Ranting Stan

The pygmy mind of Nick Clegg

2011-12-12T11:33:00.002Z

A few weeks ago I revealed that since officially retiring I've started working as a business coach. I'll be honest, I'm no business genius and most of what I tell people is common sense, but one of the most common obstacles I come up against is mindset.

People get very set in their ways - particularly if they've been doing the same thing for some time - but the worst mindset of all comes from those who won't do what I suggest because they don't believe they can.

As I'm always telling my clients - if you think you can't then you probably won't.

It's such a simple thing and, for the majority of my clients it sinks in pretty quickly. They understand that if their business is going to survive they have to start thinking their business can survive and doing the things that will achieve that.

Which brings me to Nick Clegg.

He claimed at the weekend that this country - without the EU - would become a "pygmy nation". I've no doubt that he believes that because Nick Clegg has a "pygmy mindset". He's not stupid - I'm sure he has a very high IQ - he just lacks the ability to think beyond his self-imposed boundaries.

He honestly believes this country can not achieve great things. He sincerely believes that we are incapable of forging our own place in this world as an independent nation. He believes this because he has a small minded attitude.

You don't need to be a great person to achieve great things - you just need the ability to have a great vision and the will and determination to see it through. Nick Clegg has none of these assets.

Indeed, anyone who believes - like Nick Clegg - that Britain is unable to make its way in the world as an independent nation also has a pygmy mind. They are the true "little Englander" - because they have little minds with little imagination.

They are the people who are always making excuses and finding reasons NOT to do something. I come across them all the time in my work.

Britain can survive in the big bad world as an independent nation. Not just survive - but thrive and achieve greatness once again. I'm not saying it is easy - it will take work, effort and time - but I have no doubt it can be achieved.

I am equally certain that as long as we have people governing this country who THINK we can not do this then we never will.

If the government thinks we can't - we probably won't.

What can we do?

We need to get rid of the Nick Clegg "pygmy" attitude.

Change the mindset - change the government.

Le grand stitch-up

2011-12-07T12:21:00.002Z

With the kind of breath-taking arrogance that only the French and Germans are capable of, those arch-conspirators Sarkozy and Merkel announce they've agreed a new EU treaty.

It's not an agenda for the upcoming summit meeting; it's not up for negotiation; it's not even open to discussion - France and Germany have decided and everyone else has to accept it whether they like it or not.

'Scuse me? I thought the EU was made up of 27 nations, not two.

What on earth makes Sarkozy and Merkel think they can dictate terms to everyone else?

Well - this for a start.

Of course, those of us who actually bothered to look into the thing have known for years that the EU was not intended to be democratic - just to merely assume a veneer of democracy - and that it was a tool to enable France and Germany to dominate Europe.

Whenever there has been an enlargement, we've been told this will help to dilute French and German influence. Of course, it did nothing of the sort - and was never likely to. The French and the Germans get together, they decide and then they work out how to implement their decisions using the EU framework.

This is how the EU works and has always worked. The difference now is that they're not even pretending it is anything else.

Thatcher realised this too late. Cameron is about to find out.

Even while Britain was fighting a war and our people suffering and dying to free his country from the tyranny of the Nazi jackboot, Charles De Gaulle sat in London and contemplated with relish the day when France and Germany would combine to take down the "Anglo-Saxons".

The EU is no longer pretending to be democratic and the French and Germans are no longer hiding the fact that they make the decisions and everyone else has to accept them.

How much more evidence do you need?

No time for blogging

2011-11-04T08:37:00.003Z

I've just noticed that yesterday's post was my first since the end of August.

I suspect that many people may have assumed I'd given up blogging again, but this really wasn't the case. There are two main reasons why I've not posted since August.

First of all, I've pretty much said all I need to say about the current economic and political crisis gripping Britain and the west. I think it's fair to say that it has, thus far, unfolded pretty much as I predicted, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.

Because the other reason I haven't posted is that I have been so busy.

As you know - if you read this blog - I don't like to divulge too much detail about what I do now. I officially retired in March, but opted to start my own business soon after following several requests from friends.

Well, this business has snowballed. What started off as a hobby helping out a couple of mates has turned into a full time, 12 hours a day occupation. I do "business coaching" - helping start ups and struggling businesses to survive and grow.

It's very hard work, but very rewarding - in more than one sense - but I really wish it wasn't necessary.

The trouble is - so many people are losing their jobs and deciding to start their own business I have more work than I can handle. I don't advertise or market my services at all - all my clients have come through recommendations, but because I have so much work, I have very little time for blogging.

But don't get the idea that I've given up. I haven't. When I have something to say I'll still say it - as long as I can find the time to write and post it.

I don't plan to do business coaching for ever. As long as I'm being asked to help and as long as I have the time and enthusiasm to help I'll do what I can - but I don't see it being a long term thing.

Ranting Stan is alive and well - just too bloody busy!

The day democracy died

2011-11-03T18:39:00.002Z

The 3rd November 2011.

Remember that date - because it is the date when the principle of democracy died in Europe.

Anyone who has read this blog in the past will know what I think of the EU - and that I have been warning about its anti-democratic nature for some years - but even I didn't expect the EU to behave in the way it just has.

That the leaders of some EU nations were so prepared to so completely ride roughshod over the democratic will of another nation is not new. To do it so brazenly and so openly is flabbergasting.

And yet - even as this happens, our media ignore what this means.

They see with their own eyes how the knife in the shape of a "bail out" is wielded by the killers - Sarkozy and Merkel - and thrust into the victim. They watch as the knife is plunged into the beating heart of the democracy and their only concern is that the knife is unharmed.

Incredible. This is truly a day of infamy. A day which, in years to come and in the history books of the future, will be remembered as the day the EU finally did away with any pretence of democracy.

And the biggest irony of all is that the democracy was killed off in the nation which gave birth to the idea over 2000 years ago.

For God's sake, buy a briefcase!

2011-08-30T16:41:00.003+01:00

I don't know when, exactly, using briefcases fell out of fashion, but I suspect it was sometime around the arrival of the cheap laptop computer. However, if you're not carting a laptop around with you then a briefcase is still a very useful way to transport documents, notes and even sandwiches.

And if you're in the sort of job where the documents you carry may be rather sensitive and important then there is even more reason for keeping them secure and out of sight. Especially, if you're in government.

What is up with these people? Are they so worried about looking "out of touch" that they prefer to wander around clutching confidential papers in their hand in front of TV cameras and reporters rather than risk being seen with a briefcase?

It's not as if they don't have lackeys they could hand the briefcase to if they can't handle the indignity of being seen with anything so practical - and it's not as if the government don't make these things available to them.

Or is it because they are simply careless?

The only reason they get caught like this - even after others have been caught making exactly the same mistake - is because they are careless. And if they are careless with something as simple as putting confidential papers out of sight, then you can bet they are every bit as careless with the way they draft legislation, form policy and spend our money.

It's a sound bet that anyone who can not take care with the simplest of things can not be trusted to take care of complex things and things that are important. That is, I am afraid to say, the plain and simple truth about our political class today.

Not only are they obsessed with style and appearance over substance and ability, they are incompetent and incapable.

The real cause of the riots must never be revealed

2011-08-16T10:00:00.005+01:00

I've not written anything about the riots since they began for various reasons. First of all, I've been very very busy with my work for a couple of weeks - a little too busy if the truth be told. When I started doing this it was only supposed to be a part time "hobby" sort of business, but for the last couple of weeks I've been working 18 hours a day every day. Some hobby!

The other reason I've not written anything about it is that I've pretty much said all I have to say about it on previous posts - I can't be bothered to post links - the riots are something I've been expecting and predicting for some time and came as no surprise to me.

What is clear to me, though and is something of a revelation is that the media, for a brief time, seemed to come to the same conclusions as me in that the riots were not caused by "deprivation" or any of the other poster children of the left, but simply by the absence of morality and decency.

That realisation was brief, though. In the last few days I've read more and more comment articles in sources as diverse as the Telegraph and Guardian making the usual claims about poverty, lack of opportunity and other social grievances.

It's all codswallop - but predictable codswallop. It's predictable because to admit that the underlying cause of the riots was anything but the usual suspects is to admit that everything the liberal progressives believe in is completely wrong.

That applies to David Cameron, the bulk of the Tory party and the majority of the journalists who work in the mainstream media as much as it does to the Toynbees and Milibands of this world.

So the liberals will do some hand wringing, have a couple of inquiries and will manage to draw the wrong conclusions once again.

They have to - otherwise their very reason for existing will cease.

Why globalisation fails

2011-08-06T09:36:00.002+01:00

Once again I see people blaming the current economic crisis on capitalism and failing to attribute culpability to the real culprit in this ongoing disaster - globalisation.

Why is it all down to globalisation? Well - to explain that I first need to explain what capitalism is and isn't.

Capitalism is an economic model - not a political ideology - whereas globalisation is an extension of capitalism into a political ideology.

The fundamental basis of capitalism is speculation. In a national context this is manageable because a nation has the authority and ability to enforce that authority.

The principle of globalisation as a political ideology is to circumvent national borders and, thus, national laws - as such it is, in its rawest form, an anarchic ideology.

When we last allowed globalisation to take root - just around the end of WW1 - it was in a raw form and was, consequently, very anarchic. The end result came inside 15 years and was the Great Depression.

This time around we tried to contain the anarchy with a number of transnational institutions which are supposed to impose some sort of control on the anarchic nature of globalisation (which is why globalisation is beloved by the new left - it gives them an excuse to create world governing authorities without the need for the inconvenience of democracy and elections).

But as anyone who knows capitalism will tell you, one of the features of capitalism is boom and bust. When capitalism is employed in a national context those booms are modest and the busts manageable and containable.

However, when you take capitalism global and remove the constraints that capitalism in a national context can apply, the effects are amplified significantly - the booms are massive but the busts spectacular.

It lasted longer than it did in the early 20th century, but still blew itself out inside 25 years.
This is why globalisation fails and why it will always fail.

Globalisation is not capitalism - it is the extension of capitalism into an ideology.

Globalisation is not sustainable - it is subject to the same cycles as capitalism, but because those cycles are so significantly amplified the busts are too painful to make the booms worthwhile.

It is not controllable - it is anarchic and self-feeding.

Until we understand that the economic failure we are seeing today is a failure of globalisation and NOT a failure of capitalism then we will not understand what needs to be done to recover from it. What is more, if we do not recognise where the problem lies we will see a resurgence of the extreme left just as we did post WW1 and that will give rise to a resurgence of the extreme right - just as we saw in the lead up to WW2.

What is needed is a return to nationalism before the extremes of either political wing can take root. Nationalism has a dirty name thanks to the ongoing smears of the left and the "useful fools" in the unthinking media - but we should never forget that Britain and the USA were once proud and very nationalist countries when they defended the world against Nazism.

Nationalism is not a bad thing - extremism is.

And extreme globalism is every bit as bad as extreme nationalism.

The masters of deception

2011-08-05T15:19:00.003+01:00

A few days back I wrote about how the BBC (and other media outlets) have a tendency to distort the past to suit their particular world view.

However, it's a practice which is not restricted to just media.

As was the case in the 1930s, when economic nationalism in the shape of protectionism brought the global economy to a shuddering halt, nations are starting to take measures to look after themselves at the expense of others.

This is a common view amongst economists - and totally incorrect.

Nationalism only started to become prominent AFTER the global economy came to a "shuddering halt" in the late 1920's and it was another 4 or 5 years of following the same failed economic policies that led up the crisis before protectionism started to be used as a standard instrument by just about all governments (including the US and our own).

It's also worth noting that those countries which had resisted the globalisation that took place after World War 1 and had remained staunch protectionist nationalists - such as France - were relatively unscathed by the global economy grinding to a "shuddering halt".

It was only when nationalism and protectionism became common place again that the economies of the world started to recover - from around 1933 onwards.

It's also worth noting that the conditions that brought about the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression are almost exactly the same as now.

First of all you had a new technology that vastly improved global communication (the telephone back then - the Internet today) and made it possible to instantly conduct business over vast distances.

Secondly you had credit deregulation and expansion.

Thirdly you had a similar attempt at "free trade" and business without borders.

In other words, the period after the Great War up until the Great Depression was the first attempt at globalisation in the 20th century. It failed then just as it is failing now.

It will always fail because the basic principle behind it is fatally flawed - i.e. its principle driving force is short term gain for a few people rather than long term stability for the vast majority.

So why is this incorrect and damaging view that nationalism and protectionism is dangerous and globalisation good common amongst economists? Why do they ignore the facts of the Great Depression and put forward a totally distorted view of those times?

Just ask yourself this - who do they work for?

The Perfect Storm

2011-08-04T08:54:00.002+01:00

I've been warning about this for some years now, but we really do seem to be moving towards the end game for western economic dominance now as concerns about the US economy lead to massive falls in stock markets around the world.

Anyone who has read this blog for a while will know that I don't have a lot of faith in the idea of using the stock markets as a reliable economic indicator - but what they are good for is getting an idea of the confidence in the prognostications of various politicians, chancellors and economists. And the confidence in those people seem to be pretty low.

I'm not surprised. After the murmurings of social scientists I place the meanderings of economists as one of the least trustworthy areas of "expertise" there is. The trouble with economists - similar to social scientists - is that they can never give a straight answer to a straight question.

If you ask an aeronautical engineer if an aeroplane design will fly he will tell you yes or no. If you ask an electronic engineer whether a design for a new circuit board will do what it is supposed to he will tell you yes or no. If you ask an economist if an economic plan will work you will get a maybe.

That wouldn't be so bad if they admitted that their "science" - just like social science - isn't really science at all. It's just guesswork based on assumptions none of which are certain or proven. They try to convince us that there is some sort of proper theory behind all their gibberish with macroeconomics this and microeconomics that - but there isn't. It is all bullshit.

When Maggie Thatcher came to power she understood that the best "economists" in the country weren't working at the major investment banks - they were the humble housewives of Britain. People who understood that if you spend more than you earn you will end up with debt and that debt was something to be avoided as much as possible.

But since the early nineties we've thrown the simple economics of the housewife into the rubbish bin and fallen for the charms of snake oil salesman masquerading as knowledgeable people - but their theories were flawed. Very flawed.

What started off as a Greek tragedy rapidly became an Irish joke and now seems to be spreading into an Italian comedy - but the ultimate result will be, I believe, the end of the American dream and that will have an impact on the whole of western democratic society.

To the BBC, the past isn't just another country - it's a whole new reality

2011-07-24T22:16:00.004+01:00

The fifties were a little before my time, but even so I have a reasonable grasp of what they were like because, growing up in the nineteen sixties, my little corner of Slough was pretty much the same as it was in the decade before.

So I remember enough to understand what Peter Hitchens is driving regarding the Beeb's latest attempt to rewrite history with their new drama "The Hour".

"They really did speak in those strangled accents, and in complete sentences. That is because they thought differently, had grown up with different experiences from those we know. Everyone over 25 could remember the war. Men really were courteous to women, and women – including educated women – genuinely expected to get married and have children and saw nothing wrong in that. The men wore blue or grey suits (often shabby) and knotted their ties tightly."

Of course, Slough was overwhelmingly working class so there wasn't so much of those "strangled accents", but the curious (and rarely heard these days), south Bucks accent that was a sort of cross between West London and West Country - an accent which I'm told I still have (though it doesn't sound like an accent to me!). Apart from that and that the men of Slough, for some reason, seemed to have a preference for brown suits or sports jackets, I pretty much recognise all of what Mr Hitchens describes.

Mr Hitchens ponders why the BBC get the era so wrong in their production - and, indeed, of other recreations of recent times gone by. He comes to the following conclusion.

"The BBC cannot recreate 1956 because it loves the present day too much, and is afraid to admit that anything about the past might have been better."

Well, that is one possible (and plausible) explanation, but I think it goes much deeper than that.

You see, I believe the BBC - and most progressive liberal institutions and supporters - don't love the present day at all. Oh, there are things that they - and I - love about the present day, but they are all technological advancements that would have happened regardless of whether we went all social liberal or stayed socially conservative.

But, they know that by virtually every measure of societal progress things have got much much worse. Crime is rampant, education is broken, the economy is collapsing, community spirit has been torn apart, unemployment is a curse, we're physically sicker and mentally more fragile.

These things can not be hidden. Everyone can see these things with their own eyes and make their onw judgements about the state of society today - it's shattered.

But what they can not do, unless they are over fifty years old at least, is remember what it was like before social liberalism. So, the BBC decides to tell them what it was like through these sort of revisionist dramas. It's not that the BBC loves the present so much - it's because they hate the fact that past society was so much better.

No matter how much of a shiny gloss you put on the present, it is impossible to hide the fact that the country is on the verge of societal as well as economic collapse. The BBC have been trying for donkeys years to tell us how great this time is, but even they no longer believe it.

So, when you can't hide the present, it's much easier to change the past - and that is what they do.

A cautious return

2011-07-23T11:05:00.002+01:00

After a few months away from blogging I'm about to tip my toes back in once again.

Before I delve into giving my personal opinions on the various issues of the day, I'd just like to give a quick update on what I've been up to since I stopped blogging.

Although I officially retired from employed work in March, I've been very busy over the last few months with voluntary work - but I've also been involved in doing various jobs for friends and former business colleagues which has led me to start up my own business.

It's more of a hobby than anything else, but as people were willing to pay me to do it I thought I may as well make it official. It won't make me a millionaire, but it does mean I can afford to give my kids and myself the odd treat now and again.

For those interested, Mrs Stan is now back in the family home and more or less recovered back to her old self. It's been a long haul and it's by no means over, but we're delighted to have her back. She has a new job away from the various influences that caused her to have her breakdown and is much more settled and happy.

The kids have blossomed. They are now very well balanced and emotionally stable teenagers (well - emotionally stable FOR teenagers), both are very happy and doing very well at school and I am immensely proud of them both.

For those who remember the tale of my old Alfa being written off - I have a new car. It's modern, silver, well equipped and very capable - but it is as bland and characterless as all modern cars.

Other than that, not much has happened - except that I have put on two stone since I retired. Hardly surprising as I used to cycle the 10 miles to the office two or three times a week, but haven't touched a bike since.

Deferred gratification

2011-02-28T12:15:00.002Z

After almost five years of blogging I have decided to bring Ranting Stan to a conclusion and this will be my last post.

Following Mrs Stan's breakdown and the demands, stress and strain of looking after two teenage boys on my own I made the decision late last year to take early retirement - even though I'm not yet in my mid-fifties. Today is my final day of the work and later this afternoon I will hand in the assorted accoutrement of employment and walk out of the office a free and very happy man.

The house is all paid for (I made the final payment last October - eight years early), I have been prudent and careful with savings and I have followed my father's advice all my life to avoid debt. Consequently, I'm in a position now where I no longer need to work to maintain our lifestyle - although I'm sure I will do something even if it is just to continue my voluntary work.

I confess that I feel a little guilty that I'm doing this at a time when so many others in Britain are facing hardship and a collapse in their living standards. All I can say is that I hope I am wrong in my forecast that we are about to enter a prolonged period of economic turmoil and decline that will match and possibly surpass that of the Great Depression - however, I see no reason to change my assessment.

