was a game of snakes and ladders, but turns out to be a diagram showing where the revenue goes and where it sticks. Heavens above, apparently there is somebody called 'the loan provider'. God, you don't think Lord L—y has been helping do you?

Our Tone loved it all, well keeps your mind off nasty policemen doesn't it. He was in top pukeworthy form as he gushed,

"This is just a wonderful initiative that I hope will inspire people the world over. The whole purpose of Global Cool is to mobilise that passion people have for doing the responsible thing for the environment with a sense that you can actually make an impact. You don't have to wait for others to act."

Absolutely. Just send your twenty quid to Dan and the planet is saved. Except that some of it goes to Global Cool Productions Ltd and that goes to putting on concerts, and the profits from the concerts, less 15% goes to......Oh what the hell, looks a better little earner than selling video games doesn't it?

PS. Forgot to mention, Millibum was there too but seems to have been left out of all the piccies on the no. 10 website. Is he becoming a non-person do you think? He's certainly got a head's start.

2007-02-01T10:37:00.000Z

Slave power more reliable

One of those sanitised reconstructed heritage villages has just been forced to close, due it seems to difficulties over power supplies. It features dwellings in the style of Celts, Romans and Vikings, all of whom were addicted to using the muscle power of conquered people to supply their energy requirements. The sight of a few unfortunates whipped to keep the treadmill powered generators going might improve the visitor numbers at Derventio Heritage Village as well.

2007-02-01T09:47:00.000Z

Paxman bites the hand that feeds

The fisherman's friend is very cross with the BBC. They are not doing enough to reduce their carbon footprint. The story appears in today's Indie. Paxman wants more recycling bins. Mmm, don't quite know what they have got to do with global warming, but wait. What's this? He's attacking that greenest of hoariest green presenters David Attenborough for jetting around the world while making documentaries about, err... global warming.

Now I don't know whether it has occurred to Mr Paxman, but his own carbon footprint must be pretty massive. It consists of the electricity which is being used by all those millions upon millions of viewers who are absolutely glued to their televisions while he skewers some hapless interviewee. So Mr Paxman, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint just stop drawing your salary, stay at home and grow your own veg. Simple.

2007-02-01T09:26:00.000Z

Confused.cam(eron)

Mr Cameron yesterday presented the Telegraph/Jaeger-Le Coultre 'Business Personality of the Year Award', as reported, naturally enough, in today's edition of the paper. Mr Cameron apparently opined that

"Although we have a vibrant market economy in this country there's still far too much anti-business sentiment,"

He then went on to say that

"I think one of the ways we get over that is by building up business heroes and heroines, entrepreneurs who have done great things to show the power of creativity and enterprise in a market economy."

Now the recipient of the award was a 24 year old named Lucy Watkins. Lucy has apparently been deaf since birth and may well lose her sight as well. For her situation I have nothing but the profoundest sympathy. For her efforts to improve the lot of disabled employees generally I have great respect. She works however for Somerset County Council, who are not, I suspect, leading the charge towards entrepreneurial innovation.

So, did Cameron take along the wrong speech? Has the Telegraph so lost the plot that it now thinks that local government bodies lead the way in their dedication to a free market economy? I am very confused.

2007-01-31T18:22:00.000Z

YES! Government works – unfortunately

Wallowing in her Second Life avatar as Minister for Women, Ruth Kelly, the self-flagellating role model for universal womanhood, yesterday released a press statement headed

Industry shows commitment to enabling women to succeed

Ms Kelly is boasting about the employers who have signed up to her quest for eliminating the 'gender pay gap'. This was the result of a report from that fair-minded body the Women and Work Commission (WWC), who have just issued a document entitled 'Shaping a Fairer Future'. More of them later.

Let us firstly examine how committed industry actually is to this piece of nonsense. Ms Kelly's departmental press release helpfully lists, without the least tremor of embarrassment, exactly which companies and organisations that make up 'industry' have signed up to be 'Exemplar Employers' in the quest for 'equality'. Well, not very many actually. Out of the 107 names listed, virtually 50% are, yes, central or local government bodies. So, not much industry there then.

A further 15, while assuredly companies, are companies which have their snouts in the government funding trough so deeply as to have but a very tenuous connection to capitalist free-enterprise. We find for instance Accenture and Camelot Group, both totally dependent upon government for their continuing existence. Shell and BP, busily seeking taxpayer pounds in order to build wind farms are in there cosying up as well. Other government contractors such as Mitie Group may be found burnishing their female friendly image in order that the government contracts keep rolling in.

Such a list would not of course be complete without defence contractors such as Bombardier Aerospace and BAE systems. Another 12 are companies from the heavily regulated financial sector such as HBOS and HSBC. We also find Guardian Newspapers and the Cooperative Group lurking in the list as well. In fact around 80% of the list are either government bodies or bodies which are tied to government in a bloodsucking symbiotic relationship.

Most of the rest are unheard of accountants and lawyers. Tesco appears in the list also, ever willing to do anything which ingratiates themselves with government and staves off possible enquiries into the extent, and means of acquisition, of their landbank. In fact I could find just one company which makes its livelihood from making and selling products to the public. The Ford Motor Company.

So, what is it that all these worthy institutions are signing up to? It's that last 13% (or 17% depending on how it's measured) of the gender pay gap. Tim Worstall demonstrated with admirable clarity a few months ago that this is just about the differential that you would expect, bearing in mind the career years lost due to motherhood. Never mind. The Women and Work Commission have just published their latest salvo in the never ending quest for equality.

