No longer the Me society; now the Wii society

At Christmas, it's a tradition in many households to consider some light exercise after dinner to encourage the turkey, the puddings and pies to subside gently into the gastric juices.
In years gone by, this would have been achieved by a stroll along some country lane or, for urbanites, to a duck pond in the local park.
This year, for many, the source of the exercise will  be not a gentle perambulation in the fresh air but a mat placed in front of a television screen. It will not be there for anything as enjoyable or energetic as copulation but to enable the assembled friends and relations to pretend they are playing table tennis, skate-boarding or,even, walking and jogging.
They will in other words be WIIing, or whatever the correct verb for using a WII is. Tennis racquets, golf clubs and  running shoes become redundant since the mighty WII, apparently, is also able to simulate any or all of the kit needed to play a particular game.
The most annoying ads on TV at the moment feature the pleasant but extremely limited duo, Ant and Dec, travelling the country, invading people's homes and clubs to issue challenges for various activities on the Wii machine. At least, I assume they are Ant and Dec. For all any of us know, it could be two A&D avatars or holograms doing the challenging - and the challenges themselves might be virtual rather  than actual.
In that sense, Wii and all the other electronic games, are a metaphor for our increasingly ersatz society.
We don't do reality any more.
Why take real exercise that involves real effort when you can stay inside your centrally-heated cocoon and kid yourself that you have played a round of golf or a couple of sets of tennis without breaking sweat?
Why write real drama when you can put together a cast of misfits and failed celebrities and lock them inside a house or jungle and let them work out their psychoses and character faults in full public view?
This philosophy extends into the political arena, education and even into religion.
Politicians long ago gave up on Parliament as a forum for serious debate, preferring to use the TV and internet to shape events and people. Budgets and important announcementsappear courtesy of the BBC or internet rather than in the Commons.
An education system that once acted as the template for large wodges of the globe has been systematically replaced by a new model in which social engineering and indoctrination masquerade as education.
It is entirely possible now to attain a pass in GCSEmaths with a grade that once wouldn't have troubled the scorers. One GCSE Science paper I looked at very recently contained questions similar to those I faced at the end of my first year in senior school. Except that many of these modern questions came complete with multiple choice answers; just to increase the pupil's chance of getting the right answer.
It is no longer necessay to practise a musical instrument such as the guitar. Simply buy the right game, plug it into a console and you are, automatically, transformed into a rock star - even if you can't tell the difference between a chord and a string.
I don't know about you, but the thought that the young surgeon who is about to operate on me or the equally young pilot whose plane I am boarding  might have virtual rather than real qualifications does not exactly fill me with confidence.
The disease has spread into our financial systems. Rather than save real money by cutting our costs, the Bank of England - doubtless at the urging of Gordon B - has chosen instead to print new money - lots of it. Now, at some point, such as when we are printing more money than we are actually generating in income, that cash becomes worthless.
We don't need to look too far back in history to discover the truth of that statement; just as far as the Weimar Republic ought to do it. As Maynard Keynes said at the time: "Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance."

This administration has systematically anaesthetised the populace with a mixture of cheap supermarket beers and spirits, all-day opening and readily accessible hard and soft drugs. It has reduced their ability to question or counter its actions by cutting the legs out of the education system. Thanks to Wii it is now able to reduce them to sedentary vegetables by convincing them that virtual exercise is as good as the real thing. And, to top it all off, they are printing ersatz money so that no family in the land should go without its own Wii this Christmas.

Merry Xmas and a (real) Prosperous New Year
 

Meglomaniacal, Delusional and SCARY.

Apparently 20 or more people accompanied Gordon Brown on his trip to save the world from itself in Copenhagen. They were referred to very loosely as advisors or simply as his entourage.
I have my doubts.
My personal belief is that they are either:
a. Men in white coats who, for the sake of appearances, are sticking to civvies for the duration of the conference or
b. members of the Serious Fraud office waiting for an appropriate moment to feel the collars of Flash Gordon, the Millibands and Ed Balls.
They can't, seriously, be genuine advisors, can they? No serious - i.e. reasonably compos mentis - civil servant would allow Brown to run around the conference halls pledging 6 Billions of our hard-earned pounds to various Asian, African and other chancers if they only pledge to cut their C02 emissions: would they? Equally, no one capable of performing straightforward multiplication and long division would, seriously, allow him to promise to slash our own emissions by 40% in nine years. It's just not do-able.
So, either our meglomaniac Prime Minister is seriously delusional and really has convinced himself that he has been sent from the planet Krypton to save the earth. In which case, the men in white coats will move in once the Copenhagen beano has finished and measure him for a nice, new, tight-fitting jacket. Or, he has salted away large chunks of our national treasure without our knowledge; in which case it might be the Serious Fraud Office that feels his collar.
What other explanation can there be for his actions in Denmark?
Our country is, apparently, so broke that it has to choose between providing our soldiers in Afghanistan with basic equipment now, or protecting the country against sea and air strikes in the future. Our country is so broke that we are having to print money we don't have to buy back the debts that we do have because their attraction to international investors dwindles by the day.
Yet, magically, Flash Gordon can pat his pockets and come up with the odd billion here and there to hand out to the other delegates like a Billy No Mates child handing round his sweets to buy friendship in the school playground.
There was a time when Brown's self-regard was something of a joke. But now it's more serious than that. He is so utterly wedded to the idea of his own importance that he is using money we don't have to purchase himself some sort of future legacy. It's like fame on the never-never.
The last person to believe in Never-Never land was Michael Jackson. Post-Copenhagen, he will probably look distinctly grounded and well-balanced compared to Gordon Brown.

Why the UK housing market is different

This downturn started around 18 months ago. As soon as it kicked in, all of the experts who had been predicting the collapse of the UK housing market popped their little heads out of the woodwork and chorused in unison, "told you so".
Unfortunately for them, but less so for us ordinary home-owners,  their  visions of  a deflating housing bubble never really materialised. In certain parts of the country, house prices are significantly lower than they were. In others, though, they have hardly moved at all. While not exactly buoyant at the moment, the UK housing market hasn't quite fallen of the expected cliff; unlike some parts of the US, for instance, where it is possible to pick up substantial properties for just cents on the original dollar asking price.  
The reason is simple. As I wrote in September 2008: "This country still needs 3 million new homes to accommodate all the extra people we have allowed to settle here in the last 10 years. So, despite the turmoil in world markets, the shortage of mortgages and the impact of the stupid and pointless HIPS on the housing market, house prices are never going to go into complete free-fall. People who, two years ago would have bought a property are now having to settle for renting. Nonetheless, whatever they rent still occupies land and that is a commodity that becomes scarcer every year. As Mark Twain said: " Buy land. They can't invent any more".
Anyone who has ever read Adam Smith would have understood the reason for this buoyancy.
Despite rising unemployement, stingy mortgage lenders and the fear of being saddled with negative equity, people still need to move house for business, work or family reasons. The number of new homes built has barely scratched the surface of the numbers actually needed - probably 200,000 compared to the 3 million the Government would like to see built - so demand continues to outstrip supply. When that happens, it becomes very difficult for prices to fall very far.  

 I was minded to revisit this topic by two recent news items. The first was a statement by the Council of Mortgage Lenders that mortgage approvals last month were the highest they had been in over a year. So, people still see value in bricks and mortar. 
The second was an extraordinary speech by Housing Minister, John Healey, to the Fabian Society, the gist of which was that people should stop aspiring to home ownership and settle for long-term renting. The argument in favour of this approach was, basically, that trying to save to acquire a deposit for a mortgage was so difficult that young people should accept it as an unattainable pipe-dream and rent their homes instead; like most of our Continental neighbours are happy to do.
It would take a book rather than a blog to examine the wrong-thinking that went into this paper. Despite membership of the EU, the UK is nothing like the rest of Europe. Europeans tend to like apartment living; we prefer our own house and garden. Long-term rental is both normal and do-able in countries like Germany. It is virtually impossible here.  Few other countries suffer our population density, so land scarcity is not a big issue. As long as land is readily available, it remains relatively cheap. In the UK - and most particulalrly in England south of the Watford Gap -  land is scarce and getting scarcer every day; hence this Government's wish to concrete over the Green Belt. ( but that is another subject).
So, for a variety of reasons, Mr Healey's dissertation was long on words but short on commonsense. Given the fact that he has made it close to the top of the current administration, that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Neither, unfortunately, should the sheer hypocricy of what he is advocatng, which comes straight out of the Animal Farm guidebook to equality. Because the man who wants to see a return to long-term renting for the great unwashed turns out to be a serial flipper.
According to the latest tranche of Parliamentary Expenses, Mr Healey not only hoovered up all of the  benefits going, he also flipped his second home before selling it for a profit of some £88,000 in July of this year.
What a chance he missed to set a good example. Instead of cashing in on the property's increased value, he could have found some young couple to rent it to for an economic but affordable rent.

