Seminal World Literature

There is a device used by Guardian journalists that goes something like: "Poets of international renown, including Robert Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Onku Okwame and Lord Byron ...". Lola Okolosie gives it an outing this morning, as in "...authors such as Anita Desai, Chinua Achebe, and Harper Lee".

The issue is over the inclusion of  "seminal world literature written in English", of which I am greatly in favour. However, this is not an exercise to demonstrate that those from the ex-colonies have mastered the mother-language, but one to demonstrate that literature of fine quality can originate from outside England. From North America has come a canon of literature principally in the form of fiction that has transformed the genre; and then Alan Paton from South Africa, Marcus Clarke and Thomas Keneally from Australia, Canada's Michael Ondaatje and Ireland's Samuel Beckett have all give us works that belong on the shelves of every Englishman aspiring to erudition. And there are many, many others. Including Anita Desai and Harper Lee.

The key to inclusion is in the word 'seminal'. To be seminal a work of literature must be not only original in style, form or content but must be influential in the subsequent development of the genre. Any other criteria indicate only that the term has been applied in the context of its alternative Onanistic meaning. 

HS2 Madness

The more I look at HS2 the more I'm convinced it's an utter mistake. For Keynsians looking at the proverbial helicopter dropping fivers at random it's a failure - the spending will come too late and be too uncontrolled. For Brummies hoping to attract more visitors or customers it will be a failure - the line will work in reverse, drawing even more trade, money and employment to London and the South East. The government's travel-time / cost figures are fatuous and close to the point where even the most mendacious of ministers can't defend them. Saving seven minutes on time spent in the train but spending ten extra minutes navigating the new concourses laid out like retail game-traps isn't a good deal. Then of course there's the noise, mess, destruction and upheaval, and by far the greatest cost - that of lost opportunities.

Forget Edinburgh's incompetent stupidity; light rail has been a success when it's built by the English. The DLR, Croydon's trams ad the new rail lines linking south and east London have been spectacularly successful. It doesn't have to be fast or expensive - using disused track routes and linking with portions of mainline trackspace, these bendy little routes weaving in and out of later development are heaving with happy passengers. 

An Ipswich to Colchester light rail route via Hadleigh, Bentley and Capel would end the misery for thousands; the extension in north Norfolk of lines closed by Beeching and similar elsewhere are all schemes for which there are no shortage of private operators in the wings; all they need is a bit of encouragement, a spot of cash and a little bit of Parliamentary time for enabling legislation. 

But creating small, successful, independent light rail companies is simply not on the agenda of a government obsessed by the big corporates, obsessed by the sexiness of anything measured in tens of billions (and the prospect of some of that funding, er, 'sticking' later on) and obsessed by the stupidities of Stalinist grossism.

A greeting from Bucharest

Vă mulțumim tovarășul Dave!
Suntem bogat, bogat, bogat!
 ( Thank you Comrade Dave! We are Rich, Rich, Rich!)

 

UKIP and the Bloggers

If you've been following Richard North's last couple of posts on EU Referendum, or those of Autonomous Mind, both Blogs the editorial position of which is not so distant from this, the pain is almost palpable. Their disappointment at what they think UKIP should have been and the reality is intense. 

And yes, I've no illusions about either Nigel Farage or Godfrey Bloom. 

The point, though, is this. Richard and AM are formidable intellects who understand clearly the law and process around any modification of our EU membership. The rest of us aren't, and are mostly looking to give Cameron a massive kicking in 2014 for all the lies, the reversals and the disappointments. And the bigger the kicking he gets in 2014, the more chance that many of us will return to vote Cameron in 2015.

That's the reality, simple and unsophisticated. And it really wouldn't matter if Farage started wearing Lederhosen and an Onion seller's beret, became gay and played a descant recorder - he'd still be the vehicle, the mechanism, for delivering the kicking. Until 2014, he's teflon coated.

Underpants man self-destructs

Underpants Man Chris Bryant, who it turns was not only an MP but some sort of opposition official, self-destructed on 'Today' yesterday when he denied everything he'd previously said on immigration. It turns out it was all his fault after all; he and his underpants party chums firstly made Welfare too attractive, then opened the floodgates to millions of foreigners to make up for it. Mr Underpants tried at first to blame W.H. Smiths for the crisis, then admitted it was all down to him and Gordon Brown after all.

Rowson in the Guardian captures it nicely ....

Cameron's 'Localism Lite' will cost him 2015

Cameron had the opportunity in 2010 to push big-bang Localism right to the top of the government's agenda; it had a fair wind from the LibDems and there was little that Labour could argue against without arguing against democracy, choice, freedom of local communities and the like. Instead, he bottled it. He chose big government and Whitehall centralism, and his 'Localism Lite' Act wasn't worth its weight in bum-wipe. That poor judgement is now set to cost him the 2015 election. 

