The Wisdom of Crowds - 47

The poor old Indie runs a piece this morning following research by the Royal Statistical Society and KCL that 'proves' that the public is 'wrong' on a whole range of social issues; for instance "Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34."

To a point, Lord Copper. It depends how you define 'fraudulently' - the researchers interpreting it in the strictest sense, whilst the public no doubt including 'undeservingly' in their definition. And the public's view that one-in-four on the dole needn't be is probably more accurate. Nil points, KCL. 

Likewise 'Teen pregnancy' - the public figure almost certainly includes single mums in their early twenties who may have been older than 19 when they gave birth but are included in the generic cohort . And immigration. And crime. 

In fact, all that Hetan Shah's little exercise proves is that on a sensible definition of social issues the crowd one again has the wisdom whilst the officious office-holder is exposed as a nitpicking disingenuist. No doubt there is research that 'proves' that only 0.87% of them actually are ....

I'd love to see Plumbers in Parliament

Supporters of the Trade Unions have only got it partially right in their condemnation of Miliband's metropolitan elite party; they're not opposed to having working-class union members in Parliament; like their chums in the Conservative and LibDem parties, they're opposed to having anyone in Parliament who is not a dedicated member of Oborne's Political Class. Chair of the sixth-form debating society, Vice-President of the SU at Uni, internship at the UN then a 'job' as a researcher for an MP is the perfect resume for today's ambitious politician - just so long as it doesn't show a real job anywhere. 

And the system delivers to Mr Ed wholly inexperienced blow-ins like Luciana Berger (above) who can be parachuted into any convenient constituency in the country. 

Frankly, I'd love to see more plumbers in Parliament. And bus drivers, surveyors, army officers, farmers, WI Chairladies, small businessmen, nurses and merchant seamen. In fact anyone who has ever lived a real working life, whether a member of a Trade Union or of the Chamber of Commerce. I'd love to hear a Parliamentary debate thick with regional voices and local expressions, rather than dull Oxford English politicospeak. I'd love to see independent MPs balancing the gains to Anglia against the risks to Wessex when considering legislation.  

What I'll never agree to is an unjust impost that robs ordinary people to keep those like Berger in Schmuck and Schmutter.

Back to State party funding

The three dying private political parties would just love to be State funded in line with Christopher Kelly's and Hayden Phillips' proposals. They would become permanent Parties of State and assume a constitutional position and legitimacy that they completely lack under current arrangements - yes, any of the three can still be reduced to nothingness merely by the British people casting fewer votes for it. So far the Tories have prevented them all signing up to it - even with LibDem partners gagging for cash and on the verge of bankruptcy. Now the pressure is on from Labour, making the point that the party belongs to the professional metropolitan political class that staffs it and not to the Trade Unions and Co-operative Societies that fund it. 

The fraud and corruption inherent in Kelly and Phillips' proposals are likely to become nakedly apparent in 2015. UKIP are forecast to win a large and substantial share of the popular vote - but if they fail to get two MPs in the house, they get zero funding. The Lib Dems, even if they score a third of the popular vote that UKIP gets, would get £5 a vote so long as they had the minimum two members. And as the funding will always be based on the results of the last election, the incumbent parties will never lose their advantage. 

Both Kelly and Phillips realise their proposals are hugely unpopular with the British people, and for that reason both have denied any choice to the voter on whether parties are funded in their name. If you vote, they fund. And if five million of us choose not to vote in protest, they simply increase the funding per vote by 25%. Under their squalid, third world banana republic crooked little scam of a deal, the three big parties would never lose. 

Party funding is the most important item on our domestic political agenda - and the thieving class are just waiting for the right time to introduce it.  

New Australians eat sashimi

For me, the archetypal Australian is a small, pale, mincing management accountant or HR professional living in London with an expensive gym membership who likes to get back annually for the gay festival, or a humourless fat-arsed administrator married to an Aussie vet also working over here ("Darryl doesn't do small animals") with fantasies of über-feminist superiority. Today, Australia is a gay-friendly, social-democratic part of south-east Asia with traces of European culture, a sort of Sweden of the southern hemisphere. As with cannibals with bones in their hair and steaming cooking pots, the beer-swilling Aussie lad in shorts and cut-sleeved shirt is a historic stereotype, no longer recognisable as a parody of the actuality. Except of course to some Twat called Guy Rundle who for some unknown reason the Guardian has permitted to pen a column.  