The X'cess factor

Anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation will recognise this scene. The occasion is  a large corporate gathering such as an annual sales conference. Before dinner, one bold, brash individual shoulders his way to the bar. " I'm in the chair. What's everyone drinking?"  he says  - before putting his corporate credit card behind the bar.
The same individual, out with his mates for a Friday lunch-time drink, is adept at  merging into the background until a round has been bought.
He is much happier spending the company's money than his own.
If this sounds familiar in more ways than one, think back over the last few days.
Gordon Brown, he of the doleful face and grizzly mien, turned into Sunshine Charlie when he met up with his fellow-EU leaders to discuss climate change.
The customary glower was replaced with a benevolent cheeriness.as Gordon  once more donned the garb of Flash Gordon, super-hero and single-handed saviour of the global economy (except for that bit languishing in the doldrums that he happens to be Prime Minister of) and go large on the largesse at our expense.
When it came to contributing to a Pan-European fund to bribe 3rd World countries into lowering  their emissions, our very own Flash put his Euro rivals in the shade. Each time the diminuitive Sarkozy and mighty Merkel announced their country's contribution, Britain's answer to Cool-hand Luke out-trumped them. At the death, with the others clearly exhausted, our hero had committed this country to £1.2 billion in additional funding; the biggest single contribution to the aid pot. 
Of course,a grateful Europe clapped him on the back and praised his altruism. Then sniggered up its collective sleeve. Not only was the biggest bankrupt in the room offering to buy  drinks all round but also a slap-up dinner with all the trimmings.
The irony, obviously lost on our Gord, was that, since the aid  would be labelled "From Europe with love ", he was doing so virtually anonymously.
Not that Gordon minded. He had splashed our cash and had been rewarded with personal praise.
All he needs to do now is figure out where the extra £1.2 billion is going to come from.
Now, where does Mervyn keep the keys to those printing presses?

51 below and sinking

Last night, most on Britain suffered a severe freeze. Nothing unusual about that for the time of the year. Except that, as recently as last week, the Met Office had been warning that we would be suffering one of the wettest Decembers on record and that we should put aside all thoughts of a white Christmas. Now, the nation is shivering with genuine winter cold and some bookies have reduced the odds on snow falling on Christmas day to 5-1. On the other side of the Atlantic, temperatures in states like Minnesota have hit -51C and even Florida sea side resorts, like Pensicola on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, have been hit by sub-zero temperatures.
To be fair to the Met Office boffins, this stream of Arctic air snuck down on them while they were busying themselves preparing their latest sandwich boards predicting the end of the world unless we agree to stop driving, flying, eating meat and eructing. By we, I mean of course, all of the ordinary citizens of the UK whose normal human activities create such huge quantities of C02 and not those politicians and others of blessed fame and fortune who either do not defecate or fart or whose carbon footprint can be offset by the planting of some trees in the Gobi Desert - or who are simply SO important that if they didn't continually fly around the world to desperately important conferences and seminars the globe would stop spinning and topple off its axis.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that the blame for this sudden Arctic chill can be laid at the doors of the Copenhagen Conference. The delegates there have, apparently, consumed as much C02 as a small African country simply to get themselves to Denmark and will, presumably, use as much again to get home. More importantly, at the conference itself they have generated so much hot air that it has created a kind of vacuum over the Northern Hemisphere that hoovered the freezing air southwards.

Now, I am a flat-earther

According to Gordon Brown, I am a flat-earther. His little friend, David Milliband, thinks that I and others like me are environmental vandals. Other members of the Climate Change Community are of the view that global warming sceptics ( Deniers) should be subjected to compulsory re-education; shades of Winston Smith in "1984". One particularly well-balanced individual writing in today's Independent Online opined that Deniers are more evil than Hitler and Stalin and guilty of a crime more heinous than genocide; Ecocide, which sounds vaguely like an organic garden product.

This is the level of emotional and personal odium that anyone who admits to doubting climate change has to suffer these days. None of us, apparently, has reached this state through free will, individual study or contemplation. No, we are all the unwitting tools of a capitalist conspiracy orchestrated and funded by the fat cats of the global oil and gas industry.

Climate change is so much the conventional wisdom that the BBC, as an example, does not see any point in admitting, let alone publicising, the possibility of an alternative point of view. If any of its reporters do acknowledge that there are a few dissenters out there, they do so with the tone of voice and pitying expression normally reserved for reports about UFO nuts or recipients of Care in the Community.

Take the latest furore regarding the leak of e-mails from the University of East Anglia. The story bruted about by most papers and, certainly the BBC, was that these e-mails came to light as a result of someone hacking into the university's computer.

Apparently the e-mails were "stolen" by some organisation ( possibly the Russian Secret Service) in an attempt to disrupt or discredit the Copenhagen Conference. In fact, the UN's climate change guru, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, maintained in his opening speech that "The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," (International Panel on Climate Change).

Wow. So, now we have it. The Russians have joined forces with Texas Oil barons, the Saudis and other members of the International Capitalist Conspiracy. This group has hacked into the UEA's computers and discovered, buried in over a decade's worth of e-mails, a highly-selective few that discredit or at least call into question, some dubious practices by the leading exponents of Climate Change theory.

There are several problems with this theory. One is so obvious that I am surprised it has only just occurred to me. Namely, unless they knew there was something worth hacking for, why would they have bothered? No organisation or individual would hack into a computer system of such size and complexity - risking discovery and possible prosecution - on the off-chance of finding something interesting or incriminating. The time and effort involved would be enormous and would make finding the needle in the proverbial haystack look like a game of hunt the slipper.

So, whoever discovered and released the e-mails must have known beforehand that they were there.

Ergo, they were not hacked by an outsider but, much more likely, leaked by an insider.

Now, if we work from that basic assumption, what possible motive would an insider have to leak them? It couldn't have been for money, because the corespondence ended up on a public website where it was accessible to anyone free of charge. So, personal gain is eliminated.

That leaves revenge - someone sacked or slighted perhaps? - or conscience. What if the leaker is a former team member disillusioned by the short-cuts, omissions and bullying that the e-mails expose? Such a person would know precisely which mails to copy and publish to reveal what was going on. That person would also, presumably, have to be quite central to the project to be privvy to such correspondence. He or she might, logically, have been one of the people proposing divergent theories whose work was suppressed or dismissed.

The other problem with the hacker theory is timing. As Dr. Pachuri implied in his speech, the principal aim of the hackers was, apparently, to discredit or disrupt the Conference. That was why the e-mails surfaced when they did.

Unfortunately, that theory doesn't hold water either, for the simple reason that the e-mails haven't only just been revealed to the world. In fact, they have been in the public domain for quite some time. Last week, a BBC editor revealed that he had been sent the information several months ago. However, since his instincts were, shall we say, more in tune with Global Warming than journalism, he chose to ingore them; presumably in the hope that they would go away.

Of course they didn't. They have erupted like a large and pustulent boil on the face of the Global Warmers. Rather than try to bust the boil and drain the pus, they have chosen simply to ignore its existence. Their preferrered approach has been to belittle and label anyone who has read the correspondence and arrived at their own opinions as a Flat Earther.

