A gallant but futile effort - by Richard... Monday, March 19, 2012

A gallant but futile effort - by Richard... Monday, March 19, 2012

"That was stupid", says Sandy Woodward – former task force commander who took the expeditionary force to rescue the Falklands in 1982.

This plain-speaking man of the sea says it was a mistake not to have made more noise, "to make sure people realised it was the Navy that had done the job, not the bloody Air Force or the Army". The Air Force, he adds, "dropped one bomb on target. There were more Commandos, who are naval soldiers, than there were Army".

Now, Woodward is into selling his book – and best of luck to him – but he is also supporting the service from which he has retired, indulging in the special pleading that typifies inter-service rivalry.

Characteristically, to do so he is relying on a myth - in this instance the "myth" that the Royal Navy saved the Falklands. This possibly qualifies as a "true myth", but whether it does or not, he relies on its power to support his case that, in order to continue protecting the Falklands, we still need a powerful navy.

The beauty of this is that it illustrates the archetypal myth, and how it is used. Specifically, myths are narratives (true or false) about events past, presented in such a way as to shape our thinking, how we react to current events and thence how we behave.

Woodward, in fact, is demonstrating one of the primary functions of the myth, that of supporting one faction in competition for funding between departments of state or, as in this case, within departments such as the three military services in the MoD.

This is a perennial feature of government, as much in the past as it is currently. And it was for precisely this purpose that one of the most significant Battle of Britain myths was developed and deployed – not in 1940 but in 1945.

Barrier Miner, New South Wales, Tuesday 23 October 1945, p 3

What you see from the cutting above is a scene-setter (the exact timing is not important) which tells us that, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, demobilisation is taking place and the armed forces are being cut back to a fraction of their former strength. It also has Churchill, now leader of the opposition, calling for the RAF to be "maintained on a very large scale".

The Daily News, Perth, Saturday 15 September 1945, p 20

Needless to say, the military establishment was extremely concerned that the process of downsizing might go to far, and the RAF had already been seeing plans for its fleet size to be slashed. Thus, for the anniversary of the Battle of Britain on 15 September 1946, we see – for the first time - a detailed claim that Britain was "in a bad way" during the Britain, short of aircraft and pilots, to the extent that the battle was a "close call".

The interesting thing is that this is not the invention of the media, or a revisionist historian, but is an official statement from the Air Ministry, delivered with such impeccable timing that it gets published worldwide (these pieces from the Australian press).

Yet, from a review of the contemporary records, we learn that there were no shortages which in any way prejudiced operations. Churchill had in fact visited 11 Group HQ, at the heart of the air battle on 31 August, and had on 2 September reviewed progress at a secret War Cabinet meeting. "We had every right to be satisfied,” he said, "our own Air Force was stronger than ever and there was every reason to be optimistic about the 1940 Air Battle of Britain".

Mirror, Perth, Saturday 15 September 1945, p 8

As regards the aircraft supply, the situation was tight in August 1940. Peter J. Dye in the Air Force Journal of Logistics for the winter of 2000, records that against a total wastage of 594 Hurricanes and Spitfires, new production and repair could provide only 527 aircraft.

The difference, however, was made up from the immediate reserve stocks and, by September the position had been returned to a positive balance of some 50 aircraft on the month. In October, after three months of steady attrition, Fighter Command's front line stood at some 98 percent of its established strength, slightly higher than when the battle of Britain opened.

The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, Thursday 27 September 1945, p 2

Nevertheless, some versions of the myth are relatively harmless, where the intent was merely to remind the politicians and the public of the danger of running down the air force. What are more insidious are those that have a political dimension, affecting the way we relate to the political classes. Such is the Battle of Britain "invasion myth" which limits the battle to that one phase, ignoring the strategic objectives of the Blitz. By this means, it has the British people relying on the RAF for their salvation, rather than on their own resources and fortitude.

Debunking the political myths is now more important than it has ever been - as Britain is once again under existential threat. And that was the task I set myself in The Many Not The Few. Worryingly though, Duff and Nonsense is suggesting that the book should be filed under the category "Gallant but Futile Effort" – not for any pejorative reason, but simply reflecting the size of the task I have set myself (and my likelihood of success).

