The two faces of Heston - by Richard... Saturday, February 25, 2012

The two faces of Heston - by Richard... Saturday, February 25, 2012

Remember this? Now look at this. What is happening to this country of ours? It gets to the stage where the whys and wherefores don't matter any more. This should not be happening in a country which has pretensions of being civilised.

Yet this is neither an isolated nor recent problem. So what purpose is being served by turning our nation into a third-world country, in its people, its urban poverty and its politics, making a mockery of the rule of law? Why are we allowing this to happen, and what should we be doing to stop it?

Such questions are far from rhetorical - they need a response, and we don't seem to have sensible or convincing answers to them. Consider, therefore, this a holding post. I will expand it later on today, with some further thoughts and ideas.

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Moonbat strikes back - by Richard... Friday, February 24, 2012

He's there, in all his glory on his blog ... the first time one of my photographs has been swiped byThe Guardian. The comments are priceless.

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I spoke too soon - by Richard...

Earlier, in customary snarl mode, I reckoned on getting very few reviews for the book, but I hadn't reckoned with the fantastically brilliant James Delingpole doing a wickedly insightful piece in The Spectator.

"What North has achieved here is admirable", he writes, leaving me purring so loudly they are ganging up to evict me from the "quiet coach" where I temporarily reside.

Dellers then continues, saying, "He has set out to reclaim for the people of Britain the credit for a glorious victory which was stolen from them by the political Establishment". He concludes the review with a quote from the end of the book:

To restore that history is to change the way we think about ourselves. We are part of a nation which, in time of peril, rallied and by collective endeavour engineered its own salvation... That makes us a different people from the passive, shadowy inhabitants of a myth — and all the more powerful. What we could do once we can do again.

Needless to say, lesser mortals cannot actually read the thing yet. Despite what the publisher says(who exists only to torture innocent authors), Amazon tells us that deliveries go out on 8 March. Late is better than never, they say.

In the meantime, of course, you could read that other brilliant book, Watermellons by ... er ... Dellers which, by a strange coincidence, is also reviewed in the Speccie. "Do not be deceived by his sometimes flippant and always highly readable prose. This is a serious and significant book", writes Matt Ridley. "He gets me EXACTLY right", says James.

And he does ... I'll post my own review soon.

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The disease of incompetence - by Richard...

The resignation of Cynthia Bower, the head of the Care Quality Commission, says the Failygraph, would have been merited even without its exposure of the scandalous failings of the abortion system.

But only up to a point, Lord Copper. This ghastly woman came (once again) to notoriety in June last year, over the Winterbourne View residential hospital scandal. Before that, Bower - on a salary in order of £215,000, more than the prime minister – had been chief executive of Stafford NHS Trust, where she had presided over utter catastrophe.

But despite this appalling performance, in June 2009 she was given the prestige appointment as head if the Quality Care Commission, where she has proved herself to be, yet again, an egregious failure. By any measure, this woman should never have been given the job in the first place.

The worst of this, though, is that this is far from the only case where failure has been so handsomely rewarded. More recently, we see the civil servant who presided over years of chaos at the UK Border Agency promoted – to run the tax office (above).

This is Lin Homer, who was paid almost £1 million in salary and bonuses over four years as the first chief executive of the beleaguered agency, and is now rewarded for her incompetence with another highly-paid, prestige post.

One really does wonder about high public office and why it is that the system unerringly seems to go for the most incompetent people it can find, and then consistently rewards failure. Tragically, though, this disease seems to be spreading throughout the corporate world, which looks to be embarked on its own orgy of incompetence – at our expense.

Is this the disease that is going to bring down civilisation?