My advice to anyone who wants to listen is to follow the model I have followed all my life - don't be tempted by easy credit and the prospect of shiny new things. Look after your money, save what you can, only spend what you have to and never, ever build up any debt apart from a mortgage which you can not pay off within one month.

If you do this while you are young enough then you will be able to look forward to an early and comfortable retirement too. It's called deferred gratification and is much underestimated.

I thank you all for taking the time to read and comment on my musings over the last five years and wish you all good health, wealth and happiness.

Thank you and goodbye.

Al Beeb's priorities

2011-02-23T09:35:00.002Z

Once upon a time - when Britain was still a sane country and the BBC was still a British broadcasting company - the news bulletins would always begin with home news. It didn't matter what was going on in the rest of the world, the news always followed the same pattern - home news, foreign news, sport, weather.

There was only one thing that could shift the priority and that was when some far flung country was struck by a catastrophic natural disaster - floods, hurricanes, volcano or earthquake. No matter what else was going on at home, a natural disaster was always the lead story.

How things have changed. Such is the BBC's interest and fascination in all matters relating to events in the various despotic Moslem states that even a devastating earthquake in New Zealand couldn't distract them from their coverage of events in Libya - even though nobody really has a clue what is going on there.

Let's be honest about this. Libya is a dump of a country whose only connection to Britain is that their government likes to fund and equip terrorists hell bent on causing us harm. New Zealand is a member of the Commonwealth with our Queen as their head of state, a government and legal system based on that of Britain and peopled by people who are very much like us in every respect.

But the BBC decided that Libya was more important?

Why? How on earth can they have come to the decision to put the events of Libya ahead of the disaster in Christchurch - there isn't even a comparison! You can be sure there were high level discussions about which story should lead the main news - and the winner was the story about the Moslem terrorist haven not the country which is so much like our own.

It demonstrates the priorities of Al Beeb perfectly. In their world, the Moslems must always be given priority.

Census-ship

2011-02-22T08:44:00.002Z

There have been suggestions that this years census will be the last due to the cost incurred.

Now, granted that £500 million is a lot to find while we're making "cuts", but given that the census only takes place once every ten years then in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the ocean. Are the government really suggesting that we won't be able to afford it in the future? Perhaps they are - in which case they seem to share my view that this "recession" is going to be a little more serious than most think.

However, I don't believe they really believe that. The Tories are signed up to the globalisation fantasy that we in Britain can maintain our high debt, high salary, high living standards based on an economy that is primarily geared to buying stuff and producing nothing.

And under that fantasy they expect us to be living the high life again within a year or two - and that this will continue unabated for the rest of eternity or until global warming consumes us in a fiery hell/watery grave/frozen tomb/dusty disaster (delete as appropriate) whichever comes first.

I suspect the real reason they want to stop doing the census is something else.

Because the fact is that in ten years time it will be impossible to hide the fact that the policies of successive governments over the last 30 years have changed the racial and religious makeup of Britain forever.

The spread of infantilism

2011-02-21T10:26:00.002Z

I'm sure Katherine Dewar is a very pleasant young girl from a lovely family - and I think her design for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is quite charming and naively endearing - but am I alone in thinking that it really is not suitable to be the official design for such an event?

I've been saying for years that the way our society is becoming so childish bothers me, but I could at least console myself that the royal family managed to retain a degree of adult dignity and gravitas - with the exception of the self-indulgent and very childish Duchess of York. Now it seems even the Queen has succumbed to the rampant infantilism that is infecting our nation.

Let's all just grow up, start behaving like adults and leave childish things to children.

Being a conservative and not a Conservative

2011-02-17T16:02:00.002Z

On of the frustrations of being a conservative is that as soon as you tell anyone that you are a conservative they immediately make all sorts of assumptions about you - and they are usually wrong.

Among the most frustrating of those are that you -

- don't believe in workers rights or improving their working conditions
- think that every service or business should be privately owned/run
- have a slavish devotion to the free market/free trade
- disagree with state intervention
- always vote Tory

Absolutely none of these are true in my case and I suspect it is the same for millions of conservatives up and down the country.

For starters, conservatives can be left and right of the political spectrum - I know that my political opinions cross the divide in many areas, but just because I think that, for instance, some services and businesses are best owned and run by the state doesn't make me any less a conservative and certainly doesn't make me a rabid Trotskyite. Be honest, does anyone think, for example, that our armed forces would be better owned and run as a private enterprise?

Sure, I'm certain there a good number of wannabe despots and revolutionaries who think that having their own private army would be a good thing, but the majority of us accept that when it comes to the defence of our nation then perhaps it's right to leave that to the government.

The truth is that most of us are conservatives - in some way or another. Very few of us apply the idea of radicalism to our own lives. We buy conservative cars in conservative colours, wear conservative clothes and are conservative in our taste.

So why then do we suddenly think that radicalism is a good thing with politics when it is something that we shun from our lives in virtually every other respect? Where does this obsession with "change" come from when so few of us want to apply change to our everyday lives?

If radicalism and change is such a good thing - why are so many people content to stay in the same job for years and, if they do change jobs, stay in the same industry doing basically the same thing? Why aren't people who advocate radical change prepared to quit their jobs - whatever it is - and start doing something entirely different?

The answer is obvious - they are conservative. They prefer to stick with what they know because what they know works and pays. Yes, sometimes taking a massive risk, chucking in your job and starting something completely new and different pays off - but most of the time it doesn't.

You know that if you find a particular career path that sticking to it will bring gradual improvements to your life. Sometimes you will make a modest change by trying a different employer, but it will still be basically the same thing and it is a change you can make without too much risk to the progress of your career. The same principle applies to national and political progress.

This is why I am a conservative and why I am proud to say I am a conservative - because I know that it works. Being a conservative means understanding the simple point that real progress is made by small, modest, incremental changes to tried and trusted methods rather than radical changes and leaps into the unknown.

I know that - and I suspect that 90% of people who claim they are "progressives" know that too.

And yet they think that somehow it is different when it comes to politics.

Weird.

Marriage and the "Big Society"

2011-02-14T08:58:00.003Z

The title of this post was going to be something along the lines of "flogging a dead horse" - but given the events at Newbury racecourse this weekend I decided against it. However, as David Cameron tries to revive his grand plan for "The Big Society" it would have been rather apt.

To be honest, I never quite understood this "Big Society" idea - I think the overall concept of a big society is right, but I think Mr Cameron's idea of how it would work, was at best, misguided and, at worst, deluded.

Mr Cameron seemed to think that as cuts to council provided services took effect, volunteer groups would step in to take over. In a way, he is right - they will - but it will be existing voluntary and charity groups that do this and with little or no extra resources.

The idea that tax paying citizens will accept the idea that they are expected to both provide the funds for a service through taxation AND do the work themselves is, as I said, misguided. Unless they see an appreciable drop in what they are paying the council then why would they be happy about dipping once more into the dwindling funds in their pockets to provide the service they already pay the council to provide?

It just didn't make sense to me.

Worse still, though, is that Cameron seems to completely misunderstand how society works.

Society is not some top down imposition from the government - it begins with a small group of people with a shared interest in achieving something that improves their lives in some respect. As more and more of these small groups of people begin to recognise that they share a common interest with other small groups of people that "society" grows - what starts in one house spreads to a whole street and then a neighbourhood and then the town and, ultimately, across the nation.

That is how society works and it starts in one place and one place only - the traditional family.

The traditional, stable family unit is the building block of any functioning society which is why, in every civilization that has ever existed regardless of its origins, marriage between a man and a woman has been the most obvious, single common factor.

And we live in a country where that traditional family has been undermined and marginalised for decades by the actions, laws and aims of successive governments - Labour and Tory - without exception.

This is the point Mr Cameron's "Big Society" misses completely. Until he has done something to rectify the growing problem of family breakdown and the increasing marginalisation of the traditional family then his "Big Society" ain't ever going to work.

And to suppose otherwise is simply deluded.

Intent and purpose

2011-02-11T08:30:00.003Z

I understand that the government's new "Freedom Bill" will, amongst other things, ban car clamping on private land. I'm all in favour of that, but also think they should go further and just ban car clamping.

I mean - clamping a car defies all logic.

If a car is parked somewhere it shouldn't be then that must mean that by being there it is causing an obstruction - whether that is blocking a private resident's parking bay or the traffic flow through a town centre - so to disable the vehicle in such a way that it can not be moved and thus prolong the obstruction strikes me as self-defeating.

Unless, of course, the point of parking restrictions and regulation is not to keep motorists and pedestrians safe, but to raise revenue?

Answers on a postcard to Nick, Clegg c/o 10 Downing Street.

Right and proper

2011-02-03T14:34:00.003Z

Have you ever watched those property shows so beloved of daytime TV? In some of them you'll find some couple who want to move to some particular spot such as the Cotswolds and live in a typical Cotswold village. They'll talk about how they want the "traditional" village pub, village community and shops and so on.

The presenter then takes them around 3 or 4 typically Cotswold properties and the couple moan "this isn't what we're really looking for" before going on to explain they wanted something more modern and contemporary.

Duh! What did they expect to find in a typical Cotswold village?

In some of these shows you'll then find some over indulged couple who decide to build their dream home in just such a beauty spot - thus erecting a grotesque concrete and glass carbuncle that looks more out of place than Harriet Harman at an English Defence League meeting.

Although I have no idea what sort of property he lives in, I suspect that Peter Oborne is a little like those people judging by his latest ramblings in The Telegraph.

Mr Oborne, like those people who build monstrous carbuncles in the heart of English countryside or expect to find the latest Wimpey "CopyCat" red brick mock Tudor mansion in the centre of a Cotswold stone village as he seems to think that the environment should adapt to the demands of the newcomer rather than vice versa.

What Mr Oborne - and his kindred spirits in the liberal media - fails to grasp is that if you change the environment you spoil the very thing that made that environment attractive to those incomers in the first place. You can not have a typical Cotswold village if you allow people to build what they want, where they want it.

Similarly, you can not have a modern, liberal (traditional - not progressive) western democracy and give concessions to Islamic demands. They are totally incompatible - and this is the point which Mr Oborne refuses to grasp.

Like any other immigrants, Moslems were welcome to come to Britain as long as they understood that they had to adapt to this country and not expect it to adapt it to them. Once they started coming here in floods rather than dribs and drabs then that changed the whole dynamic and now they expect - not want, expect - us to change to suit them.

Mr Oborne dismisses this lazily as "Islamophobia" which it most certainly isn't - it is a rational response to unreasonable demands made by a group of people who were allowed into this country by a government who never asked us if that was what we wanted.

Well, we don't want it and to tell those who do to get lost is not "Islamophobia" - it is the only sensible thing to do. Just as the incumbents of a Cotswold village will fight tooth and nail to prevent a newcomer changing their village for ever then so the people of England are telling the Moslems newcomers that if they want to live here they adapt themselves AND their religion to suit our culture, our landscape and our traditions.

If we allow them to change it then we will lose the very thing that made it so attractive in the first place - but more than that, we will lose something that our fathers and grandfathers fought and died to preserve and which our ancestors spent a thousand years building.

Wanting to prevent that is not irrational - it is the only proper response.

When reality doesn't make good TV

2011-01-28T12:49:00.002Z

The BBC is coming in for some criticism following reports that they employed a dozen dog owners to walk up and down a street and encourage their animals to foul the pavement.

It's a stunt to promote a new series about how the public sector cuts affect an ordinary suburban street. In the series, the street residents lose services such as waste collection, street lighting and access to libraries.

To be honest, I have some sympathy with the BBC. My sources tell me that they originally tried just removing the plethora of "services" provided by the council which aren't deemed essential - lesbian outreach workers, climate change oordinators, youth offending teams, street scene directors, health and safety inspectors, safety camera partnerships, asylum seekers support, translation facilities and so on - but it didn't make good TV.

No one noticed these services had gone.

Slaying the beasts

2011-01-27T11:47:00.002Z

Back in the nineteen seventies, Britain was a country with a strong manufacturing sector that dominated our economy. Unfortunately, we also had very powerful unions and this created serious problems for the various governments of the time. The power of the unions meant that management - particularly the weak management in nationalised industries - were unable to bring in new technology or working practices that would improve productivity and/or quality.

This resulted in that decade being marked by over the top demands for pay rises, shorter hours, longer holidays and frequent, prolonged and very damaging strikes in all sectors of manufacturing/production. The nationalised industries and the power of the unions represented a beast created by Labour policy which the Tories under Thatcher, on coming to power in 1979, were determined to slay.

They had a plan and slay it they did. Unfortunately, in killing the beast of too powerful unions and nationalised industry, they also struck the coup de grace for manufacturing/production. This was not accidental - as I said, the Tories had a plan.

Their plan was to switch Britain from a manufacturing/production led economy to a service based economy - and financial services in particular. It was the perfect solution - a stable, conservative industry, solid and dependable with little or no union ties. A loose monetary policy followed allowing an expansion of easy credit and the de-regulation of the financial services industry. The "Big Bang" of 1986 led to a huge expansion of this industry, the rise of the "yuppie" yelling "buy, buy" into his brick of a mobile phone and the "greed is good" generation.

Pretty soon Britain had moved from a primarily manufacturing based economy to a service based economy - the Labour beast of trade union power was dead and the future looked rosy. Unfortunately, there was a flaw to the plan. A service based economy requires something to service and the market in Britain is very very limited for such services. Take out a huge chunk of that market - in the shape of productive industry - and the service industry will have to look elsewhere for business if it is to expand and meet the demands asked of it.

Never fear - something came along that enabled this expansion. The rise of interconnected computer technology and, in particular, the Internet. This meant that financial transactions could be conducted from anywhere to anywhere. You didn't need to be in Hong Kong to buy a business in Hong Kong. Globalisation was born - again.

The trouble was, it was hard to compete against the massive foreign financial companies in a global market. So British financial industries had to become bigger and more powerful - so they started gobbling up one another and then started to gobble up whatever they could abroad - and, unfortunately for us, it also meant that foreign companies could equally gobble up our companies.

This had the opposite effect from that intended. Instead of making the industry more competitive it made it less so. Instead of there being hundreds of banks and building societies to entrust your money to there were less and less as more and more were taken over by the giants of the industry.

Ultimately, in slaying the Labour beast of trade union power, the Tories had created one of their own - bank power. Only this was even more powerful, more demanding and even less controllable. While the unions only had power in Britain, the banks had tentacles that reached all over the world - it was impossible to impose regulation on an industry which could just decamp to another part of the world where the regulation was less stringent and yet still retain its influence and share of the market in the UK.

The solid, conservative, safe and dependable industry that had been the basis for their creation had turned into a ravenous, insatiable monster incapable of self-restraint and increasingly demanding as it became aware of its own awesome power.

The upshot of all this is that the beast created by the Tory Party has wreaked even more devastation and harm on Britain than that of the Labour Party. What is more, the Labour Party were utterly in awe of the beast; afraid to confront it and unable to slay it - and that task has now fallen to the Tory Party.

"I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

The Frankenstein Tories must slay the monster they created.

A perfect storm

2011-01-26T08:39:00.002Z

I must say that I found it quite amusing to listen to the boy George reacting to the news that GDP had shrunk by half a percent and blaming it all on "bad weather". He may or may not be right about whether it was the coldest December on record that caused GDP to dip so alarmingly, but it was his use of metaphors that I found amusing - "we're not going to let bad weather blow us off course" he said.

I'm sure the boy thought he was being terribly clever when he said that and, judging by the smug look on his face, it appears that he did indeed think that - but as an analogy he was horribly wrong. You see, as any sailor will tell you, when you get bad weather the last thing you want to do is fight against it. It's much easier and safer to ride out a storm and then return to your course when the weather eases than it is to keep a smashed and broken vessel afloat let alone going in the right direction. So, what you do is you run with the weather and you let it blow you off course - or you find a safe harbour and take shelter.

I don't know if what Osborne and the coalition are doing is the right way to get us out of our economic predicament, but my gut feeling is that it will not help. The problems with our economy run far deeper than the structural deficit - in fact, I think that is merely a minor distraction from the real problem which is that we are a nation addicted to debt, living on credit and with no real way of paying off what we owe.

The coalition - along with the Labour party - have no plans to address the real problems with our economy. Yes, I do mean they have none - zero, not a single idea. The only plan they have is to reduce how much more they spend than they raise through tax - reduce it, not eradicate it. In other words, their only idea is to put a little less on the national credit card each month, but they still plan to spend more than they - we - can afford.

Unless and until we have a government which actually understands the fundamental flaws of our economy we will continue to be blown to pieces by a raging storm while we stay "on course". The trouble is, we're on course for oblivion and our government is demanding "full steam ahead".

Childish things

2011-01-24T12:06:00.004Z

Am I the only person who thinks we should all just grow up?

Because it seems to me that we are living in an increasingly infantilised society - just about everything going on in our country today seems to be dominated by childishness.

I don't just mean politics - there has always been a somewhat childish aspect to that for as long as I can remember with their name calling, petty arguments about who said what and so on and so forth. It may seem more childish today because of the amount of coverage it gets and the presence of TV cameras in parliament, but I don't think it's ever really been that different.

No, I mean childishness in wider society. It's apparent in architecture where elegance and grandeur has been replaced with brash flashiness. It's apparent in the names and logos of companies which have chosen to change their names from something solid and grown up - like Norwich Union - to some infantile made up word like Aviva (when I was a kid, Aviva was a car made by Vauxhall).

It's apparent in the liveries of our trains, buses and airlines which have replaced muted, understated, conservative liveries with bright, garish primary colours much beloved of children and then daubed huge slogans all over them. It's apparent in the way we dress with fully grown adult and often middle aged men and women dressing like teenagers (there was a time when the young dressed like little adults - now it's the other way around - the middle aged dress like big kids).

And it's apparent in the way we live our lives with men and women in their thirties still living with their parents and behaving like they were still 18. They drive around in £30,000 motor cars on never ending credit, splash thousands of pounds every year on two or three foreign holidays a year and spend their evenings wasting money in pubs and clubs, online gambling or playing computer games with like minded people all over the world - then they have the effrontery to complain that they can't afford to get on the housing ladder.

Grow up! Stop wasting your money, save a deposit, find someone you love, get married and buy a bloody house of your own!

Of course, it's all too easy to blame our national dependency culture for all this - and I am certain that there is an element of that to the problem of this infantile society. After all, children are dependent - and if they retain that dependency when they become adults then are likely to retain childish elements to their character - but I can't help wondering if our societal desertion of Christianity may have something to do with it as well.

As St. Paul put it in a letter to the Corinthians "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The fact that we don't do that anymore - instead we cling to our childhood long into adulthood - is perhaps why our society has become increasingly childish.

It's time we all grew up.

Eggs in one basket

2011-01-23T16:20:00.004Z

It's been fascinating listening to various economic experts and politicians discussing the "too big to fail" banking industry and deciding that the only way this can be addressed is by breaking them up in some way.

There is nothing fascinating in what they say - just the way they reach their conclusions as if there is no other way.

