You read it here first - by Richard... Monday, September 05, 2011

You read it here first - by Richard... Monday, September 05, 2011

Today, 5 September 2011, you can read this in The Guardian (above), assessing the cause of the Tottenham riots.

Those who wanted to get there first with an informed opinion could have read this on 16 August.

They will spend hundreds of thousands on investigating the cause of these riots, if not millions. They could have it for free from this blog ... and quicker.

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(Mis)reading the riots - by Richard...

If I were to nominate two institutions least likely to come to an objective conclusions about cause of the August riots, it would be the LSE and the Guardian, two such that manage to be wrong on most (but not all) issues of the day.

Yet is it precisely this pair which is setting itself up to carry out an investigation into the cause of the riots – aiming to interview "hundreds of people who were involved".

Even with the best will in the world, they will have problems. In my experience, when you are interviewing people about recent events, you can be presented with one of at least three options: what the respondents know; what they think they knows; or what they think you want to hear.

Those three, of course, assume that your respondents are generally disposed to telling the truth, but the other possibility is that they will lie to you. Then – and a very common problem – is that testimony becomes "polluted" by what has been heard and seen on the media, through discussions with his peers and even by interaction with questioners, reacting to false cues and biased questions.

As a result, raw oral evidence can be – and most often is – some of the least reliable material you can use. Only when cross-checked, especially with reality, can you give it any weight at all.

I myself have been in situations where all the oral evidence from an incident has pointed one way, yet the forensic evidence has given a completely different picture. Sometimes, though, you have nothing to go on but experience and "gut instinct" that tells you what you are hearing is not true, accurate, or representative.

Much then depends on the interpreter, and where we have – in this case – two institutions that are so obviously biased, one can already tell what the conclusions will be. Like as not they will be wrong. But then, the right answers are probably not wanted anyway.

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A thought for us all - by Richard...

As we get the latest instalment of white-collar looting from the Daily Fail - this one about how the quangocrats are amassing million-plus pension pots, Annie from Hampshire (@ 9:37) writes in the comments:

Has no one twigged, these recipients of the taxpayers' largesse and those who award these obscene amounts/gifts, beyond the dreams of avarice, don't care what we think ... they know they will get away with it. "Sticks and stones ... etc". So unless the DM can tell us what to do about it, better not to publish any more.

That is more profound than anyone can imagine, and gets to the heart of the problem. Day on day, the Fail "reveals" the latest obscenities from our looting classes, along with daily dose of slebitis, so that the whole thing merges into an inchoate mush that passes more for entertainment than news.

The "daily hate" has become embedded as a ritual, meaningless other than as a curiosity and subject of discussion (and the occasional blog), because – as Annie writes - precisely nothing will happen.

Publishing some of the excess on this blog over the last few weeks, has made me think – not least because, far from attracting new and interested readers, the blog readership has gone into one of its period cycles of decline. It does it at the end of every summer – I don't know why, but it does.

The message though, comes through clear enough. It is not that people are not interested. It is just that – in the short-term at least – there is nothing they can do about it. There is no point indulging in self-flagellation over something that cannot be changed.

Much the same, of course, goes for climate change. As the specialist blogs get excited over the treatment of the Remote Sensing paper, some predicting (as we did over Climategate) that this will mean the death-knell of the scaremongers and their ersatz science, nothing at all changes. The windmills keep turning (or not) and the taxes keep mounting.

For sure, there are reports today that recording that the Idiot Boy's senior policy adviser, Ben Moxham, has warned that "Green energy policies" are set to add more than £300 a year to the average household fuel bill – a 30 percent rise - by 2020 as a direct result of the coalition's policies.

This is nothing new, nothing we haven't said a hundred times on this blog – nothing the MSM could not have worked out for itself ... nothing that has not been published countless times in the Booker column, only for the paper to ignore its own columnist. But Mr Moxham has "prestige", so the Failygraph prints it – because what matters is not the message, but the prestige of the messenger.

But, if anyone thinks that is going to make the slightest bit of difference, they are sadly mistaken, witness the official response.

A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change said: "Reforms will not add £300 to bills. Our policies will both add and subtract from future bills because we need to build new reliable energy sources to keep the lights on, but we'll also be helping people to cut their bills through greater energy efficiency".

"Our reforms to the electricity market will deliver the best deal for Britain and for consumers: getting us off the hook of relying on imported oil and gas by creating a greener, cleaner and ultimately cheaper mix of electricity sources right here in the UK".

So there you are then – black equals white ... you say this, we say that. And they will continue as before. They know they will get away with it, so they don't care.

Then, of course, we have the EU issue, with Lord Lawson flatulating in the paywall Times as he occasionally does – another one with "prestige". This time we see him set up to lead the bleating from the Tories, worried that their masters in Brussels may yet cost them the next election.

"Get tough on Europe, Tories tell Cameron", reads the fatuous headline, as if the Idiot Boy would even know where to start, or have any desire to do so. And even then, there is no strength to it.

"Europe" (meaning, of course, the European Union) is a key concern for the vast majority of Tories, dribbles Tim Montgomerie, editor of ToryBoy blog. He said that every time his website polled party members, 80 or 90 percent "did not like the current situation".

"The Tory party has become overwhelmingly Eurosceptic", adds Tiny Tim, as if he had the first idea of what the word meant, then demonstrating that he does not, when he tells us that although members had a "wish-list" on Europe they were happy that the Government was focusing its attention on the deficit, health and education.

Senior government figures, we are told, "point out" that Britain does 40 percent of its trade with Europe, but insist that ministers will remain on the lookout for opportunities to claw back powers. They decline to name any areas under examination, but point out that Mr Cameron has already succeeded in advancing Britain’s interests, citing the written promise that Britain will avoid future eurozone bailouts.

In other words, nothing is going to happen, other than more extruded verbal material (EVM). The political classes don't care what we think ... they know they will get away with it.

So what do we do now, other than rise up and slaughter them? This, of course, is the end game – what always happens when the political classes lose touch with the people, but we are a long way from that yet. The downside of a period of death and destruction is so huge that people will tolerate a great deal from their rulers before they finally put them to the sword.

But then, there is always the opportunity for the ruling classes to wake up and mend their ways. It does happen. In the past, the system has been capable of responding, and taking the edge off the pressure which was pushing the people towards insurrection.

What worries me though is that the system has lost (or is progressively losing) the ability to respond. That is why I thought the Leighton-Morris story was so important – and so did Booker, for the same reason – reminding us of how it used to work.

But what also worries me is that so few people can now recall how our government used to work – and have any understanding of how the systems have become degraded. There is the distinct possibility that we have lost the ability to identify the changes needed to pull us back from the brink, in which case we are on a terminal death-slide.

There is time to pull back, but one increasingly has to ask whether there is the capability. And, as we see the political classes determined to engineer their own destruction - increasingly I find myself asking whether I really care any more.