More cruelty than justice in these prosecutions

Prosecutions that are unreasonably delayed often have more cruelty than justice in them; defendants may have lost access to evidence to disprove stale prosecutions, and with the exception of the abilities of new technologies such as DNA identification, if a plaintiff has a good cause of action they should pursue any claim with diligence and timeliness.  

The Charging of Max Clifford for alleged offences committed between 29 and 47 years ago brings to mind several similes which I cannot lawfully share with you, this matter now being sub judice and any comment a contempt of legal process, so please be careful if you leave your own comment.

The attempts in Germany to charge and jail 50 men who are thought to have served with the SS-Totenkopfverbände before they die of natural causes is an even more extreme example of justice delayed - in this case some 69 years after their membership, there being no actual evidence of any offences on which basis to charge them. 

My own view is that a 15 year limitation for prosecution of the most serious offences is appropriate, with a 5 year limitation on minor offences. But then I also believe that we will all be judged and have to answer for our lives.  

Two-Up

In case you missed it, yesterday was the day it was legal to play 'two up' across Australia, despite state laws prohibiting the unbelievably simple gambling game. ANZAC day is also the day on which 'gunfire' - coffee with rum - is traditionally drunk at breakfast. As the centennial anniversary of the War next year approaches, and the last survivors of those battles have been laid in their graves, one touching tradition continues to be observed on ANZAC day. 

At 5am yesterday at Hyde Park Corner the dawn 'stand to' was called, commemorating the call of Reveille in the still empty moments of first light that preceded so many attacks. Likewise in Australia and New Zealand, soldiers (largely) will have turned out at dawn to commemorate their predecessors. It started as a quiet, wordless gathering of old soldiers alone, before the later 11am commemorations involving family, dignitaries, bands and public occasion. Now it's become something of a matter of pride for those serving in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces to attend. 

Events a century ago have seared themselves into our collective psyche like no others; did they still remember the 30 years war in the same way in 1748? Or Crimea in 1954? There is something so epochal, so important about the Great War that we have determined collectively to remember it always. 

UK Left falls out of love with EU

I seemed to the UK left like they were so well suited; the EU was redistributionist on a massive scale, enforced an equality across whole nations, regulated the minutae of people's lives 'for their own good' and governed by centralist command-and-control with all the panoply of quotas, rationing and allocations. What was there not to like? 

Then the doubts started to creep in. The EU was favouring banks and big corporations at the expense of labour; crushing wage rates were being used to devalue the Euro. That fabled equality wasn't equality after all, but corporate homogenisation. And all that command-and-control meant that they had no say in decisions that were being made. Then there were all the little signs that maybe they didn't love us back; they wanted access to our bank account but wouldn't share theirs, there were secret meetings with other nations from which we were excluded. And they ate all the fish. And at first when they sent their mates round to stay for the night it was OK; we got some decent plumbing repairs and some good tiling out of it. But now they were sending some very odd sorts with no skills at all except emptying the biscuit tin. 

Earlier this week a Mr Barroso, an unelected functionary styling himself 'President' of an unelected cabal of functionaries calling themselves the 'European Commission' complained that his dream of an unelected Europe was being undermined by ordinary people committed to democracy. So when the Guardian published the results of a recent Europe-wide poll showing a continent wide slump in confidence in the European project, you might have expected the CIF comments to the piece to have been a rallying-call to back the Eurocrats. Not a bit of it. The comrades are truly out of love with Mr Barosso's European project. Some are positively savage. Many are satisfyingly staunch in their defence of democracy, if perhaps a little late at the table. All of which must now send Mr Miliband a-thinking. 

Paying less, caring more

Do a rough mental calculation. Take half your annual Council tax and multiply it by four. The result is roughly what you're paying in tax each year to 'protect' other people's children. As Christopher Booker has catalogued in his Telegraph columns, the child 'protection' racket has grown into a national industry, fully sanctioned by populist horror at baby Peter, Victoria Climbie and all the other tragic victims of adult abuse. Your local council will close every library, see each street lamp doused and let rubbish pile-up in windrows on the streets before they will willingly cut a single pound from their child 'protection' budgets.

And yes, of course 'protection' is in quotes. Most children taken from their parents into the care of the State are at infinitely greater risk under the State's 'protection' than without it. Edward Timpson MP writes in the Telegraph this morning on the recent abuse of young girls by Moslem men in Rochdale, girls without exception in the 'care' of the State. Other enquiries are examining allegations that powerful Tory figures grazed à la carte on young boys being held in a State 'home'. Suicide and self-harm figures for children held by the State are abnormal. So yes, under the State's 'protection' is the very last place you'd want a child to be.

