Plus ca change ...

Richard North has a brilliantly indignant post HERE on the DFID's inanely expensive schemes for Afghan 'wimmin' whilst the basics go unaddressed.

I'm reminded of the anecdote about the USAID feminist who first followed the original occupation. She spent several months lecturing the women of a small village on their new found rights, imported American labour-saving kitchen utensils and pregnancy testing kits, and arranged for literacy tutors.

Returning to the same village four years on, she was appalled to see the women behaving as she had found them - burka-clad, and following twenty paces behind the men.

She harangued the women that she knew at American length, excoriating their subservience. "You're equal" she railed "Why the Hell are you still walking twenty paces behind your husbands?"

The answer came softly. "Mines."

The Quangos must die

Apart from electing 646 MPs - approximately one for every 70,000 voters - we elect some 23,000 local councillors. Unfortunately, they have about as much power as a dead Duracell on Christmas Day. Not only have councillors been neutered by the central State, but councils themselves are too big to be meaningful to many people. France has an elected local administration for every 1,500 electors - even the tiniest hamlet with three cottages and a dunghill has its Mayor - but 120,000 Britons are needed to get a government unit in its lowest form.

And those 23,000 elected councillors are dwarfed by 60,000 unelected people serving on 5,200 quangos. Yes, 60,000 people we've never had a choice in appointing, who serve on bodies exercising real power in the health service, policing, housing, prisons, training and economic development. Even your supposedly elected council must have its overall policy agreed by an unelected 'local strategic partnership' dictated by Whitehall.

In addition to those 60,000, there are a further 345,000 unelected school governors who have dismally failed to govern our state schools and 31,000 Whitehall appointees to central quangos.

What price democracy? Our elected representatives are powerless, whilst the central State's insidious agenda is advanced through thousands of unelected placemen. Make no mistake, this is the agenda of the metropolitan political class and a civil service out of control. The balance between central and local has been lost, and every one of us is poorer as a result.

Simon Jenkins points out that a third of the income of the 'big seven' comes from public sector work; in many ways they are the State's occupying troops. Where once the keep of the King's castle rose above Derby or Sheffield or Norwich as reminder of State power, now the steel and glass regional offices of PriceWaterhouseCooper perform the same function. And the most entrenched, the most negative, the most destructive, the most incompetent and the most antidemocratic of all the Whitehall departments is the Treasury, its malign effects magnified and multiplied by Brown's tenure.

Unless Cameron tackles the Treasury, he has no hope of making inroads into the quangos. He is concentrating on the 31,000 strong central quangos; maybe he will trim 3,000 unelected officials. In the meanwhile the Treasury will have created a further 2,500. The 60,000 local quangocrats will remain untouched.

School governors must govern schools, not Whitehall civil servants, and for this we must elect them. Local Watch Committees must manage local police forces, not the Home Secretary, and they must be voted into office. Who sits on the board of your primary health trust? Who governs your local hospital? You have no idea - but Whitehall does. Forget abolishing the Potato Marketing Board, David, and concentrate on how you can return power to the urban community, municipality and parish.

Can Libertarians be good Localists?

The answer of course is yes. I'm a Tory, not a Libertarian or a statist Conservative, but a Tory from an older, local tradition. Until the late 1970s, the Conservatives were the party of Localism, but an enthusiasm for European Federalism and central Statism saw a million members such as me walk away from the party. There are hopes that Cameron is turning the party back to its Localist, Tory roots, but we'll have to wait and see if the brave and stirring words become radical actions.

Libertarians and Tories share much ideological ground. Robert Nisbet usefully catalogued the similarities. Both loathe the Leviathan of the Central State, and its interference on our social, economic, intellectual and political lives. Both share a belief in the meaning of equality as meaning all persons being equal in access to the law, and equal before the law; in legal equality. Both condemn the socialist belief in equality of result - of forced equality in class, status or wealth. Both share a belief in freedom, and particularly economic freedom. There is a common dislike of what Nisbet terms a war-society, and of warfare. A war-society, organised on lines of central command and control, with conscription, rationing and other evils, is anathema to both Libertarians and Tories. And both share a dislike of what we can term political correctness, a perverse liberalism that robs individuals of dignity and humanity.