Guy, sweetie, your 2,000 word winge is thirty years too late. Those Fosters lager blokes are ironic anti-parodies, dear, not stereotypes. Today's Australian has a lisp and likes sashimi for lunch.

Why I support the Qat ban

From the Guardian;

"They are always talking about a ban," said one Somali man in his 20s, who chewed qat from a blue plastic bag while sitting on a table where paperwork recorded the day's deliveries. "But if they ban it, I will go back to my home country," he said.

All your vinyl belong us

I've still got a shelf-full of fine vinyl; all the Floyd's early albums, everything by Bowie pre-1990, all the old standards and a good selection of embarrassments (Shakatak?). There's no question in my mind that it's all mine - subject to fair restrictions, of course. It's fair to digitise it so I can listen to it on different machines. It's not fair to sell copies on the interweb, or even to give copies away anonomously. 

I'd be pretty miffed if the record companies wrote to me to say that Oh no, I didn't actually own that music at all; and that to continue to hold onto my vinyl, I must pay an annual license fee or give the records back.

But this is exactly the pricing model that the information industry is now working towards. The first step is 'cloud' computing - moving both programmes and data from your own magnetic memories to their server farms. Then instead of buying a programme you'll pay an annual fee instead to use the latest version - Microsoft has already gone over to this for new Windows versions. When sufficient people have signed up they'll implement a no pay - no access policy - guaranteeing them an enhanced and secure revenue stream.

And they're all at it. Google Chrome's thuggish and crooked efforts to install itself covertly on my machine every time I updated some other programme, or the efforts of some positively repugnant search engine called 'Babylon' to replace Google as my default did neither any favours in my mind. I have become more committed than ever to open-source software running from my own hard drives. You can't trust any of the buggers.

Cull the gluttonous scum

The reckless abandon with which the BBC threw around the TV tax in a series of pay-offs and golden handshakes, with faceless and pointless executives troughing hundreds of thousands each, unearned, unjustified, is really just the tip of the iceberg of feckless gluttony from those who have their grubby little fists on our public funds. For an organisation that so pompously sets itself up as a guardian of the public morals and a model of rectitude, the reality is a grubby, chiselling crooked peculation of public funds by managers for whom probity and stewardship are moral concepts as alien as modesty and humility. 

This latest episode must surely now convince everyone that the BBC simply deserves no place as a tax funded body in its current form. Only when those gluttonous scum are taking the money from the pockets of their shareholders rather than from the helpless British public will there be a chance that their greed can be curbed. 

Public Sector 1% - MPs 32%

Yep; at a time when, quite rightly, we're holding the public sector down to a 1% pay rise MPS have told the IPSA that they're grossly underpaid and deserve at least £86,000 - a whopping pay increase outstripping any corporate current pay deal anywhere.

Let's allow them to do it. In fact, let's encourage the purblind, snuffling shit-faced toads to go for £100k after the 2015 election, with increased subsidies for their bars and restaurants. But let's also demand from each candidate standing in those elections a statement on whether they'd support or oppose the proposal - and cast our votes accordingly.

You'd need a heart of stone ...

Beekeeping has traditionally been considered the preserve of harmless old buffers, retired clergy and the like - a gentle, peaceful occupation, tending the hives in veil and gloves, wielding the smoke-puffer with gentle care. So one can only speculate at the arguments, militancy, schism and heartbreak that has split the world of beekeeping in Austria; the Austrian government now recognises not one but two bodies authorised to licence the movement of hives to high Summer pastures; 

The Landesverband für Bienenzucht (National Association for Beekeeping) I'd guess is the older association, for the Landesverband für zukunfts- und erwerbsorientierte Imkerei (National Association for forward-looking and profit-making beekeeping) rather gives it away in the title. No doubt the ideological differences are passionately debated in the tavernen and schenken ...

The Gloomy Trousers of Uncle Vanya

Terry Pratchett coined the phrase to describe a canon of literature so utterly negative that no redeeming virtue could be salvaged; such is the interview by Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl in Der Spiegel.