But there is.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is why is the banking industry "too big to fail". There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the "banking industry" has become - by design - a huge part of our economic makeup. Since the nineteen eighties we have gone through a progressive and deliberate change from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy.

Of course, we've always had a service contingent to our economy because a manufacturing based economy requires services, but the service sector was always secondary to manufacturing. It's also worth pointing out that the financial services sector of the service based economy is not the largest part of that sector either - that honour belongs to retail - but it was by far the largest "exporter".

The second problem we have is that the "banking industry" is concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations who have been allowed to expand and crush competition. In other words, a substantial proportion of our economy is concentrated in the hands of a very few people. It's not really an industry at all - it is little short of an authorised cartel and only a few steps away from a total monopoly. I won't go into the detail of this right now, but all of this has happened not because of a lack of regulation, but because of a proliferation of regulation - it just happened to be the wrong sort of regulation.

So, we have too big a part of our economy in the hands of too few people and that is why the banking sector is deemed "too big to fail" - we've not just put all our eggs into one basket we have chosen to chuck away the all the eggs that we didn't think we'd need until we only had a few left.

The answer to the problem can not be solved by simply breaking up the banking industry. You will have more eggs, but they will still be in the same basket. The problem will still exist - the hope is that some of those eggs might survive any future crash, but that is far from guaranteed.

The real solution to the problem has to be more fundamental than that. It requires redressing the balance of our economy so that no single sector dominates so utterly. The best way to do that is to make manufacturing the basis of our economy once more. Only by rebuilding our manufacturing and production sectors of the economy will we solve our problems. It will solve the problems of unemployment, the balance of trade, the structural deficit and the banks that are too big to fail.

It won't stop inflation or boom and bust, but those are constituent parts of a capital based economy anyway - and as long as they are managed they aren't always a bad thing.

Yet none of this occurs to the people who govern the country. They'll continue to keep putting all our eggs in the same basket and we'll still be the ones cleaning up the mess when they drop the lot.

Seeing the light

2011-01-21T10:42:00.002Z

I've posted before about how this current generation - my generation - have got to be the most selfish generation ever to have held power in Britain. I say this because we seem to be forever changing things to suit what we want and, in doing so, deprive future generations of the opportunity we had to enjoy things we took for granted.

For example, my generation enjoyed free tertiary education. University students got grants, college students were sponsored by employers and there was an abundance of apprenticeships in all manner of trades and skills. Forget all this rubbish about how only 20% (or whatever it was) went to university - back in the seventies as many, if not more school leavers went on to tertiary education than do now and they didn't end up with a £40,000 debt for doing so. So selfish.

Another example, although not currently in place, is the idea of getting rid of the traditional six week school summer holiday and replacing it with a four week break instead. Why? Why would we want to do this when the majority of us remember those six golden weeks of our summer holidays with such fondness? Why? Because it doesn't suit us to have kids today taking six weeks off - it interrupts the social and personal lives of the now generation too much, apparently. So selfish.

The latest idea is to change our clocks to Central European Time. Why? So that more of "us" can enjoy an extra hour of daylight when we most want it. Forget the inaccuracy of this statement - no matter how you set the clocks you get the same amount of daylight - it's the sheer selfishness that astounds me. We're told that if we set the clocks forward to CET we can have an extra hour of daylight to enjoy a drink or go shopping. Seriously? As if Britons don't seem to spend enough time getting bladdered or worshipping in the secular cathedrals we call "shopping malls" already!

Perhaps the most stupid comment was that it would make people happier. Really? Bearing in mind that happiness is an entirely subjective thing - what makes me happy won't necessarily make you happy - it seems pretty obvious that the idea of getting up and going to work or school in the middle of the night makes most people pretty bloody miserable.

I'm old enough to remember the last time they tried this in the late sixties. It was an unmitigated disaster. I remember getting up in the dark, eating my breakfast in artificial light and walking to school in the dark. It was dreadful. I also remember how hard it was to get to sleep when it was still daylight at 10PM. Truly awful. And today, as a parent, I know how hard it was for my kids to get to sleep when the sun was still shining and how hard it was to get them going on those cold, dark mornings.

Those who tell you switching to CET would be good for "us" - don't mean you and me. They mean it will be good for them and them only.

They are utterly selfish.

Choice or pressure?

2011-01-20T14:32:00.004Z

Baroness Warsi is the Tories Minister Without Portfolio. Given that her latest speech seems to be nothing short of a rant at Britain for not accepting and embracing Islam and its followers, I think the Tories really ought to either give the daft woman something to do or kick her out of the cabinet.

"The minister without portfolio will also warn that describing Muslims as either “moderate” or “extremist” fosters growing prejudice. "

Is that right? So it has nothing to do with followers of the ideology routinely exploding themselves amongst and killing honest, everyday folk going about their daily business then? Or the fact that as they grow in number then so their demands for concessions to their repressive ways grow more vociferous and outrageous? Apparently it has nothing to do with Britons being forced to give up their ways, traditions and customs of a thousand years so as not to cause "offence" to people who are newcomers to our country.

She has a point, though. There is no such thing as a "moderate" Moslem - just Moslems who fully engage in putting the demands of their ideology into practice and those who are passive. The Minister Without Brain goes on ....

“It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of 'moderate’ Muslims leads; in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: 'Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim’."

Of course - we've all heard the boss say that haven't we? Actually no - I can't say I've ever heard any of my bosses ever even mention the religion of a co-worker in almost 40 years. Indeed, the only discussion I've had with any of my bosses regarding a Moslem was when a boss of mine decided to put a new Moslem colleague next to a Sikh colleague. I had to then go to my boss and explain that although they may both be Asian in descent, Sikhs and Moslems don't get on too well as a rule and that the pair of them spent most of the day bickering and insulting each other. It's the only time in my entire working life that I have ever heard one colleague describe another as a "fucking Paki!"

“In the school, the kids say: 'The family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad’.

Really? Around my way, you're more likely to hear a kid say "the family next door aren't Moslem, but they will be soon".

“And in the road, as a woman walks past wearing a burka, the passers-by think: 'That woman’s either oppressed or is making a political statement’.”

The curious thing about this statement - apart from how unlikely your average passer-by is going to think such a thing - is that up until 10 years ago the sight of a woman in a burka on a British street was virtually unknown even in predominantly Moslem areas. Around my way, Moslem women who used to dress in conservative, but definably western clothes are now routinely wearing Moslem dress including scarves and burkas and they only started doing that when a large group of fundamental Moslems moved into the area.

Was that through choice or through peer pressure? I have asked, but they won't say - which says it all.

Do what I say, not what I do

2011-01-19T09:37:00.002Z

To be honest, I have no idea if the proposed NHS changes will make things better or worse - but I don't think those who are claiming they will have an effect one way or the other know any better than I do either.

I have to admit that I actually thing the changes make a lot of sense from a layman's perspective. - surely it is better that the money follows the patient than the patient follows the money? - but I've not really studied the proposals and, to be quite honest, don't really care that much. The NHS is a gargantuan bureaucracy and I don't seriously expect that to change.

What is of more interest to me is the reaction from a certain quarter of British society to these proposals.

You see, I'm a conservative (not a Conservative - please note that there is a difference and these days it is a significant difference) and as such I am the sort of person who is always being accused of being resistant to change and opposed to radical ideas.

To be fair, this is partly true. I'm not resistant to change - I just believe that change should come through slow, measured steps and not through giant leaps into the unknown. I am opposed to radical ideas - but only untried and untested radical ideas. I have no problem whatsoever with the idea of radical change if that means a change back to a tried, tested and proven process of doing something which we know works and works well.

But the annoying thing for me is that the very people who are opposed to these radical changes in the NHS are the very sort who are most likely to criticise me and my like for our resistance to change and radical ideas.

The reality of these progressives is that they only want radical change to the things that they don't like. They are completely opposed to radical change that has an impact on their pet projects and the NHS is their most precious pet project.

It is the clearest case yet of do what I say, not what I do.

Priorities

2011-01-19T09:07:00.002Z

There has been a bit of coverage in the media recently about library closures. Up and down the country, local councils desperate to save a bit of cash are marking small libraries for closure and in many cases the local communities are not happy about this.

The councils argue that they have to save money and these facilities are not sufficiently used to justify keeping them open. This is nonsense. The reason they are closing libraries is all about priorities.

Most people, when they think about their local council, understandably think about the basic essentials which they believe their council tax money is used for - rubbish collection, keeping the streets lit and clean, care and support of the elderly and so on - but the chances are that your local council have other ideas.

You see, they don't see things the way you and I do. What we consider a priority and what they consider a priority are often completely different things. For them, collecting rubbish is just a nuisance they could well do without - which is why they are so willing to change it from weekly to fortnightly and why you will see rats running around outside Number 10 Downing Street. The country is now a filthy tip because councils no longer consider collecting rubbish to be a priority.

What they consider priorities are things like ... helping drug users get their daily fix, assisting asylum seekers in maximising the benefits they can obtain from government, ensuring young people convicted of assault are given every assistance possible on their release from a young offenders institute and so on.

When it comes to the environment, our councils are more concerned about the impact of "global warming" on the Arctic polar bear population than the impact of their failure to keep the streets clean on the local brown rat population.

Libraries are way down the list of priorities and many of the things we consider priorities are not much higher up that list. This is why they - along with care and support for the elderly - are top of the list of council cuts. The priorities of ordinary local tax paying people count for nothing compared to the priorities of the progressive liberal elite who rule this country.

An EU success story

2011-01-14T08:44:00.002Z

This is so incredible it is almost impossible to believe - until you realise that it is the EU at work and then, not only is it believable - it is inevitable and it represents a success story for the EU.

The EU has managed to approve, print and send out millions of 2011 diaries to schools - including 350,000 to British schools - which include the holidays, feasts and festivals of every major religion except one ...... Christianity.

At first, one reads this and wonders how nobody spotted the error. However, when you think about it you understand that the "error" was inevitable.

For 2000 years Christianity has shaped the culture of every nation on the continent of Europe and yet, despite this common thread, every nation in Europe developed differently with different cultures to create unique nations. Consequently, Christianity has been a barrier to the very ideals and principles of the European Union.

The EU is forever going on about "celebrating" diversity, but the truth is that the EU only wants to celebrate EU approved diversity. The influence of Christianity on the cultures, institutions, laws and customs of the European nations is something they want to eradicate because that influence has been different in every nation - and if you plan on integrating those cultures, institutions, laws and customs in one then the first thing you have to do is eradicate the influence that shaped those cultures, institutions, laws and customs.

The very fact that these diaries have been produced without any reference to Christianity is evidence of how successful the EU has been in achieving this within its own bureaucracy - because it is inconceivable that these diaries did not go through an approval process which would have required a number of different departments and senior technocrats checking and approving the content.

These people have been brainwashed for decades to ensure that they bow down to all the EU approved cultural diversity of foreign religions while ignoring the one that shaped European civilisation. So they will have checked and rechecked that the diaries include Diwali, Ramadan, Hanukkah and what have you, but it would not have occurred to a single one of them that they were missing Easter or Christmas.

So, this represents a success story for the EU. They have successfully eradicated Christianity from their bureaucracies. Unfortunately for the EU, outside of their buildings, the people of Europe still remember it.

Some challenge!

2011-01-13T09:23:00.003Z

Perhaps the daftest travel "challenge" I have ever seen is currently being aired by the BBC. No, it's not the presenters of Top Gear trying to see who can get from Florence to the top of Mount Etna first in thirty year old Italian classic cars costing under £500 - it's Brian Milligan attempting to drive from London to Edinburgh.

What's so challenging or unique about that? People do it every day - some even go there and back. Not only that, the Top Gear team recently had a London to Edinburgh challenge of their own - Jeremy Clarkson in a steam powered train, James May in a Jaguar XK120 and Richard Hammond on a Vincent Black Shadow. If I remember correctly, the race was won by May who pipped the steam train to the post in the Jaguar after about 8 hours.

So this "challenge" is neither unique or particularly challenging - except Brian Milligan is doing it in an electric car - but why do I think it's so daft?

Because it's taking him five days to get there.

I really don't understand the BBC's point to the challenge. If they are trying to tell us that electric powered cars are viable alternatives to the standard internal combustion engine powered cars they are failing miserably. Nineteen fifties technology thrashes the latest 21st century electric wonder by four and half days!

If they are trying to demonstrate how "cheap" it is then that is a total failure too. Even assuming that Mr. Milligan is staying at an ultra cheap £30 a night B&B every night that's still going to set him back £120 - more than enough to get your average petrol driven family saloon all the way from London to Edinburgh and halfway home again. Imagine the cost of driving from London to Edinburgh in an electric car with a family of four - you're talking about the better part of a thousand pounds and ten days just to travel there and back. You can get to Florida and back cheaper and faster!

All they've proven is that electric cars are neither cheap, practical or even viable alternatives to traditionally powered cars. The mere fact that I could leave for Edinburgh now - four days after Mr. Milligan set out - and still get there before him proves that the electric powered car is the worst possible choice. Indeed, your average seventeenth century stage coach would get you from London to Edinburgh quicker than an electric powered car. So much for progress!

So, liberal lefties, which is it?

2011-01-11T09:01:00.003Z

I have no idea if the screwball who went on a killing spree in Arizona was influenced by "right wing" talk radio and aggressive political rhetoric or not. However, it seems to me that the people who are making this leap of faith are from the very same liberal left who pooh pooh any suggestion that there could possible be any link between violent imagery, dialogue and lyrics in film, television and pop music and the increasing violent and aggressive behaviour in society.

Either these things do have an affect or they don't. Which is it?

Personally, I abhor the gutter level politics common in the USA and increasingly prevalent over here (Phil Woolas, anybody?), but I believe it is symptomatic of the general decline in moral standards, self discipline and self control in society which has been encouraged by the liberal left over the last fifty years.

I'm all for a return to a civilised society based on common decency, good manners and politeness and I much prefer people to self-censor than have censorship imposed on them, but I think it's hypocritical for those on the liberal left to complain about something they have brought about.

Before they start criticising, they ought to take a good, long, hard look at themselves.

Money to burn

2011-01-11T08:54:00.003Z

I make no comment about the collapse of a trial against a bunch of environmental activists accused of plotting to close down a power station other than to suggest that if the Met can afford to have someone working "undercover" in such a group for ten years then they have plenty of scope for cutting costs without affecting "bobbies on the beat".

Measuring the cost

2011-01-10T09:59:00.003Z

There seems to be something of a growing murmur in the media about petrol prices again - with reports that the recent VAT rises and duty increases has pushed the price to £1.30 a litre. The trouble is, it doesn't sound that bad at first - only when you realise that that is the equivalent of almost £6 a gallon does the significance of the cost hit home.

Of course, we all realise that the cost of filling our cars up is higher than it has ever been, but most people do one of two things. They either fill their car to the brim and pay with a credit or debit card or they put in £10, £20 or £30 worth at a time and pay cash If, like me, you, you do the latter then £20 worth of petrol will always cost £20 regardless of whether that is 10 gallons or 3 gallons.

Petrol prices are exorbitant and they have a significant impact on the economy. Most goods are transported around the country by road and the higher the cost of doing this the more prices go up to compensate. The government like to tell us that they are doing this for our own good to ward off the catastrophic man made global warming which doesn't exist - but the reality is that they do it because it raises bucket loads of revenue for them to waste on their numerous vanity projects.

My real complaint about petrol prices, though, is the continued war by the establishment on natural, human measurements in the form of British Imperial in preference for Napoleonic or, as the establishment likes to call them, metric measurements. It's been going on for years, but has increased in pace in recent years. The weather reporters frequently tell us that we can expect 10 centimetres of snow and no one understands what they are talking about. Most of us do rough conversions in our head - 10cm is about 4 inches.

The annoying thing about the petrol prices, though is that nobody measures their cars economy in miles per litre - it's always miles per gallon. That is what the car manufacturers base their performance figures on - mpg and mph, but for some reason we're now expected to do mental conversions in our heads.

Metric measurements might be great for the scientific community, but they are not great for human use. If someone tells you they are 5' 10" tall you know how tall they are and whether they are short, tall or average height. If someone tells you they are 182cm tall most of us don't have a clue. Similarly, if someone tells you they weigh 12 stone 6lbs you can visualise their bulk and know instantly whether they are fat, thin or average. If someone says they are 56kg you don't have a clue what shape they are.

More importantly, though, with imperial measurements we know what we are getting when we buy something. So if we buy a lb of butter we know it's a lb of butter. If the following week it's only 15oz we notice that. On the other hand, when we buy 476g of butter one week we don't necessarily notice the next week if it's 470g.

This happens a lot since we started moving to metric. Manufacturers reduce the amount by seemingly insignificant amounts but continue to charge the same for it - and we don't notice because few people, unless they actually check and record it, realise that what they bought last week weighed 2 g more than the same item they bought this week for the same price. It's inflation by stealth.

Imperial measurements are human measurements. They are easy to understand because they relate to human things. They relate to human things because they are based on human things. When we are told that we can expect 4 inches of snow we know that is roughly a palm span deep. If we're told it's going to be 15cm we don't have the same guideline.

Likewise, petrol prices of £1.30 a litre mean little to most people because they don't realise what that actually is - although they know it is more than it was a fortnight ago - but when you explain that that is almost £6 a gallon it all becomes clear.

The great bank stitch up

2011-01-06T15:14:00.003Z

A few months ago I received a letter from my energy supplier informing me that my "account" was in credit to the tune of a little over £1000.

I wrote back thanking them for the information, but stated that I wasn't aware that my "account" with them was actually a savings account and could I, therefore, have my money back - with interest of course.

I heard back from them this week - not regarding my missing money, but to inform me that my direct debit is to increase once again. This started me thinking about direct debits and, subsequently, about banks in general.

I'm old enough to be able to say that when I first started work I was paid weekly in cash. I was actually in full time college (it would be "university" now), but every Friday lunchtime I'd hop on my little FS1E and tootle across town to the office to collect my pay packet - a little brown envelope with a see through plastic window through which one could discern various notes and coins and a (handwritten) pay slip.

It's worth pointing out that I was paid the princely sum of £16 a week back then, but after deductions and giving my mum a fiver for "keep" I was left with a little over £7 - if I'd been on the dole I would have got £9 a week! Nevertheless, unless it is something you have experienced yourself, you can not possibly understand the sheer joy of getting that pay packet every week - happiness was a little brown envelope in 1977.

My only expense (other than the exorbitant amount charged by my mum) was the HP payment on my second hand FS1E for which I put aside £3 a week. Once a month I'd tootle off to the local dealer where I handed over that month's payment in cash and the dealer would fill in a little payment book to record the transaction in meticulously neat handwriting. I still have the payment book somewhere in my loft. The rest of the money - all £4 plus some loose change - was mine to do with as I pleased.

It doesn't sound like a lot of money, but somehow I managed to be down the pub every night with my mates where we'd enjoy a couple of beers and a few games of darts. If I did run out of money before the next Friday it just meant that I couldn't go to the pub until pay day - never more than a day or two so hardly a disaster - and, of course, come next Friday lunchtime I was flush with cash again.