The Guardian sets out explicitly this morning how the ethnic minority vote boosted by Labour's floodgate immigration policy now determines the result in 168 marginals. Ethnic minorities want to vote on race lines - for their own caste, faith or tribe, but lacking a party to reflect that first choice will vote for Labour instead. At the ratio of 68% to 16% who vote Conservative. And this is indicative of the potential future fragmentation of British politics if we allow the political class and their allies the big corporates to continue to govern under a Whitehall, centralist command and control model. 

Any UKIP supporters who think PR is better than FPTP should think again. PR will give us a Muslim Party, a Sikh Party, a Sri Lankan Freedom Party, a Gay Political Alliance and so on; every ethnic, racial and religious interest group in the country will form a party to catch the vote drop from the dying old parties. Politics will become an exercise to see which group can grab the most loot for their supporters and PR will be the vehicle and the mechanism for gross peculation. 

The only way to counter the breakup of our country on tribal lines is to devolve real decision making, including decisions over most taxes and most spending, to the local level. Very, very few lowest tier authorities in the country will fall straight into the corruption and nepotism typical of Pakistani or Bangladeshi politics and those that do will self-correct. 

Had Cameron done so in 2010 he may now be looking at a cautious victory in 2015 rather than the humiliating wipe-out that the Tories now face.    

Party memberships

Douglas Carswell's guess that Tory party membership is now 'south' of 100,000 is probably a tad too pessimistic; ConHome's guess of 100k - 130k is probably near the truth. Labour's membership will be marginally higher, the LibDems probably now down to 40,000 or fewer. UKIP's membership is up to about 30,000.

With an electorate in the UK of 45m, that's a combined political membership of less than 1%. Fewer than 450,000 people see any advantage in joining a political party, compared to over 4m who happily pay the National Trust's membership fee every year. Perhaps the Tories could open Michael Heseltine to the public, or host cream teas in Mr Pickles. 

That little prat Bercow thinks low numbers are down to 'arrogant ministers' rather than to dickhead Speakers, but he would say that, wouldn't he?

Be scared of these numbers. The lower they go, the greater the chance of our taxes being stolen to fund these dying private clubs. The party funding issue is still bubbling along.

Godfrey Bloom graduates to 'Character'

With his remarks about Bongo-Bongo land, UKIP's Godfrey Bloom has just made the transition from I'm -not-sure-about-that-bloke to 'Character', with a licence to voice the most outrageous truths to the apoplectic fury of the liberal left. You see, just about everyone in the UK knows the problem with foreign aid is that it's stolen by foreign politicians; Bloom's image of a grinning African minister in Ray Bans and and an ill-fitting Armani suit with a wife as fat as butter spending Guardian-readers donations with a Platinum card in Antibes' chic Street of Bling is as familiar to us as, well, a dishrag foreign aid minister pretending that aid is for humanitarian purposes. 

Likewise, to a nation seeing its Afghanistan veterans now getting redundancy notices Bloom's comment "F18s for Pakistan. We need a new squadron of F18s. Who's got the squadrons? Pakistan, where we send the money." strikes a common-sense chord.

Ministers and shadow ministers should be wary of labelling Bloom a bigot; as Brown found, to do so when the 'bigoted' views are nothing but the widely recognised truth can be dangerously self-destructive.

Al Qaeda to complain to Leveson?

It is understood that top Al Qaeda bosses are set to submit a complaint to Lord Leveson in relation to the 'hacking' of their phone conversations, which has led to the closure of British and US embassies across the Middle East. 

'Hacked Off' spokesman Hugh Grant said yesterday "These international terrorists have a perfect right to plot mass destruction and global murder without the Murdoch press repeating every word of what are essentially private conversations. (flick hair, look winsome)"

Gibraltar: The sign of an economy close to collapse

The more Spain ramps-up measures to blockade Gibraltar, the more you can be sure that the crippled Spanish economy is closer to another existential crisis. The play-acting and sabre-rattling by the desperate Spanish government is just empty puff and display behaviour. You have to remember that this is a nation whose national sport is goading a large, powerful animal and then running away.

Meanwhile I shall indulge my favourite Spanish treat for a Sunday afternoon in the garden; a well-chilled 50cl bottle of La Gitana. Not only should we keep Gibraltar, but if we bail-out this stricken little country again, we should certainly make a bid for Sanlucar de Barrameda. 