All life is misery. There is no joy. We have too much freedom, and too great a choice. There is no happiness. There is no alternative. Capitalism is neurosis.

Yep; what we all need is a big, responsible State to make all those awkward consumer decisions for us; Can't choose between ten brands of washing machine? Let the State allocate you a place in the two-year queue for a single government brand instead. Don't shop - just receive a ration that the State decides for you. Don't think - the State will do all the thinking that's needed. 

It's a lesson I suppose that some people - clearly poor Renata included - are just pathologically incapable of benefiting from freedom. Of course, Communist nations used to keep tame philosophers on the payroll. These days the buggers have to earn a living. No wonder some of them aren't happy.

UK's Stasi upsets Fritz and Michael Eavis

A glance at the following images will explain why the Germans are so miffed at GCHQ copying all the traffic that passes through the UK's big IP pipes;

Practically all of Europe's IP traffic either passes through the UK or through undersea cables close to our shores - and which the Navy have long practice at accessing to attach 'hoovering' kit. It's really no good William Hague telling the Germans that we're stealing their data for their own good - they had that from the Stasi for a number of years and are no longer inclined to give it credence.

What they do with it once they get it is also questionable; as the Guardian reports today (and as reported here yesterday), shady police units maintain secret police records on law-abiding individuals; 

"Another activist, Guy Taylor, 46, who campaigns against capitalism, discovered that he was spied on while attending Glastonbury festival – which is known to have been frequented by a number of police spies in recent decades. He and Catt are among the thousands of activists who have been categorised as domestic extremists on the unit's files. The Met previously used the term "subversives" to describe citizens with radical political views whom it was spying on."

Poor Fritz, whose every search for images of "bauernmädchen mit oven gloves" is now recorded at Cheltenham, isn't happy. And for once, this is a good thing. 

ACPO's poisonous convenience

I have no doubt that the appalling revelations about the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' have their origin in the mindset that made use of ACPO as an alternative to democratic policing. ACPO offered Home Secretaries and Chief Constables an easy and unaccountable way in which to do all sort of dodgy and questionable policing that wouldn't stand the scrutiny of democracy in the light of day; the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (which infiltrated environmental groups with agents provacateur) the Confidential Intelligence Unit (which created threats from innocent political activists) and the national Extremism Tactical Co-Ordination Unit (taken away from ACPO by the Met Commissioner from 2011) are all examples of the type of unregulated, uncontrolled semi-detached policing that the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' appears to have been. 

The one lesson in this is that the public can never, ever trust the police to govern themselves. At senior officer level they're profoundly corrupt, seduced by power and purblind from ambition. Not one single Chief Constable in the land can be trusted to run his own force without effective public and civilian oversight and governance. Let this lesson never be forgotten. 

Will cyclists face ban from London offices?

You may have noticed that the anti-smoking bigots have now moved onto the fantasy dangers of what they are terming 'third hand smoke' - meaning the smoke smell that adheres to the clothing of smokers. Smokers, they declare, are covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and they should wear disposable plastic onesies every time they have a fag.

No one, ever, has died from second hand or third hand cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, 5,000 Londoners a year are actually dying prematurely from the effects of vehicle air pollution. This blog has pointed out before (HERE  HERE and HERE ) that London's roadsides actually expose one to many times the levels of harmful particulates, chemicals and benzene derivatives than being locked in a closed car with a chain-smoker. London's worst roads have eight times the concentration of harmful substances than a smoky car, according to Aberdeen University. 

Now a lobby group called Clean Air in London has squeezed a full set of London air quality data out of Boris and the real situation is worse than anyone imagined; the worst roads for PM 2.5s are actually as follows;

Now you have to feel sorry for cyclists - I mean those who commute to the office by bike. They're actually exposing themselves to the very worst levels of air pollution, far worse than making the same journey sealed inside a car with a smoker. And when they get to the office ... yep, they're covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and all the things the third-hand-smoke faddists rant against. So will cyclists who don't shower and change clothes when they arrive at work be banned from the workplace along with smokers?

GM? We just don't trust them.