The point I'm making is that I didn't have a bank account or even have need of one. Unless you are someone who works in some trade where payment by cash is the norm, I'd guess that not many people these days are familiar with this concept of weekly pay in cash, but back in the seventies it was pretty much the norm for most working class people.

My mum worked part time for a small local printing company and was paid weekly in cash. My dad worked shifts at a huge, multinational corporation and was paid weekly in cash. They didn't have bank accounts either. In fact, my dad didn't actually write his first cheque until well into the 1990's after he'd retired!

Of course, my parents did have a mortgage and, therefore, a building society account - but that was it. Banks were everywhere on the high street - there were at least four in my local high street in the 1970's ... there is one now - but it didn't matter much that they didn't open until 10 AM and closed at 3:30 PM - we hardly used them. Occasionally they came in useful for paying a bill, but even that wasn't necessary - you could pay bills in post offices or even in some local shops. High street banks were generally places for local shopkeepers to pay their takings into - God knows what they do now!

The point I'm trying to make is that there was a time when for many of us - quite probably a significant proportion of the population of Britain at the time - banks were always there, but largely unnecessary for us. We didn't need "cash point" machines because we were paid in cash. We didn't need direct debits because we got a bill and paid for it with cash. If we wanted to buy something that we couldn't afford we either saved for it or, like with my FS1E, we paid cash in installments. We didn't need banks.

This all seemed to change in the 1980's when being paid weekly in cash fell out of fashion. Instead we were paid monthly by credit transfer. I was told this was "better" - but it didn't feel like it to me. For a start I'd lost that little bit of weekly joy that came in a brown window envelope.

I still got a brown window envelope, but now all it contained was a payslip - nothing like the pleasure one got from having the money as well. On top of that, my money now went into a bank account and the only way I could get that money was to go to a bank and withdraw it. I couldn't see how it was "better" then and I still can't see how it is better now - it might have been better for the employers and certainly better for the banks, but for me .......no.

The irony is that as banks became more and more essential to more and more of us the more they withdrew from the high street. If I want to get hold of my money I have to make a special journey to go and get it.

The banks have us over a barrel. My parents generation got by without ever needing them for the most part, but we have to have a bank account or we pretty much don't exist. This is why they treat us like scum rather than valued customers - we're not customers to them ... just revenue streams.

We're just numbered accounts that the banks and the various corporations that feed off them shuffle our money about with scant regard for whose money it is they are actually shuffling. It's all one big con to make us spend money we don't have and for them to accumulate money they are not entitled to - and I've had enough.

I'm getting rid of all the direct debits. From now on I'm going to pay bills by cash and only on demand. If my energy supplier sends me a bill I'll tell them to take it out of my "account". I have to have a bank account for my pay to go into, but I'm going to run it at bare minimum levels - I'm fed up of being treated like rubbish by unaccountable and uncontactable corporations - I'm going back to basics.

I only wish more of us would do the same. Only if we start standing up for ourselves can we force these faceless bureaucrats to come out of hiding and start treating us like people again. They think that because they've pushed us into a situation where we "need" them that we don't have a choice. The reality is that they need us more than we need them. Without us they have nothing and it's high time they realised this.

Join the revolution.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-22T13:19:00.000Z

.... and a happy new year.

I'm unlikely to be posting again before the new year is under way so I'll get my best wishes in a little early.

Have a good one, everybody.

Time for change

2010-12-21T09:10:00.002Z

I've decided it's time to freshen up the look of Ranting Stan. I'm not one of those people who either has the time or the inclination to spend hours tinkering with blog settings or fine tuning to get exactly what they want so I just go with whatever is available "off the shelf". I'm not looking for "contemporary" and I don't want anything flash - just subtle, conservative and, hopefully, tasteful.

Hope you like it.

Vanity projects

2010-12-20T10:44:00.003Z

Despite desperate economic circumstances and cut backs in government spending, the government is pushing ahead with plans to spend untold billions of public money on a "high speed" rail link between London and Birmingham.

The fact is that there is already a perfectly good railway link between London and Birmingham - the problem it has is that it has been neglected and allowed to decay for the best part of twenty years or so. This rail link - in good condition - is quite capable of supporting trains capable of very high speed, but I'd question if there is even a need for such a high speed link at all.

All people really want from their trains is that they depart when they are supposed to, arrive when they are scheduled to and are reasonably clean and comfortable while doing so. They're not really bothered whether it takes an hour or fifty minutes - what bothers people is when they are told it will take one hour and it ends up taking an hour and ten minutes and they miss their connection or appointment.

Rather than wasting money on new projects, the people would be better served by a government that ensured that the existing infrastructure was fit for purpose and delivering the service people want. Spending billions we haven't got on infrastructure we neither need or want is just sheer vanity.

Utopia? For whom?

2010-12-17T12:49:00.003Z

Once again the imagined "rights" of a foreign criminal are placed above the very real rights of their British victim. It's not the first time this has happened and unfortunately it won't be the last either - thanks to the meddling and incompetence of the progressive liberals.

The proglibs like to believe they are creating a utopia - but the question is, for whom?

Before the proglib experiment began 50 years ago, Britain was a great place to live as long as you were a decent law abiding person. Sure, we were pretty rough on criminals and the immoral, but there weren't too many of those and certainly nothing like what we have today.

The vast majority of people could live decent, ordered and content lives free from intimidation, fear and threat - either from criminals or the state. Everyone had access to quality education, there were plenty of jobs available in industry, factories (that made real things), offices and shops, marriage was the bedrock of society and most families enjoyed money in their pockets, food on the table and all the consumer items they either wanted or needed in an ordered and civilised society.

Then came the proglibs with their dream of creating a utopia - and fifty years later we've got it.

A utopia for criminals and the immoral, that is.

By almost every measure of societal progress things are worse now than they were fifty years ago - and where they aren't that is only because of technological or medical advances which would have happened whether the proglibs were in charge or we had remained a social conservative nation.

Anyone who thinks things are really "better" today is either deluded or a fool - or both. And things will not get any better until we dump the proglib revolution where it should be - an unfortunate chapter in our national history - and get back to social conservatism.

How to become interesting

2010-12-16T08:43:00.003Z

While he was Defence Secretary, the uttering of Bob Ainsworth were so dull and impenetrable that barely anyone paid him the slightest bit of attention. Even at the height of his career, few people knew who he was, listened to what he said or cared what he was talking about. As Defence Secretaries go he was one of the more easily forgettable ones.

Today, though, he has suddenly become very interesting to the liberal left media. Why?

Simply by calling for illicit drugs to be legalised.

Oddly enough, long before moving to defence, Mr Ainsworth was in the Home Office with a responsibility for drugs and organised crime. One presumes that the responsibility was to reduce it, but I'm not entirely sure if Mr. Ainsworth understood that.

Mr. Ainsworth now says that his recent about turn on drugs policy came about as a result of his stint in the Home Office - but that finished seven years ago! Are we really expected to believe that Mr. Ainsworth's sudden change of mind on drugs took seven years to formulate? I don't have a particularly high opinion of the intellectual capability of your average MP these days, but even I never thought that their minds were that slow!

Nah. Mr. Aisnworth didn't change his mind while he was at the Home Office - the position he is now stating is more likely to have been his view when he was attending meetings of the International Marxists and helping to wreck the British car industry as a trade union activist.

The only reason he is saying it now is that he knows he is unlikely to ever get a position in government ever again and he can now come clean and admit his real opinion. I doubt that Mr. Ainsworth has really changed his mind on drugs at all - what he says now is what he has always believed in my opinion - but by saying it now he has changed something. He's gone from being Mr. Dull and largely ignored by liberal left media to Mr. Interesting and the darling of the BBC.

TV is so educational

2010-12-15T09:46:00.002Z

A lot of people get very sniffy about television claiming that they never watch it - except for the odd documentary about some art house director or wildlife programme, but I'm not like that.

There's no doubt that the quality of television has declined considerably over the last 10-20 years as twenty four hours a day viewing and the number of channels has proliferated. I remember how back in the seventies we heard how the USA had a hundred channels and nothing to watch while Britain made do with just three channels and there were always a dozen or so "must see" shows every week.

Given the quality of output from British television compared to the US at the time it still amazes me that we decided to adopt the American model - but that is what we did and the consequence is that there is little worth watching on television today.

Nevertheless, television remains very educational. For instance, last night I watched the BBC's latest edition of "Holby City" and learned an awful lot from that.

I learned that foreigners are better than Britons - better people and better at their jobs.

I learned that women are excellent doctors and nurses while men are bumbling idiots - unless they are foreign men in which case they are excellent, but not as good as female foreigners.

I learned that both men and women are portrayed with flawed characters - but while women are aware of their character flaws men are blind to them due to their supreme arrogance.

Of course - if you believe all that you will believe anything.

And that - of course - is the point. A lot of people do believe an awful lot of what they see on television regardless of whether it is a "documentary" or a popular drama series. They don't realise that what they are watching isn't a snapshot of real life, but simply how things are viewed through the prism of liberal left propaganda.

The left cottoned on to the power and reach of television many many years ago and now have complete control over it in this country - particularly in the BBC where they control not just the content, but also the way it is managed.

So you can still learn a lot from television - but the best thing to learn is where the off switch is located.

Crap Britain

2010-12-13T15:57:00.002Z

When lefties tell me how much "better" Britain is these days, one of their favourite references is how much better our health system is compared to, say, the pre-NHS days. I like to retort that the reason why health care has improved and so many people recover from illnesses which were once considered life threatening has nothing to do with the NHS, but is entirely down to medical advances and often due to the development of new drugs by those "evil" (and privately operated) pharmaceutical companies who - if the left got their way - would be bled dry of the profits that pay for future drugs.

There is no doubt that people died of illnesses back in the forties which are easily treatable these days - but I'm equally sure that nobody died of thirst while in hospital in the pre-NHS days.

Another of the lefties favourite references are the much vaunted "benefits" of immigration. Well, it certainly wasn't much benefit to this chap. Britain has become a dangerous place to grow old in. If the out of control youth and foreign criminals don't get you then the NHS probably will.

Why our country is going to rack and ruin (2)

2010-12-10T10:31:00.002Z

It's obvious from this story that incompetence and stupidity in authority is not limited to our parliamentarians.

It makes me wonder how people utterly lacking in basic common sense ever managed to get to such positions of authority - as well as wondering how much they get paid for doing a job that they are clearly incapable of managing.

Unfortunately, it does not surprise me in the least. I've no doubt that they have all got impeccable records for promoting "diversity and equality in the workplace" and have perfect attendance records on all the politically correct training courses and that, unfortunately, is what qualifies you for a position in authority these days while actually knowing what you are doing seems to be a "nice to have", but not essential.

When you realise that we are governed by people who openly invite foreigners to peruse our most sensitive secrets, who have turned over control of our laws and regulation to unelected foreign bureaucrats with a barely disguised distrust and hatred of our nation and that our national infrastructure is managed by people lacking the basic intelligence to foresee that de-icing trains might be needed when it is very cold ... well, it's no wonder the country is falling apart.

Why our country is going to rack and ruin

2010-12-06T08:53:00.002Z

On the face of it the news that the research assistant of a Lib Dem MP is accused of being a spy for Russia has a cold war feel about it - and reading through the various news reports of this incident it would appear that the big media agree ..... but it isn't.

It reveals with stark clarity the reason why this country is in such a sorry state - stupid and naive leadership.

You can argue whether Mike Hancock - the MP in question - was stupid or naive (or both) in employing a Russian national as his research assistant, particularly given his position on the national Defence select committee, but it is impossible to argue that choosing to do so isn't stupid, naive or both.

That one individual MP would be that stupid and naive is bad enough, but the fact that it didn't occur to any of the other MPs in the House of Commons or to the leader of his party that this was not the sort of person any nation should be employing to work on sensitive national interests is beyond a joke.

It also reveals the astonishingly blase attitude our leaders have to the issue of immigration. Why didn't anyone wonder why Mr Hancock felt it necessary to employ a foreign national as his research assistant - couldn't he have found a British person to do the job?

Did he even try?

Caught lying at the interview

2010-12-04T07:18:00.004Z

For years now, the Lib Dems have had the luxury of being able to make up policy in the sure knowledge that they'll never have to implement any of it. This has meant that they've been able to indulge in all sorts of gesture politics and moralising and get away with it.

Now, though, they find themselves unexpectedly in government and their "beliefs" and policies are proving to be as substantial as soggy tissue paper. They are like the interview candidate who makes all sorts of claims about their experience and qualifications for a job believing they'll never be offered the position and then finding themselves in the job.

And just like someone in that position they are quickly found out - exposed as frauds and totally out of their depth.

It makes me wonder, though. I mean, there are those of us who knew that anyway, but the millions of people who voted for the Lib Dems must be feeling extraordinarily let down right now. Will they ever vote for them again - and if so, why?

And as they have been revealed as being totally inadequate, that their policies are poorly conceived, poorly planned and totally inappropriate then why the hell does anyone bother to listen to them still?

Nurses that don't nurse and carers who don't care

2010-12-02T08:43:00.002Z

The Daily Mail is backing a campaign by the Patients Association to change the way the NHS handles complaints with particular concern over the care received by hundreds of thousands of elderly patients in NHS hospitals every year.

The fact is that nurses have given up on nursing. They have turned a vocation into a profession and no longer bother themselves with the basic fundamentals of patient care - like making sure they are fed, watered, clean and as comfortable as they can be.

It's typical of our entire way of dealing with the sick and elderly. If you're in hospital you'll be "looked after" by nurses who don't nurse and if you're at home you'll be dealt with by carers who don't care.

It's symptomatic of a system which has forgotten what its purpose is and no longer exists for the reason it was first created. The purpose for which the NHS was created was to provide high quality health care free at the point of use for all people. That is no longer why the NHS exists. It now exists to provide state employment for a huge number of people.

If that wasn't the case then why would it matter whether the health service was provided by private enterprise or by a state run institution as long as it was free at the point of use and available to all?

Lord Carey is wrong

2010-12-01T10:07:00.002Z

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has suggested that Britain has become "ashamed" of Christmas.

He is wrong.

Although I welcome Lord Carey's comments for bringing the matter to public attention, the simple fact is that, although many are ignorant of the message and meaning of Christmas, most British people are not ashamed of Christmas or the Christian heritage of the nation.

Lord Carey is falling into the same trap that many commentators and opinion formers do - he is assuming that the thoughts and actions of those in authority are representative of the general population. They are not.

The fact is that authority in Britain is dominated by political correctness. The simple truth is that unless you subscribe to the politically correct world view of progressive liberalism there isn't a hope that you may reach a position of authority in Britain today. It doesn't matter whether you work for one of the major political parties, in the public sector or civil service or for a private company - unless you sign up to the policies of progressive liberalism you will not reach any significant position of authority.

This isn't because most people are progressive liberals either - it is because it has become enshrined in our law that you must subscribe to these views ... publicly at least.

You are required, by law, to actively pursue the policies of "diversity", "mulitculturalism" and "non-discrimination". As a result, nobody who doubts the validity or need for these policies can or will reach any position where they can influence policy making or decision making in any significant body. Even if they do, the slightest step out of line will see them very quickly removed from that position.

So, the whole of British authority is dominated by a particular mind set which assumes that we all accept that mind set as well - even though most of us do not. The vast majority of people in Britain do not wish each other "Seasons Greetings" or "Happy Holidays" at this time of year - we say Happy or Merry Christmas.

The fact that virtually all public celebrations - whether it is on Christmas cards, decorations or displays - are devoid of anything relating to the birth of Christ is entirely down to the fact that authority in Britain today is dominated by minority opinion which is not representative of the general population.

They are not "ashamed" - they are just ignorant and unable to think any other way.

Anyone else fed up with touchy feely politics?

2010-11-29T12:30:00.002Z

Britain is teetering on the brink of economic collapse still (despite what the latest propaganda tells you), we've given up on the idea of being able to defend our nation, our international interests and our sovereignty and we're at the start of what could turn out to be a very long and very cold winter with the promise of massive price hikes in power costs to give us something to think about as we try to keep our homes warm ..... so what does Cameron think we need?

A happiness index!

Meanwhile, the opposition under the leadership of an unthinking left wing clone, have decided that what they need to do is connect with the "hopes and dreams" of the British people. Well, my hope is that Red Ed and the rest of the socialist carbuncles that infest Britain disappear from public life for good and my dream is that Britain is restored once more to a socially conservative, independent and economically stable nation once more. Good luck with that one Ed!

This is the trouble with left wing politics - yes, David Cameron's Tories are a party of the left - they can't deal with real life so they focus on feelings and emotions. It's what left wing politics is all about. Very creepy.

How we feel or what we aspire to is absolutely none of the government's damn business. The first concern of government is whether the nation can defend itself and whether our economy is able to sustain itself - neither of which is true at this moment in time. Worse still, there is no suggestion that there is any hint of a plan to ensure this is true at any time in the foreseeable future!

I for one have had enough of these touchy feely politicians and their creepy ideas. They can take their happiness index and their "hopes and dreams" and shove 'em where the sun don't shine.

Spot the difference

2010-11-29T09:48:00.002Z

I'm not going to make any comments on the items exposed by Wikileaks themselves, but I would like to take a moment to compare and contrast the way the media report them in comparison to the way they reported the so-called "Climategate" emails - because the difference in the way they are reported and treated are stark.

When the story about the Hadley data broke there was very little comment from the mainstream media about the content of the data - instead they focused on how the data was "hacked" or "stolen". Any analysis of the actual content was left to the various "sceptic" blogs such as Watts Up With That? and Climate Audit.

The mainstream media - and particularly the alarmist supporters at the BBC, Guardian and Independent - concentrated instead on who obtained the information, how and why. Later, rather than follow up on the considerable evidence discovered by the aforementioned blogs, these media outlets merely reported on the inquiries into the leaks.

With the Wikileaks revelations there is no such concern being shown by the BBC, Guardian or Independent who are happy to report on the content without bothering to worry about how the information was obtained, by whom and, more importantly, why.

Of course, I expect nothing less from the likes of the Guardian and Independent. These organisations make no attempt to be impartial or balanced, but the BBC is supposed to be - which begs the question ..... why do they treat one set of leaks different from another?

Could it be that it suits their agenda to do so?

Makes you wonder.

Just what needs rescuing here?

2010-11-17T08:57:00.002Z

The Irish government are still trying to resist the pressure from the EU to accept an economic "bailout". The Irish say that they don't need it and haven't asked for it, but the EU says they do and if piling on intense pressure to force the Irish to accept.

It's not the first time in recent years that the Irish government have come under intense pressure from the EU. After the Irish people rejected the Lisbon Treaty through a referendum, the EU forced the Irish government into holding a second referendum with barely concealed threats that a failure to gain acceptance for the Lisbon Treaty would hold dire consequences. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Now they are being pushed into accepting loans they don't want. Worse still, they are being forced to do this not to rescue the Irish economy - no, this has nothing to do with Ireland except superficially.

This is about rescuing the euro. Unless Ireland accepts this bailout there is a very strong possibility - no, strong likelihood that Ireland will leave the euro. And once Ireland leaves it is likely that others - notably Greece, Portugal and Spain - will follow. The leaders of the EU know this and this is why they are trying to force Ireland to accept the bailout.