Timpson is acting the Muppet in calling for even more investment and greater spending to prevent another Rochdale. We need a radical alternative. We need to make major cuts to State spending, and child 'protection' is a massive one; we really have to face it. Cityunslicker writes on the C@W blog

However, there are no votes in this approach from a populace used to the Nanny state; so what to do? I can see the default position being minor cuts, more tax rises and a slow Japan style death with the national debt slowly climbing towards Italian and then Japanese levels whilst politicians hand out the treats to harvest votes.

Anyone but Blair

As reported in the Ephraim Hardcastle column in the Mail this morning, Baroness Thatcher's death leaves a vacancy in the Order of Merit, limited to twenty-four living holders. In fact, there is not one but two places vacant in the list - in which technologists, scientists and historians figure largely. Denying the atrocious Blair a place is a sine qua non, but who to appoint to block him?

Well, the waspish David Starkey must surely be a prime candidate (Antony Beevor and John Keegan may have to wait as Michael Howard holds the incumbent military historian spot). As must both Brian Eno and Peter Maxwell-Davies, there being at present no musicians in the Order. And if Tom Stoppard is a member, why not Alan Bennett? Or even David Hare?

There are clearly many millions of Britons more deserving of public honours than Blair, surely it can't be that hard to find just two?

French and German woes

The Telegraph terms it 'disillusionment' that has come to France, but it could as well be the realisation that the post-war model of ever-increasing national wealth funding ever-increasing social welfare has come to an end. The astonishment is that the character of French rural society has survived despite this post-war wealth rather than because of it; "That spirit of solidarité – the instinct of people to help their fellow man — runs wonderfully deep here. The sun is still shining and the trains still run on time. Entire villages conjure up feasts and sit down to them together, just as they always did". It is, in human history, more frequently adversity and shared hardship that forges bonds of community.

In Germany, the wheels are falling off the Industrial-Educational compact. If the essence of France is the bond between commune and terroir then the essence of Germany has been its system of industrial apprenticeships. As Der Spiegel reports, a dual-track system of vocational and academic educational streams has helped maintain Germany's competitive advantage. Now, just when the UK is moving to adopt the German model, Germany is moving to adopt, er, the British model. 

And in the UK it's with mixed emotions that I must report the demise of the Quantity Surveyor; India and Malaysia both still base construction mensuration on SMM7, published by the RICS, and consequently 'taking off' a bill of quantities from a set of drawings is something that can now be done in Mumbai or KL at a fraction of the cost of employing a chap from Richmond. Consequently, QSs have been re-inventing themselves as Project Managers or Cost Consultants, and the merest suggestion that they might usefully do a bit of taking-off is met with the expression of a surgeon asked to change the patient's bedsheets. Ah well.

Asparagus and Strawberries

Native, English Asparagus and native, English Strawberries, of the sort growing not in polythene tunnels but in the open air, are set to be delayed this year. Bad news for Asparagus, which can only be picked until mid-summer's day, but possibly good news for consumers, if a sudden glut of fat, pale spears hits the market and pushes prices down. But not, alas, for April - the one month in which in good years one can enjoy a dozen Colchester natives and a plate of fat spears on the same table. Ah, such is England.

Ditch this wretched shackle

Against every military maxim, the EU Parliament and Commission are hell-bent on reinforcing failure. The Euro is crippled; like the Heer in 1945 it lacks metaphorical air cover, fuel, munitions and transport but keeps surviving due to tactical moves of desperation, sometimes brilliant, that squeeze every gram of advantage from each embattled position. 

And now with proposals for Euro-wide extraordinary wealth taxes - preferably in a form that will also catch non-Eurozone EU nations - it is moving to the equivalent of calling-up 15 and 16 and 65 and 66 year olds. Already parts of Europe are plunging into real poverty, and the spectre of disease and hunger, of Typhoid, Diphtheria and Cholera, not seen in Europe for seventy years, broods menacingly over the economic wreckage and spoilation caused by these zealots. With a fanaticism bordering on lunacy, they will see Europe burn to cinders before they will relinquish their belief in the Euro. Human lives and an ocean of human misery are of little consequence to the Berlaymont Gauleiters strutting like fat pheasants in their insulated, privileged world of make-believe.