The day they start to think more objectively and agree that there could be other, natural explanations for global warming, I will probably fall off the edge of the world in surprise.

Lies, damn lies and global warming

The warming tendency has worked itself into a fine fury over the last week or so, possibly adding several degrees to global temperatures in the process. The reason; some of the most senior people in the Climate Change Community (sic) have been caught out cooking the books, moving the goalposts, fielding several ringers. You choose the metaphor that suits the situation best. But, basically a hacker has published a series of e-mails in which this select band seems to conspire to, well, fiddle the evidence by:
deleting or simply ignoring data that don't fit neatly into their models for future warming
attacking any person or thing that contradicts or casts doubt on their research
attempting to blackmail respected scientific journals into refusing to publish papers submitted by the contrarians.

Now, as you can imagine, this has set the cat among the pigeons. Well, to be honest, some cats among some pigeons. For all the interest the story has aroused in the BBC news rooms, it might have happened on the planet Zog. But, the opinion pages of the Guardian and the Independent have been catching fire with all of the claims and counterclaims from the Climate Change Community and the people that they describe, in their more polite moments, as Deniers.

Actually, this whole affair has demonstrated how political virtually every aspect of modern existence is. The fact that the Climate Change Community regards and refers to itself in precisely those terms tells you a great deal about its them-and-us mentality. Just like the Gay Community; the Travelling Community and all the other Communities that beset the rest of society, they huddle together like early Christians threatened by the Roman mob. And, just like Christians, as their beliefs have become more mainstream and gained respectability, they have coalesced into a major political force with wealth, stature and power. Now, as we all know power corrupts and absolute power etc, etc. That, I believe, is what has happened in this case. Professor Jones and his colleagues and acolytes around the Globe have attracted research funds, prestige and immense influence thanks to what they call AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). Having acquired these trappings they are, in a very human and understandable way, reluctant to give them up. They are the point of reference for people like Al Gore. Their predictions ( or perhaps prophecies, given their quai-religious fervour) have convinced governments around the world to tax the rest of us to the hilt so that they can make the necessary investment in wind turbines, carbon capture and the like in an attempt to stave off the inevitable horrors that will be visted upon us all unless we comply. In short, they hold the future of the globe in their collective hands. What a burden. What a responsibility. How God-like must it all make them feel?
And then, some bloody hacker with an agenda comes along and sets a bonfire under all of their vanities.
Even the High Priest of the Warming Cult, George Monbiot of the Guardian, very briefly had to admit that things looked bleak for the Warmists. He urged Prof. Jones to resign. He hasn't, but he has withdrawn his labour, presumably on full pay, until all the fuss dies down. George, meanwhile, having rent his shirt and rubbed on a few carbon-free ashes has left the fight to his many disciples while he has flown off to Toronto the better to rail against the shale oil processing going on in Alberta - roughly 2400 miles away from where he is staying.
The disciples, showing all the zeal of the converted, have girded their loins and pitched head-first into the Deniers. According to them, a few random e-mails ( around 3000 actually) do not undermine the great body of evidence that the high priests of the Climate Change Community have accumulated over the years. Asking people to delete or ignore inconvenient data is not sinister; merely a tidying-up exercise.
So, this is what I would say to them. Let's substitute the Crown Prosecution Service or DPP for the University of East Anglia. Let's say that the DPP has a rock solid case against a suspected rapist; eye witness evidence, oodles of DNA scattered around the scene and the victim. They are about to go before the judge and jury with this evidence when a copper sends an e-mail saying that the scene of crime officer found traces of DNA from a lot of other people at the scene but it was somehow omitted from the evidence presented to the prosecutor.
All of a sudden the cast-iron case has sprung several leaks. So the prosecutor contacts the copper and explains that everone is absolutely certain that they have the right man, all the evidence points to his guilt - except for this one inconvenient bit of contradictory evidence. He asks him, nicely, to delete his e-mail and forget that he ever sent it. It would merely be a case of tidying up, ironing a few anomalies; the main body of evidence was proof enough of the man's guilt, so there would be no danger of a miscarriage of justice.
Imagine the outrage such a suggestion would cause. Yet, here we have the warmists suggesting that anyone feeling outraged by the shenanigans at UEA needs a brain transplant.
Afeel each other up, nd so, on to Copenhagen where, at your expense and mine, politicians and Green lobbyists alike will burn millions of tons of carbon fuel, nod sagely - and vote to tax modern life out of existence.

Is the EU now stable - or just a stable?

The Roman Emperor, Caligula, had a horse called Incitatus whom he kept in ostentatious luxury. The horse slept in a stable of marble, ate oats mixed with gold flakes and had a manger made of ivory. To complete his pampering, he had a collar of precious stones and was. apparently, waited on by a team of eighteen servants. At one point during his reign, Caligula proposed to make Incitatus a Consul, to demonstrate his contempt for the members of the Roman Senate.
Last night, 27 or so politicians and their assorted hangers-on gathered around a table and appointed a new Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Sorry, I'll rephrase that, what they appointed was a new President of the European Council, a nonentity of a Belgian to whose insignifcant shoulders Angela Merkle and Nicolas Sarkosy had already attached reins, the better to control him.
Like Incitatus, Herman van Rompuy, the new President will be kept in luxury. He will have advisors by the score, limousines and jets at his command and luxuriously appointed living and working quarters. He will probably even have the equivalent of his own Pratorian Guard to keep him safe from disgruntled Little Englanders and other assorted Europhobes. But, despite all the trappings, he will be as powerless as Caligula's horse. Real power will still be vested in little Nicky, lumpy Angela and the bureaucrats of the EU Commission.
At his side when he ventures abroad will be the august figure of the new High Representative; a title only previously encountered in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Catherine Ashton - for it is she -is such a nonentity that our dyslexic prime Minister called her Ashdown several times during an interview.
The pair's combined anonymity is being touted as a demonstration that The EU project is becalmed, or even dead in the water. The people pushing this view are life-long Europhiles and that tends to set the alarm bells ringing. These are the same people who, for years, poo-poohed any suggestions that we were moving inexorably towards a federal Europe. After a while, it was easy to tell when they were lying; their lips were moving. Now they wish us to believe that the appointment of two nonentities signifies how reluctant the assorted prime ministers, presidents etc who make up the Council are to relinquish the reins of power. Several have declared the whole business as undemocratic. That is so post-ironic it's almost non-ferrous.

The truth is that the reins may be attached to the new incumbents; but it is only a temporary measure. Like Caligula's horse, the two appointees are there to express an idea; to put flesh on the bones of two rather vague functions. Once people have grown accustomed to the reality of a de facto president and foreign minister representing the EU around the world, Mr van Rompuy and Ms. Ashtone will be eased into touch and replaced by some suitably big-hitting career politicians. When that day arrives, democracy in the UK will be a distant memory.