I shall save until tomorrow an historical analysis of the role of women in the workplace, for now interest lies with what the WWC wants and how it should be achieved. It comes up with a forty point list of demands. Most of them based around compelling employers to institute programmes to ensure that the WWC's vision of equality is met.

The report, however, goes far beyond measures just to promote some dippy notion of equality. It wants to enforce a whole new structure on British culture and society. Never mind about product placement, how about this,

Government information campaigns should show women in occupations not traditionally taken up by them, and men as parents and carers. The media, in particular drama and advertising, should be encouraged to do likewise. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport should set up two high-level groups, of advertisers and key players in television drama, to encourage non stereotypical portrayals of women and men at work.

Baroness Prosser and her cohorts want to manipulate all aspects of the media in order to achieve their ends. How long before a Tessa Jowell commissar is sitting right there in the East Enders scripting sessions... oh no sorry, the BBC shape up pretty well already. OK, how long before James Bond is forced to own up to his hidden feminine side and take a job as a female hygiene receptacle emptier (yes they do exist), or Maid Marion twangs her bow while leading her Gallant Girls against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. You can bet he'll remain a man.

There is, unfortunately, a very, very sad side to all of this. You see, it works, and works only too well. All those ads which portray men as silly and their wives as wise and decisive, the endless characterisation of men as incompetent or violent, or often both, so beloved by soap writers, they are worming their way into society's collective subconscious. Mix in government initiatives that are destroying the two parent heterosexual family as the norm and leaving boys bereft of resident fathers, and you'll get a result.

In an overwhelming irony of timing which illustrates the unwanted effect of government social engineering, another branch of government has noticed something which I have written about before, (you can find the articles here). The dwindling number of boys, particularly white boys, entering university. So, government thinking is not too joined-up yet then.

Bill Rammell, one of Postman Al's minions, seems to want to make the situation worse. We're working harder to improve participation he is quoted as saying. That's the problem Bill, not the solution. Just go away.

POSTSCRIPT - THURSDAY!

Boris Johnson has quite obviously been reading my mind. He has a piece on the subject here. If you need more ideas Boris just let me know. I'll see what I can think of.

2007-01-29T10:06:00.000Z

NHS - Again

Right on cue following my last couple of posts, we have a report from the Association of Directors of Public Health (ADPH) suggesting that certain medical procedures should be paid for by the recipient. Perhaps I could earn a living as a fortune teller. The ADPH is a trade association of the public health directors of NHS Trusts. Their own website suggests that the BBC report is the best way to access their ideas.

There are some strong messages here. The 'discussion' is opened by suggesting that only semi-cosmetic procedures such as varicose vein removal or 'ineffective' treatments such as tonsil removal should be paid for, though if the latter really is ineffective why is it done anyway. As far as I am aware there has never been a queue of patients demanding that their tonsils be removed.

A little later in the 'discussion', other procedures such as hip replacement and cataract removal also join the list. Presumably these cannot be classed as either cosmetic or ineffective. If you can't see or walk, a procedure which restores a pain free normality to life can hardly be ineffective.

Both of these procedures are presumably carried out on more elderly patients. Could it be that the ADPH is suggesting that elderly patients should not receive their treatment for free? I certainly fail to see why, say, a self-induced sports injury, or the result of an après nightclub brawl is more entitled to free treatment than is a hip-replacement which is the result of the wear and tear of life.

However, having attempted to habituate us to the idea that certain treatments should be paid for by the recipient the net is widened again by Dr Crayford, the ADPH president and spokesman, to include 'non-life threatening' procedures.

So, what is going on here? You do not have to be a seer to figure out that the NHS and the way that healthcare is delivered in this country is doomed. NHS budgets will continue to rise unless demand is restricted in some way via rationing, either by price or by some bureaucratic system. This little outburst by the ADPH is an attempt to manipulate the agenda in favour of rationing by charging thus ensuring that their particular empires are immune to change.

I hold no brief for either the NHS or the way that healthcare is currently funded. They both need to change. There will be no answer to the health problem however until individuals are required to take care of themselves and suffer the consequences if they choose to dodge that most fundamental of personal responsibilities.

Only then will individuals start to think a little more carefully about the way that they conduct their lives in terms of what they eat, the quantities and nature of other substances they ingest and the amount of exercise they, and their children, partake of. They just might enjoy life a little more as well.

2007-01-28T17:49:00.000Z

NHS comments considered.

It could well be that the tax collected on cigarettes and alcohol does actually cover the eventual care costs. It seems to me, though, that the payment of the tax, i.e. the penalty, is disconnected from the consequences of the action. If you were aware that the cost of your health insurance premium was double that of your friend who neither smoked or drank this would be a powerful incentive to do neither yourself.

Individuals take care not to cut themselves or run in front of vehicles because the consequences of their actions are immediate and predictable. Not so with the disabilities that ensue from excessive alcohol, tobacco or unsuitable food. It is easy to carry out self-harm in these circumstances because the consequences of the action are individually minute, although accumulative, and are shifted into an indeterminate future. Having to pay extra every week for a risk based insurance premium would make immediate the consequences of the action.

There is of course a downside to this. You will always get individuals who will not take out any insurance. Society would then be faced with the highly unpopular spectacle of extremely sick people who were receiving no care, although, as in America, charities would probably step in to provide some basic care.