But across Europe ordinary people are coming to recognise the enemy in Brussels, and the danger it poses to their very way of life. It's not 'populism' but a hunger for real democracy that is driving members to UKIP and its equivalents across Europe. People are choosing between freedom and the Empire, and more and more are backing freedom. The harder the Empire tries, the more support it loses.

Margaret Thatcher - Stateswoman

The release of Baroness Thatcher's death certificate describing her occupation as 'Stateswoman' was something that could be disclosed without fear of contradiction from any quarter. Even her enemies would concede that she strode the world stage with the foremost of that breed. Statesmanship is not something that can be acquired by an individual; it must be bestowed by a caucus of informed opinion.

Blair's tragi-comic cavortings in his attempts to reach that status keep us all entertained, but besides real statesmen he is a pygmy. And Brown seems sensibly to have avoided the ridicule that such a bid on his own behalf would earn. Both will be there tomorrow, still in Margaret's shadow as just ex-Prime Ministers, not as elders and Statesmen. One has only to imagine, in the event of the sudden death of either, the snorts of derision that would be caused if either's death certificate made that absurd claim. But for Thatcher, the term is no more than the simple truth.  

Polly's wish may come true

Lady Toynbee has long urged the governments of Europe to tax the wealthy in order to fund the recession. Now, it seems, not only will her wish come true, but Polly herself will be able to share in the noble sacrifice. If Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph is right, and EU finance ministers move to taxing holiday homes, Polly's Tuscan retreat will certainly give her the personal opportunity to contribute a great wodge of cash to the tax-starved club Med administrations.

No doubt readers will share Polly's undoubted joy at the news.

Thatcher Library

A Thatcher Library, in the form of those US (ex) Presidential libraries, will no doubt be a good thing. American Presidential libraries are actually public libraries, administered at taxpayers' expense by the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) under the Presidential Records Act. We don't have such provision in the UK, so Margaret's would have to be privately funded. And perhaps this is more suitable, under the circumstances. Part archive, part museum I would expect permanent exhibitions on both the Berlin Wall and the Falklands. And just as the Reagan Library sells copies of the famous RR Stetson at $209.95, the Thatcher Library could vend tasteful copies by Mulberry of those handbags at a similar price point. Or the 'Thatcher Steampunk tank Pashmina and goggles' perhaps. 

Of course no Thatcher venture would be complete without some hideous embarrassment caused by her wayward son, so we'd have to expect a concession stand run by Sir Mark offering gay men's underwear with 'Thatcher' embroidered on the waistband and no doubt these will prove popular also with the gangsta types who wear their jeans half way down their bottoms.

Thatcher and Sid

The pub juke box was belting out Boy George for the third disk in a row; eyes were fixed on the mechanism as the arm lifted the 45 single, jerkily returned it to it's slot in the fan-array of black plastic ... and then returned back to the same place to lift it out again. There was a soft groan from the bar. The London after work pub crowd was complacent; it had been three years since the IRA's last major mainland bombing and Londoners, who recover quickly anyway, had almost forgotten the threat. This was a workers' pub, which is to say well-frequented by students and the unemployed with a leavening of actual tradesmen - mostly painters, for some reason - having an after-work pint. 

" 'Ere maigh, izzat your Standa'?" Came a voice in my ear. I nodded and passed it across. "See 'ow me shares have done today" the voice explained. It didn't need to explain further. Thatcher's Gas privatisation in December 1986 had made shareholders for the first time of hundreds of thousands of small investors. Though some had taken to buying the FT on the basis of a £250 shareholding, thereby wiping out their dividend, most relied, in London at least, on discarded Standards to keep track of the share price. 

Many preferential small shareholders cashed in immediately, walking away with a fat profit, but no matter; share ownership, once something arcane and foreign to most people, had become commonplace, something of which your neighbour had experience. Those who recall the impact that it had didn't find at all extraordinary Vince Cable's suggestion that the government's bank shares be sold off preferentially to small investors; most folk can find £500, particularly if this represents a real discount on the share market price. Unlike the feeble-minded Osborne, Thatcher could see the scale of social impact such a move would make.    

Thatcher and municipal anarchy

On the roof of County Hall, the GLC's offices across the river from Parliament, a massive banner proclaimed the daily count of London's jobless. Red Ken's direct challenge to the government didn't end with annoying MPs using the terraces; a series of refusals, obstructions and challenges led the government in a fit of pique to abolish it - and didn't they wish they could have abolished every large metropolitan council in the country. This was the era when a new rainbow alliance of lesbians, greens, socialist workers, radical feminists and academic Marxists had displaced old Labour from the town halls; the archetypal Labour councillors - male, middle aged, white, ex-manual workers, proud to wear a suit, and who called the cleaners 'love' and 'petal' without thought - had been ousted.

