Whoever

Sometimes you can't have everything. I'd like a cheap and very robust tablet with integral GPS that runs marine chart software and does office functions. I don't need a megapixel camera or to store half a million MP3 songs. In the end, of course, I'll pick the best fit available. And this, I think, is what we will also do with our new choice of four main parties. Out of the Eurofederacy but in free-movement Europe? Tick. My borough no longer over-run by Nigerian women having babies? Tick. H.M. Armed Forces properly financed and effective? Tick. No more bloody windmills? Tick. And most importantly Are they listening to me or just talking at me? Tick.

Ryan Shorthouse, Director of 'Bright Blue' advises Tories today that “Conservatives should not panic and react by trying to be more hardline than UKIP on welfare, Europe and immigration. Instead, we should convince voters we are the only party with enough experience, gravitas and compassion to be really trusted - with the difficult and complex job of government, to sort out the public finances, and with supporting the vulnerable and those struggling in these challenging economic times”

The problem is, people just don't believe it. It lacks sensible credibility. The voters know that if they were stuck changing a tyre on a lonely rain-swept road at night it would be Nigel and not David who stopped to lend a hand. 

UKIP's success also spells the death of the LibDems. The corrupt and crooked party funding proposals first from Hayden Phillips and then from Christopher Kelly that would reward the three incumbent parties on the basis of their last voting share - so long as they had MPs sitting - was designed to maintain the status quo and keep the LibDems afloat. Any attempt now to introduce such a scheme would quite rightly provoke a march on Parliament with pitchforks and burning brands. The LibDems, with probably no more than 40,000 members and bereft of all their opposition cash, are now up against the ropes. 

Phillips, Kelly and all the rest of the cosy political establishment have taken a slapping. The real kicking will come with next year's Euro elections - when there's everything to play for.

Reasons to be cheerful

Sorry, no post this evening. I only had £100 on at 5/4 for more than 100 UKIP gains, but when they paid out at about sixixh I found I could afford some alcohol ...

UKIP for change

The problem of warnings that 'Vote UKIP - get Miliband' have is that people really don't care - most can see little difference between Miliband and Cameron and want neither of them equally. I've said on this blog time and time again that people are hungry for change, that they're not 'apathetic' but fed-up with a political class that has betrayed them. Europe has failed, globalisation has delivered benefits to everyone but the West, Corporations have prospered, the obscenely wealthy have become more so, self-interest and greed characterise all our most senior public servants, MPs scrabble with their snouts for yet more money, third-world standards of electoral distortion are maintained for party advantage, immigration has changed the face of our nation without the people ever having been asked about it, the ancient hills are littered with bloody pointless windmills and still they distort and pervert science for lunatic ideology. 

So No Mr Cameron and No Mr Miliband and No Mr Clegg  I really don't care what UKIP's policy on plastic surgery is, or how their sums on the aggregates levy add up. You see, I loathe you all so very, very much right now that I will vote for anyone to slap hard your silly smug privileged faces. 

And however bad the UKIP candidate may be, they're infinitely better than the alternative slaves of the existing metropolitan political clubs.

France and Germany

We may have been mildly shocked at crude and insulting semi-official comments directed at Cameron from the French government. Governments don't speak to each-other in this way, do they? As with John Major, opponents may be 'the Bastards' in private but 'valued colleagues' in public. The Kermits, however, seem to have lost it.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard catalogues, the latest exchange of insults between France and Germany is quite unprecedented. And France started it. The problem is that the garlic-munchers blame their woes on everything and everybody but themselves; their sclerotic economy and productivity, an industrial sector on the Liverpool Death Pathway, more hands grasping rewards from the tax-till than can be re-filled, an agricultural sector that takes most of the CAP budget - 22% of CAP money goes to France, which has just 7.8% of the EU's farms over 1 European Size Unit (ESU) - and outdated beliefs in 'Gloire' that make France look as decayed and absurd as Miss Havisham in scarlet lippy. 

