Pointless authoritarianism

Back in April 2007 I witnessed two trainspotters being roughly treated by police as they tried to take a photo of a Victorian manufacturer's plate on a bridge. I thought at the time this was a bit of overzealous silliness that would calm down. Some time later, a colleague and his wife, eminently respectable middle class professionals, were harshly prevented from taking a piccy of their daughter departing on her gap year from a London mainline station.

Today the papers report that Tory MP Andrew Pelling was stopped and searched under terrorist legislation for taking a photograph near East Croydon station.

A parliamentary question by Lib Dem MP Norman Baker has revealed that about 160,000 people have been stopped and searched on railway property in the year to September 2008, many of them, one assumes, for attempting to snap an innocent photograph.

Because each incident happened at a busy station, it will have been witnessed by many more people. Even if ten or twenty people see the police acting harshly and unreasonably, that's millions of people each year that will become further disillusioned with the state of policing in the UK.

For a start, the policy is pointless. Every station platform and concourse is filled with people holding mobiles, most of which can now take photographs without it being obvious. Ironically, the photo above is of the big screen at Charing Cross station exhorting mobile users to 'Shoot it'. To leap only on people with cameras is quite pointless. Secondly, the web is filled with photographs of stations and railway property; these are public places and have been ever since they were built. Thirdly, real terrorists are quite capable of carrying out a recce and sketching up layouts without obviously taking photographs openly with a camera. Whilst dressed in a purple anorak with a thermos flask.

Since the policy is so obviously pointless, the only conclusion I can reach is that it's being pursued as a very public display of police authority from which none of is immune. And that the authors of the policy are quite conscious that they're further driving a wedge between the police and the law-abiding public.

What business is this of government?

The way in which I light my home is entirely a matter for my own choice; candles, Tilley lamps or incandescent lamps. This is no business of government.

Thankfully the free market remains more powerful than either the EU or the Labour government, who have implemented this absurd ban. I may, in time, need to convert my ceiling fittings to Edison screw rather than bayonet cap to continue to use 150w and 100w GLS lamps, but this is an inconsequential price to pay to dismiss this impertinent interference.

Glad to see the world catching up

Being English, I don't really like to direct attention to 'I told you so' prescience on this blog, but a couple of snippets today have tempted me out.

First is Christopher Meyer's very sound piece in the Times today. He propounds the wisdom of agreeing, as did the Congress of Vienna in 1815, spheres and zones of influence. As the Ukraine, once the darling of Euro hawks, is prompting indignation at its refusal to pay $250 a unit for gas that we pay $450 a unit for and thus making Euro gas supplies a little wobbly, Russia's position appears both benign and reasonable.

Meyer, a diplomat of great experience, comments:

Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.

And as I commented here on 9th August last year:

Europe's purblind expansion into the Caucasus is mistaken. Europe's eastern boundary is a line that runs from the Baltic to the Aegean. Anything east of that is either Russia's natural fiefdom or needs to be strong enough to stand on its own feet without NATO and we should leave them to it.

The blogosphere strongly disagreed at the time. I suspect a few may have come round to mine and Sir Christopher's view since.

Second is Robert Key's question in Parliament to the Chancellor (H/T Iain Dale) on the cost to the nation of Brown's sale of half our gold reserves. Which featured here on 27th October.

The loss isn't quite as large as the Parliamentary answer makes out - one needs to apply the GDP deflator, as I did, to get a true comparison - but it's nice to know they're catching up.

Morris dancing for the 21st century

Concerns that the brand of rather gay gingham skippy Laura Ashley Morris Dancing of the type that appears in Midsomer Murders is dying off are misplaced. Let it go.

To see the future of English subversive folk display, visit the Rochester Sweeps Festival this May.

Imagine Christian Bale's dark, brooding Batman. Imagine teams of men big as Shire horses leaping their way down the street, the smash of heavy sticks hitting the cobbles in unison, the gutteral shouts, flying black plumage like so many psychotic crows diving at the crowd. This is folk display with attitude. Even the policemen's grins fade from their faces and they look slightly nervous as the bands pass them. Small children hide behind their mothers' skirts. The heavy thud of war drums keeps the rhythm, and not all of the anger is feigned.

Imagine 'V' masks .....

Gordon's cesspit morality

I don't normally agree with much of what Melanie Phillips writes, but this morning she is spot on the money:

If ever one needed proof that this government has ripped up the moral rule book of the original Labour movement, it is surely provided by its apparent obsession with liberalising Britain’s gambling culture.

In the long-lost days when Labour owed more to Methodism than Marx, gambling would have been viewed as a scourge which - along with drinking and sexual licentiousness - stood to destroy in particular the lives of the poor.