Gurning Griffin makes an idiot of us all thanks to the BBC

I have to hold my hand up. I didn't make it all the way through Question Time.
You know, the one that was set up to prove that the BBC is objective and balanced in everything it does. That was meant to prove just how fair-minded and non-censorious we are as a society. That, above all, was intended to give Nicholas Griffin enough rope to hang himself in full view of the whole nation.
I didn't make it through because, much to my horror, I started to feel sorry for Griffin about twenty minutes into the broadcast. I couldn't believe it. He is, in every conceivable way, a dislikeable chap. He looks shifty. He gurns manically in the belief that this will endear him to the rest of us. He kept trying to put an arm around Bonnie Greer, as if to demonstrate that he could make contact with a brown skin without recoiling in horror. Not once did he answer a question directly and when he did answer, he did everything in his power to disavow the privileged education bestowed upon him at Cambridge.
In short, his was a performance calculated to prevent anyone with half a brain taking him seriously.
Yet, despite his many and continuous own-goals, I started to feel sorry for him.
Ranged against him, he had not just the panel and the carefully selected and beautifully multicultural studio audience but David Dimblebey as well.
Dimbleby, who normally performs his Chairman's functions as an ancient and sacred duty bequeathed by earlier generations of BBC Dimblebys. strayed egregiously this time. In place of the calm moderator, we were given the Prosecutor Fiscal or Examining Magistrate. He made no attempt to hide which side of the argument he was on; indeed, at the commencement of proceedings he invited the audience to fell free to boo and jeer. So much for balance, then.
As for the studio audience, they had clearly been selected first and foremost by race ( preferably mixed), then by gender or sexual orientation and, finally, by age. All clearly had an agenda and a pre-formed set of ideas that they wanted to get across. I probably don't need to explain that these did not include allowing anyone with contrary views a platform on which to air them.
There were very few actual questions in the segment of the show that I could be bothered to watch. Instead, we were treated to the likes of Jack Straw trotting out carefully-planned statements, designed only to demonstrate how right-on message they were when it came to questions of race and multiculturalism. The only avid self-promoting, one-trick pony missing from the Panel was Yasmin Alibi-Brown. I understand from her column in the Independent today that she had a prior appointment with relatives in Pennsylvania and, after a few days, has already worked out that the US is doing a better job of integrating the races than we are in divided GB. Wow. She has obviously not yet made it to Auburndale, Polk County, Florida.
Anyway, I digress. By the time, I had heard Jack Straw sounding off, in that infuriatingly smug way of his, and the rest of the panel - Griffin excepted - nodding wisely at every word, I realised that I was both bored and more than a little offended.
Griffin is patently an arsehole. It took about five minuted for that truth to be established. It wasn't necessary then for each member of the panel to be given the opportunity to kick him while, metaphorically, he was down on the floor, in a head-hold and with both arms pinned to the canvas. By any measure, this was bullying. The fact that the kicking was being administered by the self-appointed great and good didn't make it any more edifying in my book.
We have a long and honourable tradition of tolerance in this country. Much of that tolerance springs from an innate sense of fair play; an instinctive sympathy with the under-dog, whether in sport or in a fight.
By turning Question Time into a Griffin-bashing session, the BBC and David Dimbleby, managed to undermine their own cunning plans. Initially condemned out of his own mouth, Nick Griffin ended the night backed into a corner and, by the time I switched off, looking like the victim of a mugging.
Making an avowed Nazi look like a martyr is a difficult trick to pull off. Unfortunately, by cramming the Question Time studios with the massed bands of Political Correctness last Thursday, the BBC managed it

Static Travellers may be oxymoronic but

An oxymoron is a word or phrase that contains within itself a number of contradictory terms or ideas. A frequently quoted example is "a deafening silence".
Modern life is full of people and institutions that seem to embody the same oxymoronic qualities. Civil Servants, for instance, are rarely civil and even less rarely provide anything remotely approaching a service. At a local level, which is where most of us bump up against them, they try very hard to turn the employer/employee relationship on its head.
Stories of local councils dictating how, when and where residents should deploy their rubbisn and recycling bins and punishing them when they fail to comply, are commonplace. To this lexicon of offical bullying, we can add the use of Anti-Terrorist legislation to snoop and spy on people to ensure that they don't, wittingly or otherwise, let their dogs foul the pavements or enrol their children in a school outside their allotted post code.
At Government level, we have various Ministries and Quangos whose functions and titles seem at odds with each other. The performance of the Intelligence Services over the last ten years makes them a prime candidate for the Oxymoron of the Decade award. The Department for Transport and the Ministry of Justice would run them a close second, based on their failures to achieve anything of note in their respective fields.
However, the clear leader and undisputed champion, must be the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
This Quango is, by definition, charged with ensuring equality in all areas of our life: An entirely honourable and desirable objective for any government to pursue.
What it actually does is encourage discrimination, foster racial divides and promote the causes of special interest groups, many of whom form not only its client base but the pool from which a significant proportion of its top executives are drawn.
Thanks to this agency and its predecessor, the Commission for Racial Equality, we have so many minority lobbies active in this country that we are frequently treated to the unedifying sight of them vying for attention - and funds.
The more clued-up among them have managed to push to the head of the queue by identifying themselves as distinctive Communities. Thus, we have a Black Community; a Gay and Lesbian Community; a Transgendered Community, a Moslem Community and a Travelling Community.
This, of course, means that our whole understanding of what constitutes a community has to change. It must no longer be based on a geographic location, such as a town, village or street, but a set of preferences.
In the case of the Gay and Lesbian Community, for instance, what defines them is how, where and with whom they choose to deploy their genitalia.
With the Travelling Community, what brings them together, is the way they choose to live. In which case, look out for the Semi-Detached and End Terrace Dwellers Community to be pushing for recognition soon; certainly before those posh bastards from the Detached Community grab all the attention.
Of course, the whole concept of a Community united by a single, distinctive trait or feature is flawed. What camp does the Gay or Lesbian Traveller belong to? ( Excuse the pun; totally unintended)
What about the Traveller who happens to be a Moslem or Christian? Do they have to establish their own separate faith Community to ensure they get a fair shake of the equalities stick?
Which brings me neatly back to my oxmoronic theme.
Can a traveller who no longer travels, truly be a member of the Travelling Community?
Isn't a Static Taveller an oxymoron?
The question comes to mind because, not for the first time, a member of the TC has managed to buy some highly-desirable, agricultural land and, by obtaining planning permission for two static caravans and two mobile homes, inflated its value many times over.
The land's original owner - a farmer - had been denied the self-same permission. But local authorities have been told to look kindly on any planning applications coming from the Travelling Community; a fact that the said TC is only too eager to exploit. When was the last time you read a story about travellers buying up and moving onto some derelict industrial land? The only land they ever show any interest in buying tends to be in areas of outstanding natural beauty.
The Traveller in the current case claims to be a Gypsy and purchased the land so he could return to his roots. Hmmm.
He has spent the last fourteen years in a detached bungalow in Norfolk. His stated intention is to create sites for two static caravans and two mobile homes on his newly-acquired land. In other words, all four homes will be static - along with their owners. Sounds very much like any other fixed community to anyone with half a brain. They are travellers only in the same sense that someone who once owned a boat could claim to be a sailor.
Sadly, this kind of logic never pierces the fog of sentimentality and patronage that surrounds the Travelling Community.
We may surmise that our friend's motives for buying the land had little to do with rediscovering his Gypsy Rover roots, and more to do with making a profit. But, as a member of the Travelling Community, no such base motives can be attributed to him. His right to reclaim his Romany lifestyle has been sanctioned at the highest level and it is officiladom's job to make damn sure that he achieves it.
If that means making him and the rest of the Travelling Community more equal than the rest of us under the Law, so be it. Anyone who thinks that this is divisive, discriminatory and downright unjust is not only a Racist and a Member of the BNP but, almost certainly, a Daily Mail reader to boot.
On the other hand it reduces another English tenet that we all hold dear to the level of just another oxymoron: Blind Justice.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

The allegation that new migrants are jumping the queue for council housing and housing association homes was nailed as a myth by research recently published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
That study found that more than 60% of new migrants who had come to Britain in the past five years are living in privately rented accommodation, and most newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers are actually banned from access to social housing.

This was how the Guardian, rather triumphantly it has to be said, announced the publication of a new report by the EHRC last week that purported to demolish the urban myth that migrants receive unfair advantages when it comes to council house allocation.

Reading the Guardian's synopsis of the report, it would be easy to accept their conclusion that there is no perceivable bias in the allocation of council housing. To be fair, most journalists and commentators seem to share that conclusion. But then, we all know what lazy buggers they tend to be. After all, the report runs to 82 pages and is stuffed full of the sort of graphs that make you think you have a migraine. If the authors - Jill Rutter and Maria Lattore - have concluded that council house alllocation is totally untainted by any hint of politically correct thinking, then, hey, it's simpler just to accept the fact and move on to something more straightforward like the Swine 'Flu Panpanic.

Except, of course, that nothing is that simple. As the Guardian story points out, this report was commissioned by the EHRC in response to a warning from ex-Minister, Margaret Hodge, that local people in her constituency felt that council housing policy was skewed in favour of immigrants. Perhaps, given its genesis, it is unsurprising if it reached a diametrically opposite conclusion.