It's not just Germany that must contemplate whether to bail-out the Kermits yet again; they cost each working Briton a fortune, keep food prices artificially high, decimate our fish stocks and are taught at birth to sneer. Despite not having produced an international pop star since Edith Piaf. Turkey may once have been the 'sick man of Europe' - but today it's France and not just diplomatic flu, but a basket case. 

But like a huge art-nouveau ocean liner sinking beneath the waves, she'll pull us down too if we're too close to her. And voting for UKIP is important for this alone; who cares what their policy on bloody dormice is when we're struggling to stay alive. 

Beez

TO DO LIST

1. Kill all the bees

2. European farmers pay billions to hand-pollinate crops

3. Sell our special GM self-pollinating varieties at a bit less than (2) costs

4. Collect Knighthood


"The House of Commons environmental audit committee concluded that "neonicotinoid pesticides are not fundamental to the general economic or agricultural viability of UK farming". In fact they can prevent a more precise and rational use of pesticides, known as integrated pest management. The committee reports that all the rape seed on sale in this country, for example, is pre-treated with neonicotinoids, so farmers have no choice but to use them, whether or not they are required." Guardian

Women on banknotes

I am all in favour of depicting women on our banknotes so long as they are Britannia, Boadicca, Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale. I would add Mrs Thatcher, but the previous convention seemed to be that they were 'historical' figures, from the 19th century or earlier. As Winston will now adorn the fiver perhaps these things are flexible. The problem is, there are few truly famous women from past ages, and it will only be in the 2200s that we'll start to feature the rich seam of more contemporary achievers. If we have to do it now, let's at least make-up some historic figures rather than keep re-using the two worn-out obscurities we have:-

Ethabell Scrathwick - Leader of the Luton Spoon-planishers strike of 1873, demanding equal wages with knife-grinders and price-controls on Bengal grit, the essential material for her trade, then a monopoly commodity in the hands of the Marquis of Slough. Transported to Australia for 7 years. 

Meena Jones - Daughter of Lascar parents who both worked as stokers for the Red Star Line (and therefore black) she married Hywel Jones of Swansea. She never forgot her maritime ancestry and spent her life providing comfort to wounded sailors. She also cooked them favourite Goan dishes. 

Lily Priestley -  Scientist. She noticed that larks boiled in saline and Orpiment produced a gas she called 'demelancholised air' which she recorded in her journal for 1758 'produced amongst those servants I tested it on great gusts of laughter and joy'. She is credited with discovering Nitrous Oxide but passing the facts to her son, Joseph, as women were not then permitted to be clever. 

Ada Crabbe -  Daughter of a Methodist clergyman, Ada invented sex education in 1894 but was so shocked by what she had discovered she died, still unmarried, shortly after. Her journals were discovered in 1986 and are now held by the Winnie Mandela Cultural Institute in Tottenham. 

Where did crime go?

News this week that I live in the most violent borough in Britain induced a slight frisson of unwarranted pride, I'm afraid. Unwarranted because I've lived here since 1995 without once having been the victim of crime, excepting being defrauded by my bank (which took a County Court summons to solve). Mine is typical of several wealthy inner London boroughs; three or four massive council estates separated by swathes of middle-class Victorian terraces, two or three town centres and a score or more tube, rail and DLR stations. The violence happens around the council estates and town centres late at night, when we gentrifiers are either abed or on our way home from the opera to our safe local station. The last burglary in my street was in 1997. Then there was the prolonged shouty incident of 2001, in which two black women spent twenty minutes verbally abusing eachother over a distance of fifty metres. Despite a keen middle-class audience peering from every window they declined to fight, however. Life in Britain's most dangerous borough is, er, safe, unworrying and comfortable. So where did all the crime go? Look at the graphics below;

Since the turn of the century, crime has plummeted everywhere. Andrew Rawnsley writes in the Observer today seeking the reasons why, and finding multiple credible answers but no single cause. And there is no correlation whatsoever between the number of police officers and levels of crime. Nor has it risen again since 2008, as predicted (wrongly) on this blog and elsewhere.

Are the buggers putting bromide in the tea or something?

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.