I've no idea what Monsanto has done specifically to annoy so many Austrians, but the very word was a curse amongst almost everyone I met there recently; the agrigiant was held liable for everything from bee-deaths, declining wildlife, nitrate contamination and aphid infestation to the poor weather. Needless to say they're firmly against GM foods - but not for the reasons that Boy Dave and his trusty sidekick Owen Paterson are campaigning against. 

Cameron has gone on the offensive in defence of GM foods. Emulating the great Gummer, who force-fed his daughter Cordelia with minced horsemeat to prove that beef was safe to eat, Dave has invited the world's press to his table to witness him feeding his family with a plethora of GM foodstuffs. He's addressing the food safety aspect  as though this is where the public objection lies. Which is utterly pointless.

The reason most people oppose GM is that they simply don't trust Monsanto. Their grain is sterile by design in the F1 generation, meaning farmers can't simply retain 1/10th of each crop to sow for the following year, they have to buy each year's seed from Monsanto. Any firm whose business model is based on establishing a monopoly supply position can't be trusted. And until the US has been growing the stuff for 50 years and all the negative environmental effects become apparent there why should we pollute our own farmland?

Sorry, we simply prefer the alternative that has already improved crop yields a hundred times more than Monsanto could ever achieve. By selective breeding. 

The idiot boy clearly has a political death-wish in lining himself up with yet another issue utterly antipathetic to the public view. What on earth will he support next? Free broadband for kiddy-fiddlers? Early release for Ian Brady? Banning the flag of St George from churches?

On the side of the Angels

Simon Jenkins has a decent dig at the crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who run FIFA and the IOC this morning; after conning the UK out of £9bn for their beanfest of Lithuanian tarts, blacked out limos and goody bags packed with Columbian marching powder, they imagined that squeezing £12bn out of the favelas of Rio would give them another go, this time with sunshine and bronzed bottoms. Back here in 2012 we cynics predicted a popular uprising against the Zil lanes, with IOC functionaries being pelted in their limos with ordure mid-pipe. It never happened - they just added half a billion to the security measures and another £250m to the publicity budget. But I'm not so sure it couldn't happen in Rio in 2016; it's therefore imperative that we do all we can to encourage the most lavish, extravagant and wasteful games ever.

After all, it may be our last chance to see crawling on hands and knees an IOC member stripped naked by an angry Brazilian crowd, his Lithuanian tart dismissed and his IOC limo jacked up on bricks while youths high on his IOC drugs-packet nick the wheels. It would be worth every penny of 2012.

Meanwhile our own crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who ran the CQC find themselves unexpectedly exposed; Cynthia Bower, Jill Finney and Anna Jefferson have been named as the scum who tried to cover up a negative report. Despite the redacted report trying to hide them by naming them as 'Mr' alphabet letters. I think it's also time that all UK public sector senior managers who are members of Common Purpose to have to declare it - as Masons do. What's the betting that at least two out of these three are CP shills?

NHS loses its Halo

Just two or three years ago even implied criticism of the NHS was unthinkable. It was the nation's sacred cow, free to wander unhindered and unquestioned; it defined 'Britishness' and even to hint that it was less than perfect was alike to declaring one's support for kiddy-fiddling. 

How things have changed. The accepted view is now that the NHS is an out-of-control behemoth, unmanageable, our hospitals death-factories, contaminated with deadly bacteria and viruses, uncleaned and unhealthy, staffed with uncaring incompetents, our GPs overpaid fat-cats who golf at weekends while patients die. Above all, we have accepted that NHS management is not only wholly disfunctional, but criminal in its negligence and grossly culpable for its cover-ups.

And now, to little surprise, the Care Quality Commission, the body that itself should have policed standards, has been caught in a massive cover up. This time it's new born babies that have been dying in Herodian proportions. And all the while the top guns, like senior bankers, escape jail. 

The reality is that there are many more good, professional, dedicated, caring and committed professionals in the NHS than there are incompetent fraudsters, shysters and other senior managers. A large part of the problem has been a culture of Managerialism that has robbed the professions and the Royal colleges of their authority to secure professional standards. 

But not until we have strangled the last NHS bureaucrat with the small intestines of the last NHS board member will we be able to reclaim a useful health service.

