A view from the Szamuely - by Richard... Saturday, April 16, 2011

A view from the Szamuely - by Richard... Saturday, April 16, 2011

We are missing the point: the real problems with the European Union; our bloated, centralized, inefficient and corrupt welfare and social security system; above all, our education system. Too difficult ... so much easier to scream abuse about foreigners of all description.

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Don't call it apathy - by Richard...

We wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Instead, they gave us a referendum on AV – an obsession of a small cadre of the political classes, mainly the Lib-Dims. Then The Independent tells us there is "apathy and anger" and that both camps are having to "struggle to convince voters of importance of 5 May poll".

Well, there is certainly anger – but there is no apathy. Both camps are struggling because the poll is not important. Just because the political classes - still less the media - think it is important does not make it so.

That is something the political classes seem to have difficulty understanding. If they address issues of importance and interest to us, we take an interest in them. But as long as they devote themselves to their own concerns and ignore ours, then the electorate is only too willing to reciprocate. But it should not be called apathy. This is indifference, which is not the same thing.

Further, when you cross-link issues – which the politicians hate you doing - and you see the pig's ear they are making of things, they should count themselves fortunate that it is just indifference they are having to confront.

Unfortunately, they are bolstered by the media, which is setting an agenda which daily becomes more bizarre and distant from the real world. Even the doyen of critical comment doesn't really get it. In an incredibly limp piece, Simon Heffer wants Cameron to "take the lead" in demanding that discussions for the future (of the EU) be conducted on a basis of what it is, rather than on what the eurocrats would like things to be.

If that is the best contribution he can make to the debate, he need not have bothered – as some of his commenters have been quick to point out. But then, none of these political commentators can really cut it. They have yet to understand that they are also part of the problem, and are never going to contribute to the solution.

For the moment, though, they will still find humour and derision, but it won't be that long before that evaporates and anger takes its place.

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Please tell me there's a "Plan B" - by Richard...

"Nato mission in disarray as criticisms mount", reports The Independent, telling us that Obama has admitted a "stalemate" on the ground, with France seeking fresh UN resolution, and little Dave trailing in the wake of TLOTK.

France and Britain are still bleating to the other "partners" in this ill-fated venture to provide additional warplanes. But, as always, they talk the talk, and then go AWOL. A meeting of member countries in Berlin yesterday broke up without any guarantee that new resources would be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi is still in power, still giving the rebels a hard time and still running rings round the coalition. This is so seriously embarrassing that even of they do eventually manage to get rid of the Libyan dictator – which is by no means a certainty – their reputations will never recover.

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Greece domed - by Richard... Friday, April 15, 2011

If I could work out what the geeks were actually saying, I'd probably be heading for the hills. However, the headline seems clear enough: "Greece Is Now Doomed" – or is it domed? EvenReuters sounds a bit worried. But what does "restructuring" really mean, daddy? Trust Ambrose to bugger off when you really need him.

Anyhow, I guess the Greeks'll not be bearing gifts – although they may now be donating large numbers of petrol bombs to the local constabulary (picture above of one I made earlier). The likelihood of that seems high, as the knobs are promising "more austerity" - not for themselves, of course, but for everybody else.

The puzzling thing is that they're saying the dominoes are "isolated". Is this from the same lot who saw the bankers' crisis coming (not)?

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I think we already knew this - by Richard...

Pilots of the RAF's Euroshiters are being grounded because shortages of aircraft spares mean they cannot put in enough flying hours to keep their skills up to date. This is according to The Independent, on the back of the Public Accounts Committee.

But this is not new. It actually goes back to last year when someone gave 13th Century Fox a question to ask and he managed to get the words out in the right order. Even then, they were cannibalising airframes, so it was obvious they were in trouble.

Spares were always going to be a problem for this benighted machine, more so if we insist on using the things for anything more than the occasional airshow. Somehow, I suspect that if we'd bought F-16s (like the Dutch and Belgians), we'd we still using them, we'd have a lot more of them, and they would have cost us a lot less money. But no, we had to go for Heseltine's folly.

Ah, but the Euroshiter is so much better, I hear you all say. Well, chuck ... not if it is grounded through lack of spares it ain't.

In reality, though, this is yet another MoD cock-up. From Aviation Week on 4 September 2009, we learn that RAF utilisation of its Euroshiters was more than double that of the other "partner" nations. Yet, despite their higher utilization, the RAF had ordered fewer spares packages than partner nation forces. Up to February 2009, MoD figures showed that the UK had ordered less than 35,000 lines of spares compared with 37,000 for Spain, nearly 45,000 for Italy and more than 50,000 for Germany.

And surprisingly enough, now that The Boy wants to play in Libya, he's creating even more stresses on an already creaking system. One of these days, the politicians might just learn that the real enemy of Britain is the MoD. The best thing they could do is launch an invasion of the Whitehall headquarters to restore British sovereignty there.

Even now, the cynicism and duplicity of the RAF bomber barons and their mates in the MoD are almost beyond belief, as Lewis Page in The Register writes. Perhaps people will believe me now when I tell them in my book that the MoD is an organisation that would sooner let soldiers die than have their over-priced toys junked.

But do not forget, it was a Tory decision to buy the Euroshiter ... Heseltine's bid to increase European integration. Well, he got what he wanted. We end up with a useless, over-priced pile of shit. That, it seems, is the way of things. The taxpayer has been screwed, screwed, and screwed again - and they want to come back for yet more.