Pushback

A couple of stories in the news that show that the fat cat troughers aren't getting it all their own way must at least send a frisson of warning to all those still robbing public funds. In Caerphilly the then Chief Executive Andrew O'Sullivan and his mate were arrested for awarding both themselves and another score of top-troughers a gut-busting pay increase in the face of a three year pay freeze for the rest of the Council. Plod is not pursuing charges, the unlawful pay increases have been reversed and they've brought back the old CE rather than shoeing-in O'Sullivan's bent mate Nigel Barnett. 

And top-trougher Phillippa Williamson, who featured here as the work-at-home former SFO boss who paid herself a near half-million pound pension top up is today considering whether to pay the money back in an effort to avoid prosecution. New SFO boss David Green has written to three former senior managers  inviting them to return the money, but you can be sure it is more than a polite request. The move to find broken laws and thus get Plod involved is a smart one - and ex-SFO boss Phillippa will no doubt be considering the possibility of being arrested by grinning plods in a dawn raid on that idyllic Lake District hideaway of hers.

One problem remains; who will arrest the many top cops who have awarded themselves and their chums gut-busting pay and bonus deals that make the PM's wedge look like an office trainee's salary?

And now the news in Slavic ...

Take a look at the war memorial below. It's pretty typical of many I have seen in Germany and Austria but a little different to those found in our English towns and villages. Typically, ours will have a substantial list of Great War dead and a shorter list, perhaps a third the length, of those that died in World War II. German memorials are reversed, the ratios of 2m military dead in WWI to 7m military dead in WWII shown by the red and green outlines. Many like this one will also have an auxiliary panel listing victims of civil war, Nazism, bombing or other. 

Reich losses in WWII were tremendous - and largely incurred in the East, in the great battles in Russia and in final defence of Germany. Even when the shooting stopped, the deaths didn't; half a million German soldiers died in Soviet POW camps, their names here amongst those in the block in the bottom right with no date of death. Germany is still building new war cemeteries in Russia, the current one to hold 400,000 dead - half the UK's war dead total for WWI. Of course the cost in Soviet and Russian lives was even more horrendous, costing whole generations. 

Now I'm certainly no historical revisionist and hold David Irving in academic contempt, but one can't help but pose the question to what extent Western Europe has gained from the German losses in WWII in emasculating the Soviet Union to a point from which it never recovered; and is the victory in 1989 that we ascribe to Thatcher and Reagan really due to Albert Speer and Wilhelm Keitel? 

Without those 7m German war dead, would we be hearing the news in Slavic? 

When did a Fire Engine last pass you on blues?

The banshee wail of emergency vehicle sirens is a daily occurrence here in London traffic, but when a colleague asked me yesterday of the last time a fire engine on 'blues and twos' had shouldered its way through the queued traffic, I couldn't remember. Police vehicles and ambulance vans and increasingly cars are common; a fire engine as rare as hens teeth. 

Of course it may be we just don't spontaneously combust any more, or set fire to chip pans, or chimneys, or use Naptha instead of charcoal on the BBQ. In which case Boris' planned closure of fire stations in London has some justification. Or it might be that they're quietly and discreetly attending the homes of Guardian readers in order to remove domestic appliances from their penises ... 

UKIP poll share holding

The latest Comres poll for the Indie gives:-

Labour - 37% (+1%)
Conservative - 34% (+4%)
UKIP - 12% (-2%)
Libdem - 10% (-)
Other - 8% (-1%)

With UKIP still pushing the LibDems out of third place, and the combined Conservative / UKIP vote share pushing Labour into irrelevance, the figures show strong and enduring support for the centre-right. Without an electoral pact between the parties this will not result in a government; we'll still get Miliband's Labour.

With Farage the party's one-trick pony petulantly opposed to potato-head rich boy Dave in a seemingly irreconcilable dispute, and barring the possibility of a fatal Boden shorts accident in Portugal, it's far from clear how people will mark their papers in papers in 2015. 

However, so long as UKIP keep hold of that third place, there will be sleepless nights on the Treasury benches.  

Banks' greed feeds fraud

Hey ho. Your chances of being mugged on the way home from the station are now lower than ever, but the odds of someone hacking your bank account have never been greater. MPs may criticise banks for keeping quiet about the level of small-number frauds, but the banks have their reasons - and must make from increased sales more than they lose from this type of fraud. Let me explain.

It recently took a summons to the small claims court issued by me to my bank to finally sort their recalcitrance about taking the hit on a fraudulent transaction. For over a year they'd wriggled and twisted in blatant defiance of FSA rules. All quite deliberately. All the while the amount was in dispute it wasn't a liability - allowing banks to keep in suspense for up to a year the value of frauds they must write-off. And yes, in case you'd forgotten, a fraudulent transaction on your account is a crime against the bank, not against you; it's not your money once it's deposited, you're merely a creditor of the bank. So only the bank can report a fraud to the police - which, because they don't actually want a police investigation in many cases, they don't do. 