It does not seem to me to be an impossible task for the state to collect, via the tax system, a risk-based premium to cover health costs. It could be accomplished quite easily through tax returns and tax codes. This would also mean that health insurance premiums would not become an issue in the case of people unable to work for any reason. It would also provide a direct link between the lifestyle of choice and the associated health care costs.

Of course, restricting health care is something we actually do at present. The body which makes decisions on drug availability and clinical procedures, NICE, habitually refuses to make certain drugs and treatments available.

The monolithic NHS is a monumental mess. It does not seem to me to matter too much who owns the units that deliver health care as long as it is not a state bureaucracy. They could be trusts, private companies, charities or whatever. The important thing is that they should broken down into the most efficient units. Competition could ensure this.

If the individual was provided with a voucher to spend at the health care provider and venue of his/her choice, with the provider subsequently paid by the state, we would have a situation where providers had to compete in two ways. Firstly they would have to compete on price in order to become an approved contractor. Secondly they would have to compete on service in order to win patients.

Elements of this system exist elsewhere. In America, most health care is insurance based. However, because it is normally provided as a perk of the job, it does not provide the necessary disincentive to pursuing a self-harming lifestyle. France I believe uses something similar to the voucher system proposed here. Whatever is done, something has to be done. As fast as deaths from heart disease are dropping, obesity and diabetes for example, are increasing. As are the amounts of taxpayer's cash being swallowed up. Notwithstanding, chunks of the NHS are either getting into debt, fiddling the returns or both.

Back to you.

2007-01-26T17:34:00.000Z

Loopy NHS

The BBC is carrying an item concerning the recovery of costs for treating workplace injuries, from the insurers of the employer concerned. Now just note these comments. The first from Health Minister Andy Burnham

"It is unacceptable that taxpayers have to pay for the medical treatment of someone injured at work simply because employers fail to take adequate steps to protect their workforce."

and this from TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber:

"It is only right that where employers cut corners at work and take risks with the health and safety of their employees, it is them, not taxpayers, who pay the cost of treating the hospitalised ill or injured worker. Employers can easily protect themselves from increased costs by ensuring that employees do not get injured through negligence in the workplace."

As employers will pay differential premiums based on their propensity to injure their workforce, what they are both in effect saying is that costs for healthcare should be in proportion to the risk involved, as presumably some businesses will seek to minimise their premium costs by making their workplaces safer, while those that don't bother will pay higher premiums.

If it is OK to apply this principle to businesses, why is it not applied to individuals also? To put it another way, why do I pay exactly the same amount of tax to fund the NHS as the 40 cigarette, 5 pints of lager and a hamburger and chips a day fool who earns the same as I do? In effect, my taxes are being used to subsidise the inevitable health care costs of a person who should have protected themselves. It is I believe known as a feedback loop control system. At present it is running out of control.

2007-01-26T16:28:00.000Z

Looters galore

Could someone please explain to me why the sight of looters liberating beached cargo from the freighter at Branscombe Bay has so raised the ire of sanctimonious commentators such as Mathew Norman in today's Independent, when a film of Compton Mackenzie's book, Whisky Galore which depicts exactly the same thing happening to a cargo of whisky in the Hebrides during WW2 is always described as witty, charming, gently humorous and so on. Based on a real incident during the war, Whisky Galore became one of the highest earning films for Ealing Studios.

Mr Norman attempts to use the incident in Dorset to indict the whole of English society as 'unpalatably coarsened and grasping.' Delightful as it is to see him lay this directly at the door of Cherie and Tone, I can't help but suggest that the idea of something for nothing shows no respect for race, creed, culture or historical period. It is in fact one of the few universal traits that defines our humanity as exemplified in the lifestyle of our 'hunter gatherer' ancestors.

2007-01-26T13:35:00.000Z

The demons down-under

I awoke this morning to the sounds of bloody carnage. Observers reported the massacre of old and heroic warriors. The slaughter was apparently terrible to behold. Yes, England were playing cricket again. Aficionados, as well as those who take but a passing interest, must be bemused by what is happening, for the team, at least when they arrived in Australia, was not that different to the team that won the Ashes not so long ago.

The major difference has been with the captaincy. Flintoff took over from Vaughan when the latter received his knee injury. England's fortunes proceeded to diminish somewhat and then Strauss took over last summer when Flintoff was himself injured. The ship was steadied somewhat. Then Flintoff took over again and things have gone from bad to worse.

Morale must now be at an all time low. As ever when sportsmen, or women, are not on top of their game, usually due to other preoccupations, injuries have also taken their toll. There have been rumours of dissension within the team and talk of two camps. No army divided against itself wins battles. So, what has gone wrong?

For much of my early career I was in sales and subsequently sales management. One of the major conundrums in sales management is handling the super-salesman or woman. Month after month they outsell their colleagues. They win the competitions. They earn more commission than anybody else. But will they make a manager. Many times I saw these individuals promoted into positions where it was the performance of their team that mattered and not their own contribution.

Inevitably it ended in tears, dismissed for poor team performance or a disillusioned shift to another employer. The qualities required for personal prowess are not the same as the qualities required for team motivation. The temptation for the super-salesperson was to try to compensate for poor team performance by doing it all themselves. This inevitably caused disaffection among the members of the team. Which brings us back to Flintoff.