Where Libertarians and Tories differ is in the extent of the primacy of the individual, or the primacy of the structures that those individuals create for themselves, seding a degree of individualism. Tories follow Burke in his insistence on the rights of society and of its structures - family, locality, church, guilds and associations, local social structures, the "little platoons" - against the arbitrary power of the central State. Tories believe that individual liberty is only possible within 'the context of a plurality of social authorities, of moral codes, and of historical traditions, all of which, in organic articulation, serve at one and the same time as “the inns and resting places” of the human spirit and intermediary barriers to the power of the state over the individual.'

Libertarians can draw philosophically from Adam Smith, from Locke, and from Jefferson, but it's primarily John Stuart Mill who provides the mainstay of Libertarian ideology. In 'On Liberty' Mill wrote:

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually and collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self protection.. . , His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

He didn't of course include everybody in this paramount right; just people like himself. He excluded anyone below the age of 21, anyone in a state that required them to be 'taken care of by others', all people who are in 'backward states of society' and anyone who is a 'nuisance' to others. Oh, and he qualifies the entire thing by writing that liberty should apply to words but not necessarily to deeds - 'no one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions'.

And many modern Libertarians hold Mill's exclusion clauses fast still; that the right to Mill's absolute freedom from interference doesn't extend to one's own or other people's children, the underclass, the feral and ill-educated, the unsocialised, foreigners or anyone who is too rich, too Christian or who has a historic title. And it doesn't allow creating a disturbance on the streets. In such cases, Libertarianism, as it is distinguished from Toryism, seems largely to exist in defence of the right of the educated middle classes to consume pornography, use dirty words on the internet and be rude about Christians.

In practice, though, many Libertarians recognise the authority of the family, the authority of a caucus of moral opinion, the authority of intermediate institutions, the belonging to a place; they love their 'little platoons' as much as any good Tory. As such they are as good Localists as any Tory.

Must dash - I'll continue anon.

No obligation to tell the truth to Kuffirs

It is not a religious offence for a good Muslim to lie to a Kuffir, or non-Muslim. There is no obligation in Islam to tell the truth to Kuffirs. The two Pakistanis who have just made a mockery of our legal system will therefore have done nothing wrong in the eyes of Islam. Rarely can either the Chancery Court or Appeal Court have seen such a debasement. The judgement in the case of Zahoor v. Masood states:

In this lamentable litigation Peter Smith J found that both sides attempted to deceive the court by forging documents. A list of over 50 challenged documents was produced. The trial judge had to hear the evidence of three experts on handwriting issues. He found it impossible to come to a clear conclusion in respect of each document and did not do so. He identified those key documents, agreements and share transfers which he held were not genuine.

The judge also found that both sides also lied in their evidence. In some areas of the case his task of evaluating the true facts about the dispute was difficult, if not impossible. Each of the individual parties, by using reprehensible means, set out to improve his own prospects of success, to damage those of the other side and to defeat the efforts of the court to do justice according to law. They abused, obstructed and attempted to undermine the justice system and the legal processes in which they were participating.

The perjury and forgery by both sides was so extensive that the judge said that he would not accept the evidence of either side, unless supported by independent documents whose authenticity was not challenged and the evidence of witnesses whose veracity was not challenged. He aimed at deciding the case on the basis of uncontaminated evidence.

The question is why both men are not now serving lengthy prison sentences for contempt of court.

The proper working of our legal system and of our courts is the most fundamental foundation of our society and nation. Those like Jonathan Aitken who imagine they can escape with lying to the court are quite rightly proven wrong with a lengthy jail sentence.

