Neighbours of a dark star

Iran is surrounded by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iraq. Russia and Kazakhstan are across the Caspian Sea. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE are across the Persian Gulf. Oman is across the Arabian Sea. Iran is not just an evil empire on a dark star full of creatures bent on the annihilation of the human race; Iran is one of many states of Asia Minor. As an optimist I have to believe that none of Iran’s 13 immediate neighbours is egging them on to develop hydrogen bombs.

Scotland's police state

The Baroness Scotland saga rumbled on in our household. I looked the story up on the Mail website. It looks a clear case of more to it than meets the eye. Heavy policemen batter the door down of the Tongan maid. There are insinuations that they were trying to fit her up for a robbery. How ham fisted is that? You have to believe that Pat Scotland lied about seeing the maid’s passport before hiring her. That now becomes the crime: the unseemly scramble to cover her tracks supported by the apparatus of a police state.

It’s illegal not to cut the deficit

Gordon Brown turns up in Brighton for the Labour Party Conference and announces that he is going to make it illegal for the government not to halve the deficit by 2015. This will apparently give Middle England confidence that a Labour Government would achieve this target despite spending money hand over fist up until next year’s election. It is hard to think of a crasser insult to the general public. I just wonder if his audience is not the Americans and others who can see this country going bankrupt yet spending money unrestrainedly.

When it’s time to shut your fat face

William Hague says we have to take action against Iran. However, this is the statement of a man who will be sipping Pinot Grigio in his smoker while others go out and lay their bodies on the line. It seems that the Iranians are developing a nuclear capability and it may not be entirely peaceful. What would be really useful in this situation would be for Hague to shut his fat face and David Miliband to talk nicely with his EU counterparts to see if there’s anything they can do as a group.

Cameron and Murdoch snuggle up

David Cameron employs Andrew Coulson as his Communications Director. Andrew Coulson carried the can for Rupert Murdoch over the 2006 phone hacking scandal. Rupert Murdoch announces that his mouthpieces will be supporting the Tories in the election campaign. These mouthpieces report little on the revival of the hacking scandal apart from tucked away confirmations that a worried looking senior policeman called Yates doesn’t see any reason to prosecute anyone. We are talking here about the Sun, the Wall Street Journal,Fox , for God’s sake, the London times aka The Thunderer and of course the News of the Screws.
For some reason, the man Murdoch is not in jail.

Everybody's second favourite cause

I went to a rally organised by the Electoral Reform Society. I was hoping to be inspired, but it was worthy rather than exciting. None of the speakers could convince me that proportional representation was a great cause for our age. I think it’s because the voting mechanism is just a means to an end. The people there were passionate about other causes and united by frustration at not being able to make progress with them. The Climate Changers, Youth Activists, Pensions Rightists are really more worried about their things, but I guess that proportional representation would be their second choice on a single transferable voting paper.

The Beetles are coming

Before I forget it I want to record what I learned today listening to the BBC’s Discovery program. It was about a plague of mountain pine beetles in British Columbia, which is largely due to climate change and a monoculture approach to forestry which has provided an abundance of congenial hosts. The beetles had previously been thinned out by the cold winters, which have recently been a couple of degrees higher. The long lodge pines have been reduced by 40%. Skillful control measures by local foresters have led the beetles to flee east into Alberta and they are en route to New Jersey.

A routine lie

Gordon Brown says that it is down to Sir John Chilcot to decide whether the Iraq inquiry is to be held in public or behind closed doors. How was it then that Brown’s initial announcement was that the inquiry would be held in private? I doubt that Sir John phoned him up to tell him. Nobody can believe that Brown will leave the decision to a civil servant in practice, but he assumes that he can transfer to Sir John the opprobrium that accompanies the “in camera” decision. The saddest thing of all is that nobody in the media bothers to call Brown a liar. It is taken as read.

The Front Line

We must listen to the cry of the earth which is asking for help. The earth has no price. It can't be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together what will our future be? Your children need land and nature alive and standing.