Of his personal commitment there can be no doubt, Flintoff is a brilliant cricketer, the best all-rounder to have played for England since Ian Botham. You cannot, however, consistently win cricket games based on the prowess of a single individual. Sometimes, of course, both sets of attributes, personal ability and leadership, are present in one individual. Martin Johnson comes to mind as a sportsman who had both – and look where English rugby has gone since he retired.

Flintoff should not have been made captain. It was not as if there were no precedent for what has occurred. Ian Botham was also an England captain for a short while and suffered a similar handicap – amazing individual prowess but not a team leader. He also suffered a lapse in personal form when he was appointed as captain. Botham had the good sense to resign the captaincy before he was destroyed personally.

One can only hope that Vaughan will return in time to stop the destruction of Flintoff's cricketing life. To see such talent cut down by the short-sightedness of selectors would be criminal.

2007-01-26T12:21:00.000Z

Apples for addicts

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the part of the NHS that usually spends its time rationing money spent on drugs for treatment, has come up with the idea of giving drug addicts vouchers if they turn up for NHS treatment programmes.

Apparently this has been trialled in America, where the vouchers could be redeemed against purchases of burgers. Here it would only be healthy food they could be redeemed against. Ho hum. How long do you think it would be before they could be discounted against cash?

I seem to remember a scheme where benefit claimants were given vouchers to be redeemed against purchases of household furniture or items such as cookers. I also remember talking to the manager of a furniture and white goods retailer who told me that far more of their turnover was in discounted vouchers than in actual sales of furniture. Do bureaucrats never learn?

2007-01-25T17:31:00.000Z

Education, New Labour and indoctrination

Over at Labourhome, a contributor who refers to him/herself as TrueLabour reports that in an interview in the Spectator, schools minister Lord Adonis admits that comprehensive education has been a failure and bemoans the closure of grammar schools. I haven't been able to read the Spectator article as it requires a subscription but I suppose it's true. (NOTE: This article has now been posted in the comment section. 2/2/07)

TrueLabour is more concerned with Adonis's motive for saying this, supposedly to attack Brown, than with the truth of the remarks. The left wing inspired politicisation of education delivery in this country since the 1960s has done irreparable damage to the lives of millions of our citizens and yet the limit of TrueLabour's analysis is the factional squabbling within NuLabour.

Elsewhere, Alan Johnson has welcomed a report from a group led by Sir Keith Ajegbo, on teaching citizenship in schools. Brace yourselves for another round of political indoctrination in the name of education. Mind you, Sir Keith and his chums had obviously not read the latest script on the ethnic minorities front. The word 'diversity' occurs 438 times, but 'integration' just 8. I notice that this enthusiasm for diversity did not lead to the appointment of any indigenous white males or females to the group which produced the document.

The report consists of 150 odd pages calling for 'diversity' to be embraced, welcomed, celebrated, but predominately forcibly incorporated into every aspect of the curriculum. Just one instance will give you a flavour of the whole document which, if you have the stomach for it, you can read here. This quotation neatly encapsulates the unidimensional nature of the report

One Muslim pupil in an East London secondary school, for example, said to her Maths teacher, ‘You didn’t tell me that some of algebra comes from my culture, I would have been more interested if I’d known that!’

So, is learning only of relevance if it emanates from 'my culture'? I think not. The teaching of algebra as a branch of mathematics is an end in itself. It should not be a vehicle for the promotion of cultural competition.

In any case, as a Muslim in east London, I doubt very much that 'her culture' had anything to do with the development of algebra. It is true, however, that a Persian Muslim, around a thousand years ago, did make an important contribution to modern algebra. So to, however, did countless other individuals from a multiplicity of other racial and religious backgrounds. But in any case, who they were or where they came from is utterly irrelevant, except possibly, but not necessarily, in a study of the history of mathematics.

I studied algebra at school. It was in the company of Jews and the children of east European refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland. As pupils, none of us was concerned with racial origins or religious persuasion. We were totally united in our hatred of solving bloody quadratic equations. It is not diversity schools need to be worrying about. It is education.

2007-01-24T17:47:00.000Z

Global politics, economics and culture explained

Here. Don't you just wish you'd thought of it first? I do.

2007-01-23T18:36:00.000Z

From Teddy Boys to ASBOs

An article in the Independent struck a few chords in my memory. The piece in question concerns anti-social behaviour, specifically by teenagers. The first occurrence it brought to mind was when I was retained to do some research for an environmental group, who wanted to discover the attitudes to the environment by older people. They were rather hoping that the older people in question would all say that the quality of the environment had declined. This being seen as a handy crowbar to lever some funding increases.

Irritatingly, for the commissioners of the research, the majority position was that the flower beds in the local park had declined in both quantity and standard but everything else was pretty much the same. Worse still, among all those I interviewed, was the determination to discuss what had got worse, considerably so. The near universal contention was expressed that they did not feel safe around teenage boys.

I well remember one old couple relating to me how they had gone on their first overseas holiday to Cyprus. Leaving their hotel for the evening to go for a stroll, they saw a group of local youths coming towards them. I can still recall the extent of the anticipatory horror in their voices as they related the tale, and the amazed relief they experienced when the youths wished them good evening and carried on their way. They fully expected to be either mugged or abused with the usual stream of invective.

Something similar happened not too long ago to my wife and myself. This however was here in England, shortly after moving into the village where we now live. Just up the road are a group of Council houses, not enough to call an estate. One evening we encountered a half a dozen youths from this group of houses coming towards us. A little unsure as to our reception we were taken aback rather by a chorus of enquiries as to how we were settling in.