Of course, they can do this because it isn't their money they are throwing around left, right and centre - it's our money. It's very easy to chuck other peoples money down the drain - especially when those people have no say and no way of holding those doing the chucking to account.

If Ireland accepts this loan they will be crushed entirely as an independent nation. Their economy will be controlled almost entirely by faceless and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Strasbourg, Paris and Berlin. At the very least they will be forced to increase their corporation tax - the mechanism by which they attract the investment which enabled the Celtic Tiger to be born.

The alternative for the Irish government would be to pull out of the euro - but then they'd have to go through the pains of recreating their own currency - not an inexpensive business at the best of times, but even tougher when your banking system is on the verge of collapse.

However, there is another option - accept the pound as their currency. In comparison to starting their own currency this would be relatively straightforward to do and their would be benefits for both nations.

Of course, it won't happen. For starters, our government would not do anything that might upset their EU masters and secondly there might be just too much baggage between Ireland and Britain for the Irish people to accept such an arrangement.

So, Ireland will concede to the dictations of the EU - and in that lies a certain irony. After less than 100 years of independence, Ireland will have become a dependency and more subservient to the EU rule than it ever was to British rule.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

All smiles

2010-11-17T08:44:00.003Z

The announcement that Prince William is to marry his long term girlfriend, Kate Middleton, certainly seemed to put a smile on a lot of peoples faces yesterday. There is no doubt that the news brought a buzz of excitement and lifted the morale in my office yesterday - which is no mean feat given the tough economic circumstances and the number of recently vacated desks - but there was one person in particular whose grin was as wide as the Cheshire cat's - David Cameron.

This could, of course, be due to the fact that Cameron is, like me, an unapologetic monarchist, but the cynic in me can't help wondering if the real reason Cameron was grinning like a demented lunatic is the fact that in one brief moment Clarence House had managed to lift the doom and gloom that was settling over the increasingly divided and derided coalition which he leads.

Governments love royal weddings. In terms of poll ratings it is the quickest and easiest way to improve your standing and is second in effectiveness only to the successful conclusion of a short, successful war.

The bad news for Cameron is that the wedding will take place within a year - which means that whatever benefits his doomed government feels now will be long gone by the time the next election is due - though I still doubt that they will survive even that long.

However, for the time being let us celebrate the engagement of the lovely couple and I wish them both long, happy and successful lives together.

Irish stewed

2010-11-15T10:25:00.002Z

I can't help feeling a little sorry for Ireland at the moment. Their economy is in dire straits and, although they can't really blame anyone but themselves for the situation, they don't have luxury of being able to prop it up the way the government here is doing.

Currently, the only things preventing Britain being in the same boat are the facts that we still retain our own currency and therefore have control over monetary and fiscal policy. Keeping the pound - which most of our political leaders wanted to dump, but were only dissuaded from doing so by the belief that it was one step too far for the British public at the time (and probably for good now) - has enabled us to keep the wolves from the door a little bit longer.

The other thing propping up our economy is the property market. Not the selling and buying of homes - no, the crucial thing is the value of property. You see, as long as the government can keep the value of property artificially high they can convince people to spend money - and that is what our economy relies on.

As long as the value of our homes remain considerably higher than the prices we paid for them then people will consider that a cushion for their spending. As most people of my generation bought their homes when they were relatively cheap it means they often have one or two hundred thousands of pounds of equity and this "cushion" is what enable people to continue to spend.

It's also one of the reasons why the government - this one as much as any of the previous governments - is so keen on letting immigrants flood into the country - it keeps the competition for housing fierce and the cost of homes artificially high. Of course, this is also short term and temporary. As soon as the current generation fades away the next generation are going to be left with a huge debt burden and unable to buy the homes their parents did - but my generation - which includes the politicians who run this country - is the most selfish generation this country has ever seen.

Ireland can't do this. Although they have also allowed immigrants to flood into their country as well, the trouble is that their population was tiny in comparison to Britain's - so the housing boom it created melted away as soon as the economy hit the skids. They just aren't overcrowded enough like good ole Blighty.

So with their monetary and fiscal policy dictated by some faceless bureaucrats a thousand miles away and their population too small to support the high property values ours does, the Irish are well and truly up the creek without a paddle.

As the Irish government try desperately to avoid having to accept an EU bailout there is one thing they could do that might avert this - junk the euro. But the EU don't want them to do that as they fear that as soon as one member state drops this fake, flawed currency then others will do the same - but ultimately this is what they will have to do. The longer they delay it the more it will cost them in the long term.

And it should serve as a cautionary tale to all those proponents of the euro. Take the opportunity to write to your MP - especially if they were one of the euro supporters - and remind them of this fact.

Student backlash

2010-11-11T08:14:00.002Z

I've long been a supporter of students and have frequently voiced not just my opposition to tuition fees, but the very idea of student loans in the first place. However, following the violence and disruption caused yesterday during their protest march I can no longer support them.

As far as I'm concerned they have forfeited any moral high ground they may have occupied and from now on they deserve whatever rubbish the government wants to heap on them. I don't buy the assertion that it was a small minority either - the number actually involved in the violence may have been small in number, but it was apparent that the majority were at best ambivalent and at worst encouraging towards the violence.

As for the police and the Met's Paul Stephenson admitting that he wasn't expecting violence - he must have been the only person in London who wasn't which suggests that maybe he isn't the man to lead the Metropolitan Police. I certainly wouldn't want a man who was unable to see the blindingly obvious in charge of anything as important as the security of a city and its people.

I would hope that all those identified as taking any sort of part in the violence and invasion of private property will now be kicked out of their university and receive a life ban from attending any state run education establishment - this is, after all, a similar punishment to that a rioting football fan caught doing the same sort of thing would receive. That is what should happen - but I doubt that it will.

Who are ya?

2010-11-10T08:43:00.002Z

As far as pompous acts go, David Cameron attempting to lecture the Chinese on how they should manage their country must rank pretty high in the all time top ten. Coming from the "leader" of a nation who wasn't democratically elected by the people, but was appointed by a small cabal of politicians, I should think it must rank pretty high on the all time hypocritical list too.

However, although Cameron, like the leader of China, has not won an election to claim the position of leader, the similarities end there. While China's economy forges ahead, Britain's limps along. While China's influence on the world stage accelerates, Britain's is stuck in reverse gear and while China's military continues to expand - entirely paid for by the USA - Britain can no longer afford to defend itself as we spend more covering the interest on our enormous debt to China than we do on the armed forces.

It's actually quite hard to think of a suitable analogy for this ludicrous situation. At first, I thought it must be like an elephant being shouted at by an ant - but that isn't really accurate, because the ant - though tiny - isn't dependent on the elephant. No - it's more like a dung beetle complaining to an elephant about the way it tramples the undergrowth while depositing a pile of crap on which the dung beetle depends.

Will China pay any heed to Cameron? Will the elephant change it's way of life because of the complaints of a dung beetle? No - China is on course to become the world's largest economy, the world's largest military and the most influential nation on the planet. Britain is on course to become a debt riddled dependency.

I think Cameron should get back to shovelling dung at home.

One strike and you're in

2010-11-05T08:43:00.003Z

With the BBC affected today, the London tube network being in an almost perpetual state of disruption and the London fire brigade choosing their busiest day of the year to walk out, the issue of strikes is high on the agenda and David Davis has weighed in with his two penneth worth over on the Daily Mail.

Davis seems to favour the idea of banning certain "key workers" from the right to strike on one hand while saying he supports the "right to strike" on the other - which strikes me as slightly contradictory. For a start, it depends on how you classify a "key worker". No offence Londoners, but tube train drivers are not key to the vast majority of British people - they are no more "key" than, say, the bus driver in a remote rural village.

Davis also wants "pendulum arbitration" - a system whereby the arbitrator, rather than splitting the difference between demands of employer and unions, picks the demand he considers most reasonable. Not a bad idea in principle - at least it would prevent either side from making outrageous demands - but it remains rather arbitrary as arbitration goes.

If the government do want to do something about disruptive strikes such as these one or two day strikes then there is one simple piece of legislation they need. One that says once a strike begins then any subsequent return to work by the striking party is an implied acceptance of the terms and conditions on offer and they may not strike again on the same issue.

That would put an end to these deliberately disruptive one/two day strikes spread over weeks that cause maximum disruption and inconvenience to the public with the least amount of inconvenience to the strikers and employers.

Power and privilege

2010-11-03T09:28:00.001Z

On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be a link between the terrorist bomb discovered on a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport and the European Court telling our government that they have to allow prisoners the vote, but there is.

The fact that a small group of unelected people can dictate the law which our duly elected government is allowed to enact rides roughshod over the principles of democracy. As I've tried to point out many times on this blog, democracy can only exist with the presence of two things - a people (demos) who have a shared interest and common heritage and the consent of that demos. Without either or both of those things you do not have a democracy. The "right" to vote on its own is not democracy - if it were then the old Soviet Union would have been the ultimate democracy and it clearly wasn't.

What all that fundamentally means is that the people of a nation (the demos - as only a nation can have the things necessary for a demos to exist) have to have the right to determine what laws they live by and who enacts those laws. In other words, they must have the power to decide the rules by which we live our lives - and, therefore, the punishment for those who transgress those rules. Probably the most obvious punishment is the one that says anyone who breaks the rules loses the privilege to decide what those rules are to be and how transgressors are punished.

Note that word - privilege. Yes, voting is a privilege, not a right. A right is something that exists without conditions - but a privilege is something you earn. In Britain it is ridiculously easy to earn the privilege to vote - all you have to do is stay alive until you are 18 years old. As with all privileges, the easier it is to obtain, the less valued it is - which is one of the reasons why more and more people don't bother to vote.

But in one stroke of a pen, a group of people with no connection to our nation, our people and our culture have decided that our people do not even have the power to decide who has this privilege and our government - the people we elect to decide these matters - has no choice but to bow down to them. This reveals the reality of where real government power lies - it does not lie with the people we elect (at any level of government) - but in the hands of foreign and unelected bureaucrats. Britain is no longer a democracy, it is part of the new Soviet Union - a place where everyone has the "right" to vote, but very few people are allowed to decide what we vote for.

What has all this got to do with a terrorist bomb plot? Simple - power. You see,government needs power, but a government which has lost most of its power (or in our case, voluntarily given it up) will look for new ways to exercise power wherever they can. Having lost (or given up) the ability to decide on the major things, their only choice is to exercise power in more and more intrusive ways.

Of course the bomb wasn't intended to explode in mid air - what would be the point? Islamic terrorist plots are deliberately designed for high exposure and impact. If the plane had gone down over the Atlantic ocean the chances are no one would ever know it was caused by a bomb. Few people would have died and it would have been assumed to be just another tragic air accident. The only point in blowing the plane up in the air would be if they could guarantee that it was over a major city when it happened - almost impossible to achieve.

In fact, it's quite likely that the bomb wasn't expected to explode at all - the whole point was to cause maximum disruption to the airline industry and in that regard it has succeeded (as most Islamic bomb plots do). If the bomb had reached its intended target and killed some Jews then all well and good as far as the plotters were concerned - but it wouldn't have taken long to work out how the bombs were delivered and still cause maximum disruption to western interests - the whole point of the plot.

But our government - assisted by their agencies (which are equally interested in grabbing or retaining power) have decided to clamp down in ways that will do nothing to make us safer, but does give them an excuse to exercise their power over us. And that is ultimately what they want.

Fighting our corner

2010-10-28T12:34:00.002+01:00

As I've mentioned various times on this blog, the word "fair" is overused by politicians and often done so without thought for what it actually means. The trouble is, the left have been allowed - primarily by the media, but with the implicit consent (and now the explicit consent) of the Conservative party - to corner the market on who decides what is and isn't fair.

So I was delighted to see the Taxpayers Alliance come out with all guns blazing on Channel 4 news last night. Confronted with Jon Snow at his foaming mouthed liberal best (or worst, depending on your outlook) demanding from a TPA spokesman whether it was "fair" that "poor people" will be "deported" as a result of housing benefit changes - the TPA spokesman first chided Snow on his use of the word "deported".

Snow backtracked claiming that he meant "deported from London". This in itself reveals that the modern liberal is either an ignorant dunce (deport means to expel from a country and London is not a country) or an unprincipled stirrer who will abuse the language and rhetoric to inflame and aggravate a situation.

Having made Snow to look like the bigoted idiot he is, the TPA member then asked Snow whether it was "fair" that hard working taxpayers should be forced to pay the housing costs of people in homes that those taxpayers themselves could never hope to afford? Snow, of course, had no answer and ignored the question - but the TPA member reiterated the question and Snow's bluster and fake anger blew itself out into babbling, incoherent nonsense.

I couldn't help applauding the TPA member for the way he handled Snow - he made the veteran leftie look like a fool and it was well overdue. What is more, the point he made is one which I've been saying for years - that why is it fair that honest hard working taxpayers are bled dry to feed the habits of the workshy and feckless? How is it fair that someone should receive free and without any effort on their part, something which those who are paying for that could not expect to acquire themselves?

The fact is that housing benefit it totally out of control in Britain and the decisions made by the coalition will do little to stop that - but even such a modest attempt to get to grips with something which is nothing less than a national scandal is derided by the left as they attempt to ring fence their captive clientele.

The truth is that £400 quid a week is still a damn sight more than most of us taxpayers could afford to pay each week in rent (it's only marginally less than I pay monthly for my mortgage). If we can't afford to live in central London then why should anyone else? What gives them that right?

Incidentally, the old garbage about "not enough homes being built" was also trotted out last night. This isn't true. The problem isn't that there aren't enough homes being built, it's that those we already have aren't being used correctly. There are estimated to be upwards of one million homes lying empty and unused - largely due to a taxation system that rewards people for keeping them empty and unused.

If we made better use of our existing housing stock and stopped importing foreigners while paying British people to sit on their backsides all day then there wouldn't be any housing shortage at all - but then neither would house prices have risen at such a rate and that is a central pillar of our economic policy (debt based on property value).

Telly tubbies

2010-10-26T08:30:00.002+01:00

Am I the only person who is fed up with the sight of pregnant women waddling across our tv screens?

It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fashion to display their pregnancy by wearing the tightest possible attire rather than something loose and concealing.

Cracks and craters

2010-10-25T15:01:00.001+01:00

These days I don't go travelling very much although I used to when I was younger. The reason I haven't travelled much in recent times was initially because of having a young family and then because of the sheer inconvenience of travel in these terrorism blighted times - but back in more carefree times I travelled extensively.

Everywhere I went was different and distinctive - but there was always one thing that was the same. The fact that you could tell how each country was doing economically by the state of the roads. The immaculate blacktop roads of northern Norway suggested a modern, prosperous nation while the crater strewn, crumbling surfaces I encountered in southern Spain pointed to a nation in decline and suffering severe problems in the early eighties.

It was a reliable, if somewhat informal, economic barometer back then and I still think it is the case today - and nowhere is this more apparent than in the roads of Britain. Today it is our roads that are crumbling and crater strewn. In many cases (and particularly around my way in Slough) the ravages of last winter have still not been repaired even as we prepare for winter a year later. Of course, dodging potholes along the Costa Brava on a 500cc motorcycle in the early eighties was actually life threatening while these days it's more of a case of the damage inflicted on my cars suspension - but the principle is the same.

So when I hear the Prime Minister talking about "growth and prosperity" I know he isn't inhabiting the same world as the rest of us. The reality is that any growth seen over the last few months is primarily inflation driven (i.e. unsustainable and potentially dangerous) and that the growth in GDP is not translating into real prosperity for ordinary people. In real terms, the vast majority of us are worse off than we were nine, six or even three months ago and there is no indication that this is likely to change in the short, medium or long term.

Sustainability is going to be the watchword of the early decades of this century. It is over applied to the issue of environmentalism where much money is being given over to expensive and ill-conceived projects with little thought given to the actual long term viability of such adventures. It's such a shame that no thought whatsoever is being given to a sustainable economic policy - because one built on GDP growth fuelled by inflation and immigration and paid for by debt is not a sustainable policy. It wasn't sustainable during the nineteen nineties and the early years of the 21st century and it will not be sustainable in the future either.

But it is all our government can offer us because they don't know any other way. Yes, they will fluff it out with buzz words and vague, vacuous phrases such as "technology led" and "entrepreneurs", but that is all just pie in the sky. The truth is that the great global economic shift from west to east is in full swing and nothing this government - or any of our current political parties - come up with is likely to stop this. It is far easier for any entrepreneur to set up their business in Asia now and it is the east which is producing a steady, growing and considerable stream of highly educated graduates in the fields which will create future growth against which our university system is an insignificant trifle.

While China and India churn out untold thousands of engineering and technology graduates year after year, Britain leads the world in producing social workers, nutritionists and crisis counsellors. The irony is that we are likely to need these in the coming decades - but we won't, as a nation be able to afford them.

So when you've finished listening to our esteemed leaders and policy makers telling you their grand plans for our economy, just take a little drive around your local area and make a note of the state your roads are in. And, if you can afford it, repeat this in a years time. My bet is that your roads will be no better and probably considerably worse even if we are theoretically in "growth". You see, papering over the cracks of a crumbling economy is relatively easy statistically, but the reality is harder to conceal - and the reality is that we're now more of a crater strewn southern Spain than a smooth northern Norway.

Too little, too late

2010-10-21T08:54:00.002+01:00

The much vaunted comprehensive spending review was about as comprehensive as our education system - i.e. not very. Of course, the media, the unions and the vested interest groups are all throwing up their arms in exasperation and dismay claiming that this will cause untold misery to untold millions, but the reality of the cuts is that they amount to nothing more than a damp squib.

They are no where near enough and, as such, represent a missed opportunity.

That might seem a bit harsh - given that the unions are planning mass protest and promising huge disruption, but the unions were going to do that regardless of what the cuts really were or who they affected. The unions are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of flexing their newly acquired muscle and taking on the Tories again. They are more confident and more powerful than they have been for twenty years and they are looking forward to a good old fashioned ding dong with the government.

So given that this was always going to happen, the government should have taken the opportunity to really wield the axe - but they didn't. And they didn't because, contrary to popular misconception, the Tories are not conservative anymore. David Cameron doesn't believe in a smaller state - he believes, like all progressives, that the state is the nation and the nation is the state.

The up shot of all this is that we will have massive disruption and civil unrest and the measures taken by the government to address the economic problems we face will have about as much effect as a sticking plaster on a gaping wound.

And so it begins

2010-10-20T08:56:00.003+01:00

I've been predicting it for a couple of years now, but the main event of the "recession" is about to get under way. Strikes, chaos and disorder are already taking a grip in Europe - especially France - and here the coalition is about to announce the scale of the cuts to public sector spending as they attempt to get to grips with the debt monster created by the stupidity and profligacy of Blair, Brown and New Labour.

The non-existent recovery is stuttering to a halt while the banks and foreign companies feast on the entrails of our dying industry like vultures devouring a once proud lion that still breathes, but no longer has the strength to fight off the beaks and claws that tear at its flesh.