These are the words of Peruvian Indian spokesman Davi Kopenawa Yanomami as Alan Garcia’s government backed by foreign multinationals sets about removing the indigenous people from the Amazon and tearing down rainforest. Read about it here

Targets

My much loved father-in-law died in April in a North London hospital. He died from an MRSA infection, although his death certificate said bronchial pneumonia. This morning I heard a government spokesman proclaiming the great strides made in countering MRSA as a result of there being government targets for this matter. Well, one way of meeting targets is to fiddle the figures. At any event it would perhaps have been worthwhile to have a government target for the amount of excrement smeared on the lavatory walls. The ward where my father-in-law died would have brought a satisfied gleam to the eye of the administrator assigned to reporting the hospital’s achievements in this respect.

Government by acronym

The STV (Single Transferable Vote) is now the most important voting criterion. It is the only way I can see to obtain a trustworthy government. The FPTP (First Past the Post) system delivers governments representing a minority, which descend into disaster as they pull every stroke to maintain their hold. For GB (Gordon Brown), some kind of PR (Proportional Representation) is his only hope so for him it’s just another slimy trick. However, there is just a chance of a coalition government representing the people more equably, and, just as important, less corruptible by the establishment paymasters. You will not see the Tory press supporting PR.

Tips for a healthier lifestyle

Pretty soon now the oil and gas will be running out, the IMF will be in imposing high taxes and cuts in public spending. There will be a devaluation of the pound to reflect the true value of the currency as a result of monetary easing. We groundlings will be struggling to pay for a decent meal, heating and clothing. Many will feel aggrieved that the staples of their lives are being wrenched from them. Quite a few of these people have a tendency to violence as it is and the need to sustain life will aggravate this. It is time to buy a gun and see what barbed wire is going for on eBay.

Lest we forget

Nicky Campbell’s Phone-In yesterday was about the election results. A very articulate BNP voter spoke of the 8 people in the 100 dwellings in his street who had a job and the ease with which foreigners could come over and get jobs. The best exchange however was the following:

Nicky: John of Mablethorpe, how did you vote?
John: I didn’t vote, Nicky.
Nicky: Shame on you John. People died in the war so that you could vote.
John: No Nicky. People died in the war so that other people could make a lot of money.
Nicky: Helen in Hull. How did you vote?

Baron Stoneybroke of Kircaldy

There is a pattern of sacrificing the future to the present. Why would he sell the gold reserves? This is living off your capital. You can live really well for a time selling off assets and running round town with a fat wallet. That’s what we have done. Firstly we have raided the family vaults and then when they were bare we borrowed money from strangers to keep our crazy lifestyle going. That is Gordon Brown’s legacy, but why did we let him do it? The fact that nobody in the Cabinet disagreed with him or was able to stop him tells us a lot about the sorry bunch round Blair.

Amateur History Boy

I listen to “Any Answers” and the people who phone up seem so sure of themselves. What am I trying to say? Given the same set of facts available and in this case the things Gordon Brown has done, it seems possible to draw a spectrum of conclusions. He is described as a towering genius and as a waste of space. He is almost certainly neither but I feel a mission creeping over me to be a bit of an amateur historian. When Ho Chi Minh was asked whether the French Revolution had been a success he replied that it was much too soon to say. I think he was just being a clever dick.

Banks Jim but not as we know them

This lunchtime I went to HSBC to pay in some cheques. I was struck by the number of employees just standing round and smiling at people. There must have been at least a dozen. They had 4 machines for paying in cheques but they were all in use and there was a queue. I went downstairs to the counter where there was no queue and the chap just did a bit of stamping and the deed was done. And there was music interspersed with bank messages like “Don’t hesitate to ask a member of staff for advice”. It reminded me of The Truman Show for some reason.

Not waving but drowning

The British electorate comprises a sad bunch of bastards. We let our opinions be formed by the Sun or the Daily Mail on the whole. Jostling for space with Jordan’s love life, Amy and Pete’s substance abuse and the sexual peccadilloes of ugly footballers are the messages Lord Northcliffe and Rupert Murdoch want us to internalise. A shared set of chummy bigoted values is assumed as if all right thinking Brits pin the economic malaise on the scapegoat of the moment and agree that we are under constant threat from Islamic extremists. We are drowning in a mire of crass ignorance.