The Independent writer blames boredom and a lack of facilities for the current problem of anti-social behaviour. The supposed lack of facilities, as the cause of teenage hooliganism, has been trotted out to my knowledge for the last forty years, back to the days of 'teddy boys' and 'mods and rockers'. Coffee bars, youth clubs, bike tracks, have all enjoyed a brief vogue as the palliative which would civilise teenage behaviour. All have failed. Now we have ASBOs and they are seen to be failing as well.

We actually have very little trouble with teenagers here in the village, despite the total absence of facilities. So why?. What is different about our settlement? I call it a settlement because it is in no way a cohesive community, that is not the answer. Nor is it that it is rural in nature, other than that some of the lads go fishing together.

No, the answer lies in the fact that the inhabitants are a very mixed bunch socially. We have rich and poor, young and old, indigenous and newcomers. No one group outnumbers another. There are inbuilt checks and balances on the behaviour of all.

The source of the current problem lies in the concentrations of residents differentiated by social class which is the result of the planning system and the local authority obsession with building huge estates of council houses. Until the residential differentiation based on social class is ended we will continue to have the problem. Government both local and national is currently obsessed by divisions based on ethnicity and religion. There is a far more basic fault-line which needs to be removed.

2007-01-23T16:01:00.000Z

2012 Olympics move to Red Planet

A rather optimistic scientist has come up with the idea of turning Mars into a habitable planet over the next thousand years. To get started it just needs to... wait for it.... warm the planet up. This requires, yes yes, you've guessed it, CO². Now then Messrs Blair, Jowell and Livingstone you could really make history here. Instead of worrying about the lower Lea Valley, you could move the Olympics to Mars and turn a whole planet green.

2007-01-23T14:43:00.000Z

How green is the lower Lea Valley

Right on cue, following yesterday's post, Blair, Jowell and Livingstone, together with Seb Coe, announced their 'green strategy' for the 2012 Olympics with a bunch of meaningless targets. It is so easy to sound like a killjoy when discussing what for many will mark the zenith of their sporting careers. This blowsy TV spectacular which panders to the overblown hubris of national politicians has, however, little to do with sport.

Top track athletes make millions of pounds out of their chosen discipline due to the packaging of their sport for worldwide TV audiences, while a percentage (anybody know how much?) of their training costs are borne by the taxpayer in attempts to move the UK up the medal tables.

Sport should be something for all. The only motivation required being to improve your own performance, and to compete against your peers for your own satisfaction. Youngsters will learn more about life and their own capabilities in one school sports day than they will ever learn by watching the Olympics.

Meanwhile, if the lower Lea valley required to be turned into a new area of parkland, it would have been far more beneficial to the environment to have got on and done it, without the Olympics. Additionally, whatever spurious 50% reductions in emissions are going to be touted, there would have been NO emissions at all if the Olympics were not happening in the first place.

2007-01-22T18:51:00.000Z

If you went down to the woods yesterday...

...you may have bumped into my wife and myself. We had a great morning's orienteering. For those of you unfamiliar with the sport it consists of running, well staggering in our case, around woods and moorland armed with a compass and a map in order to discover the whereabouts of several control points, usually well hidden. It is great exercise, tremendous fun and very frustrating – good for the body and soul. You can find out about it here.

The age range of participants is from c. 3 years old to 80+. The average age would probably be around 50. It is a very cheap sport to stage because it needs no special venue, requires little in the way of equipment, is suitable for the whole family, encourages self-reliance and confidence in the young and keeps you fit. So, the government would be supporting this for all they're worth then? Ticks all the right boxes doesn't it?

No and no. It is impossible to televise and therefore not nearly as attractive as spending £20 billion (latest informed guess, see BOM) on the gigantic mediafest planned for 2012 in east London. The relevance of the Olympics being that it is now draining away the pitiful support that this and other sports with no Blair/Jowell/Livingstone self-publicising opportunities previously received.

Mind you central government bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. The central body requiring more and more funding and support staff to cope with regulation and compliance with the various initiatives which government sourced funding imposes. This then pushes up membership costs.

You can spot immediately how young people benefit from such an activity as orienteering. Fee-paying schools send their pupils along in droves. Not so state schools.

There were probably a couple of hundred at the event yesterday. Young and old hurling themselves through the undergrowth in order to register the best possible time. Ah, it's competitive, probably why the state schools don't join in. At the end there were, as usual, no injuries, apart from the odd sprain and a little wounded pride. You could almost think that people could take care of themselves without the benefit of Health and Safety. If we didn't know better that is.

2007-01-22T17:50:00.000Z

Curriculum Crap

Mike Ion, over at LabourHome, wants to put Al Gore's ~~desperate election ploy~~ film about climate change, 'An Inconvenient Truth', on the school science (?) curriculum. Yep, doubtless to be followed soon after by 'Braveheart' in the history curriculum. Now I wonder where we could fit Adamski's 'Flying Saucers Have Landed' or von Däniken's 'Chariots of the Gods'. Any ideas?

I note that no less than 13 labour supporters stampeded to vote online on this crucial issue.

PS Could someone sort out his use of 'compulsive'. Either the word is wrong or the grammar is wrong. Didn't he used to be a teacher of a socialist persuasion? Ah yes, that explains it.