As we all know, statistics can be used to prove anything. In the same way, so can the parameters that are set for the research. Just a few examples are all that is needed to undermine the simplistic conclusions reached:
1. The authors restricted their research into people who arrived in Britain within the last five years. Mass immigration started in earnest almost as soon as Labour came to power in 1997. So, they deliberately chose to ignore the huge body of the huddled masses who arrived here between 97 and 2004; probably 1.2 million or thereabouts.
2, Included in the survey were a great wodge of Poles and other eastern Europeans, most of whom, as they acknowledge, were from relatively high socio-economic groups in their home countries and therefore capable both of finding work and accommodation without too much official help.
3. The authors analysed the housing policies of 50 local authorities. Wow, you might think, that's a lot. Well yes, until you start to look at which Councils they looked at and, more pertinently, those that didn't. For instance, they include such well-known immigrant hot spots as Shrewsbury, Plymouth and the Malvern Hills. They did not think to go to Bradford or Burnley. Granted they looked at five inner London boroughs but not Tower Hamlets.
Why exclude such well-known immigrant areas?
If the purpose of the report was to provide an accurate and balanced picture of the distribution of council housing between the indigenous populationb and immigrants, it failed dismally. If its brief were simply to try to allay fears and silence dissenters in the media, then it can probably be judged a total success.
Once again, statistics win the day over truth.

Mediocracy scores over democracy every time

There was a time, in the middle of the last century, when most Labour politicians's vison of a modern Great Britain was of a meritocracy, driven forward by the brightest and best to a future fuelled, in Harold Wilson's words, by "white hot technology".
The 21st century version espoused by Nu Labour is a mediocracy driven, but not necessarily forward, by the un-elected and State empowered into a future of unorecedented energy dependency and technological poverty.
In Nu labour's ideal universe, the cream no longer rises to the top but is driven to the bottom of the bottle by the sheer weight of mediocrity. The latest manifestation of this approach is the promotion of Alan Johnson to the position of Home Secretary. Now, granted that Jack Straw has split the former Ministry into two and siphoned off the most interesting bits - as he sees it - into a new and Orwellian sounding Ministry of Justice. But, the rump is of sufficient importance to the current and future welfare of the country to demand that the Home Secretary be someone with talent, strength and, above all, a real sense of duty to the British people.
Gordon Brown's first appointee, the remarkably talentless and charmless Jacqui Smith, should have given us a clue to his thinking. She used the post mainly as a way of funding her domestic living arrangements but, importantly from Gordon Brown's point of view, did nothing that went against her master's wishes. When Johnson's appointment was announced there were quite a few pundits who regarded it as a positive step, principally because he satisfied the main criterion, i.e. not being Jacqui Smith.
Prior to his recent appointment, Johnson's performance as a Minister has been ordinary in the extreme. The only time he was faced with a big decision - to bring Pubic Servants' retirement age in line with the private sector - he caved in at the first hint of Union pressure. This lack of bottom did not seem to damage his prospects in the least. He managed to avoid breaking anything during his tenure as Minister for Health so, even though he signally failed to get to grips with major issues such as MRSA and the bloated NHS beaurocracy, he was regarded as a safe pair of hands. His reward has been to be asked to occupy one of the great seats of State. So far, his performance has failed to reach even the modest levels of mediocrity we have come to expect from incumbents of the Home Office.
He blithely informed the Home Affairs Committee that he " didn't lose any sleep over the prospect of the population of the UK growing to 70 million". Echoing most of his peers, he referred to the benefits of multi-culturalism and how it had transformed Britain into a "vibrant" culture. As he was saying this, other beaurocrats were preparing to publish figures that showed unemployment at its highest level for 14 years. Coupled with the recent disclosure that the bulk of the 1 million new jobs created since Labour came to power had gone to recent arrivals from overseas, it demonstrated either an unforgiveable lack of sensitivity to the plight of the British unemployed (whose interests he is supposed to champion) or, and marginally worse, a genuine ignorance or understanding of the bigger picture.
The latter is the more logical interpretation following Johnson's abject performance in the House of Commons yesterday. By all accounts, he was casual to the point of insolence, appeared ill-briefed and, at one point, admitted that his lack of legal training meant that he struggled to grasp many of the finer legal points. Here's bit of advice Mr Johnson; one that anyone who has ever worked in business either learns rapidly or falls by the wayside. Before you present anything, if there is something you don't fully understand , grab hold of someone who does and get them to explain it to you in words of one syllable. Do not go into any situation ill-prepared, poorly briefed and without a sure handle on the most important issues. Falling back on the "I am just a poor boy from a working-class background" defence , simply won't work at this level.
The fact that Johnson decided he could wing it suggests one of two things: Either he is so lacking in genuine intellectual ability that he simply doesn't realise the depth of his own ignorance. Or, he is so contemtuous of Parliament that, in common with most of his Labour peers, he feels no real need to prepare before he faces questions in the House. Either way, he has proven, once again that, in this administration, mediocrity is the only benchmark aspiring ministers need to aim for.

Minority interests are un British

One of the defining characteristics of the British character has always been an innate sense of justice and fairness. We didn't much mind what happened in life or sport as long as everyone got a fair crack of the whip. Watch a TV documentary about British society in any era prior to the current one and you will find it littered with examples of this respect for fair play: queue-jumpers being chastised for not "waiting their turn"; people deferring to one another in bus or taxi queues; the majority instinctively supporting the underdog in any kind of sporting event and the acceptance that winning by cheating wasn't worth a light. Those were the days when a handshake was frequently all it took to cement a deal; the days when the expression "an Englishman's word is his bond" had some substance. These days, it would probably sound cliched to an audience brought up on The Apprentice or the Dragon's Den; but it was a truism long before it became a cliche.
Fair play wasn't something taught at home or school. You wouldn't have found it on any curriculum. It was never something much discussed or analysed; it was simply there, providing a framework for a reasonable life. People just knew, instinctively, what was right and fair. They did not jostle or push into queues, but quitely awaited their turn. From the playground onwards, fights were governed by unwritten - and immutable - rules; fists were OK; feet, heads and anything remotely resembling a weapon most certainly weren't. And fights were strictly for men and boys. Fighting was not a feminine past-time.
In cricket it was the norm for batsmen to walk when they knew they were out, or for fielders to own up if they hadn't quite managed to hold onto a clean catch. Footballers who dived and feigned injury were treated with contempt by referees, opponents and spectators alike.

Cheating of any kind was considered beyond the pale. Even criminals embraced a rough and ready form of morality. They might not all have been the loveable rogues who worshipped their old mums beloved of popular fiction but, by and large, they didn't prey on females, the poor, the weak or the elderly. Any young man who attacked an elderly man or woman would,have been the object of scorn and, most likely, have found himself on the wrong side of a battering. That is why virtually any middle-aged housewife could disperse a group of rowdy teenagers with a few well-chosen words; something that most policemen wouldn't attempt on their own these days.