Instead of curbing such activity, however, this government has given a green light to sexual irregularity (of which today’s news of a sexual health clinic in every school is but the latest grotesque example), relaxed Britain’s drinking laws and hugely expanded the gambling culture.

Winter comfort food

As far as Winter comfort food is concerned, I'm in my element. Not for me a scrape of salady bits flown in from Kenya, but honest, cheap, traditional dishes using cheap cuts of meat and cheap winter veg. The thing about tonight's Lancashire Hotpot is that the lamb fat must percolate through to the sliced potatoes and make them at the same time both crisp and sticky. This is essential and non-negotiable. The stew beneath is covered in shimmering golden yellow globules of fat, the meat exactly between chewy and flaky and the plate crying at the end for bread to mop the last of its rich coating. Very simple, truly delicious.

...and if you didn't have enough to worry about

..you can watch the live seismic recorders around Yellowstone Park in the US as they monitor the 'swarm' of earthquake activity that started over Christmas, on 27th December. HERE.

Doom mongers in the US are fearful the dormant volcano could blow, sending several square miles of dust into the atmosphere, endangering life on Earth etc.

I'll bet the train operator already has a pre recorded announcement ready

"South Eastern trains apologise for the cancellation of this service due to apocalyptic volcanic activity and regrets any delay or inconvenience this may cause to your journey ..."

Gordon's 100,000 lies

Let's look at Gordon's latest promise of bringing forward £10bn of public sector projects and 'creating' 100,000 jobs. First, the bigger the projects, the longer the lead times. Big infrastructure projects need years of planning, planning enquiries, and often involve land acquisition and assembly, legal appeals, huge design and project teams, extensive site investigation and so on. So little chance of getting big projects to deliver on site within three years, by which time the worst of the slump is forecast to be over.

OK, so take a smallish project - say £10m. Say a new ward block for a hospital, or a VIth form block for a school. Delivered by a public authority and built on land it already owns. And let's say the project idea was approved and the cash allocated on 1st January 2009. Here's how it might happen.

1. Mid February - Project team decide on traditional build rather than modular build; using the Treasury's Green Book options appraisal methods, this provides the optimum return given the economic life of the alternatives.
2. Start of July 2009 - Architect appointed. Writing and getting approvals for the design brief has taken 8 weeks, and as the fee will exceed the EU threshold for public procurement, they have had to spend 13 weeks advertising the job in OJEU and in internal procedures in appointing the designer.
3. September 2009 - Sketch designs, layouts and building performance criteria agreed. Design team proceed to detailed design.
4. January 2010 - Detailed design completed, planning consents (8 weeks) applied for
5. March 2010 - Production information and tender documents completed. Must go through EU tender procedures as exceeds construction threshold, so in
6. June 2010 - Contractor appointed. Contractor needs 6 weeks to mobilise, so work starts on site in
7. August 2010 - Groundbreaking ceremony; Chair of Health Trust presented with silver plated spade.
8. The contract is worth £8m; the rest of the £10m budget is contingency and design team fees. The contract period is 50 weeks.
9 - October 2011 - Building completed. Delays due to specified window manufacturer having gone bust, poor weather, unknown obstructions in ground.

So, apart from the design team, the temporary construction jobs that will have been bought will have lasted for about a year from Autumn 2010 to Autumn 2011. The permanent jobs that could come out of the new facility - nurses or teachers, cleaners, a few extra managers - won't come on stream until the start of 2012. By this time the IMF will have imposed swingeing cuts on UK public sector expenditure, so it's likely the new facility can not actually afford to open.

So who will benefit? Well, design firms, quantity surveyors, structural and M&E engineers and the like, if they can hold on until mid 2009 when appointments are made. And by how much will economists reduce their forecast of the unemployment totals for 2009 / 2010? Nil. Nada. Nothing. Zero.

Who are the extremists?

I am grateful to Iain Dale for bringing to our attention the Stasi's Met Police's google ad asking us to report 'Right Wing Extremists' to them. Iain is correct in pointing out that they offer no guidance in how to identify one, so I suppose we'll have to make our own judgements.

However, just to be on the safe side I have completed their online form and have reported both Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer as being considerably to the right of me. Let's see how quickly they act on this valuable information.

Brown's corrupt government falsifies consultation

The Devil's Kitchen carries a disturbing tale HERE of the way in which Brown's corrupt government falsified the results of a consultation into retail tobacco displays.

Read it and then tell me honestly that the entire bunch of them aren't shameless chiselling little crooks who will lie, and distort, omit, invent, and misrepresent the facts to suit their chilling social engineering agenda.