2007-01-21T19:49:00.000Z

The Termites Return
(refers to yesterday's article)

The story regarding the termites originated as far as I was concerned as an RSS feed from the EPSRC on the 16^th of January. It had originally been a part of a general press release from EPSRC on the 10^th January, i.e. nearly a week earlier. The press release consisted of a general bulletin from EPSRC entitled Newsline issue 37. This is a regular item put out by the EPSRC. It also contained a special feature on 'green' technologies. You can read the press release here.

The story on termites and houses was included without comment, and appears to show that the research grant award has happened recently and that the research has yet to be carried out. Not so. The date on the release is actually 21^st September 2004. In fact the research was completed by November 2004, without, it has to be said, any indications that it is leading to any wonderful and mind boggling advances in constructing carbon zero buildings.

Even stranger is the date at the bottom for when the item was last updated, 16^th January. It is impossible to track back to what the document was like when first issued in 2004. If you do, it comes up with the same 16^th January amended release. It has to be said though that the revision was a bit sloppy, as it still relates that David Attenborough was intending to use material from the Namibian trip in a BBC programme in 2006.

So why was this document re-released on the 10^th January, purporting to show that that the EPSRC was funding some new research? If you go to the Loughborough University website and examine their take on the project you can see that zero carbon emission houses were not exactly high on their list of priorities. In fact they make the usual gestures in the direction of possible spin-offs you would expect of a bunch of academics desperately attempting to justify funding for a pet project.

The answer to this little conundrum is probably to be found here on the Communities and Local Government website. You will note that our leading cabinet free thinker, Ruth Kelly, launched a scheme to make all newly built homes carbon zero emitting within ten years. Now whether the EPSRC was just jumping on the green bandwagon, or whether there has been a government edict that all government departments must toe the green agenda line I don't know, although I would suspect the latter.

You will note on the Loughborough University site that the project leader, Dr Rupert Soar, appears to have been more interested in construction techniques than carbon emissions. This is borne out by an article in the Sunday Times on the 15^th January, describing research at Loughborough on automated house building methods. No mention of this in the green technologies puff from EPSRC, despite their funding of the construction techniques project to the tune of over £4 million. It may though explain the date of 16^th January for further revision to the press release from EPSRC.

I am just a tad sceptical of the likelihood of success on the part of either Ruth Kelly or Dr Soar. All innovation in house building techniques in the past has foundered on either the Scylla of the mortgage lenders or the Charybdis of local planners. You can amend the building regulations all you like, but if a mortgage lender doesn't consider a house to be suitable security for a loan then no money. Similarly, planners have always been very reluctant to grant planning permission for any dwelling that was untraditional in appearance. We will see.

Additionally, the £421,000 on the trip to Namibia does not seem to be money well spent, let alone the subsequent £4 million. The Loughborough team having come up with a technique based on the termites' ability to squirt building material out of its backside, while their American counterparts seem to have looked no further than the ink jet printer sitting on their desk to come up with a similar process. Still, if I had to work in Loughborough University perhaps I would be looking for excuses to go to Namibia.

2007-01-20T17:37:00.000Z

Termite Town - the Vision

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) recently highlighted its payout of £421,000 to Loughborough University to study termites, or rather termite nests.

As you will note termites are short legged, white, squidgy and repulsive and bear little resemblance to a human being.

Well, OK then, a bit like John Prescott, but I can't push the analogy too far as termites are pretty much asexual and, as far as I know, they don't have diary secretaries.

There is usually only one reproductive male and one reproductive female in each nest. Nice job for a bloke, if you can get it, don't think the sisterhood would be too keen on the female role though. Termites, when they are not eating their way through peoples' houses, live in nests.

The EPSRC informs us, via a press release, that the reason for the research grant is,

Termites Could Hold the Key
to Self-Sufficient Buildings

Mounds built by highly-evolved African termites could inspire new types of building that are self-sufficient, environmentally friendly and cheap to run.

The mounds provide a self-regulating living environment that responds to changing internal and external conditions.

A multidisciplinary team of engineers and entomologists (entomology is the study of insects) is looking at whether similar principles could be used to design buildings that need few or no mechanical services (for example heating and ventilation) and so use less energy and other resources than conventional
structures.

As you can see a nest doesn't look too much
like a house, or even a block of flats.

You see, shame, shame upon you if even for just one moment you thought that this was an excuse for a bunch of scientists to remove themselves from Loughborough to Namibia for a jolly couple of weeks in the bush, understandable though this may be. What this is really all about is us living in the sustainable, carbon zero houses that Ruth Kelly is so keen on.

Although... perhaps not. As you can see, termite colonies are a major source of methane, a prime greenhouse gas. Whoops! Bet the lads from Loughborough never mentioned that in their original research grant submission. Some termites apparently use their own waste products as fertilizer for fungi which then serve as food for the colony.

Termite nests can be pretty substantial structures, housing hundreds of thousands or even millions of the insects. The nests consist of a network of galleries and chambers constructed from a mixture of cellulose and faecal material, i.e. Cardboard and Sh*t. Now I could be wrong here but I'm pretty sure that building large structures for hordes of people to live in with lots of interconnecting walkways and chambers, all made out of cardboard and sh*t was pretty much what Tower Hamlets and Lambeth Borough Councils had been specialising in for the past thirty years or so.