If you want to pay for an easyjet  flight online directly with your plastic, you'll need your 3-digit CVC. However, book the flight through one of the many 'B-to-B' agencies and just the card numbers and your address will do. And book a hire car through a nationally-known online agent in Paris and they won't even do an address check. Banks have left these doors open quite deliberately to make card transactions easier - but also making their money easier to steal. Never mind. First they'll try to charge it to you anyway, and perhaps a third of small scale fraudulent transactions aren't even noticed by people who don't check their statements. Then they try to impose unreasonable time limits for reclaim, or make up humpty-dumpty rules that won't stand up in court to wriggle out of responsibility. 

The truth is, if these frauds were really hurting banks they could tighten up the way they work overnight. In fact, they manage to pass most of the pain onto customers and retain the gain from increased business; in other words, it's sheer naked greed on the part of the banks that's fuelling the fraud boom.     

Still Swamped

It's damned easy to be laid back about immigration in small Suffolk market towns. The gentle burr of the regional dialect on the streets is never broken by barbaric Yoruba invective, and brownish and yellowish faces appear in just perfect proportions, as in a colouring-book on diversity produced by the Ministry of Migration. Here in South-East London we're still swamped. 'Swamped' used to be a no-no expression, but not any more. Here it's Nigerians; elsewhere it's Pakistanis, Chinese or Eastern Europeans. No-one knows quite how many, but they're filling the maternity wards, blocking transport with their buggies, needing dozens of new primary schools. About half of them (according to a Channel 4 / ippr study) work, pay taxes and contribute to GDP. And about half just consume housing, benefits and health care, adding nothing. Overall, GDP is increased - but per-capita GDP remains just the same. There's no real benefit.

Rather than start counting them, the government has hired a transit van with a sign on the back inviting them to go home. It's really not the answer. It's a tacky, clumsy suggestion that immigration is the fault of the immigrants, whom we should blame rather than the political class who are actually responsible. And of the politicians, Labour in particular - the party that betrayed this nation, trashed its people and trampled on its voters when it used open-door immigration as a clumsy, treasonous political tool. For that it must forfeit our votes forever. 

Hell near for Hoogstraten

The Mail runs a piece this morning on one of the most loathsome pieces of ordure ever spawned on these islands - the thug Hoogstraten. I have nothing to add to the fine demolition job done by the paper except to observe that, at 68, all the pains of Hell are nearing for this monstrous man, whom I hope is kept awake at night by the knowledge of his own foulness.

Banks, Big Pharma and Corporates are crims shock

It seems that the revelation that banks, big pharma and the international corporates all indulge in deeply criminal activity is news to our MPs. SOCA, in a rare and unusual effort by Parliament to exercise control over these semi-detached part of the State, has been compelled to reveal evidence that the big corporates employed criminals and criminal methods thinly disguised as 'private investigators' to carry out a plethora of criminal acts against individuals.

The banks, pharma companies and corporates who used the criminal 'investigators' were not alone; SOCA's interest came from the fact that organised crime used the same criminal methods and the same criminal operators as your bank. "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank"

One of the key reasons that parts of our secret State are so reluctant to expose the activities of this criminal mileau to the light is that our intelligence services are also undoubtedly dependent on them to carry out a host of 'black' operations with deniability and no links to the official spooks. Cops on specialist squads who are wannabee spooks have also undoubtedly sought to use the same methods. And not a few of the criminal 'investigators' will be ex-cops - retired or forced out for disciplinary reasons. So it's actually "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank and a spycam to plant up that way for the Vauxhall boys"

Even if I'm prepared to temporarily overlook the needs of the intelligence organisations, as a special case, the police and it's weird and wonderful offshoots, organised criminals and the big corporates should be treated no differently from offending journalists if they use such methods - that means dawn raids, lengthy questioning, widespread arrests and criminal charges.

HRH the Marquis of Coton

Not even the republican Indie can refrain from running the only story in the news today on its front page. The birth of a child (well what did you expect? A piglet?) to their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge is even the Guardian's lead story, with a thousand comments already, some of them chuckle-aloud amusing. The red-tops speculate widely on the young man's name, or rather speculate narrowly, veering between James, George and Charles, with never a Wayne, Darryl or Tyrone even considered. His first names are quire irrelevant, of course; he will be given about a dozen, as is normal. No, it's his title that will be critical. As the son of a duke he will be a marquis of course, but taking his title from where exactly in his father's honour? Rupert Brooke may help;

For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.