So, how have we managed to descend from that innate sense of what is right and fair to our current state of affairs, where queuing is a lost art form - particularly in London - footballers who cheat and win penalties are regarded as the epitome of professionalism and a significant number of young men would not even consider fighting without some sort of edge; whether a real edge in the form of a knife or simply greater numbers than their opponent?
It would take several thick volumes to explore all of the underlying causes. And all I have at my disposal is a hastily-written blog. But, purely at random, here are a few things to consider:
1. Overcrowding. Experiments with rats have shown that colonies break when animals are confined in a small space and their numbers are allowed to grow unchecked. Regard England as a rat colony and you are already a long way to explaining the rapid breakdown in reasonable behaviour; especially in big cities like London. We are a small country that enjoys - probably not the right word - the most people per square mile in Europe. We have more and more people scrabbling for less space and rapidly dwindling resources. It is madness that we don't offically acknowledge the fact and put up the barriers before we all do ourselves a mischief.
2.Officially promoted inequality. Despite the findings, published today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that foreigners do not enjoy advantages when it comes to the allocation of social housing, the feeling persists that they do.
Sometimes, the anecdotal evidence looks stronger than any statistics. Take the awful fire that occurred in Camberwell last week. Look at the names of the people who died, those who survived and the people who witnessed the conflagration, all of whom lived in the tower block or one of its close neighbours. They all came originally from eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and points further east and west. How did they manage to get housed in an inner-London borough where the council housing waiting list runs to thousands of names? Whose places have they taken in the queue for council housing? How many elderly people have been left stranded in the area while their children and grandchildren have had to move out in search of affordable housing?
Ask these questions of any politician or local offical and you will immediately be labelled racist. Because, the simple answer is that, despite what the E&HRC says, foreigners who arrive homeless and with large families do seem to be given precedence over the indigenous population. This seemed to be confirmed by what John Healey, the Housing Minister, said on radio 4 this morning: "At present, those people with the most serious housing needs get priority. We are not changing that. " They are not changing it because they can't - at least not without infringing their own Human Rights Act. So, as long as the overarching selection criterion is immediate need rather than entitlement, the refugee family with four children must take precedence over the local couple with just one or two.
It might be the law, but it certainly isn't fair or just. Unfortunately, the only political party that has picked up on this point is the BNP; which is why they made gains at the recent elections which, in earlier, fairer times, they would never have had a hope in hell of achieving.
Harriet Harman will shortly add to this offically enshrined discrimination when she makes it illegal for institututions to discriminate against people from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds. Quite who will set the bar as far as a measurement of poverty or disadvantage is concerned is not yet clear. What is clear, based on the evidence of all prior discriminatory legislation, is that the rules will simply create yet another stratum in our society. Post this act, the poor will be further divided between those shrewd, crafty, well-informed and well-connected enough to exploit the legislation and the great mass who will never quite get the hang of it and go on being just as down-trodden as ever. Plus, of course, there will be another layer created above the other two made up solely of Quangocrats whose job is to monitor, review and enforce the regulations and pad out thei own pension schemes.
3. Much of the blame must, inevitably, attach itself to the people who have guided us for the last 30 years - not just in Westminster but in all the institutions charged with the care and mentoring of our children. They have created the curricula and agenda that have shaped our society. It is the educationalists, philosophers, teachers and other assorted care-givers who brick-by-painful-brick have dismantled a system that took around 200 years to perfect and have replaced it with something that fails in the most basic objective of any educational system; education, education, education.

Doubtless inspired by the noblest of egalitarian motives they are the ones, nonetheless, who have hollowed out our educational system from within. With their insistence on prizes for all - irrespective of talent, skills or effort- they have completely severed the link between effort and reward. Outside the classroom, they have achieved the same effect by eliminating competition from play and sport; awarding the feckless and lazy the same prizes as they do the strivers and achievers. When that hasn't had the desired effect and quashed children's natural competitive urges, they have simply sold off the playing fields. The results of this collective anti-competition activism can be seen in the obese, ill-educated under-class they have created whose opportunities for advancement or betterment are virtually nil.
Even black footballers and athletes from disadvantaged back-grounds rarely have the formal education system to thank for their success. In an earlier era, school sports were organised at all levels from Primary to Senior, with legions of teachers willing to devote time and energy to the running of school teams. Now, thanks to the everyone must win mentality, lack of facilities and Health and Safety issues competitive sport is dead or dying in many state schools. Children in such schools have to depend on external clubs to nurture their talent and provide the coaching and encouragement needed to see it bloom. If the Health & Safety tendency gets its way, of course, these same clubs will soon become so enmeshed in elfin safety regulations and paedo seeking legislation that no sane adult will want anything to do with them - but that's another story altogether.
By contrast, in the private and selective sectors, school sports are flourishing, just as they always have, alongside traditional academic excellence. English/British teams have enjoyed fantastic success in recent years. Probably 90% of the cyclists, rowers, sailors, swimmers, cricket and rugby players who have represented us so successfully on the world's playing fields hail from a middle class or otherwise educationally-privileged back-ground. They can all go on to greater professional achievement in their chosen sports. Alternatively, they could spend a few years getting paid handsomely for something they enjoy and then use their superior academic education to take up another career altogether. Their near-peers, meanwhile, consigned to life in an average sink comprehensive, will be left far behind with very little real prospect of ever catching up.
In other words, in pursuing their dream of unprecedented equality, the levellers have simply replaced a system that gave the majority a fair crack of the whip and allowed the best-equipped to advance, with one that condemns a large majority of its unfortunate participants to a life of unrelieved mediocrity.
Not very fair or just and, by definition therefore, not very British.

sounds, secrets and breathy aitches

I nearly crashed my car the other afternoon.
I was driving home from the West Country and listening to radio 2. The music stopped and a pleasant, female voice chimed out one of the many commercials that litter the BBC's airwaves these days.
I can't remember precisely what programme or presenter the commercial was plugging. I tend to tune out when these things are broadcast. But, I do remember that I almost swerved off the road when she added the strap line "..... the sound to your Sunday morning".
The sound TO your Sunday morning.
What the hell sort of language is that? Who wrote it? More to the point, who, charged with the job of editing it, allowed such meaningless drivel to be broadcast?
I wanted to call the Beeb - as I frequently do - to complain. I wanted to take the announcer - or preferably the writer/editor - gently by the throat and explain that there is no such construction in the English language as "the sound to". Unfortunately, I was driving, I was in a hurry and, truthfully, too apathetic to pull off the road and make the call on my mobile.
So, I let it go. And it has rankled ever since.
But really, how could anyone with English as a first language feel comfortable with such a construction. Imagine writing a diary entry that began: The day was fine and filled with the sound to the birds singing. UURGGH.
Why are people not only being allowed to mangle our language on a daily basis but, what's worse, being paid to do so? Is it out of some mis-guided sense of trendyness? Does it denote lack of interest or affection for the language?Or are they simply ignorant ? Whatever the reason, its effect is grating in the extreme.
It was probably around three or four years ago that I first noticed this trend. Like many linguistic horrors it seems to have originated in America.
The carrier of this particular virus was an ad for a shampoo or hair treatment which promised to provide " the secret TO glossy hair" or something equally specious. It made me grind my teeth then and, just writing it, makes me grind them even now. In any event, such is the power of the broadcast word, whether on TV, radio or the WWW, that "the secret TO" rapidly established itself. It infests evry form of the written word but seems to be particularly prevalent in women's magazines, which regularly promise to reveal the secret to bikini figures, workplace romances, perfect teeth, summer diets and buiness success. The people who write and edit these sections are only outdone in their air-headeness by the people who actually choose to read them.
Another hair-tearing construction that pops up all the time is Bored OF or Fed-Up OF. In fact, it's been around so long that, nowadays, when people find things or other people tedious they are just as likely to anoounce that they are Bored Of them as the rest of us are to be bored with them.
But, these prepositional aberrances pale in comparison with the modern insistence on inserting the letter aitch into the word aitch so that it ends up being pronounced as Haitch.
My bank is called HSBC. Or at least, that is how I have always thought of it. Not any more, though, if a young man that I talked to the other day is to be believed. No, according to him, the correct title of my bank is Haitch SBC with a very breathy emphasis on the H inserted at the beginning of the word.
I tried - and dismally failed - to explain to him that the company's name was HSBC with no aitch sound at the beginning. What I actually said was " There is no aitch in the aitch of HSBC". The surreal nature of that opening never really dissipated. The debate that followed progressed rapidly downhill. We might justt as well have been discussing some obscure grammatical construction in Serbo Croat for all the effect my argument had. Suffice to say that the young lad went away convinced that I was either some kind of nutter or that I was the unfortunate victim of a distinctly sub-standard education. For my part, I had to retire to a darkened room and rub myself down gently with a copy of Usage and Abusage.

Democracy - or what?