Termite colonies are far from self-sufficient, nearby houses often providing a rich and valuable source of provender. Even more like Tower Hamlets and Lambeth then. Termites also have some pretty noxious habits that might take a little getting used to if adopted by humans. Termites that die in the nest are eaten by their friends, who then use the waste product emanating from their own rear end as food for other termites.

Still, Ms Kelly has set a target date of 2017 by which all new dwellings have to be zero carbon, so perhaps we'll have to get used to a bit of necro-cannibalism as a way of hitting those Kyoto targets. Heaven knows how the vegetarians will cope with Granny-burgers for dinner though.

In an exclusive interview, a spokesperson for Communities and Local Government said,

Global warming is a ~~useful~~ immediate threat and ~~stringent control~~ tough action is required ~~by you~~ by all of us . We are committed to integrating the results of this innovative research into our ongoing strategic 'Micro-home for all' initiative. Blue sky thinking has always underlain this department's joined up approach, and together with our partners and stakeholders we will be driving forwards the ambitious 'Everyone a Butcher' programme to provide all families, whatever their ethnic origin or sexual orientation, with the skills required for necro-cannibalism. To this end we are funding a project with Accrington University to develop the 'Eating your family' explanatory leaflet which will be available in English and fifteen other languages as part of our 'Diversity in death' commitment.

We are very pleased to welcome Jamie Oliver as an adviser on the 'Toilet to table' food recycling programme. He will also be introducing exciting snack options in the 'Faeces and fungus' programme which will replace the 'Five a day' ~~fiasco~~ triumph.

At the heart of our total commitment to building fully sustainable communities, we will be ~~blackmailing~~ inviting local authorities to upgrade their planning density target for all new developments to five thousand homes per hectare, in line with the new termite inspired building regulations. We will be working hard with our partners in the construction industry to turn the ambitious target of 'Two cubicles a family' into a mainstream vision within ten years.

Footnote: There are some other rather strange features to the press release from the EPSRC which I will describe tomorrow.

2007-01-18T11:37:00.000Z

I'll have a pint of the real stuff

I drank my first pint of beer in a pub called the Five Bells in Eynsford in Kent. I was in my late teens, and a Friday evening visit with friends became a regular feature of the week. The landlord and his wife had spent their earlier years on the stage and many the time was the door locked at 11.00pm and we were regaled to hilarious tales of theatrical life. The beer was Courage draught bitter, brewed locally. I was hooked for life.

This was the time when television advertising was really getting into its stride. We fell in love with a John Player's cigarette, we fell out of love with a Strand. Television, it was discovered, had the power and ability to infuse a product with any magic ambience the advertiser chose.

Draught beer needs to be looked after. It needs to be stored correctly at the right temperature, the delivery pipes must be kept clean or wild yeasts will start to grow. It was stored and distributed in wooden casks, brewing it an art not a science.

The brewing industry at the time was still somewhat fragmented. Distribution costs and the difficulties associated with transporting wooden beer barrels meant that even the bigger brewers had to brew and sell locally. Then, some smart young men at one of the brewers came up with a marvellous wheeze.

They argued this way. We want to sell a nationally branded beer. It has to be easily transported, simple to install in any pub. It has to have a flavour which will not put anybody off. We will use TV advertising to impart its image as a proper man's beer.

Instead of going to the head brewer to produce this new beer, they brought in chemists. Instead of traditional brewing methods it was made in something akin to an oil refinery. Wooden casks were replaced by aluminium, hand pumping was replaced by a CO² pressure system. The beer had no live yeasts, it was pasteurised. Easily transported by tanker it could be sold nationally. All flavour was removed, no one could possibly dislike a taste which did not exist. TV advertising could provide all the character that was required. Not much more than fizzy water, it required little in the way of ingredients to produce.

And so it came about that Watneys Red Barrel was born and launched upon an innocent world. Known as keg beer it was fizzy, tasteless rubbish. It made me ill. It was of course a huge commercial success - for a while.

This all came to mind the other evening, sitting before the fire with my wife in our local, a pint of the locally brewed ale to hand, and thinking about David Cameron. Yes, you did hear right. Now David Cameron and a pint of Watneys Red Barrel may not have come simultaneously to your mind before. But just consider the facts.

They both require CO² in copious quantities, one for delivery the other for delivering a threat, mind you Red Barrel was pretty threatening in large quantities. They both have lack of flavour and substance in common. The need for marketing to achieve a spurious reality is a shared feature. One was short on ingredients, the other is short on policies. Plus, and this the real test, my stomach has a similar reaction to both. You see, when you get going he really is just a pint of Red Barrel.

Now I draw a great deal of encouragement from the keg beer analysis of political leadership. Back in the seventies, to start with just a few, but then in ever increasing numbers, people who cared what they drank started to vote with their feet. They sought out pubs that still sold real ale. CAMRA was borne and gave us a voice. The world did not turn into one huge Wacky Warehouse. There is you see hope for the future.

Now if David Cameron is a pint of Red Barrel, does that make Kim il Blair a pint of Double Diamond? Nobody ever could tell the difference.

2007-01-18T08:13:00.000Z

Meet PC e-Plod

Stray 5 mph above the limit and they'll have you. But it seems they may not be quite up to speed themselves.

2007-01-17T17:08:00.000Z

A slave to dubious truth

Richard Gott may like to consider himself a historian, but he should stick to the history he knows, which, judging by his publications, never strays too far from eulogies for modern left wing South America and the Caribbean. To wit Chavez and Castro. In an article in today's Guardian, he attempts to tar us all with the brush of guilt over the slave trade, and at the same time, aid the cause of those who seek reparations.