The unions are on the rise once more - boosted by membership from the bloated non-productive public sector of people in non-jobs - and are belligerent and confident once more. What is more they are now armed with a tactic - the repeated one or two day strike - which causes the most harm and disruption to the employers and the public with the least inconvenience to themselves and their members.

Our armed forces will soon be no longer fit for the purpose of defending the nation - although I'm not convinced that they have been for twenty years - but it doesn't matter. We've sold our nation to the EU anyway and the only thing our soldiers are likely to be doing in the next ten years is putting down internal insurrection and civil chaos. They won't need tanks, planes or aircraft carriers to do that.

And all this as a result of spending cuts that will do nothing to stop the inevitable. This isn't the end of the cuts, the chaos and disruption - this is merely the beginning.

Heroes and miracles

2010-10-14T10:22:00.002+01:00

The incredible story of the rescue of 33 miners trapped underground for 69 days in Chile has to be one of the stories of the year - if not the decade. I'm a huge admirer or anyone who makes their living working underground as a miner - they are all heroes as far as I'm concerned - but these men go far beyond even that admiration. They displayed a spirit and stoicism which any Briton would have been proud of.

But it also reminds us that even in this post-modern, ultra cynical, anti-God world miracles do still happen. The only thing that has changed is our ability to recognise them as such, but this story - along with that of the baby in Australia brought back to life after two hours by the love and hugs of his mother to the utter disbelief of medical professionals who had declared the child dead - proves beyond doubt that heroes and miracles still exist and are among us.

Avoiding the answer

2010-10-11T16:01:00.003+01:00

As the inquest in to the 7/7 atrocity begins you can be sure of one thing.

It won't be anything to do with Islam or Moslems.

They'll blame poor communications between various organisations.

But it won't be anything to do with Islam or Moslems.

The police and security services will come in for criticism.

But it won't be anything to do with Islam or Moslems.

They'll probably find that there were failings by government.

But it won't be anything to do with Islam or Moslems.

They'll probably even manage to criticise the transport infrastructure and providers.

But it won't be anything to do with Islam or Moslems.

It never is.

Missing the point

2010-10-05T08:37:00.002+01:00

With its usual display of bias and total lack of impartiality, BBC Breakfast this morning was featuring a item asking why are women leaving it later to get married. They trotted out the usual suspects as reasons - focus on career, more opportunities, travel etc. - and totally ignored the obvious answer.

I'll tell you why women aren't getting married until they are into their thirties on average .... blokes aren't asking them to get married anymore. They don't need to. You see, young men are driven by testosterone - they want fast cars, adrenalin surge excitement and sex .... lots and lots of sex. Thirty years ago they couldn't get fast cars, adrenalin surges generally came from football and fairground rides and the only way they could get lots and lots of sex was if they got married.

These days you can buy a fast car for peanuts (though they can't afford to insure it - but when the penalty for not having insurance is barely a tenth of the cost of a years insurance, why bother?), adrenalin rush sports are cheap and plentiful and young men can find plenty of women willing to provide for their sexual urges without commitment.

So they don't need to get married. Instead, young men extend their adolescence well into their twenties and even beyond in a guilt and responsibility free social environment. But the BBC doesn't get that point.

Sunday biites

2010-10-03T10:53:00.002+01:00

Just a couple of quickies.

Pro Choice

Just listened to another tedious debate about abortion with the usual stupid feminist claptrap about wimmins choice taking the lead.

For what it's worth - I'm pro choice. Women can say no to sex or they can say yes to sex. That is the choice they make - after that they live with the consequences of their decision.

Principles of Law

Just read that the ludicrous left wing hack, Evan Davis, got in a tizzy when Lord Young, talking about health and safety, said that if he wanted to do something stupid and broke his leg skiing then that was his choice.

Davis then asked, stupidly, what the difference in principle was between skiing and smoking a spliff. Simple, Evan - it's not illegal to ski.

Honestly, don't they teach these lefties anything any more? How on earth did someone that dumb and so biased ever get on to the BBC - oh wait, of course, I forgot that is actually a requirement of the BBC these days.

Boots on the ground

2010-09-23T08:59:00.003+01:00

It's thirty years too late, but at last their is an acknowledgement from the police that their retreat from the streets has been disastrous for Britain. Or rather, there has been an acknowledgement from the man who inspects the police that this is the case - from what I've heard so far from the police themselves is the usual denial that there is a problem or, if there is, that it is their problem.

For me, this is one of the most frustrating things about the modern police force - not so much their inability to tackle the problems of crime and disorder or even the inability to recognise that the problems exist and are theirs to deal with. It is the constant denial that the problems of crime and disorder that we face as a society come as a result of deliberate decisions and policies made by the police themselves and their refusal to accept that those decisions and policies have failed - completely.

If the police were ready to admit their failings and the disastrous consequences of past policy decisions I could accept their current inability to deal with the problem of crime and, particularly, disorder. At least we would know they are, at last, getting serious about dealing with them. But they are not. They are still tied to the idea of the police being a primarily reactive force rather than a visible deterrent.

Part of the problem lies in the fact of creeping "newspeak" which infects modern Britain. Rather than calling disorder what it is - disorder - we label it now as "anti-social behaviour" and the police believe that anti-social behaviour is a problem for local councils, not the police. But they are wrong. Anti-social behaviour is just the pseudo-intellectual way of saying disorder but using more words - the common mark of modern jargon infested language - and the mission of the police is to PREVENT crime AND disorder.

Please note those words - "prevent" and "and". When Sir Robert Peel laid down his nine principles of policing these were the words he used to sum up the mission of the police force. They are not there to simply to detect or react to crime - although these are also important requirements - their main purpose is to prevent crime taking place and to bring order where disorder reigns.

This can not be done from the confines of a CCTV room or a tin box on wheels whizzing past at 30 miles per hour. CCTV can be fooled by a simple device known as a "hood" or a "hat" and everyone who has ever been either a passenger or a driver of car knows how hard it is to assess what is going on around them from a moving vehicle. No matter how hard you try to keep your eyes on the houses or the pavements your eyes are inevitably drawn back to looking straight out in front through the windscreen.

What is more, being inside a moving vehicle or a CCTV control room prevents police officers from having contact with the people they are supposed to be protecting and policing preventing them from making the connections which will reassure people and provide the intelligence that the police need. Attending monthly or even weekly meetings with the same bunch of community activists - many of whom have personal agendas and motivations - is not going to provide that connection.

The inspector of constabulary said that resolving this problem will require "boots on the ground" and that is the only way it can be solved - by proper police officers patrolling neighbourhoods on their feet by pounding a beat. It works. It is proven to work and it is the only way we will ever tackle the problems of crime and disorder that blight Britain today.

Where are they now?

2010-09-21T08:47:00.002+01:00

Just been watching BBC Breakfast talking to one of the stars of the new British film "Made In Dagenham" which is about the strike by women workers at Ford's Dagenham plant in the nineteen seventies. The strike was about the women wanting to be classed as semi-skilled workers rather than unskilled and the higher pay that would bring and led, eventually, to the introduction of the Equal Pay Act, allegedly.

Now, it's all very well "celebrating" this landmark strike, but the question is - where are all those jobs now? Ford don't make cars in Britain - let alone Dagenham anymore. Those female strikers may have struck a blow for women's rights, but they also struck a blow to the future of British manufacturing.

And yet, this fairly significant point seems to have been missed by the liberal media who are so busy telling us what a great thing this was that they've forgotten that the eventual result was that those women - and future generations of women no longer have the opportunity to work at Ford's Dagenham plant.

I can take the despair, it's the hope I can't stand

2010-09-20T11:46:00.003+01:00

So the Pope has come and gone and the ranting secular atheists who went to such lengths to disrupt his state visit have been left looking rather foolish, petty and bigoted - as, indeed, so many of them are.

The BBC spent most of their time trying to promote criticism of the Pope and the Catholic Church and only switched tactics when it became apparent that instead of being a damp squib as they predicted, the visit went rather well. Of course, it helps that the Pope, rather than swinging like a leaf in the breeze, is firm and certain in his convictions his faith - unlike the leaders of the branch of Christianity I follow; Anglicanism.

I've said this many times before, but it doesn't do any harm to keep repeating it even if nobody listens. People want certainty and strength in their faith. What use are beliefs if you don't believe in them? Our leaders tell us that our church has to change with the times, but why? There is no evidence to support this contentious claim - just the opposite in fact, as church attendance has shrunk considerably since the Anglican church became so ambiguous in its defence of certain moral standards.

The difference between the Catholic Church and the Church Of England has never been more apparent than in the way the Pope refuses to bow to "fashion" while our own Church prevaricates and procrastinates. The result of that is that the Pope comes across as a strong leader who answers his critics and shows them up to be the intolerant fools they are, while the leaders of the C of E look weak and abject in comparison.

As a committed Anglican I still see the Catholic Church as the natural enemy of England, but even I am starting to believe that the only future Christianity may have in this country is a Roman Catholic one. I hope I'm wrong - but I'm sure that this recent visit will have many Anglicans switching to the RC version of the faith. I still can't as long as there remains hope that the beautiful and solemn faith which Anglicanism once was may return.

I realise that it is probably a forlorn hope - but as long as it remains I'll remain an Anglican.

Service versus services

2010-09-16T15:48:00.002+01:00

Seeing how Britain has decided to put such great faith in the service industry and abandon any pretence or hope of ever being a nation that makes things itself again, you'd think that at the very least we would be good at providing a service.

We aren't. Shop assistants - if you can ever find one in some of bigger chain stores - are often unhelpful and frequently rude. I've lost count of the number of times I've bought something from a shop and they haven't even bothered to say please or thank you as I hand over my cash - let alone call me "sir".

But worse even than that are the banks. I've been banking with the same bank since I got my first monthly salaried job in 1978. I don't want much from my bank - I just want to be able to pay my salary in, pay the odd bill here and there and take money out when I need it. However, I get bombarded with circulars from my bank telling me about the multitude of services they offer - loans, overdrafts, credit cards, travel insurance, mortgages, home insurance - none of which I require. I keep telling them that I don't require these services, but every month they send me more circulars offering me these services that I do not want.

And yet, earlier this week I dared to use the internet to pay a bill - a fairly large bill. There's more than enough money in the account to pay the bill so I knew there wouldn't be a problem - but I've since had numerous calls and discussions with their "fraud" investigation people regarding it. I confirmed straight away that the transaction was genuine - but it's been cancelled by this fraud investigation unit twice now.

I've had to make half a dozen phone calls to half a dozen different people in half a dozen different departments - none of whom have the slightest idea about what I've talked to the others about or even what those departments are doing - to resolve the issue, but finally the bill has been paid - a day late, which didn't please the recipient!

This is the problem with our so called "service" industry - they mistake offering lots of services with offering a service. All I want is for my bank to do what I ask of them when I ask them - and if I want anything else, I want someone who know me and knows my account history to talk to about it. I don't want them to offer lots of services - I just want them to do the basic requirements of what I need properly and efficiently. If they can't do that then they are failing in the basic rudiments of being a service - regardless of how many "services" they offer.

The sneering voice of leftism

2010-09-15T08:38:00.002+01:00

I can't remember what it was that propelled Robert Peston onto our TV screens - I think it was something to do with the banking crisis or maybe the expenses scandal - but whatever it was he has been a virtual ever present on the BBC news since.

On the face of it, Peston is the ideal sort of person for the BBC to employ as they attempt to address the criticism of their often overt left wing leanings. The son of a peer and with past experience working at a stockbroker's as well as various journalistic stints at leading "right wing", pro-capitalism newspapers such as the FT and Telegraph, Peston must be as right wing capitalist as they come, right?

Wrong.

Peston's membership of Common Purpose reveals his true political leanings, but you'd never know that just by looking at him. What does give him away, though, is his voice - because Peston has that trademark of the rabid left winger; a whining nasal drone shaped by his barely concealed contempt for politics of the right.

It's the same vocal style I first became familiar with through my scouse English teacher in the mid-seventies. It doesn't matter what the upbringing, accent or dialect - left wingism is characterised by this whining nasal drone with underlying tones of contempt and sneering. It's nasty. This English teacher saw me as something of a protege - I was, at the time, leaning to the left myself - and took me under her wing to some degree introducing me to punk rock and the works of the "poet" John Cooper Clarke.

To be fair, it's probably true to say that this introduction to John Cooper Clarke was what sparked my love of classical - proper - poetry. I found his stuff to be such drivel that I had no choice but to go and find out about real poetry and what a joy I discovered.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that the BBC are reacting to the fact that their institutionalised left wingism has been outed by trying to give an impression of impartiality. Peston is one of those who is supposed to address that. Unfortunately, for the BBC, his sneering nasal drone gives away the reality of Peston's rampant left wing ideology. It always does. Whenever you listen to anything on the BBC, it pays dividends to listen as much to the tone and style of the delivery as much as the words they say - because however they try to dress up their left wing bias the sneering voice of leftism cuts through.

Revising history

2010-08-24T14:30:00.003+01:00

First of all, thanks to everyone for their best wishes and supportive comments. Mrs Stan remain very unwell, but is making progress albeit slowly. Sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back - sometimes it's one step forward and two back - but there are occasional glimpses of the woman I married starting to show through. It's been particularly hard on the kids though - it can't have helped that this happened while they were on summer holidays - but they are coping well under the circumstances.

However, rather than dwell on the problems of the Stan household, I'd rather talk about something which is currently happening in Britain. To be honest, I've been rather surprised by it as the sort of thing that is currently taking place is more often put off until a more .... appropriate time. I'm talking about the progressives habit of rewriting history.

Progressives hate Britain. They hate England even more, but essentially they hate anything to do with our country which is not of their making or choosing - and that means anything that happened before progressivism took its death grip on our nations throat - i.e. anything before 1960, roughly speaking.

In particular they despise anything that is positive about Britain or British history. They'd like you to think that everything pre-progressivism was bad - health care was bad, education was bad, inequality was bad, social mobility was bad and so on. Unfortunately for progressives, historical evidence often disputes their depiction of pre-progressive Britain - so what they do is rewrite history to change that view.

It's not that hard to do. All you have to do is wait until everyone who might possibly remember what life was like in the past is dead then get someone to write a book telling the "true" story of the bad old days before we had social liberalism. These books are often based on second or third hand anecdotal evidence - i.e. the thoughts and opinions not of people who were there at the time, but people who knew people who were there at the time - and then published as non-fiction.

As I said, this is easy to do when those who were really there are dead - and even easier if they are long since dead - but it is a little trickier if there are still some who are still alive. Which is why I was surprised last week to find that the task of rewriting the history of WW2 is already in progress - with particular emphasis on transforming the crucial and decisive Battle of Britain into a "folk myth".

Robin Hood is a folk myth. There is no evidence to suggest he ever existed let alone did the things he was supposed to have done - but the Battle of Britain was not only a real event it was a real event captured on film and photograph and which those who were there at the time still remember. Even my mother recalls the time a "Spitfire" downed a "Messerschmidt" near Slough (they may not have been a Spitfire and a Messerschmidt, but to a very young girl every British fighter plane was a Spitfire and every German aeroplane was a Messerschmidt).

Incidentally, even popular folk myths are not immune from progressive revisionism. In its last incarnation on television, Robin Hood was depicted using a Saracen bow rather than the traditional English longbow with the explanation that it was "more powerful". It wasn't. The English longbow was the last word in weaponry back in those days as the French knights of Agincourt would testify (Agincourt itself being subjected to revisionism in recent years). The only advantage of the Saracen bow was that it was easier to use while mounted on a horse due to its shorter length - but there wasn't a chance in hell that someone like Robin Hood would have used one in preference to the English longbow. It would be like a sniper today giving up his telescopic sight equipped long range rifle in preference for a handgun.

Anyway, over the last week I heard and saw various attempts to suggest that the Battle of Britain was neither crucial or decisive or even particularly important in the grand scheme of things that was World War 2 - and the cheerleader of this revisionism was the dear old BBC. Unfortunately for Auntie and the rest of the progressive scum who want to do this country down, there are still sufficient men and women around who were not only alive at the time, but actually took an active part in defending this nation from Nazi tyranny.

This won't stop the progressives, though. They planted the seeds of doubt and over the coming years they will feed and water them. It is the intention of progressives to destroy the Battle of Britain as an icon of our history - it will no doubt be replaced by something more acceptable to the progressive mind set. I don't know what that will be, but it will almost certainly involve women, ethnic minorities or homosexuals. By the time of the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Britain it will be a celebration of the part played in victory over Nazism by transgendered Moslem immigrants.

When a stranger comes to stay

2010-07-16T10:10:00.003+01:00

I'd just like to take a moment to explain why I've had to put Ranting Stan well on truly on the back burner for the time being, but, before I do, a big thank you for your messages of support.

Mrs Stan has had what is known as "a breakdown". It's not the first time that my lovely wife has gone through such a distressing period - indeed, she was quite honest and open about her mental health problems when I first met her. However, the last time she went through this was in 2001 and there were very clear causes for her breakdown - which I do not want to dwell on. On this occasion, though, it has come utterly out of the blue and there is no single thing which I can put my finger on and identify as the cause.

It's also the first time this has happened since the kids were old enough to appreciate what was happening and it has been extremely distressing and unsettling for them in particular. It's hard enough for me to cope with my wife becoming a virtual stranger to me as happens when Mrs Stan goes into one of these dark periods, but for the kids it is far far worse. Worse still is that we have no idea how long this will last or how to help Mrs Stan through this - all we can do is give her all our love and support while she comes to terms with whatever inner demons are troubling her - in 2001 it took 9 months to a year before Mrs Stan began to emerge from the cloud which enveloped her.

Obviously this means that I have a lot on my plate to deal with right now so I can not spend what little spare time I have attending to a blog - I have a demanding job and my wife and kids need me more than ever so I have to devote as much time as I can to their needs. I can't say when or even if I will come back to blogging, but it is my sincere hope that I can and do.

However, as others have said, family comes first.

Thank you to all the readers and commenters over the last few years. I hope to be back sometime - I just don't know when.

A brief hiatus

2010-07-04T09:26:00.002+01:00

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last few days. I'd like to say that things will improve soon, but this is not likely to be the case. Mrs Stan has been taken ill and this, combined with an increased workload at the office, means I have little time for anything other than my work, wife and children at the moment and this will remain the case for the forseeable future.

One man, two votes

2010-07-02T08:28:00.004+01:00

We're supposedly set to learn the date of the referendum on voting reform - a date which every one seems to think is going to be May 5th next year. If anything is likely to put a strain on the coalition love-in then this might be it.

The Tories favour retaining the traditional first past the post system - a one man, one vote form of voting which is simple, transparent and reasonably quick. The Lib Dems favour a proportional system - preferably using a one man, multiple vote system which is complicated, wide open to abuse and fraud and takes ages to deliver a result.

Some people argue that listing your preferred candidates is still one man, one vote - but it isn't. It's a single ballot paper, but each person casts multiple votes on each ballot paper - so there is no way it can be considered as a one man, one vote system.

I've mentioned before that a PR system of voting will completely change the way we do politics in this country and will remove the historic link between constituent and MP. The thing people forget - more than ever following the last election and the "leaders debates" - is that we do not vote for a party or a "leader"; we vote for an individual to represent us at parliament.