And there you have it. For a United Kingdom with such a plethora of laws that not even the Police can keep track of them, with crimes so foul that not even the Prime Minister can name them publicly, there can be only one choice:- let's welcome his Royal Highness the Marquis of Coton to court.  

Cameron the porn crusader

The walls of Herculaneum are covered with vile pornography depicting sexual acts of amazing and imaginative depravity, painted into wet plaster with rare care and skill some 2,000 years ago. And the camera hadn't been invented for five minutes in the 1850's before it was being used to capture unfortunate young women who had forgotten to put any clothes on. Muybridge had hardly let the silver nitrate dry on his stop-action galloping horse pics before an assistant was using the technique to capture a creature with two backs; the polaroid Land camera's popularity owed little to instant photos of family birthday parties, VHS won over Betamax becsuse of Californian pornography and indeed it is estimated that one minute in three spent on the interweb is spent watching porn.

Cameron wants to draw a distinction between 'good' porn and 'bad' porn, in other words to regulate international porn on the internet in conformity with UK laws on sexual behaviour. Never mind that sex with a Turbot is legal in Kazakhstan, or miffling is permitted after dark in Tashkent. Oh well, good luck to him.

Italian collapse rapidly approaching?

Italian voters have long been fed up with their corrupt parties pigging-out on public money; in 1993 a referendum motion to end party funding was passed, only to have been completely ignored by the politicians. Recent events prompted the shaky Italian Cabinet (desperate for some populist legitimacy if lacking any such democratic authority) - to propose an actual phasing-out of funding by 2017, starting with a reduction in this July's instalment. Unsurprisingly, yesterday only Beppe Grillo's 5-Star party and Bossi's Lega Nord voted for the measure - it was defeated by all the other parties voting together. It won't, however, last for long. 

Anyone following Hatfield Girl's painful accounts of the failure of the Italian economy - and the virtual bread rationing was for me one of the most telling indicators - will realise that the crisis is deep and real. A recent piece from the LSE puts the contraction as worse on just about every measure than the 1929 - 1934 collapse, and predicts 'The collapse of the Italian state finances is rapidly approaching. It will have an enormous impact on the Eurozone and the European Union'. Ambrose in the Telegraph has been saying so now for months.

Even my nephew, a studious mediaevalist spending the Summer in Chiantishire with no desire to notice anything after the fourteenth century, has been unable to neglect the malfeasances of bankers, panderers, frauds and politicians in Italian life today for those confined to the bolgia. (in translation only for me, but my valued 1976 edition with the translation by Dorothy L Sayers remains the best)

Timing-wise, an Italian collapse around October would suit me, with the € back to 1.25 or so.

'Working at Home'

Reaching a certain level of seniority in employed work is marked by one's ability to announce breezily from time to time that 'I'll be working from home tomorrow'. Sometimes it's really beneficial, such as sorting a complex final construction account that needs quantities of ciggies and coffee only available at home. Most of the time it means a visit from the plumber or waiting for a parcel for which we senior types aren't willing to take a day's holiday. Whichever, it's a valuable privilege to be used carefully, not exploited. Except if your name is Phillippa Williamson and you work in the public sector.

Phillippa decided she wanted it all - a top London public sector job-for-the-girls, a fab home in the Lake District, a child and a family life. Her first grab was at HM Revenue and Customs, where she persuaded them to let her do a five day job in four, permanently 'working from home' for the fifth. Then she took the job as Serious Fraud Office chief where (so ironically) she not only decided that she only needed to work three days a week in London, but that the taxpayer should pay for her travel and accommodation when she did so; she changed her job into permanently working at home, with additional payments if she had to come into the office. And all for the wholly selfish and self-interested reasons - to spend time with her teenage son at her beautiful home.  ‘Now I have a Black-Berry, a webcam, I can teleconference – it’s amazing how it’s all changed. Part of my job is to think about where we are going to take the organisation and I do that more contemplative side better in my home environment.’ said Phillippa to the Mail in 2009, when the direction she was taking the SFO was straight down the shitter. With an absent boss who had already decried that the SFO shouldn't tackle any cases that were 'too expensive' to investigate - those against large global corporations - Phillippa could chillax by the Lakes at the taxpayer's expense.

The Commons PAC yesterday published a damning report on what to many eyes amounts to a serious moral fraud. The Chair of the PAC said;

“Mr Alderman provided the SFO’s Chief Executive Officer Phillippa Williamson with a contract specifying that her place of work was her home address in the Lake District. She worked there two days a week. When Ms Williamson worked at the SFO’s London offices three days a week, taxpayers paid for her travel and hotel costs to London, at a cost of nearly £100,000 between 2008 and 2012. For the CEO of an important public body such as the Serious Fraud Office to be granted such arrangements is quite astounding.