If Mohammed Zahoor and Sohail Masood hold our standards of truth and justice so lightly, let us also find a way to deprive them of it. If they want to be outlaws, so be it; let each be permanently and irrevocably barred from any civil law recourse or protection in the United Kingdom. The civil law and the civil courts should be closed to them for ever.

Fund the Monarch from the BBC budget

Cost to the taxpayer of the Monarch: £41m annually

Cost to the taxpayer of the BBC: £2,859m annually

The monarchy costs us a sum equivalent to just 1.4% of the BBC's cost.

I know which one I think provides the better value.

Perverse policy and the Camberwell blocks

Central government has been responsible for some inane public policy decisions. Not least of these was a Soviet-style State commitment to high rise public housing. From 1956 to the late 1960s, the government distorted local decision making by providing councils with a generous subsidy for each storey built in excess of six. Stories seven to fourteen of the Camberwell blocks are not there because they are the most economic building solution, but because of a misplaced ideological distortion by the State. The nonsense is that the spaces between the blocks - nowadays car parking, vandalised play spaces and dog-toilet grass, with a few sad looking Korean cherries stuck here and there - are by necessity large, and low-rise traditional terraces could have housed the same number of people on the same footprint.

When the private sector builds high-rise, as at Canary Wharf, in the absense of site constraints the buildings will be square, or even circular like the Gherkin, giving maximum floor space for minimum cost; the cost of constructing and maintaining the envelope of a building shaped like a matchstick, and the increased heat losses from the larger surface area, is hardly attractive to those who have to make commercial returns from such structures. Surface area and volume. It's why mice freeze to death in temperatures that leave bigger creatures unaffected.

If the cladding, the infill panels and the envelope of buildings such as the Camberwell block are found to be at fault in the fire, creating an inherent risk, it may be cheaper to flatten them than re-clad them.

The TV interviews I've seen with survivors and residents of neighbouring blocks suggests a resident population rich in Nigerians, Brazilians, Portuguese and Vietnamese, with a sprinkling of the English middle class living in rented RTBs. Comments have mentioned practices such as barbeques on the balconies. If there is truth in this, it adds another danger. High rise flats designed for a culture that has never been short of cooking fuel, and whose cuisine has therefore refined long roasting and slow simmering, relatively low fire-risk cooking methods, may not be as safe when used by cultures whose cuisine has developed rapid high temperature open frying or grilling, often in the open air, in response to traditional scarcity of cooking fuels. Probably not a major risk, but an additional one nonetheless.

Camberwell fire - press speculation

Evidence on how the fire started and why it spread will take many weeks to assemble, and the MSM can perhaps be forgiven for their confusion. The BBC is reporting that the fire started on the ninth floor and spread to the eleventh; the guardian that it started on the fourth. The image below suggests it started on the fifth floor and spread vertically through the structure to the eleventh, where the fatalities are reported to have occurred.

So why is this important? Well, for those of us involved in construction, understanding part B of the building regs is fundamental to managing the design of large or complex buildings. The principle is that buildings are constructed in fire resistant compartments, with both horizontal and vertical compartmentation; that individual dwellings also each have a protected lobby to prevent fires spreading to common corridors, and corridors and stairs should be specially protected and in particular that linings should be fire resistant.

I have two major concerns about the Camberwell building. Firstly, the fire appears to have spread vertically through the structure, from flat to flat. Secondly, the fire appears to have spread along an internal protected corridor on the eleventh floor (if the layout was as in the sketch plan below). Older buildings can have fire-stopping and cavity barriers inserted, as well as additional protection such as alarms and sprinkler systems. Those resonsible for reported recent building works will have valuable evidence to give.

Extraordinary claim on Cranmer's blog

For reasons known only to himself, Cranmer gives space on his blog to an extraordinary piece by Michael Shrimpton 'QC' that alleges that Swine Flu, and Hong Kong Flu back in the 70s, and Spanish Flu back in 1918, were all, er, bio-weapons developed and released by the Beastly Hun.

Cranmer has always seemed a level-headed sort of chap to me. Subject to mawkish popular sentimentality, perhaps, but that is usual for an Anglican clergyman. And it's not April the first.