Of course, many people just vote for the individual who represents the party they support most - and that is fine - but it still should not detract from the simple fact that by electing a person to represent us at parliament the first past the post system gives us a direct link to governance that a proportional system will not have.

No doubt I'll come back to this in the coming months, but I know I am fighting a losing battle. The media have decided they want voting reform and voting reform we will get. That's probably the most dis-spiriting thing about politics today - that we get what the media (and the broadcast media in particular) decide we will get and not a lot else.

This is why policy decisions are made by leaking possibilities to the media to see what their reaction will be - and why the budget, which used to be so secret that only the Chancellor and a few advisers knew what would be in it right up until he rose to his feet in the Commons, is now common knowledge for days and often weeks in advance.

A futile exercise

2010-07-01T12:44:00.003+01:00

I understand the deputy head boy - sorry, Prime Minister - Nick Clegg, is setting up a web site to allow the people of Britain to tell him what laws we want to get rid of.

Why is he doing this? He knows full well that he has no intention of paying the slightest bit of attention to it unless the suggestions coincide with his own particular views - so why bother asking?

Let's say, for example, that millions of people asked for the smoking ban in pubs to be lifted - does anyone think he would do that? I don't.

On top of that, the vast majority of laws which have come into effect over the last decade or so originate from the EU and are passed without any debate, discussion or serious consideration by parliament. They're simply rubber stamped and that's it - because we are not permitted to refuse or repeal them. They are directives - i.e we are directed to introduce them by our political masters in Brussels.

So what would Clegg do about those if people said they wanted to get rid of them? Absolutely nothing - because he can not do anything.

The whole idea reminds me of my school days when the teachers - along with the sixth form prefects - would tell us how they wanted us lower forms (in both senses) to be "more involved" in school decisions. There would be huge enthusiasm for a couple of days, hundreds of suggestions and, at the end of it, the teachers would do what they wanted to do anyway.

Not only does Clegg look like a sixth form collaborator - sorry, prefect - he still behaves and thinks like one too.

And there was me thinking discrimination wasn't allowed

2010-06-29T08:32:00.003+01:00

Watching BBC Breakfast this morning I was intrigued by the story of the black councillor who had been prosecuted for "racial harassment" after describing an Asian councillor as a "coconut".

Councillor Shirley Brown was apparently so incensed by the demand of her Asian colleague that, what with money being tight and everything, it would be a good idea to cut spending on council projects for black and Asian people, that she accused her fellow councillor of being a "coconut" - i.e. brown on the outside, but white underneath.

I found this story interesting for two reasons. First of all, I couldn't help wondering why - with incidents and prosecutions for racial incidents involving councillors going on up and down the country all the time - this particular incident was worthy of prime coverage on the BBC Breakfast programme.

The other thing I find interesting is that councils throw money into projects that specifically exclude white people and no one gives a damn.

It seems overt discrimination and blatant racism are acceptable after all.

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: "Now only four nine nine"

2010-06-26T08:19:00.002+01:00

I'm sure you've seen those adverts - usually for large electronic goods or furniture - where some breathless voice over actor tells us that the price of a television or sofa is now just "four nine nine".

Four nine nine what? Does he mean four hundred and ninety nine pounds? If so, why not say so?

Why has it become so hard to say numbers properly?

Almost as annoying is the habit of saying something is "now under five hundred pounds" when the sticker price is £499.99.

I hate it.

Breaking the cycle

2010-06-24T12:35:00.002+01:00

In case you haven't noticed, I am more than a little sceptical about the coalition governments plans to fix our economy. More than this, I am not convinced that any current political party - or coalition thereof - understands what our economy needs long term for real growth based on wealth rather than pseudo growth based on debt.

I believe that we are set for a decade of, at best, stagnation and inflation - stagflation they used to call it - and, at worst, a full blown, full on depression that will have profound and long term consequences for this nation, its people, their living standards and prosperity. Nothing I have seen from government or read in the media has changed my mind about this - indeed, I've read various articles from various sources which tend to support my view.

However, even if I am wrong and this coalition does manage to stave off the worst case scenario in the short to medium term there remains the problem of what happens in the future when we are back to where we were - say - in 2000?

This coalition - from both the Lib Dems and Conservative flanks - have made much of how they are a "progressive" government. Both the Prime Minister and his Chancellor have claimed that they are progressive politicians and dedicated to the causes of progressivism - and, by implication, the fallacies that ideology is based on.

Consequently, there is no reason to believe that once the economy is "fixed", they will not resort to throwing money into schemes and ideas which progressivism favours - and all that entails. For me there are two major problem areas with this - welfare and manufacturing.

The problem regarding welfare is perhaps the most obvious. Progressivism insists on certain universal "truths" which are either uncertain or patently wrong. For example, the belief that crime is linked to poverty and that if you give people enough money they won't commit crime is clearly daft - but it is considered a "truth" by progressives.

Hence they pour billions of pounds every year into "supporting" criminals and their lifestyles in the vain hope this will solve the problem. It doesn't, of course, because crime is not caused by poverty but by greed, avarice and laziness - and welfare supports all of these traits.

That's just one example of many, but the point I'm trying to make is that to genuinely have a hope of fixing Britain's problems in the long term we need a government committed to breaking the cycle of dependency which so many people in Britain have fallen into. That needs a government that is tough and, above all, socially conservative - because any government that subscribes to the social liberal position is going to fall into the same traps as previous social liberal governments.

There isn't a hope in hell that this coalition will have either the will or the strength needed to break that cycle so the only conclusion that can be reached is that, even in the unlikely event that they do sort out our current problems, they will only make the same mistakes as Brown, Blair and Major.

Remember, before the "credit crunch" struck and the reality of our "economic miracle" was exposed, Cameron and his party backed the Labour government spending plans completely. It was only after the dire situation was revealed that the Tories decided to change tack - and then only marginally.

They do not have the answers. They don't even understand the questions. All they have is the same misguided beliefs that Brown and Blair had and the result will be exactly the same.

Disaster

Did I miss something?

2010-06-23T08:46:00.004+01:00

While All the news channels and newspapers are going on about Osborne's "tough" budget cuts, I'm still trying to work out what they heard that I didn't.

Aside from the completely expected rise in VAT and CGT there was little in this budget that put any flesh on the bones of the cuts we are all told to expect. A public sector pay freeze? Well, no doubt the public sector will complain, but let's be honest - this was two years overdue (at least).

Instead the Chancellor has deferred adding any detail on the cuts until October - which makes me wonder why he had this budget now when half the stuff he mentioned was deferred until next year anyway! It looks to me as if this was designed to grab headlines - which it has - and, perhaps more than this, it looks like it was forced by the Lib Dems to push their election pledges.

When it came to actual cuts, there was no detail whatsoever - hardly surprising as the government haven't held their comprehensive spending review yet - but the media have gone mad over the prospect of a 25% cut in public sector spending.

Which wasn't what was said - if I understood it. I thought the Chancellor said the cuts would "average" 25% - not that public sector spending would be slashed by 25%. There is a difference - if you cut the spending of a minor department by 50% and that of a larger department by 1% you'll get an average cut of around 25% - but that won't necessarily slash the combined spending of those two departments by 25%.

If the budget of the first department is £6 billion and the second is £60 billion then you'll save around £3.5 billion pounds off a total spend of £66 billion - which is about 5%. So, although you've cut departmental budgets by an average 25% the actual savings in money terms is only 5% - hardly the sort of thing to solve this crisis.

So, unless I missed something, I'll defer my opinion on whether this is enough to stave off the coming crisis until Osborne actually adds some specifics. So far, all we've got is a paltry few billion pounds worth of cuts which won't make the slightest difference in the long run - or even in the short term.

Time to tighten your belts

2010-06-22T08:38:00.002+01:00

The long awaited day has arrived and we will finally learn the details of the coalition government's plan to rescue Britain from the depths of recession and stave off the depression that will engulf this nation for a decade or more if they fail.

Yes, it really is that important. It is, quite probably, the most important budget since the end of the Second World War and we've entrusted it to the boy George Osborne. Personally, I can't think of many people whose hands I would be less inclined to place my fate and that of the nation in - but that's who we've got so we'll just have to hope he's up to it. Perhaps he'll surprise me - I certainly hope so.

However, I've not been impressed with what he has done so far and I'm set to be disappointed again. I expect taxes to go up sharply for most of us and I suspect that a lot of what is introduced will do more harm to our already weak jobs market.

Let's be honest about this. Tinkering around the edges of an economy where jobs are rare and getting rarer isn't going to help much - and those jobs have to be real, productive jobs and not the non-jobs which proliferate in the public sector.

It doesn't matter how much this budget helps reduce the deficit if there is no long term plan to get the millions of Britons off benefits and back to working in the productive sector.

That is the key for the future - making stuff.

Shock, horror! MP exposed as a lying, cheating hypocrite!

2010-06-21T08:44:00.004+01:00

So it turns out that, while promoting himself as a decent family man during the election campaign - devoted to his wife of 26 years and their children - the Lib Dem MP and EUphile, Chris Huhne was actually conducting a long term, clandestine affair with another woman.

As others have pointed out before, there was a time when such behaviour was deemed sufficiently bad that ministers were expected to resign. These days they cling on to their jobs pretty much regardless of what they get up to - which says a lot about the moral standards of our modern world and the current generation of politicians.

Perhaps the only real surprise here, though, is that anyone should be surprised that an MP should turn out to be a lying, cheating hypocrite.

That's partly the trouble - we've all become so used to our MPs being skilled in the art of deception that we're no longer surprised or even bothered by it. I've no doubt that Huhne's constituency party will rally around him and, by the time of the next election, it will have been sufficiently forgotten about for the electorate to vote him back in again.

But the reality is that all this stuff builds up over time. MPs wonder why the public no longer believe them or have and trust in them when they have repeatedly seen that these politicians have no loyalty to even those closest to them - so why are they amazed to find the public doesn't trust them either?

If they really want to restore public faith in politics - or rather politicians - then this would be a good place to start. Huhne should resign as a minister and stand down as an MP - if he doesn't then Cameron should sack him and his party should deselect him.

If they want us to trust them then they better start giving us reasons why we should - and one way of doing that is by not giving jobs to lying, cheating hypocrites.

Blame the system

2010-06-19T07:36:00.003+01:00

Prior to this World Cup, it's been years since I watched any live football and judging on last night's performance by England against Algeria it doesn't look like I've missed much.

Although I'm always saying that I'm not much of a football fan I did used to play the game up to a reasonable level in my youth. I'm no master tactician or qualified coach, but I do understand the game a little. But after listening to the pundits last night there is something I don't understand - so perhaps someone can explain this to me?

How does playing a 4-4-2 formation make players unable to shoot, head, pass or control a football?

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Affected Accents

2010-06-18T22:35:00.002+01:00

It's pretty hard to explain this one, but basically I'm fed up with the way newsreaders - and particularly BBC newsreaders - feel obliged to assume a dodgy French accent when pronouncing the name of the President of France. For some reason they mumble along in their usual estuary English until they get to his name and suddenly they go all Sacha Distel and it's "Neecoola Saarcorzee"!

Who are they trying to impress? It's bad enough that they insist on calling Peking "Beijing" or Bombay "Mumbai" - they don't call Munich "Munchen" or Rome "Roma" - but now they are starting to adopt a fake foreign accent when they attempt foreign names.

Why? It's pathetic and I hate it.

Is the message getting through, yet?

2010-06-17T16:12:00.002+01:00

As yet another nation distorted by the corrupt and bankrupt policy of multiculturalism collapses into violent, bloody ethnic conflict Central Asia I can not help but wonder whether anyone in Britain is taking note of this.

The first thing to say about the troubles in Kyrgyzstan is that it really isn't any of our business directly. However, what I will say is that the lessons we can learn from this (and from similar previous incidents such as what happened in the Balkans) is that multiculturalism does not work - ever.

Which is why our leaders and politicians are playing a dangerous game by insisting that they can make it work and that it is good for Britain - and they are playing this dangerous game with our nation and the futures of our children and grandchildren.

It should be impossible for them to ignore the evidence that multiculturalism is not just a misguided policy, but a potentially explosive and catastrophic policy - everywhere it is tried the end result is eventually violence and bloodshed. It should be impossible, but somehow they do.

They do because they stupidly deceive themselves that this can not happen here because we are British and its just not the "British way" to do things. That may have been true fifty years ago, but after decades of multiculturalism being imposed on the people of Britain we no longer have a British cultural dominance and we also have an increasing ethnic population who have no attachment to "the British way" of doing things.

We must make our politicians listen to us. Multiculturalism has never worked anywhere and it is stupid to assume that we can make it work in Britain. They have to abandon their belief in this dangerous policy now and abandon it for ever.

Removing the barriers to being a good neighbour

2010-06-17T11:35:00.002+01:00

I read something the other day that said that more and more of us don't know our neighbours. Some people might have thousands of "virtual" friends on FaceSpace or MyTwit with whom they will spend hours chatting with, but have never said anything much to their next door neighbour beyond "hello".

I don't know what the reason for this is, but I personally suspect that fences have something to do with it - that and this modern craving for "privacy".

When I was a kid growing up at the family home we lived in an ordinary 3 bedroom semi. When I was young I would play out in the back garden as did the neighbours kids. Between us were the herbaceous borders and a three foot high cross link fence over which we would talk and play - it made a very good net for tennis or badminton.

Consequently, my mum would often spend time chatting with the mum next door while hanging out the washing or just enjoying the garden. They became firm friends and remained so even after the neighbours moved on. This scenario applied to just about every other home I knew or visited - the low fences meant that neighbours knew one another and looked out for one another as well.

When we moved to our current home this also had the standard three foot high cross link wire fence between us and the neighbours. As a result we got to know them and they got to know us, but when they moved out a few years back and the new lot moved in, the first thing they did was install a six foot high wooden fence between us and them (and the other side too). When I asked why they told us it was for "privacy" - what they hell were they planning to do in their garden I wondered, but didn't ask.

As a result we barely talk to one another beyond the odd exchange out front as we pass. As far as I can tell they don't do anything in their garden that requires such "privacy", but their bloody great fence does a great job of blocking out the afternoon sun from my garden. The thing is, just about every home I go to these days has the same six foot high wooden fence between them and the neighbours - so it's hardly surprising that nobody knows their neighbour anymore.

Let's get rid of these bloody great fences between our gardens, install short cross link fences and start chatting with real people who live next door instead of some fat, balding 50 year old pretending to be a 25 year old Brad Pitt look-a-like online.

The song remains the same

2010-06-17T08:43:00.004+01:00

I've got to be honest, I know very little about the financial sector or how it is regulated, but the "sweeping" changes being suggested by the Chancellor, George Osborne, don't sound that much different to me.

A powerful new body – the Consumer Protection and Markets Authority – will regulate the conduct of every authorised financial firm providing services to consumers, Mr Osborne said.

Isn't this just the FSA with a different name and a new face? Wasn't regulating the conduct of every authorised financial firm providing services to consumers what the FSA was set up to do? Isn't this just creating new quangos and regulatory bodies stuffed with faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats the same way that New Labour did?

A month into a new government and it is already indistinguishable from the government it replaced. Their ideas are the same as the last government; their way of doing things is the same as the last government and the results will be the same as the last government- hardly surprising as their policies were more or less the same as the last government and the parties now in power share the political ideology of the party last in government.

The band members might have changed, but they are still singing the same old songs.

The blame game

2010-06-15T11:44:00.002+01:00

I'm no Obama supporter, but I do feel the criticism of the US President by various sections of the media for his "anti-British" rhetoric is a bit rich.

After all, when Gordon Brown was telling anyone and everyone that the global financial crisis was the Yanks fault they all just seemed to nod along in agreement as if this was an obvious fact (it wasn't and isn't. The global financial crisis was the fault of every western nation - the sub-prime mortgage scam was just the ultimate symptom of a system out of control - and the system is called "globalisation").

Now that the boot is on the other fault and Obama is blaming a British company for the environmental catastrophe that has struck the Gulf Of Mexico the media are getting all huffy about it. Tough luck, guys - you shouldn't live in glass houses if you're gonna go around chucking bricks.

What is unforgivable, however, is for Obama to equate the Gulf oil spill crisis with 9/11.

What was the man thinking of? The attack on the twin towers was a premeditated and carefully planned act of wilful destruction and murder that cost the lives of almost 3000 people. The BP oil platform explosion was an accident - possibly an avoidable, but an accident all the same. There is no comparison - none whatsoever.

Of course BP should pay for clearing up the mess - and they will - but running about pointing fingers and shouting "it's your fault" isn't going to solve anything.

And just with the financial crisis we should all take a good long hard look at ourselves before we point the finger - as someone once said (Bob Marley?), when you point your finger there are three more pointing back at you. You could just as easily blame the US drive for energy independence (and thus the exploiting of offshore oil reserves) for the disaster - and when you boil that down that comes down to each and every one of us who demand cheap and reliable energy supplies.

Of course, I am one of those and I still support that demand for energy independence and cheap and reliable sources of energy (and, believe me, if wind farms could do it I would support them - but they can't so I don't). However, as far as Britain is concerned I believe we should be doing more than we are to exploit our natural coal reserves - estimated at 200 years of readily accessible supplies and a thousand years of harder to reach supplies.

Accidents and disasters happen in coal mines too and, when they do, it is right and proper that there inquiries to ascertain what went wrong, what could have been done to avoid it, how it can be avoided in the future and who is to blame.

None of this is helped by the leaders of any nation going around blaming other nations - whether it is a global financial crisis or an oil spill. If you really feel you must blame something then blame the thing that is really at the root of this - globalisation.

New look for Ranting Stan

2010-06-15T11:30:00.002+01:00

It's about time I refreshed the look of this blog and I thought this had a nice summery feel to it.

Hope you like it.

The man who can't make his mind up

2010-06-14T10:33:00.003+01:00

A few months ago, Nick Clegg was a nobody in politics. He had very little support from the electorate, not a great deal of support within his own party and it didn't matter much that he seemed incapable of making a decision or statement and sticking to it.

But since the election Clegg has been elevated to a position well beyond that which he deserved after his party's election performance and even further beyond his capabilities. He is, whether he deserves it or is capable of it, the deputy prime minister - for now, anyway.

People in such a position should know what to say and when to say it - and when they say something they should mean it. People in such a position should realise that they are no longer speaking to just their party supporters - they are speaking to and for the people of the country.

So how is it that a week ago Mr Clegg was telling us that the forthcoming cuts will be nothing like those of the Thatcher era (where, in reality, public sector spending actually rose), but is now telling us that savage cuts are necessary if we are to avoid “decades of debt, higher interest rates and fewer jobs"

A week is a long time in politics, but not so long in economics that what you say one week is completely negated by what you say the following week. If he didn't know just how bad things were last week then he should have kept his mouth shut until he did know.

The truth is that Clegg is so far out of his depth he is already looking like a drowning man. He's trying to balance keeping his party supporters on board while dealing with a crisis that will prove that everything he and his party believe in is false. The man has a choice to make and he has to make it soon - does he put his party first or his country?