In place of men who had done their national service we had Greenham Wimmin who promptly declared their municipalities nuclear-free zones, a Chief Executive who used 'sexist body language' was dismissed, and flying tribunals to root out sexism and racism swept the country. In the People's Republic of South Yorkshire attempts to eradicate 'love' 'flower' and 'pet' from the language met an unexpected reactionary pushback - from the Yorkshire miners, who could no more stop using these terms to their canteen ladies than they could understand their own inevitable demise. 

In the face of this municipal anarchy, Thatcher centralised with single-minded ruthlessness. She took from local councils whole rafts of powers and competencies they had enjoyed for generations and instituted Direct Rule from Whitehall. It may be that she had little choice. But the effect was to mortally wound her own party; over a million members of the Conservative party walked away between 1979 and 1997, many because they had, at local level, been disempowered. Local government, in the form in which had previously existed, ceased to be. Councils became what they are now - branch offices of Whitehall departments, taking instructions predominantly from Brussels and Westminster rather than from their own aldermen, portmen and burgesses in Council assembled. 

Homeopathy on the NHS

Justifying the £4m - £12m spent annually by the NHS on Homeopathy, Dr Sarah Eames claimed it worth it on the basis of 'positive patient outcomes'. Now given that Homeopathic remedies can have no physical effect whatsoever, any statistically significant patient outcomes must be down to the power of mind over body, or the benefits of positive thinking. And if Homeopathy, then why not Crystal Healing, Shamanism, and the people who tinkle little bells over the unwell? In fact, why not do away with conventional medicine altogether and administer cheap chalk placebos to the ill?

The earliest Christian doctors - monks and friars - fortified by arab scholarship soon learned that faith and waiting for God were not enough, and that the scalpel and Henbane could achieve so much more. By all means let cranks of all varieties do their good for the sick, let's have Nigerian tribal fetishes set up on the nursing stations and Dayak hermaphrodites doing the frog-spirit dance in the aisles, let's have joss sticks, tinkling bells and glittery crystals hanging from the light fittings, but for goodness sake let's not waste money on it. The perpetrators should do their thing for free - and be grateful they're given access to ward-fulls of sick people to play with.

Lady Thatcher

The greatest post-war Prime Minister, and thank God she was in office when Argentina invaded the Falklands. There are negatives, but they're for other times. My favourite scurrilous and apocryphal Spitting Image anecdote? The Prime Minister took her Cabinet out to dine at a conference restaurant. The Maitre d' approached her to order.

"I'll have the British steak"

"And the vegetables?" the Maitre asked

"They'll have the same."

Welfare slavery reprise

It seems some on the left are actually catching-on. Back in September 2012 I wrote

By reserving to itself the duty of care of our less fortunate fellows, the State also creates a barrier to the fulfilment of our own obligations to our neighbour and community; Welfare measures intended with best intention to end the human indignity of the Poor Law and the stigma of poverty have themselves at the start of the 21st century created a Welfare slavery that condemns entire generations of families to a culture of idleness and ill health, deprived of the dignity of work and belonging, alienated from the mutual rewards of citizenship, barred from fulfilment and deprived of that human solidarity "of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples ". Surely to God it's time to end their captivity.

Now Simon Danczuk writing in the Telegraph today;

Anyone who has lived with or spent time with people capable of working that have been parked on benefits for a decade or more will know the tragedy I’m talking about. We should all experience the feeling of satisfaction after a hard day’s work, the pride at getting a promotion, the sense of achievement from making a difference in the workplace. But for those trapped in welfare dependency these experiences will never happen. This is a criminal loss of human potential and something everyone interested in progressive politics should rail against.

IDS reforms are not the answer - but they're a start. 

Army manoeuvres 1913

1913 was, weatherwise, generally a rather dull and cool year in which both sunshine and rainfall were limited. Perfect, in fact, for the second of the large scale army manoeuvres carried out before 1914. The first, in 1912, had exposed Haig as dangerously incompetent. Haig commanded a crack Aldershot 'Red' force with an established command structure, against Grierson's rag-bag 'Blue' force made up of scratch units including Yeomanry and cyclists (classed as cavalry). Despite having all the advantages, including being the attacking side, Haig screwed up monumentally and Grierson walked all over him. 