“Furthermore, a payment of over £400,000 was made to enhance her pension, even though the necessary approval from Cabinet Office to do so was not in place. The Cabinet Office should explain how this payment was allowed to go ahead without being approved."

And exactly why is no-one going to prison for this?

Labour can't be trusted with the NHS

Voters in the North East are learning painfully that Labour is best when it's, er, Tory. Having failed dismally to manage any sort of economic resurgence in the old Northern heartlands, Labour actually managed to widen the gap between rich and poor in the UK, had more young people out of work than any other post-war government, destroyed working-class communities with reckless immigration and so criminally maladministered the nation's finances that the great-grandchildren of all voters will still be paying for it. But it's with the NHS that Labour betrayed its own voter base most grievously. 

After throwing a tsunami of cash at an organisation unable to make good use of it Labour managed to double GPs' salaries to over £100k but cut their work to M -F 9 - 5, managed to pay NHS executives salaries and bonuses many times the Prime Minister's own salary, and fostered a culture of carelessness and irresponsibility that was ultimately responsible for over 13,000 needless pointless deaths in just 14 hospitals from poor care, medical errors and inadequate management. As the Telegraph points out, for Andrew Burnham, one of the Labour politicians responsible, to defend indignantly his own reputation whilst 13,000 families have lost so much more is behaviour of the most revolting self-interest. But what would you expect from a professional politician?

As with the banking and financial debacle, people should be in prison for what happened in the NHS under Labour - perhaps including Andrew Burnham. Why aren't they?

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.

EDL? UAF? Not PLU.

Simon Jenkins has penned a fine piece for the Guardian on the impact of real rather than virtual demonstrations, and the role of the city square in rocking the foundations of government. All quite true. No amount of interweb polemic can equal the image on the evening news of a copper's cudgel rising and falling on the person of some patchouli-scented crustie. However, it's probably harder than you think to get folk out on the streets and squares if I'm any example to go by.

I've been on exactly two 'demonstrations' in my life; the first was the Countryside Alliance march against the Hunting Ban, the second the anti Blair-War march in February 2003. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. And on that limited experience, here's my checklist for bringing Britain's silent majority out on the streets:-

1. The ostensible reason has to be intellectually defensible with a degree of moral respectability 
2. Fellow protesters and march organisers must be law-abiding and committed to peaceful protest
3. Demonstrable shared values help; I remember how all we men doffed our caps as we passed the Cenotaph on the CA march
4. The likelihood of bumping into people you will like and may nip-off for a pint with should be high
5. The march route should pass a few decent restaurants for lunch (a Westminster to Mayfair leg at about one-ish is ideal)
6. Above all, fellow marchers must be PLU. There is nothing more guaranteed to prevent a Brit marching than the possibility of being accidentally photographed with someone whose acquaintance they would normally avoid. 

Oh, and until Waitrose start selling Throwing Vegetables in 450g blister packs ("perfectly decayed, piquant with sulphur and squishiness, firm enough for a decent lob but deliciously rotten") these things must be entirely non-physical. 

The Limits of the State

You may never have noticed, but Switzerland doesn't have a President. Or a Chancellor. In fact, the Swiss Head of State is, collectively, the seven-person Federal Council. It's worked this way since 1848, and the seven between them run just about everything a central State should run. The Swiss people make sure the central State doesn't get too ambitious by limiting the amount of tax-take they can spend - about 30%. The other 70% is determined and managed locally.

You see, there's no causative link between a nation's level of taxation and the size and power of the central State, a fact that bypasses Polly Toynbee completely. Shocked by the damage that Snowden's revelations may do to the image of the benign and all-powerful central State, Lady Toynbee leaps to the defence of the Megastate. "Labour needs to hymn the good the state does and the civilising value of what taxes buy – health, education, safety, proud public spaces. All the things that people value most." Toynbee pompously proclaims, blind to the reality that the Swiss enjoy better health, education, safety and higher quality public spaces than we do, with a much much smaller central State and highly constrained taxation.

People have a perfect right to grant their governments the power to snoop on their emails, browsers and tweets - but this must be a choice openly made, with the power always to withdraw or reverse the consent. Such consent has been noticeably absent in this case.

Cameron's Hedgehog Party

Austria, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, was always destined to carry some dodgy traffic once Schengen kicked in. Most passes through on the superb A roads, through tunnels or over high Alpine passes without incident, but just occasionally a truck comes to grief revealing an illegal cargo. So it was last week, when a vehicle carrying some 2,000 small animals overturned. Most of the cargo obediently permitted themselves to be recaptured by the Animal Welfare (well, this was Austria). The owner optimistically sent a replacement vehicle. The Authorities of course declined; the cargo would be detained whilst procedural irregularities were investigated. At the owners' expense. The irony in all this is that some 80% of the cargo was live-food for pet snakes and the like - small rodents, which the owners were now having to pay to be fed and cared for. The other 20% of the cargo was the exotic pets themselves; snakes, Armadillos and, um, Egyptian Hedgehogs. 