Given his opinion of Britain from the statements he made before he found himself in a position of power I'm not putting much faith on the latter. When it comes to loyalty Clegg's starts with the EU, followed by his party, followed by various ethnic victim groups - at the bottom of the list for his loyalty is the country which he now finds himself the deputy prime minister of.

You can bet if Clegg had to make the choice between doing what is right for Britain or doing what is right for the eurozone it will be the eurozone every time. If he has to make a choice about what is right for British farmers or Greek tobacco growers it will be the latter.

I'm not sure it is good for Britain to have a man with such dubious loyalty in such a position of authority, but I'm certain it isn't good to have a man in such a position who can't make his mind up when tough decisions have to be made and made quickly and decisively.

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: England football flags on cars

2010-06-13T10:37:00.002+01:00

I hope, by now, that anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a patriot and nationalist - and very, very proud of both my country and its flag.

I also should say that I have no objection to people hanging bunting or draping the English flag from their homes, but I draw the line at those who have the English flag fluttering from their cars.

I don't object because of any safety reasons or because of any assumed disrespect to the English flag - my objection is to the sheer bloody hypocrisy of people driving around with an English flag proclaiming their patriotism from a German/Japanese/Italian/French/Korean car.

Yes, I know people have no choice these days if they are buying a mainstream car, but to buy a foreign mainstream car - but it still smacks of hypocrisy.

Good luck, England

2010-06-12T11:04:00.003+01:00

Even though I am not a big sports fan, I wish the England football team the best of luck in their World Cup campaign that kicks off this evening against the USA.

I seriously hope they do well as it is always a boost to England and Britain if our sports teams perform well - but I'm sure I'm not the only one who is already pretty fed up with all the hype and coverage that this has already received.

Nevertheless ....

Come On, England!

Furthering education

2010-06-10T08:36:00.003+01:00

A couple of things caught my eye on the news this morning. The first was the suggestion that university tuition fees will have to rise and the second was something about Britain's status as one of the world's leading science and research nations is in decline.

They both caught my eye individually, but the curious thing is that they are, in my opinion, related.

First of all, you would think that with more and more youngsters entering university these days that our science and research traditions would be boosted, wouldn't you? But they are not - and the reason is that, although more and more children go on to university, fewer and fewer are studying degrees of serious academic worth.

The second thing that bothers me - and is something which I've been ranting about for a long time - is the fact that I can not stand the way my generation are depriving future generations of the things we had access to and enjoyed - and one of those was the student grant system. The majority of MPs in parliament who went through university probably did so at a time when students got grants to study - instead of student loans which leave them up to their necks in debt before they even start their careers.

I just don't think it's right that the people who took advantage of a benefit should be the ones who deprive the next generation of that benefit to just suit their own political and personal ambitions.

The truth is that we need to get people into university and get them studying worthwhile degrees that will bring long term benefits to this country - medicine, physics, chemistry, engineering and so on. I think the government should identify a few core degrees such as these, plus a few of the "classics" and offer student grants (not loans and free from tuition fees) for anyone studying these degrees at an approved university.

This will do two things. It will encourage more of the most able people to study degrees that will benefit the nation in the longer term, but have fallen out of favour - and this, in turn, will boost our science and research fields.

If other children want to go and study media studies, pop music or social science then they can have the student loans and pay tuition fees.

I also believe that the whole point of university is to educate the brightest and the best - and the sad fact is that, in any society, the brightest and the best is unlikely to be much more than 30% of the population - so that should be the benchmark target for children going on to university.

Of course I want to see the other 70% of children getting further education when they leave school - but I think that is best served through a combination of technical colleges, incentivized employer sponsorships and day release - not state financed mickey mouse degrees.

Use it or lose it

2010-06-08T08:42:00.003+01:00

I don't have much time for squatters or their proclaimed rights - but I have even less time for those people who leave buildings abandoned and unoccupied for years either.

At a time when there is increasing pressure to expand into green belt land to provide housing for our rapidly expanding population (it doesn't need to be rapidly expanding and the reason it is is almost entirely due to immigration - but that's a whole different rant) it is nothing short of a national scandal that there are hundreds of thousands of empty homes in Britain today.

Having said all that, I can completely understand why people do leave them unoccupied and abandoned - particularly if they are in prime locations such as town centres. I know of two instances reasonably local to me where the owners of a property on a large piece of prime real estate have left that site unused and abandoned for a decade or more - both were previously business sites.

They left them like that because the local council would not allow them to develop the land the way the land owners wanted to develop the land. The local councils wanted them to remain as business sites while the land owners wanted to build large blocks of luxury flats. Both sites were recently given the go ahead and one now has a humongous square lump of a building that more resembles a prison block than a luxury condo while the other is set to be developed into more luxury flats.

Of course, that's not the only reason such sites get left abandoned and empty. For some inexplicable reason, buildings that are left unoccupied get a discount on business rates - 75% I believe.

This has got to be the most stupid and self-defeating rule ever in the history of town planning. The last thing any town wants is to have its lucrative business areas not contributing to their full potential. Not only are they losing out on the business rate taxation, but they are losing out on jobs and the income that those jobs will generate.

Furthermore, if a prospective employer is looking at your town as somewhere to base their business in they won't be much impressed with rows of abandoned offices and industrial units. If anything, business units that are left unoccupied should attract an increase in business rates to make up for the loss that they would otherwise bring in - I would suggest double the rate.

This would encourage landlords to get tenants in as quickly as possible rather than leave these units abandoned and unoccupied. They might have to drop the rental a little, but better to have the property earning some money.

I also think that there should be a "use it or lose it" policy for any empty building or site. By that, I mean that once a council has identified a property as being unused they should issue the owner a notice that they have two years to submit an acceptable planning proposal or get that site occupied or the property/site will fall into council ownership.

I know that sounds draconian - and it is - but I would also expect councils to be more flexible on their planning consents. As long as the planning proposal isn't for a fifteen storey mega casino with attached brothel and nuclear reprocessing plant then they should allow the landowners to do pretty much whatever they want with their land - except leave it vacant.

The storm is brewing

2010-06-07T07:46:00.002+01:00

David Cameron is expected to announce that the scale of Britain's economic crisis is worse than expected and that Britain faces cuts, austerity measures and tax rises which will effect the country for decades.

OK, maybe he won't mention the tax rises, but they're coming. My point is, though, that my claim that this "recession" - far from being nearly over - was merely the precursor to the deep depression that is going to effect our nation for the next ten years or so.

While all this is going on we will be expected to stump up more and more to assist the other EU nations who are going through the same problems - including those eurozone members - and this will probably mean the end of what is left of the rebate.

This deep depression is going to effect most of the developed world, but the nations that will fare best will be those who retained their manufacturing and production capability and who have the sense to protect it - Germany and Japan for example. The nations that will struggle most will be those who rely on imports the most and make the least effort to protect their industries - and that, I'm afraid, means Britain.

Further still, until we wise up to the basic fact that a service industry needs a strong manufacturing base to service then we will continue to struggle - and as we can not compete on level terms with developing nations that means using protectionism.

There is no alternative - we have a choice now between protectionism or a completely failed economy for decades. It's not a hard choice is it?

Shrinking clothes

2010-06-04T08:53:00.002+01:00

I'm not a great shopper. By that I don't mean that I'm no good at spotting a bargain - I mean that it's not something I get a lot of pleasure out of so tend only to do it when absolutely necessary and nowhere is that more evident than in clothes buying.

When the sun comes out, though, I do tend to start wearing short sleeved shirts and the truth is that most of my short sleeved shirts are a little on the old side. Twelve to fifteen years old to be precise. Don't get me wrong - they aren't tatty. Well, not very - but Mrs Stan had decided that I need something a little newer so took it upon herself to buy me three new short sleeved shirts.

But there is a problem. The shirts themselves are fine - there is nothing wrong with Mrs Stan's impeccable taste - it's just that they don't fit. They should do - they are marked as XL and all the other (old) XL shirts I have fit with room to spare - but they don't.

Of course, I'm not quite as svelte as I was ten to twelve years ago, but I'm not that different (I'm about half a stone heavier than I was when my kids were born) and I certainly haven't grown any taller, but not only are the new shirts too tight around the chest and neck, but they are too short.

The old XL shirts still fit fine - so the only conclusion I can draw from this is that XL isn't XL anymore. At least not a British XL. No doubt they are fine for your average Indonesian, but they don't quite work on a six foot plus Englishman.

The odd thing is that Mrs Stan - who is and always has been a size 12 - has had to resort recently to buying size 10 clothes to get a decent fit (which she is chuffed to bits about), so it's obvious that women's clothes are getting bigger while men's clothes are getting smaller.

Is this just a coincidence or is there a conspiracy going on here?

Why why?

2010-06-04T07:19:00.002+01:00

With the events in Whitehaven and west Cumbria still very fresh in the mind, I don't want to appear insensitive, but I have a problem with the news and the ongoing investigation.

The big question on everyones lips is "why"?

What I want to know is why it is considered so important to know why he did what he did - and particularly why the police need to continue to investigate. They know the crimes committed and who did it - so surely that is the end of the investigation? They have the victims and the killer. The killer is dead so there is no need to prepare a case to prosecute and I really can't figure out what they think they will gain by knowing why he did what he did.

I could understand the need to know why if, for example, this was a politically motivated killing spree, but in these sorts of incidents the trigger will be different from person to person. Understanding why Derrick Bird flipped his lid and went around shooting people at random will not help to prevent the next nutter losing his rag and going on a murder rampage.

I'm sure the police think they are doing the right thing - after all, isn't it all about that dreadful word "closure", but I am dubious of this. Firstly because whatever reason they come up with will only be speculation - Bird is dead so you're never going to know why he did this really - and secondly because I don't think "closure" in these circumstances is achieved by knowing why someone killed your relative - only by knowing who and that is already known.

Both necessary and honourable

2010-06-02T11:45:00.002+01:00

Over on Peter Hitchens' blog there has been an interesting discussion about Dunkirk.

Some people, including Mr. Hitchens (as I understand it) have suggested that Britain's guarantee to support Poland and our declaration of war was both unnecessary and damaging - and that if we had not given this guarantee we may have stayed out of the war and held on to our Empire.

Although I agree that our offer of support to Poland was useless from any practical point of view, I do not agree that it would have made any difference to the way the war was to pan out.

First of all, a lot of people seem to think that had we not gone to war over Poland then Hitler would never have invaded western Europe. They seem to think that the war was always going to be between Germany and the Soviet Union.

This is nonsense. Hitler's motivation leading up to the war was to erase the ignominy Germany had suffered at Versailles. That is what reclaiming the Rhineland was about, that was what invading Czechoslovakia was about and that was what invading Poland was about.

British intelligence were already aware at the outbreak of war that the next target for Germany was an invasion of western Europe to begin in November 1939 and the defeat and humiliation of France. This would be the ultimate prize for Hitler to make up for Versailles and was not only central to his plan for a "United Europe", but essential to his personal ambition.

In other words, we were always going to be dragged into the war regardless of whether we declared war in September 1939 or not. If things had gone to schedule then there would have been no "Phoney War", the BEF would have still gone out to France, would still have been kicked out at Dunkirk only we'd have been trying to extract them from the beaches in the middle of a harsh winter rather than a dull early summer.

As it happens, the November invasion was postponed due to bad weather - but it is possible that our support for Poland gave those people the spirit to fight on for more than a month when their defeat was predicted in 2-3 weeks. Had they not held on then the invasion of western Europe may have begun earlier and the above scenario played out. I doubt that we could have used the "little ships" to assist in getting 30,000 men off the winter beaches of Dunkirk let alone 300,000 and Britain would have been in a far worse predicament than we eventually were.

And let's not forget that at this time, the Soviet Union were our enemy, Germany's ally and were supplying the Nazis with the oil with which they would launch their invasion of France and the low countries.

There was never going to be just a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Western Europe was always the principle goal and the defeat and humiliation of France the prize for Hitler. Had we not declared war in September 1939 we would stil have declared war in May 1940 and it is only through luck that we weren't at war sooner than we wanted and even more unprepared than we eventually were.

There was never any chance that Britain could have stayed out of the war and our guarantee to Poland made no significant difference whatsoever.

What did make a difference and is severely under rated by modern historians is the North Africa campaign. When the allies finally kicked the Nazis out of North Africa they took over a quarter of a million of Germany's most experienced troops prisoner - three times as many as were captured at Stalingrad - while the Germans suffered more casualties and lost more tanks and planes in North Africa than they did at Stalingrad too. This massive loss of men and materiel was crucial to the outcome of the war - every bit as important as Stalingrad.

And while all this was going on, we were also fighting the Japanese in the Far East - so we would still have lost our Empire regardless. Far from being an "unnecessary" war, WW2 was unavoidable for Britain. There were disasters, defeats and humiliations - but we also have much to be proud of too. Not least that - when the rest of the world thought we were defeated - we stood and fought against the evil of fascism.

That we ultimately failed Poland was shameful - but not our fault. Churchill pushed for free elections for Poland and insisted that Britain could not be content with a situation that didn't leave Poland as a free and independent state. It was Roosevelt who sold Poland out - not Churchill or Britain.

The Mary Whitehouse experience

2010-06-01T14:48:00.003+01:00

Dame Joan Bakewell - back when she was just plain Joan - was in the spearhead of revolutionary fervour that created the permissive society in the sixties and the sexual revolution. Back in those heady days of her youth (when everything seems so clear and simple to immature minds - no matter how well educated) she couldn't see anything wrong with that, but now it seems she's had a conversion.

Her opponent back then wasn't some intellectual giant or senior conservative Lord of the Realm, but an ordinary housewife and mother by the name of Mary Whitehouse who was - and still is - vilified by the liberal left as either a figure of hate or ridicule - or both.

Now it's Joan Bakewell who finds that in her twilight years she is blessed with the experience and understanding which she and many others condemned as "reactionary" back in their youth and leads her to say .....

"I never thought I would hear myself say as much, but I'm with Mrs Whitehouse on this one"

Bakewell goes on to complain ....

"Then everything came to be about money: so now sex is about money, too."

Coming from someone who made themselves a tidy little sum from popularising filth that comment smacks of hypocrisy - especially as Mary Whitehouse never made a bean from her campaign and didn't get so much as a thank you note, let alone a peerage.

I doubt that Bakewell really understands what she and her like created back then. They were young, thought they knew it all - but are starting to realise that they knew nothing. Perhaps worse of all, though, is that even with their advancing years they still know nothing.

They say that "with age comes wisdom". Yes - but not always. The Bakewell's of this world might have the money, the education and the reputation, but they still don't understand the Mary Whitehouse experience.

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Headlamp Fetish

2010-05-30T10:11:00.003+01:00

Driving along a pretty country road and a beautiful late spring evening with the sun low in the sky last week I was briefly dazzled by the light as I approached the crest of a hill. It wasn't the sunlight, though, it was some idiot driving along in broad daylight with his headlights on.

Why? It wasn't dark. It wasn't raining. It wasn't even a dull, overcast and gloomy day. It was a perfect English evening, bright with light and blessed with sunshine - so why was this fool driving around with his headlamps on?

It wasn't even one of those silly Swedish jobs which only run when you have the sidelights turned on. Did he think I wouldn't see him otherwise? I managed to see all those other cars driving around without their headlights on and I managed to see all those parked cars OK - so why would I not be able to see this car?

I'm seeing more and more people driving around in perfectly good light and weather with their lights on. and it drives me bananas. Headlamps, used inappropriately, are distracting and can dazzle other road users - particularly these days with these very bright halogen bulbs. Why do they do it?

It's beyond me, but I hate it

That went well, then

2010-05-29T07:25:00.003+01:00

A couple of weeks after Dave heralded the coalition as a new type of politics and we're already hearing about members of the new Cabinet up to the same old tricks.

David Laws says it was because he wanted to keep his relationship with his partner secret - and in doing so decided it was OK to defraud the taxpayer out of £40,000.

This wasn't even a case of Laws working "within the rules" as it has been against the rules since 2006 to make payments to MPs partners. Laws tries to excuse this by saying that he didn't think it applied to him - a remarkable claim that suggests Laws is either very, very stupid or a lying, conniving git.

Either way, I don't think that sort of person should be serving in government let alone in The Treasury.

It'll be interesting to see what Dave will do now. After all, he's made a big thing out of cleaning up dodgy expense claims from MPs in his own party - except for close allies and himself of course - so it will be fascinating to see what he will do with an MP in his Cabinet from a different party.

It's crunch time for Clegg too. Laws is something of a rising star in Lib Dem world - which says a lot about the Lib Dem party - and Clegg will find himself somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Will he back the sacking of a Lib Dem colleague or will he defend the "next big thing" in Liberal Democrat politics? Either way he is going to upset some people in his own party.

Laws has been "credited" with being the chief architect behind the £6 billion of cuts introduced as if this is something of a good thing. Personally, I think that someone at such a high level in the government drilling down to such excruciating levels of detail is a signal that that person is too focused on micro-management and unable to see the bigger picture - something which is all too common in government today.

It's not surprising, though. I've been saying for years that the three main parties are the same in terms of overall policy and only differ on minor details - so it is likely that they will tend to focus on detail when they are in government.

Consumerism is the new opium of the masses

2010-05-28T12:34:00.003+01:00

Religion, as Karl Marx once claimed, was the opiate of the people.

What he was trying to say is that religion fills a void in people's lives when they become disaffected and disillusioned - unhappy - and creates an "illusion" of happiness.

Of course, Marx, being a revolutionary atheist, didn't understand that what religion - or, specifically, Christianity - actually did was provide the comfort and contentment through which people attain real happiness rather than an illusion of it.

However, in our modern world where Christianity has been all but abolished by secular atheist militancy, it is no surprise that people turned to other things to try and fill the voids in their lives and provide the contentment and comfort which leads to happiness. And, as is the way of the modern world, the people didn't turn to something which requires thought, discipline and time but turned instead for quick fixes.

For a lot of people that means real drugs - hard drugs - but for many millions more they use something else. They use the quick fix of consumerism. Go out and buy something and, for a brief, fleeting moment you will attain happiness. What else explains the reaction to the launch of Apple's iPad - with people queueing up overnight to buy one and describing themselves as "elated"?

It's a quick fix to a problem that won't go away. The "high" induced by buying something new will quickly wash away and the consumer junkie will be compelled to go out and find their next "fix" as they search for that elusive peace and contentment which so many people find is missing from their lives.

Consumerism has become the new opium for the masses - but unlike religion which really can provide comfort and contentment, consumerism creates a truly illusory delusion of happiness and one which requires ever higher dosages to fill the void. It is also certain, ultimately, to fail.

As a nation we've turned to consumerism as a quick fix to the problem of attaining happiness. We build our temples in the form of out of town shopping malls - ever larger, ever more grand - and worship at the altar of our new gods - Ikea, Next, Sony and so on - every Saturday and Sunday. We give generously of our wealth in return for a shiny, new possession which we will display and worship at home.

Welcome to the new secular atheist religion - the new opium for the people. Unlike Christianity, it won't help you achieve happiness and you'll end up deep in debt, but at least you'll be able to be miserable comfortably. For a while, anyway.