The rich have discarded New Labour

The newspapers, the radio and the television have been telling us for some time that Gordon Brown is a busted flush and has to go. I can see why all of these (apart from the BBC) would propagate this view. For the media proprietors and their friends New Labour has run its course. Blair and Brown have presided over a lax regulatory framework, sold off national assets at knockdown prices, and done deals to mortgage the nation’s future under banners like PPP and PFI. And the beauty of it was that Labour was supposed to be the party of the poor. But they are no use to anyone now.

Gordon is just another bloke

The last couple of days have seen a media feeding frenzy on the political body of a barely surviving Gordon Brown. On Nicky Campbell’s Phone-In yesterday he was all things from the finest politician of our generation to the single-handed destroyer of the nation’s well-being. There are 60 million people in the UK and 6 billion on the planet so I think the media are spending too much time on the foibles and fate of a particular individual. Gordon is neither the author of our joys nor of our ills. He has simply gone along with our glib acceptance of a higher standard of living than we deserve and for which the rest of the world is now presenting the bill.

Lisbon Treaty for Dummies

People keep rattling on about the Lisbon Treaty so I thought I would find out about it. The first lesson I learned was not to start at Wikipedia. Even the summary section confused and frightened me. I need Lisbon Treaty for Dummies. The BBC has a more accessible Q&A but the thing still eluded my grasp. It defeats me how the Lisbon Treaty can be such a hot political issue when there are probably only a handful of people in the world who know what is in it.

The Yes Man

There’s something not quite right about the bloke. They made a big deal of how he could do a speech without an autocue. So he has a good memory, but he speaks strangely. For example:

Yes, our country can change. Yes, we can build a better future for ourselves and our children. Yes, we can get the change we really want.

When he gets home from work does he say:

Yes I want a cup of tea. Yes I fancy a bit of dinner. Yes it’s time for Eastenders?

I warrant he doesn’t for fear his wife would tell him to stop being a prat.

Not a happy voter

Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, finds the AV+ PR voting system “elegant”. Well, elegance has nothing to do with it. How about “intelligible” or “transparent”, as a Single Transferable Vote system would be? The AV+ has you voting in part for a party list. I will not start on the patronage issue. It’s too bleeding obvious. Then I look at the voting forms for the MEP’s on June 4th. Here you are clearly voting for the party rather than the individual and that is just as screwed up.

Resilient Nation

The Demos Resilient Nation paper is a good read, majoring on anecdotes and examples around emergencies. It tells you how different communities respond and what organisations are out there dealing with emergencies. You have to be impressed by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those involved either professionally or as volunteers. I would have liked to see some more concrete recommendations. The authors shy away from fingering Central Government with the responsibility on the basis that a government programme would be too costly and look what a fine job some organisations are doing. So in the end Demos’ recommendations are no more joined up than the nation’s disaster recovery plans.

Resilience

Lindsey Colbourne has written a paper on "Resilience" for the Sustainable Development Commission. I have been dubious about the usefulness of this organisation for some time. Mr Porritt seems to be making a fine career around being a good egg ecologically but he is clearly an establishment insider. Ms Colbourne’s work is an academic paper offering a definition of the term “Resilience” in relation to environmental issues. It offered no new insights regarding the problems we are facing, beyond suggesting a new label for what used to be called “sustainable development” before the term stopped attracting government funding.

A tad more independence

Roy Hattersley was the most impressive presenter at Hay. It was exciting to see an old Labour hand supporting proportional representation. It jarred a bit that his support was based on pragmatism rather than a desire for fairness. The other odd statement was that he felt that the real Gordon Brown had yet to stand up. He still supported Gordon as leader. This did not make sense. Gordon Brown is a grown man. If he is frightened to express himself honestly and clearly, how long do we have to wait? Roy was brilliant but he has to show just a tad more independence.