No, of course I don't believe a word of it.

How very strange.

Update
=======
I can find no Shrimpton listed on the 2008 Queen's Counsel lists. Has Cranmer been the victim of an elaborate hoax?

Beware the urban allotment

News that Michelle Obama's much touted White House vegetable garden is contaminated with lead comes as no surprise to me. A few years ago we were developing a London brownfield site adjacent to a large council allotment with scores of plots. To the west of the site a number of light industries had flourished until the 1950s. When we got the results of the ground investigation, we found the soil heavily contaminated with Cadmium, Arsenic, Mercury and Lead - heavy metals that fell out of the factories' smoke plumes most rapidly - and that the contamination was a long teardrop shape stretching eastwards, driven by a prevailing westerly wind. Straight across the allotments.

This is also why I'm also pretty sure that whatever comes out of the new Buckingham Palace 'allotment' will end up in the tourist cafe or in staff meals rather than on the royal plate. For the upper classes who maintained both a country estate and a town house, it was the job of the country house kitchen garden and hothouses to produce healthy fare for the table; town houses rarely had their own kitchen gardens.

While I'm quite happy to use the fruit and herbs from my small London garden, I wouldn't want to eat spuds or carrots or other root veg from it in any great quantity. Fresh horseradish root is the exception - the first of the big Autumn roasts wouldn't be the same without the nose-streaming torture of grating fresh horseradish sauce.

The only reason I'd take a local allotment plot would be to grow tobacco on. In fact, for the sake of putting two fingers up to the council, I think I'll put my name down ...

Michael White defends Labour liars

New Labour's emeritus apologist, Lord White of Farringdon, has penned an extraordinary defence of political lying in the Guardian.

"In the age of 24/7 news channels, internet search engines and Twitter-based citizen journalism, some claim political lies can be instantly exposed. It happens, but voters seem to accept the distinction between a direct lie and being economical with the truth: that it is sometimes justified, in war or economic crisis, to withhold the full facts."

Yes, perhaps it is sometimes justified - when in it in the national interest. But surely even White cannot begin to justify Brown's endemic lying which is not in the interests of the nation but in the interests solely of Gordon Brown and the Labour Party? Or perhaps he can.

Reminder - lamps

There's always a little snobbery in every trade. In mine, calling lamps 'bulbs' is as big a faux pas as referring to your 'lounge'. The immediate fitting that the lamp plugs or screws into is called the lampholder, and the assembly of lamp, lampholder, shades, diffusers, fixings, carriers or prisms is called a luminaire.

Anyway, just a reminder that now is a good time to buy incandescent lamps. Those of 150W and 100W have already disappeared from the shops, but are widely available through eBay and from stock discounters at a good price now that the original hysteria has died down. Go on. Treat yourself to a lovely rosy red white light rather than the baleful green white light that comes from the Mercury low energy dross.

Lunatic ban on smoking in the open air

There is no evidence that one single person has ever, ever, died from the effects of passive smoking. Let me repeat. There is no evidence whatsoever that passive smoking has ever killed anyone. Over the years Numberwatch has catalogued this government's abuse of science in support of the indefensible, summarised in The March of the Zealots.

I am grateful to Witterings from Witney to drawing my attention in a comment to a post below to a lunatic proposal to ban smoking in the open air. Well, it's already started. South Eastern Trains have already banned smoking on open station platforms, and I expect it won't be too long before my local council bans smoking in its parks.

In a beautifully excoriating post, the Devil sums up the recent history of attacks on smokers, and now drinkers, all founded on a fouled tissue of outright lies, false science and emotive propaganda. The demonisation of smokers exempt from any discrimination law, though, could well prove to be the undoing of the zealots.

For if there is no offence in discriminating against smokers, there can be no offence in smokers discriminating against non-smokers. Where's the smokers' paper in which I can place employment adverts?