Brown's recession tour in full

The news that Brown is to embark on a tour of Britain's recession blackspots this week prompts me to reveal his itinerary:

• Monday - Guildford, Croydon
• Tuesday - Reading, Slough
• Wednesday - Sevenoaks, Maidstone
• Thursday - Colchester, Chelmsford
• Friday - Docklands, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey

As many commentators have pointed out, this is a middle-class recession that will hit the financial and service sectors, including retail and distribution, in the south-east of England particularly hard, completely unlike the last recession that took a toll of industry and manufacturing in the midlands and the north.

Actually, I have to tell the truth. Gordon will be visiting none of the above. You see, he's not visiting any of the places hit by this recession. Oh no. He's visiting the Labour strongholds hit by the last recession. As the Mail says:

The ‘recession recce’ will take in the East Midlands, the North West, the Midlands, the South West and Wales, all of which were badly hit by unemployment in the early Eighties. The visit to some of the areas worst hit in previous slumps comes amid reports that the Prime Minister is considering a second bail-out for banks after the first £37 billion package of taxpayers’ money failed.

Now to many people this may sound like party electioneering at the public expense.

And many people may consider that Cameron would be perfectly justified in dispatching his own front bench at public expense to visit the people who will really be bearing the brunt of Brown's economic folly. So how about it, Dave?

And so it starts .....

The central State is inherently weak. Those at the centre of the State know this better than the civil population, and this knowledge makes them fearful and paranoid. Every shadow is a threat, every blog an enemy, each dissenter a potential terrorist. As Willem Buiter wrote in the FT:

Every restriction on our liberties - our right to speak, write, criticize and offend as we please, to act and organize in opposition to the government of the day, to embarrass it and to show it up by forcing it to look into the mirror of its own leaked secrets - must be resisted. We cannot afford to believe any government’s protestations that it is acting in good faith and will safeguard the confidentiality of any information it extracts from us. Public safety and national security are never sufficient reasons for restricting the freedom of the citizens. The primary duty of the state is to safeguard our freedom against internal and external threats. The primary duty of an informed citizenry is to limit the domain of the state - to keep the government under control and to prevent it from becoming a threat to our liberties.

The threat posed by our own government to our liberty and fundamental rights is a constant one. Most of the time it is a much greater, direct and immediate threat than that posed by foreign states (through conquest or extortion) or by external non-government agents, the violent NGOs like Al Qaeda.

2009 will see violent upheaval in Greece, Spain and Italy as the fall-out from their membership of the single currency hits. The EU will be fighting for its survival as a putative Federal State - and it will fight. The legislation is in place for a Greek magistrate to extradite any one of us should we be seen as adding to the threat posed by their own people on their own streets; Europe wide jurisdiction is now a reality. You can all forget Magna Carta.

Both France and Germany - the EU's spine - will become increasingly repressive in defence of the EU under threat. The Guardian reports today that nine French 'anarchists' who sound more like modern hippies have been seized by anti-terrorist police from the small Limousin village (incredibly with a communist Mayor) that they had settled in. The French government says they posed a threat to the State; they say they were just being anti-State hippies and wanted to be left alone. We will see much more of this throughout Europe during 2009 as the EU feels threatened by its unwilling citizens. Any UK libertarian blogger who campaigns in their defence could see themselves the subject of an extradition warrant from the French examining magistrate; no longer can we stand safely in our realm and comment on the excesses of mainland Europe.

I've mentioned before that we are going through changes of the magnitude of those of 1830 - 1860. A period of fundamental political reform that will be resisted by the established but dying parties, the Statist civil service and those whom Peter Oborne calls the Political Class. British good sense avoided the blood spilt on the continent in the 19th century, and my most fervent wish is that we can do so again. However, the baneful grasp of the evil fronds of the EU on our nation may mitigate against this.

No, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat or hearing voices. We're so used to political stability, so indoctrinated with the supremacy of individual rights, that anything else is incomprehensible. Everyone forgets that all those rights, rights of expression, of assembly, of thought and conscience, and rights of privacy are expressly caveated so that they only exist insofar as they don't threaten the State. The European Convention on Human Rights is actually the Convention on the Rights of European States over the People of Europe; just read carefully the second clauses of Articles 8, 9, 10 and 11 HERE.

And as the nine hippies of Tarnac are finding, one doesn't actually have to pose a real threat to the State - it's enough for the paranoid and weak central State to believe that you might.