He would like us to believe that the technological and industrial society in which we live today was a a direct result of the slave trade. Hence whenever we enjoy the blessings, such as they are, of our present day culture we should all feel guilty. He invites us to accept that we are all still living off the fruits of what was, of course, an abominable business.

His assertion that the slave trade was crucial to the so-called industrial revolution is piffle. The technological advances and commercial development which are seen as the defining features of industrialisation started well before the slave trade became a significant component of British economic growth, and continued long after the slave trade ended. Indeed, it was Quakers who were often prominent in the new business enterprises which characterised industrialisation. It was Quakers also who were most prominent in the movement for abolition.

An increasing domestic market due to population increase was of far greater importance than any capital investment which may have derived from the slave trade. Indeed, much of the profits from the trade were invested in land. Then as now, arriviste wealth sought to legitimise itself with the trappings of the existing aristocracy in the form of a country estate.

If it was profit from the slave trade which drove industrialisation, perhaps Mr Gott could explain why Spain and Portugal are not the world's leading industrial nations. Between them they carried twice the number of slaves to the Americas as did Britain (6.25m as opposed to 2.6m; see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade).

As is usual whenever the subject of reparations is promoted, Mr Gott conveniently omits to mention the other protagonists. The organisers and procurers of potential slaves on the African continent were not the British. They were Islamic Arabs, often the spiritual leaders themselves, who had been involved in the trade for centuries. Further, the collectors of the slaves from the interior were not British either. They were indigenous Black Africans from the coastal region continuing an activity which they had been practising for centuries also.

There is no doubt that the slave trade was an utterly reprehensible enterprise, no matter who was involved. A position I am utterly committed to, and I am not seeking to defend. It should never have started and it finished far too long after it did start. This continuous invitation to communal guilt proselytised by Richard Gott and others, based as it is on distortions of the truth, is though far more dangerous to those whom it seeks to aid.

Reparations are not going to happen. It would be impossible to figure out which persons owed their situation now to which country out of the eight main ones involved in the actual shipments, let alone the traders on the African coast. The population of Brazil is approaching 185 million, many of whom owe their descent to slaves shipped there by Portugal, and would therefore have a claim against Portugal. But in 1850, shortly after the trade finished, the population of Brazil was just over 7 million. The idea of everybody in Brazil attempting to trace their ancestry in order to lodge a claim demonstrates the absurdity of the reparation concept.

The view that modern day British people (not just the English, Scotland was involved as well) should collectively cry mea culpa and back the cry with money, fuels resentment among many Black residents of the UK and further delays the changes in society, from both black and white, which are required to ensure a harmonious future. It is the future which is important, not the past. Particularly not a past distorted and misrepresented by Richard Gott.

2007-01-17T14:43:00.000Z

Peering at the lunatics

The Bethlem Royal Hospital, was, over time, situated at a variety of locations around London. It housed the insane, and was known colloquially as Bedlam, a word which has since entered the language to describe a scene of violent disorder. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was located at Moorfields, members of the public were admitted, upon payment of course, to view the antics of the inmates. Tens of thousands each year would visit to see the fun, often providing themselves with a long stick with which to goad the unfortunates to action.

Progress is a wonderful thing. Now we have Big Brother.

For all those bleeding heart liberals out there who are incensed at the goings on the answer is very simple. Don't watch it and it will go away. For affronted participants the answer is also simple. If you take the devil's coin, he expects payment. Don't sell your soul in the first place. You know what to expect.

2007-01-17T10:05:00.000Z

Dying embers of the technological revolution

Demos, that rather worthy think tank, is today unveiling a series of studies showing how India, China and South Korea are powering ahead in technological innovation. The overall project, entitled the 'Atlas of Ideas' will be launched today at the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

There will doubtless be many pious speeches on how Britain can benefit and calls for extra government money to fund science and technology here in the UK. Demos itself reckons that Britain will be sidelined in the global science revolution.

It already has. As I have noted before, the numbers of undergraduates studying science and technology has actually declined since 1997. This has been accompanied by massive increases in the numbers studying law, sociology, social policy and psychology, together with the wretched media studies.

Labour governments don't seem to like science. Harold Wilson hailed the 'white heat of the technological revolution', and promptly appointed a trade union leader, Frank Cousins, as the first Minister of Technology. He was followed by left-winger Tony Benn. There is no longer a Ministry of Technology. The DTI is where current responsibility lies. It is headed by Alistair Darling. He is a lawyer. The other half of the equation, education, is in the hands of Alan Johnson. Another trade union leader. Says it all.

2007-01-16T15:32:00.000Z

Paper Industry Recession Forecast

It was announced today that John Tiner is to resign as head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA). During his time at the FSA he was responsible for introducing mortgage industry regulation. The necessary handbooks issued by the FSA, if piled on top of each other stood approximately nine feet high. To process a single mortgage application generated anything up to a hundred sheets of A4 paper.

Administration and insurance costs rocketed. Many small brokers, who developed relationships with clients and their families, based on trust, over many years, were forced to leave the industry. The net result? The FSA is still not satisfied with the advice given. All for nothing then. Still, the Scandinavian wood pulp industry will miss him. He'll doubtless, having a perfect knowledge of all the weaknesses in his systems, get a very good job with a highly respected financial institution.