Just as gay people, fed up with an underlying hostility, used the strength of the 'pink pound' to run their own hotels, bars and facilities, I can see the advent before long of a whole network of smoker-friendly facilities. I'd love to arrange travel and accommodation on a website dedicated to the smoker's needs; a list of hotels with smoking encouraged in all rooms, even airlines that permitted smoking. Pubs and bars rated with stars on the quality of their smoking accommodation. I'm overdue for a short holiday; where are the world's most smoker-friendly destinations?

At the same time, a very small number of legal challenges to the EU smoking bans is growing. The prospect of class actions across the EU as well as a low level civil disobedience beyond the resources of the State to police can regain much of the ground lost to the Zealots. Where's my directory of smoke-friendly solicitors? Where's the legal advice line for smokers?

At a time when financial services are under pressure, I'm astonished that the pensions and annuities sector isn't making more of the enhanced benefits available to smokers. Where are the entrepreneurs chartering smoker's flights to Luxembourg to stock up on 3,200 cheap ciggies each and back the same day? Every flight would be filled to capacity.

The time for whingeing has ended. The fightback must begin. Let us smokers use our financial resources, our flair, skill and expertise and carve out for ourselves a future despite the Zealots.

Labour killjoys deprive the poorest of culture

There was a piece in the Standard last night by Simon Jenkins that documented a massive revival of the hunger for live entertainment, in particular amongst the young. It was the iPod generation, Jenkins said, who are filling not only Glastonbury but also packing theatres, the O2 and other live music venues. As with any mass enthusiasm amongst the young, this one cuts right across class lines - but Labour have been instrumental in destroying opportunities for the less affluent and less mobile.

Local clubs - CIU clubs, previously known as working men's clubs - have been a mainstay of our entertainments industry, providing employment and experience for a large number of acts and individual entertainers. In February of last year I commented that 'The Stage', the house-journal of the ents industry, was reporting 100 clubs a year closing as a result of the smoking ban, and club ents budgets the first to suffer from a downturn in trade, hitting employment in our important creative and cultural sector particularly hard.

For many people who can't afford thirty or fifty quid for a theatre or O2 ticket, local CIU clubs provided quality live entertainment at a fraction of the cost, often of surprising quality. Had they remained open, the current hunger amongst the young for live acts would be packing them out and revitalising them with a new generation of not only audiences but management capacity. Labour's spiteful smoking ban has destroyed this vital popular culture, and stifled opportunities for the less affluent to provide for themselves.

A press release from Freedom 2 Choose received yesterday says:

Through the good auspices of The CIU Club Journal, a monthly issue delivered to more than 2300 Working Men’s Clubs, Freedom2Choose have uncovered some shocking facts about the smoke ban implemented on 1 July 2007:

• 98% stated the ban had definitely had a detrimental effect on their club.
• 98% stated the ban was not implemented fairly.
• 98% believed there should have been freedom of choice.
• 98% of clubs had the facility for a separate smoking room.
• 81% stated that they did not trust this government anymore.

Phil Johnson, Club Liaison Officer for Freedom2Choose, said "This clearly proves that the smoking ban has had a disastrous effect on one of the largest social institutions in the country. This ban, supposedly brought in to protect staff, has caused nothing but unemployment and hardship throughout club-land and cannot be proven to have saved one single life. Yet 90 clubs have closed forever, with more set to follow."

Phil further stated, "The biggest shock was the disastrous 81% that no longer trusted this government. When you consider that the majority of the clubs lie within the Labour voting heartlands, this government has clearly shafted 'their own' with this draconian law. Had any form of fairness been applied to this law, i.e. choice or separate rooms, then this control-obsessed government would not be facing the inevitable backlash from its hardcore supporters."

The survey was verified by Dr Ruth Cherrington, Lecturer in Cultural and Media studies at Warwick University, who commented "When the truth of such prohibition surfaces it is always a very sad truth. The clubs are the backbone of our communities - but for how much longer?"

Just another whole tier of local intermediate institutions destroyed by Labour's ruthless Leviathan State.