The 1913 manoeuvres again had a crack 'Brown' force under French of two Infantry corps and a cavalry division against a scratch 'White' force under Monro of Territorials and Yeomanry. This time there was no mistake and Brown duly won. White, however, did remarkably well - making excellent use of aircraft as spotters, motor transport and cyclists, by now correctly classed as mounted infantry. French had not done well, however. The problems in co-ordinating the movement of 50,000 men and 25,000 horses in the field had not been overcome and the generals were then practising very much a war of rapid movement. The stars were the aircraft, and they were to prove their worth in 1914 at the Aisne and the Marne.

Yet the following year it was French and Haig that led the BEF of 75,000 men in Belgium. Grierson died of a heart attack shortly after landing.  

Between now and next year there will be a great deal of guff that portrays farmhands and factory workers flocking to the colours in August 1914 and 'in the trenches' a month later. This will all be bollocks and can be disregarded. The trenches didn't come until later, and the only men sent to France and Belgium were the BEF and slightly later those trained men in the reserve. That first phase of the war, very much a war of movement, was fought by the professionals and no doubt lessons had been learned at Brigade level and below from the 1912 / 1913 exercises that served them well.

Dead sheep

Hill sheep are not entirely stupid. In a driving blizzard, they will huddle together in the lee of a stone wall. Normally it works. But when the snow just goes on and on and the drifts cover them they die where they shelter, only to be found by the hill shepherd's dog, or when the snow thaws. 

Radio 4's 'On Your Farm' broadcast this morning is shocking and powerful, all the more so as it features only the voices of a single reporter, Sybil Ruscoe, and those of hill farmers now burying their dead stock. Hill farmers are as tough as their stock, and their voices were steady, but beneath the laconic accounting of stock losses the tension they were feeling was audible, a quiver in the voice that they could not disguise or repress. The loss is not so much the lambs but the breeding ewes - and to lose 250 from a flock of 500 may be a terminal event. 

There will be no government aid, and this is ideologically right, though it means a further diminution in those working lives we used as a nation to hold iconic of our island breed - the hill farmer, the trawlerman, the forester - and no doubt the survivors will be the toughest and most resilient of their kind. 

But please, no whining or pleading today for the indolent urban welfare underclass and their 42" plasma TVs. I'm really not in the mood.

Pity the poor Grauniad

Pity the poor Grauniad. In the away-with-the-fairies world that many of its writers inhabit the issues couldn't be clearer; austerity measures should cause riots on the streets, the parks should be filled with homeless workers displaced by the housing benefit cuts, NHS workers should be on strike and in order to escape recession all the government has to do is employ more people at even higher wages in the public sector. It's a strange, twilight fantasy world and it's so out of touch with the country that one feels the hacks are continuing to write solely to an audience of each-other.

'Where are the sistas?' Wails the paper; 'where are the street activists?' and most puzzling of all to the hacks, why has the Guardian lost the fight for public support for welfare largesse? In fact, just getting the word 'welfare' back into common speech was half the victory; when this blog first started, using the word welfare was a bit like saying handicapped instead of disabled, or bastardy instead of illigitimacy. And there's another word for something that is more widely recognised than Guardian hacks would ever imagine - the concept of an underclass. Mick Philpott exemplifies membership; idle, welfare-scrounging, violent, sexually exploitative, poorly educated, a nightmare neighbour, costing the rest of us a disproportionate fortune in police and criminal justice, social work, special education, health and housing and management services. Everyone who lives in contact with them at some level recognises them - except Guardian hacks, from whose Strawberry Hill gothic villas such life is invisible. 

You see, if the Guardian's Leveson-loving writers (with a few honourable exceptions) were proper hacks instead of luvvies playing Lady Bountiful, they'd be running columns headed 'Where are the journalists?' For there seem few resident at York Way, N1.

Unintended consequences

I don't know why, but this made me smile this morning. 

You may have noticed a newish trend for retro-fitting external wall insulation to blocks of flats; 4" or so of mineral wool batts covered in a coloured render. Not only do they dramatically cut heating bills for those in old solid-walled apartments, they are proving very popular with green woodpeckers. Once they're through the render on a corner, it's short work to create a warm, snug, waterproof home to raise a family in at safe treetop level. And as birds learn very quickly from each-other, these are proving more popular than the harder work of hollowing out a burrow in a live tree.