The problem with democracy is that it's so bloody unpredictable. Give people the right to vote for whomsoever they fancy and, blow me down if that's not just precisely what the buggers will go and do.
Apart from being found wallowing up to their armpits in the exes trough, nothing exercises our Westminster political reperesentatives more than the idea of people wasting their votes on fringe candidates who refuse to behave like proper politicians: People who spend their own time and money getting their names on the ballot paper in order to pursue a cause or make a difference.
It's enough to get Politics a bad name.
That's why, in the wake of the Local and European elections we have had people like Harridan Harperson sliding in and out of radio and TV studios and claiming that the electorate had used the ballot box to deliver a sharp, wake up call to Labour and the other mainstream parties.
Let's get something straight. The main message the electorate sent Labour was that they didn't like its leader, its policies and, most of all, its arrogant disregard for the concerns of ordinary people. The expenses scandal was just the latest - and most blatant - manifestation of that arrogance. So what has been the party's response to this outpouring of dislike? An exhibition of collective guilt perhaps? A ceremonial donning of sack cloth and ashes? Even an admission that their policies might have, just possibly, been ill-conceived and ineptly executed?
Many things have occurred but none of them remotely like any of the above. A series of nonentities, nobodies and mediocrities has rapidly abandoned ship, each closely accompanied by a painfully thin list of their own accomplishments cunningly disguised as a letter of resignation. These missives contain many references to ME and The PARTY. What they signally fail to contain is any mention of country.
Gordon is still getting on with the job of running the country and saving the world yet still makes time to mutter about the need for Constitutional reform. The same old arguments about the superiority of Proportional Representation have surfaced, encouraged by ministers who hope that therein lies a magic formula for survival. (Strange how every administration that gets hammered at the ballot box touts PR as the most democratic voting system - until results improve or they get re-elected, when they suddenly decide that nothing can beat the dear old first past the post system after all. )
The main purpose of this activity is to distract the electorate from the real issues. What our political elites have chosen - and are still choosing - to ignore is the very simple message that we also don't like Europe. We are fed up with having 80% of our laws dictated to us from a bunker somewhere in Brussels. We are not convinced that allowing Spanish ships to hoover all the fish out of our territorial waters is a good idea; or that European judges from such noted democracies as Albania and Romania should be the final arbiters in our Justice system. Even now, most of us struggle with the proposition that decisions taken in Brussels that outweigh Laws made in Westminster really represent the apogee of democratic governance.
This is where your average politician of whatever stripe puts his or her fingers in their ears and makes nannannnanna sounds. Because, it's not what they want to hear.
Europe is good.
Outside the EU we would be just a small island with no influence and no voice in the world. (That's always been one of my favourites; as if, somehow, being part of Europe changed our geographical location and, once we leave, we'll be towed back into a little backwater where no one will ever take any notice of us again.)
If we leave Europe, major companies like Volkswagen, Renault, BMW and their ilk, will no longer want to do business with us. That's right, on the orders of Frau Merkel or Monsieur Zarkosy, their CEOs will close their UK operations and simply ignore a market where new car sales run at 2 million a year, . It would certainly be fun listening to them explaining that decision at their respective AGMs.
The simple fact of the matter is, politicians like the EU because it's like the UK - only much, much bigger. Hence, there is more money sloshing around; the decisions affect vastly more people and the ministers and apparatchiks making them acquire even more power. The fact that the whole bangshoot is riddled with incompetence, corruption and sheer bloody crookery doesn't lessen its attraction one iota. It's so like the Westminster they have come to know and love that they are all bound to feel perfectly at home.
So, when politicians interpret the EU election results, this is the prism through which they view them. The fact that number 2 in the ballot in many parts of the country was a we-want-out-of -Europe party (UKIP) is an inconvenience to be ignored. They rationalised the switch to UKIP ( or the BNP ) as a simple protest vote. The voters didn't really understand the issues because they hadn't been put simply enough and had placed their cross next to UKIP or BNP as a form of punishment. Ergo, the problem was not one of voter disenchantment, but simply one of failed communication. If only Gordon and Peter could simplify the core message the problems would all melt away as the electorate, once again, was regailed with visions of sunlit uplands, where there was never any boom-or-bust, and the skies are not cloudy or grey.
It never really seems to get through to any of them - Tory or LibDem as much as Labour- that it is precisely this kind of self-absorbed arrogance that really gets people's goat. Obviously, some people voted the way they did to send the big parties a message. But, many placed their crosses where they did having carefully evaluated the options available to them. Until the main parties, and especialliy Labour, take this simple fact on board they will never win back the people who have deserted them.

Martin flees the nest

If you pay close attention this afternoon, you might just spot something that hasn't been seen for close to 400 years; Mr Speaker, Michael Martin, being expelled from the House of Commons.
When he does, eventually and reluctantly, take his leave, his going will, no doubt, be marked by sober and heartfelt tributes to his worthiness, personal probity and dedication to Parliament and democracy.
As usual, the hypocricy and crocodile tears will serve only to highlight the Old Boy's club mentality of most MPs - even those of the female persuasion. Some of the names already thrown into the ring for consideration as his successor, doubtless by impartial friends and associates of the nominees, feature entrenched opponents of democratic government like Harriet Harman and serial expense fiddlers such as Ming Campbell. Who says that virtue has its own reward?
Anyway, back to Speaker Martin. Rarely can anyone have been less suited to a job. Martin was not merely ignorant of Parliament, its function or traditions ; he actually tried to make a virtue of his ignorance: As if being a product of the Gorbals, the trades union movement and Old Labour not only excused his ignorance but precluded him from acquiring any of the knowledge or understanding necessary to the role of Speaker of the House of Commons. The fact that George Thomas - Viscount Tonypandy - rose from an even more humble background to become universally acknowledged as one of the great modern Speakers was just one aspect of the history of his role that he, patently, failed to grasp.
Some old Labour apparatchiks wear their working class credentials like a shield. Martin used his as a bludgeon. Opposed by anyone capable of forming a coherent sentence, his instinctive reaction was to accuse them of snobbery. In this, he was enthusiastically aided and abbetted by other members of the Lowlands tartan mafia.
As soon as news of his imminent resignation leaked out, these Labour outriders were busying themselves on the political blogs on the Guardian and Independent websites. Their snide little posts stand out like dog turds on a snow-covered field. Predictably, they claim that Martin is a Skapegoat (sic) hunted down by a mob of howling cretins. Whether this refers to the Press or the public is not altogether clear.
The fact that he - along with Harriet Harman and one Gordon Brown - spent £2 million to try to prevent the expenses information being published is, apparently, neither here nor there. Poor old Michael is characterised as yet another good socialist crushed under the wheels of the right wing juggernaut.
Mind you, if Not So Flash Gordon and his friends start to use Martin's demise as an opportunity to draw one of their famous lines under events and "move on", then we all might just start to think of him as a convenient scapegoat. For, let none of us forget that the great Gordon has plenty to answer for on the expenses front; not the least why he needed to maintain a London home as well as a constituency home while living for 12 years in his grace and favour pad in Downing Street.
Now that Martin has had to fly from the House (couldn't resist that one) he might just feel inclined to reveal where some of Gordon's other bodies are buried. In which case, look out for an early promotion to the House of Lords and further and better opportunities for the lad from Glasgow East to feather his nest at the public's expense.