A bit of a Brazilian

The event that must be sending little frissons of unease amongst the besuited oligarchs at the G8 is the spontaneous demonstration by about a million Brazilians last night. The Guardian reckons it was prompted by another rise in bus fares, but El Pais has the better story; it was unplanned, entirely unexpected, not organised, without leaders and with a simple and universal message "We want to change Brazil". Young and old, from all classes, they just appeared, committed and angry. El Pais quotes Brazilian historian Francisco Carlos Teixeira as explaining that people felt that politicians "no longer represent them". 

It really does seem that this is more than just a temporary though global crisis of confidence in our political systems. It's really no good telling people they're being silly, it will all come to nothing and they're best off putting their trust in their local Tory MP and carrying on. That response misses the mood by a country mile and marks the responder as remote, out of touch and actually part of the problem. 

Of course (whilst avoiding potentially racist national stereotypes etc) it's possible that Brazilians are a tad more spontaneous than the inhabitants of Esher, or that Brazilian Monday night TV is even more banal than our own or that the Brazilian streets are actually not a bad place to be on a weekday evening, but it's the sheer unexpectedness of the thing rather than its size or actions that is the key point. And that's why there will be a few anxious phone calls home today from Loch Erne

Broken China

Ambrose turns his basilisk gaze to China in his latest Telegraph column, and what wondrous gloomy reading it makes. Not all his readers are happy that his focus has shifted from Europe, though;

China China China... I am sick of these doom and gloom stories about China. I want to hear some good news... like that Deutsche Bank is not broke, or that Credit Agricole is not a zombie that needs a bailout, or that there aren't 470 billion euros of construction loans sitting on the books of the Spanish banks... enough bad debt to sink the entire euro zone, and all from one misguided property boom.

 Meanwhile Boy George thinks that property booms are quite useful tools for bribing the electorate and his doing his best to stoke the UK furnace

Another commentator notes that since Chinese lenders and borrowers both are the same State there is no crisis; it's taking money from one pocket and putting it in the other. Whereas (after bailouts and nationalisations) British lenders and borrowers are ...oh, I see what they've done there

'Someone's got to win the next election'

'Someone's got to win the next election' runs the headline for a Speccie piece by James Forsyth, making the point that even though the electoral prospects of Conservative, Labour and LibDems are equally dire, the 2015 intake of MPs will come from their ranks and a government must be formed.

And this will be the case even if turnout falls to 20%, if only one in five of us bother to vote. Unlike true democracies, our corrupt third world standard electoral quotas (maintained by Labour and the LibDems), widespread and acknowledged electoral fraud and electoral malpractice, which places the UK beyond all European standards of electoral probity, will put an MP into Parliament if two bribed electors and a dog called Bert submit ballots. 

The 2015 ballot is shaping up to be a contest between the UK Political Class and the people of Britain. That neither will score an outright victory is perhaps less important than the watershed that may occur; either the Political Class realises it faces a deep crisis of democratic legitimacy and sacrifices Party for democracy (yes, unlikely isn't it?) or it is effectively abandoned by a population no longer constrained to accede to obedience.

Syria - a game of two halves

Bluntly, there's no mileage for the UK in any active involvement in or support for either side in what is squaring up to be a very bloody sectarian war. The choice is between supporting Hezbollah and the mad Mullahs of Iran, or Al Quada and the insane Imams of Pakistan. This is a Shi'ite / Sunni war, not a proxy for East vs. West or communism vs. capitalism. This is Islam eating itself, and the harsh reality is that every Jihadist from either side who succeeds in killing themselves in Syria is one less that we have to worry about. 

The press may be concerned about the several hundred Pakistani youths reported to have left the UK to fight for the rebels. They shouldn't be. Those few that aren't killed by Assad's forces should be arrested, convicted and imprisoned if they try to return to the UK - either way, they're out of action. 

As in the Iran / Iraq war, the two sides will only have the will to stop fighting once a certain level of blood has been spilled; we're nowhere near that point yet in Syria. Both sides still believe victory is possible and are negotiating for weapons, not peace. The best thing we can do is stand back and let them get on with it until they're both exhausted, then step in with the reconstruction contracts.