Oborne on Lab Lib Dem alliance

If there is substance to Peter Oborne's conjecture in this morning's Mail that there is a deal in the offing for Brown to bring the Lib Dems into government, this could be Brown's and Clegg's biggest miscalculation to date. The Lib-Lab pact negotiated between David Steel and Callaghan in 1978 didn't save Sunny Jim and neither will such a pact save Brown. And in 1979 the Libs lost a third of their votes as a result.

What's been absolutely clear from recent elections and by elections is that people have been voting not for Dave's Tories or Cleggie's Libs but against Brown's Labs. The anti-Labour vote has been split between the two, the Lib Dems taking votes from those who can't yet quite bring themselves to vote Tory. Public feeling against Labour will be stronger than any other electoral motivator. If Clegg allies his party to Labour, the Tories may gain some extra votes but the Lib Dems will certainly haemorrhage support - much more than the third of their votes they lost in '79. The Greens may now do quite well from lost Lib Dem votes. The country will see this as trickery, as denying the people the chance to be rid of Brown, and the outcome for both Labour and the Lib Dems will be disastrous.

For this reason I believe we should give every encouragement to the Lib Dems to join Brown's doomed government.

Smokers, spend an hour or two in Hackney

Powell details in 'Dance' how young officers would tease Widmerpool by giving all the signs of preparing to render him a salute and then at the last moment refraining from doing so. It's the sort of pricking of petty pomposity that we English are really quite good at.

The Standard reports today that Hackney's litter enforcement officers are following smokers around with video cameras. As far as littering is concerned, smokers are an easy target. You know exactly when the offence will occur.

It strikes me that some mischievous smokers may take some minor pleasure in leading these people a merry dance.

'Top Gear', Localism and energy security

Strange as it may seem to find those three topics in a blog post, they are connected, I promise.

In a recent episode the Top Gear team tested two non-petrol vehicles. The first was the battery powered Tesla, an incredibly expensive but fast sports car. Then James May tested the Honda FCX Clarity, powered by a Hydrogen fuel cell. The team had no doubts that the Honda was the future; the very point of a car is to be able to drive it continuously, topping up the fuel as you go, and not having to leave it on charge for half its life.

North Sea gas - essentially methane - is running out. Alternatives are gas piped in from elsewhere, including Russia, and LNG tankers bring in gas by sea from around the world. It is curious that I recall the conversion to natural gas of our cooker back in the late 60s, and that it may cease to be an economic and affordable energy source within my lifetime. As North Sea gas winds down, the UK will be far more exposed in terms of energy security than at any time in our history.

Before North Sea gas, in my childhood, we ran on Town Gas. Every urban conurbation had its own gas works, often operated by the local public corporation. Originally, town gas was the by-product of the coking process that provided the steel industry with fuel, but it was found that low grade soft bituminous coal could be used where coke was not needed. Town gas plants didn't have to be big to achieve economies of scale, and modern technologies could make them clean and highly energy efficient. The UK has over 190 billion tonnes of coal 'in place' of which around 45 billion tonnes are classed as recoverable, so there's no shortage of secure raw material.

Best of all is the composition of coal gas - generally as follows

Hydrogen - 50%
Methane - 35%
Carbon Monoxide - 10%
Ethylene - 5%

Honda, as part of associated research for their Hydrogen cars, have developed two prototype 'fuel stations' to make hydrogen. One of these is a home-sized plant (pictured below) that, insanely, converts natural gas - essentially methane - into hydrogen.

Coal gas could give us not only a sensible source of hydrogen to replace petrol, but a source of methane to replace natural gas without having to back-convert every appliance in Britain. If they can be separated. And if the dangerous CO can be removed; it was this that enabled so many suicides by gas in the old days. And because it can be produced on a small scale, perhaps even domestic or neighbourhood scale, it can be left to the market.

Even if the economics are not yet quite right for a comeback for coal gas, they may soon be so. Let's be ready.

The future of football clubs in 2009?

I must confess that footy has never been amongst my interests, and I have little understanding of the economics of the business that manages to pay tens of millions to buy players and then pay those players up to two hundred thousand a week. I assume club income comes from gate receipts, corporate sponsorship and TV broadcasting rights.

However, nothing typifies the conspicuous consumption of Brown's bloated boom decade more than football. A riot of laughable bad taste by the players, together with sexual excess and every variety of illegal and deviant behaviour imaginable, at the same time both lauded and condemned by the red tops.

Will TV user subscriptions and advertising revenues dry up? Will corporate sponsors fall by the wayside? Will footy fans desert the terraces? I simply don't know. Will all those footy assets, like every other asset in the economy, prove to have been grossly over-valued? I suspect so.