Hedgehogs? Since when did hedgehogs become pets? What was the attraction? I sought out an online guide to hedgehog-keeping. It consisted of page after page of advice aimed at preventing the creatures from killing or seriously injuring themselves. First, they need lots of room. "Without room, a hedgehog will show signs of depression, such as excessive sleeping, refusal to eat, repetitious behaviour, and self-mutilation. Due to their small size obesity is a very dangerous problem and hedgehogs require a fair amount of exercise to avoid liver problems due to excess weight." Uh OK a big wire cage then "Cages with wired floors are dangerous for hedgehogs because they can easily slip and get a limb caught in the wire. Multi-level ferret or rabbit cages can allow a hedgehog more room to explore without taking up extra floorspace, but when using multiple levels, keep in mind that a hedgehog has poor eyesight, can climb easily, but has difficulty descending and often does not seem to understand heights" Hmm a big cage with a safety rubber floor, then. "A wheel is necessary to provide hedgehogs with exercise. When choosing a wheel, it must have a solid floor. If an open-wire wheel is used, the hedgehog will continually fall between the bars and possibly break a leg. Wheels with crossbars can also cause facial injuries as hedgehogs have been known to look sideways out of the wheel while running." The list goes on. They are liable to amputate their own limbs with their bedding, their genitalia may get blocked with cage-dust, they are (unsurprisingly) prone to many diseases, including Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome and commonly react to stress with vomiting and green faeces.

And then the simile struck me. Hedgehogs are the Tory Party of the pet world - intent on self-destruction, blind, incapable, liable to unintentional self-injury and deliberate self-mutilation. When threatened all they can do is roll up in a prickly ball. Suddenly gay weddings, bloody windmills, state snooping, Europhilia and all the other rubbish came into perspective; it was all Hedgehog behaviour. The party has grown into an endangered creature incapable of flourishing, subject to Wobbly Tory Syndrome and liable to react to stress with vomiting and green faeces.    

Hutton, like Dworkin, is deeply Illiberal.

There's another characteristic whine from Hutton in the Guardian this morning. The recently dead Dworkin, Hutton writes, "argued that to live well and with dignity was every human being's aim – one that law and government should support" and that this was true liberalism. Poppycock. 

Let's just Fisk that quote above. By 'support' Hutton actually means 'enable' - he sees an all-powerful State regulating individual lives and rationing-out rewards equally to all, using law to prevent the emergence of a meritocracy in a system in which all are beholden to State Welfarism and to the State alone for the fulfilment of their own lives. What a dreary, squalid Soviet Hell.

In proclaiming the virtues of a Statist, repressive and coercive vesion of what he terms 'liberalism' in the Guardian, Will Hutton demonstrates nothing but his own essential illiberality. Hutton simply can't stand the simple realisation that even the Economist has reached that many more British people, and particularly the young, are rediscovering true Liberalism. Tolerant of people's differences, but with a deep distrust of the State, the Political Class and Welfarism; we should rejoice that the new generation of Brits growing into power are likely to follow Burke rather than Engels. Hutton despairs.

Let's turn that quote around and say "Neither law nor government should obstruct, hinder or restrict every human being's aim to live well and with dignity". That'll do.

Luciana Berger - the nauseating face of the political class

Labour blow-in Luciana Berger has been in a spat with one of the local councillors in her Liverpool constituency ("They've found me a safe seat in Liverpool? Where's that? Wasn't that where the Beatles came from?") before she's even been able to remember the major street-names.

Berger of course is the poster-girl for the new breed of political class who are driving voters away from the Labour and Tory parties in droves. Like most of her contemporaries, she was privately educated (Haberdasher Aske's) and from a Labour political dynasty. And no, she's never had a proper job or done a single day's proper work in her life. It was student politics, then a bit of expenses-experience with a health quango before Parliament.

She was screwed into one of  Labour's safe Liverpool seats for the 2010 election by the party's London HQ against local opposition. As Wiki records "In the run-up to the General Election, the Liverpool Echo tested Berger with a four-question quiz on Liverpool life and history. She scored two out of four, not knowing who performed Ferry Cross the Mersey and not recognising the name of former Liverpool F.C. manager, Bill Shankly."

It's Berger and her like that that are worth 10,000 votes each to UKIP and the alternative parties; the sickening and nauseating 'jobs for the boys and girls' nepotism by the dying private clubs of the main parties being truly out of favour with voters.