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Intellectual mildew - by Richard...

Well, this is a refined blog, so you wouldn't expect me to use a crude term like total bollocks for my title, would you? This is so bad this it's barely worth fisking. The trouble is that Dave will be tucked up with his morning bikkies, reading every word.

The thing is, it's all very well the urban luvvies, and the darlink little Zrinkas of this world talking about immigration. Let them come to Bradford and tell us whities to put our kids into schools where for eighty percent, English is a second language, and the koran is compulsory reading, and see how they like it. Let them walk the streets and have their women spat on because they do not wear a veil. Let them put up with the aggressive, rude little madams jumping the queues, all dressed up in their kafkas, burkits, with the slitty-eyed gaps in the front.

I used to be very tolerant on immigration. But when the biggest development in the city is a new mosque - and they are not even using local material, but importing it from Pakistan - where the Muslims are stitching up the local Council, own the local paper and take over every area they inhabit, it is time to call it a day. Integration? There is not even a pretence at integration, and in the inner city, we - the kafirs, the unclean - are the minority.

So yes, we have this filth in our midst who call us unclean - a "culture" that never invented toilet paper and uses their left hands to wipe their arses. And they call us unclean? I'm sick of it. It isn't about jobs, it isn't about resources. It's about having an alien culture in our midst, people who loathe and despise us, and reject everything we stand for - and don't even bother to hide it any more.

It doesn't matter how you dress it up. We have had enough.

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Man of the people - by Richard...

Well done The Daily Mail for picking that one up – Ed Miliband doing his "man of the people" act – travelling first class to Coventry, then to be seen with the plebs on a Council estate. But so hypocritical is he that, when he is to be interviewed on the train, his aids scurry around removing the "First Class" seat covers.

This is the man who would be prime minister ... a man no better than the present incumbent. What is disturbing, though, is that too many people – and the media – still see politics in terms of the merry-go-round. Euroslime Dave loses popularity, so they look to Miliband. One day they will learn that they are all the same and none are worth voting for.

That, of course, is the issue with the AV referendum. Since it makes no real difference WHO you vote for, with our supreme government in Brussels, it is a matter of supreme indifference HOW we vote for them. This is something for the political classes to get excited about – one telling me that we must vote against AV otherwise we end up with the Lib-Dims as "king makers". And the difference will be?

Either way, we end up with posturing scum like Miliband. One and all, they are putting on an act for the plebs, and they are stupid (or vain) enough to think they are getting away with it. It was ever thus, of course. Perhaps we are just more aware of it, less deferential and more iconoclastic.

But there is a mood out there – even seasoned political commentators are beginning to realise that things are amiss. It ain't just the hoodies who are giving the politicians the finger.

I don't think we're ready for the tumbrils quite yet, but I hope there is a little man in a back street somewhere greasing the axles. We wouldn't want to wake the neighbours when we roll them out.

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A question of priorities - by Richard...

Five people have died and almost 60, including young children, were injured after a fire ripped through a block of flats in Paris yesterday, according to The Daily Mail. Four of the dead had jumped from high windows to escape the blaze, while one was burnt alive. Six others were in a life-threatening condition. Fire service spokesman Frederic Grosjean said all are believed to have been "surprised in their sleep without any warning".

The blaze in Menilmontant, a densely populated area of the 20th arrondissement, is the latest in a long list which have blighted the French capital's public safety record. Scores of mainly immigrants have died in similar circumstances over the past decade, with the authorities apparently unable to do anything about the scandal. The apartments in Menilmontant did not have fire escapes, or even smoke alarms, and many of those killed became trapped in the tightly packed stairwell where the fire broke out soon after 3am.

This incident is of some interest at several levels. Firstly, this is an immigrant area and it underlines the French tendency to herd their "guests" into ghettos, crowded in unsafe and insanitary accommodation. I do, however, have a special interest here, as in a former career working for a London Borough, I carried out fire protection enforcement in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).

We worked to a then GLC code (before it was abolished), implementing a cheap, standard scheme which gave half-hour fire protection, with protected "means of escape". There was a big fire in an HMO on our patch, and afterwards we were all taken to see it – because everybody had got out. It worked, and we had the greatest confidence in the scheme (which, incidentally, used copious quantities of white asbestos sheeting).

I don't know what standards are like now – I've lost touch. Although when sprog junior wanted to move out to his first flat, I inspected the attic flat he wanted to rent. And it didn't even have basic fire resistance, and no means of escape. I wouldn't let him rent it. As a campaigner against excessive regulation, I have nevertheless always accepted the need for well designed, properly implemented and adequately enforced regulation where lives can be saved. And I always thought our particular fire code was an example of that.

It has always thus struck me as a test of a civilised and humane society, that it can develop such systems. On those grounds, France fails the test. But, when you see the waste of effort these days, enforcing ridiculous rules and regulations, while the basics are ignored, I am not so very sure that the UK will continue to do so much better.

Regulation and enforcement has always been a matter of priorities, and we now seem to be a society which has the greatest difficulty working out the right priorities. But the one thing of which I am very certain is that, however bad we get, we are in absolutely no need of any guidance from the Kermits – as this incident illustrates only too well.

It is a sobering thought, therefore, that the French Government, through the modern miracle of the EU, has just as much say in the formulation of much of our regulatory code as our own provincial government. I remain to be convinced that we are better off for it.