Shining examples

“I know this isn’t enough and people are angry and it will take time. My single most important thing in my life is my relationship with my constituents in Salford.” Of course it is, Miss Blears: especially when they are likely to take the first available opportunity to end the relationship; probably about this time next year when Gordon finally calls an election.
Suddenly, if the stream of contrite apologies spewing out of Westminster is anything to go by, the penny has, finally, dropped. MPs of all parties now seem to understand that the British electorate is absolutely appalled at the whole expenses scam. They will no longer be fobbed off with references to rules and entitlements. They will no longer shrug at the idea that someone living in a relative's bedroom actually, honestly, believes it to be her main residence. Tory grandees who use the system to pay gardeners and other domestic staff will now attract odium instead of indifference.
And, despite the best efforts of his sister-in-law, Gordon Brown is still going to find it difficult to explain not why he paid someone to clean his London flat, but why he needed a London flat as a second home at all when he has spent the last 12 years lording it up in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street at the taxpayer's expense.
The other Mrs Brown was just one of a number of extras wheeled out over the weekend to try to lighten the atmosphere surrounding the expenses scandal. Another was ex-MP Matthew Parrish whose brief was to introduce a little levity into the proceedings. This he tried - and failed - to do by making the whole thing sound like a, slightly farcical, storm in a tea-cup, with frequent references to claims for bath plugs and other inconsequential household items ; as if ramping the system to defraud taxpayers of thousands of pounds was no different to padding a claim for car mileage in the private sector. Compounding his obvious ignorance of how the private sector works, Mr Parrish then compared the relatively low pay - his words - that MPs had to endure with the fantastic salaries they would undoubtedly attract if they worked in the Private Sector; as if the City and the private sector were two interchangeable terms.
MPs earn a basic salary of £68,000 without allowances. Compared with the six and seven figure earnings of the average Investment banker, that doesn't sound like a great deal of very much at all. But, it is three times the average wage. And, take it from me, it is a great deal more than many middle managers in the productive sector of the economy enjoy. More to the point, very few of the mediocrities who populate Westminster would actually hold down a job in private industry. That is why they are all so keen to climb the political greasy pole. Because the contacts and experience they accrue during their time in power are about the only marketable attributes they have once they get tossed out of office.
The reason that this and other attempts to downplay the scandal failed was that the Telegraph released details of Tory piggery to set beside the earlier revelations of Labour snouts in the trough. At a stroke, strident Labour claims of political bias were shown to be groundless. More to the point, the latest revelations demonstrated the depth of the corruption inside our political system. It became obvious to every one but Speaker Martin -apparently- that no one was going be able to puncture this particular balloon.
If anything, the more strident the denials become, the more hot air is spouted, the larger the balloon grows. Personally, I believe that at least one major politician might receive a visit from the police in the not too distant future. My nomination is Jacqui Smith although I would be equally happy to see Darling, Michael Gove or Michael Ancram having their collar felt. We live in interesting times.

What a bloody liberty!

It's akin to Ken Livingstone embracing capitalism; Jamie Oliver Oliver endorsing Turkey Twizzlers; or any member of the Christian Right in America throwing in his lot with Obama.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.

Firepersons urged to hide light under a bushel

If your house were on fire, how worried do you think you would be about the gender, faith, sexual orientation or hair colour of the person doing their best to put it out?
If you needed to be carried, dragged or otherwise physically removed from a burning building, how desperate would you be to know the extent and intensity of the diversity training the person saving your life had enjoyed in the previous 12 months?
These are not rhetorical questions. They actually need to be addressed and answered.
If the Lincolnshire Fire Service is to be believed, the thorny problems that firefighters have to confront are to do with gender and faith; not the physical strength or mental ability needed to save life, limb and home.
So, they have splurged precious time and money designing a range of clothing which does not, apparently, compromise Moslem restrictions on dress and public modesty in order to attract more female members of that faith into the fire service.
Take a long moment to consider the sheer lunacy of this proposition if you really want to appreciate the damage that the PC culture is doing to our society.
Like most Fire Services, Lincolnshire does not struggle to attract would be firefighters. In fact, they have candidates queuing up for the job. The big problem is that they're the wrong type of candidate; white, male and, like most of the population, either irreligious or CofE. All of which, from the standpoint of the Lincolnshire Fire Service, disqualifies them from applying. What they desire, above all, are female firefighters and, preferably, female firefighters of a Muslim persuasion. They have quotas to fill and Brownie points to earn. Hence the lady Muslim firefighter's uniform complete with all-enveloping skirt and blouse and a hoodie that shields the face and covers the hair.
Now, Lincolnshire is not the South of England and, although it attracts its fair share of immigrants, they tend to be agricultural workers drawn from Eastern Europe; Poles, Czechs, Estonians and the like. Not too many of a Muslim bent, in other words. So, no meaningful argument can be made for the need for more Muslims - male or female -to be recruited to achieve some bureaucratically contrived racial balance.
But, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were some Muslims who might be interested in firefighting as a career - and that some of them were female. Now, here is where the conundrums really start to roll.
If these women's beliefs were orthodox enough to welcome a westernised version of the burkah as a uniform, they would have husbands of an equally orthodox bent. And these men would be the last people on earth to allow their wives to take a job that involved direct, unchaperoned, contact with men every working day.
On the other hand, no self-respecting woman - Muslim or otherwise - would seriously entertain the notion of doing the tough, physically demanding job of a fire fighter wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. Like their counterparts in the Police and the Armed Forces, they would want to wear clothes that were practical, comfortable and suited to the rigours of the role. That takes our mock-burkah out of the equation straight away.
What this sorry tale tells us is that the Lincolnshire Fire Service, like so many of our traditional services, has been infiltrated and taken over by the PC tendency. It's main purpose is no longer to provide protection for life and property but a career path for social engineers whose only goal is self-advancement and aggrandisement. The day is not that far off when people's lives are lost because some PC idiot prevents firefighters actually confronting a fire until it has burned itself out because of Health & Safety issues. Don't bet against it being someone from the Lincolnshire Service who issues that command.

Unnatural selection

Around fifteen years ago, I was living in the US and working, among other things, as a freelance journalist. The Group of Newspapers that I worked for gave every new arrival a large tome that would have made War & Peace look like a pamphlet. It included the style guide, which covered practical matters like where and how to use apostrophes, the company's approach to freebies for journalists (Answer: accept any and you are toast) and its dos and don'ts regarding what could loosely be labelled relationships and discrimination.

Although I thought it unnecessary to spell everything out in such detail, at least it left everyone who worked for the paper in no doubt about its attitude to discrimination of any kind. Put briefly, one was not allowed to discriminate against any group or individual based on gender, sexual orientation, religion or race. I remember talking about it with friends and work colleagues whenever I was back in the UK - about twice or three times a year. Generally speaking the reaction was one of disbelief coupled with comments about bloody pc Yanks and a general sense of relief that we, the British, were far too sensible to need any such guidelines. Oh how easy it is to be smug: And wrong.

I look around the UK now and I doubt that there are many more politically correct countries in the world. Occasionally I read blog sites that make the same claim on behalf of Canada but, never having had to live there, I am happy to claim the PC Cup on our behalf.
Well, happy is probably not the word I am looking for; resigned, disillusioned and bloody furious would be closer to the mark. Because, as with all things in modern Britain, we have embraced political correctness with a degree of enthusiasm that I would never have thought possible twenty years ago.
Like most people I let the sheer irrelevance and pointlessness of most politically correct policies wash over me andwhile I try to get on, probably slightly more grimly, with my life. Recently, though, I have witnessed a prime example of what happens when political correctness becomes the key driver in a decision making process. My company - a global engineering firm- has recently decided, with no small degree of satisfaction, to identify a number of female managers from different parts of the global organisation that it will groom for future occupation of the most senior management positions. In fact, so proud of this initiative were they that they announced it on the company's global intranet. And were, somehow, taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction. A reaction, it has to be said, that was equally disillusioned from whichever side of the gender divide it came.
The stated purpose of this initiative was to redress a perceived imbalance in the number of women on the main board. Which was ironic in itself. You see, my company is Scandinavian, but its reach is genuinely global, with subsidiaries in almost 100 countries many of which have been around for almost 100 years. Despite this fact, the main board is composed almost exclusively of Scandinavians and is, apparently, closed to almost everyone whose name doesn't end in sson, irrespective of gender.
The point of this little anecdote is that "positive discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to discriminate positively in favour of one group without discriminating negatively against everyone else who isn't a member of that select group. The truth of this is so self-evident that it shouldn't need explanation or justification. Unfortunately, it's a measure of our PC times that, simply for saying so, one can be labelled mysoginistic and anti-female. It engenders the same kind of reaction - a mixture of pity and condescension - that one receives for expressing doubts about Global Warming.

Anyway, since promoting discrete groups seems to be the order of the day, I am currently lobbying for people of the Romany persuasion to be promoted to the main board. If that fails, I might be tempted to turn my lobbying skills to the benefit of left handed, ginger-headed Albanians.