PRISM story tops the day

The story shared by the Washington Post and the Guardian of how the US security services enjoy unhindered access to the internet activity of the customers of the world's largest internet corporations should surprise no one. If you weren't already aware that every single word you type on that keyboard is known to some security official somewhere you should be. US security officials have responded by calling the reports 'irresponsible' - not untrue, note - and claiming that the US's security has been damaged by disclosure that the government is snooping on everyone's email. 

It's not just the septics, of course. Our own MPs, both Tory and Labour, are pushing for even greater access to our private information under a new 'snooper's charter' but at the same time seeking to restrict radically our access to information on their own pay and expenses, and our ability (through Leveson) to share information on their badger-watching activities or to share photographs they have posted of themselves in their underwear or dressed in rubber or leather harness.

And at a time when we've lost not only Tom Sharpe but Oliver Bernard, the last and most human of the three brothers. I remember too fondly an afternoon session in the French back in the 90s with Dan Farson, Sandy Fawkes and both Bruce and Oliver - in reality the invective was poison - all of whom are now dead. I mention this only because they shared a common loathing and mistrust for anyone who presumed to know better than they what was good for them - including the presumptive and impertinent interference by the government in our private affairs. Still, the revelation that it is the US that is the world's first Police State fills me with hope; if there's a people anywhere in the world who will not stand for this, it's the Americans.  

Osborne a Moron - official

Whilst I'm waiting for the boy's latest genius wheeze to add a further 20% to the value of my home here in London, there's equal satisfaction to be had from the comments of Soc Gen's Albert Edwards;

"I don’t think Andrew Bridgen at Fathom Consulting was strong enough when he described George Osborne’s scheme as “reckless”. I believe it truly is a moronic policy that stands head and shoulders above most of the stupid economic policies I have seen implemented during my 30 years in this business. It ranks above some of Alan Greenspan’s very worst blunders. And when so many highly regarded commentators speak out against it, only to be totally ignored by George ‘I know better’ Osborne, he may really deserve to be called a moron."

So what do they think the EU is?

It's always good to see the beaker people over at the Grauniad running about like puppies every time they discover fire. Today it's Seumas Milne who is granted the rare flashes of insight;

But the real corruption that has eaten into the heart of British public life is the tightening corporate grip on government and public institutions – not just by lobbyists, but by the politicians, civil servants, bankers and corporate advisers who increasingly swap jobs, favours and insider information, and inevitably come to see their interests as mutual and interchangeable. The doors are no longer just revolving but spinning, and the people charged with protecting the public interest are bought and sold with barely a fig leaf of regulation.

 It defies rationality to believe that the prospect of far better paid jobs in the private sector doesn't influence the decisions of ministers and officials – or isn't used by corporations to shape policy. Who can seriously doubt that politicians were encouraged to champion light touch regulation before the crash by the lure and lobbying of the banks, as well as by an overweening ideology?

Britain is now an increasingly corrupt country at its highest levels – not in the sense of directly bribing officials, of course, and it's almost entirely legal. But our public life and democracy is now profoundly compromised by its colonisation. Corporate and financial power have merged into the state.

And what of the European Commission and the European Parliament, where the merger has not only gone further but is increasingly more explicit? A Europe run for the huge corporations by the huge corporations, with national governments bought and sold and free market competition crushed?

Hey ho. Maybe they'll discover a use for the wheel next week.

Just more bent politicians

Did anyone really imagine that after the mass-culling of bent MPs from the Rotten Parliament that Westminster would transform into an exemplar of probity? No, of course not. The game has changed - and not getting caught is now the name of the game. To make things fair, and to balance the list of Lobbyists, Levenson will no doubt now back an official register of undercover journalists, fake sheiks and investigative reporters and make it an offence to gull an MP. 

And no one really imagines that if UKIP were at Westminster things would be much different. Already somewhere I'm sure a newly-elected UKIP Councillor is pocketing a fat brown envelope in return for believing that what his ward really needs are a few more bloody windmills built by Romanians. 

And still there are out there strident voices urging us all to support them all the same; a bit like salesmen convincing us that blue asbestos is just the stuff from which to make children's play equipment. Oh yes, they aver, Labour and Tory sleaze, corruption and fraud is completely different. Labour mostly go for money, while for the Tories it's deviant sex. Or maybe LibDems. Just shuffle back into line you lot and support detached millionaire confection Dave for top fruitcake. 

It's gone way past that of course. We'll all vote UKIP in 2014 to deliver such a kicking to Dave's curly icing that will be felt right through to his Angelica bits. And that's about as adult and responsible as it gets.