However, if I acknowledged that my labours were futile (whether gallant or not), I would give up now. That, I cannot do because the myths of the past are still current, framing the population as passive dependants, who need to rely on their political and technocratic élites to guide them through the crises of life.

The "true myth" though, is that there is no crisis so bad that our politicians cannot make it worse and that, in times of crises, there is only one set of people on which we can rely – ourselves. To pursue that line may be futile, but we simply cannot afford to abandon what is probably our only hope of salvation.

No one is in charge - by Richard... Sunday, March 18, 2012

The chattering classes in conference - but who is in charge?

Front page of The Sunday Telegraph offers a prolonged lament about the effects of the EU's working time directive, recording the huge amounts spent on temporary staff to fill the gaps created by the rules. Hospitals, we are told, spent more than £2 billion on temporary clinical staff in the two years since the rules came in, a sum which could have paid the wages of 48,000 nurses or 33,000 junior doctors over the period.

In response to this obscene waste, a spokesman for the Department of Health is cited, saying that trusts should always seek to negotiate the best value prices for locums. He adds that the government understood there were "real concerns" over the impact of the directive, and had begun EU negotiations to revise it.

Earlier, we published an item which has Charles Moore complaining in The Daily Telegraph that the "civil servants are the masters now". But these "masters" apparently can't even affect a situation where billions of pounds are wasted on absurd and unnecessary rules, and must go trotting over to Brussels to ask permission to make changes.

It is evidence such as that which clearly indicates that, in vital aspects of our administration, the British civil service is most definitely not in charge. Similarly, it can hardly be Jeremy Heywood who is running the country, as Quentin Letts asserts. Had he such power, he would doubtless wave a magic wand and bring the absurdity to an end.

When it comes to the effects of the working time directive, however, doubtless the Brussels eurocrats did not intend to impose such a burden on the NHS. But, as it stands, they too are powerless to make changes – without going through due process, which will take years, if indeed it happens.

In the meantime, while money flows down the drain and taxpayers get steadily poorer, we have the unedifying prospect of legions of legislators and officials doing nothing but tell us their hands are tied.

Not for nothing did I once remark that the most prevalent activity, even on a European scale, wasgroup bondage. But we should also recall a fascinating interview with Lord Salisbury recorded in July 2009. Then he said: "The parliamentary muscle is atrophying and we now have a vast, complicated, self-referential bureaucracy".

Whitehall, said Salisbury, is "mired in treacle". A clear line of authority from officials to ministers has been lost and must be restored. And, of Cameron trying to implement his own agenda, he declared: "He will go into Whitehall and pull the levers and find that nothing works. I don’t think he realises how Whitehall has become so broken".

Yet still we get the ineffable lightweights like Charles Moore, his ponderous prose mistaken for gravitas, completely failing to understand the malaise which afflicts modern government.

Thus, to spell it out yet again, as I did in December 2008, no one is in overall charge – there is no one to get a grip and sort the problems out. Everything is compartmentalised and detached, everyone doing their own little bit, without reference to their impact on other areas.

That, in a very real sense, I wrote, is the general paradigm. It was not always like that. But with power and responsibilities split, and spread between national and international bodies, no one person or entity – like the British government – has any longer the wherewithal to resolve even pressing issues.

And so the money pours down the drain and governance falls apart in front of our very eyes, while the MSM laments, without even beginning to understand what is happening. In pointing this out for the umpteenth time, though, I sometimes wonder what it is going to take to acquaint our chattering classes (pictured above) with reality.

Bring them to book - by Richard...

After ploughing a lonely furrow for so long, Booker has finally gained some high profile support on the "stolen kids" issue – not from his own newspaper, which keeps him firmly locked away in the "ghetto", but from The Daily Mail. Much of what this newspaper does is toe-curlingly bad, but just occasionally, it rises to the occasion with a superb piece of journalism which only the Mail can do with such style (headline below).

Furthermore, this is but one of two pieces, The Mail has run, the first dealing with how the family court system is relying on a closed circle of incompetent experts, who are perverting the system in a terrifying way. Thus – at last – is Booker able to remark in today's column that "a long overdue scandal hit the headlines last week".

He is referring to a "semi-official report" which has exposed one of the murkiest corners of our child protection system – the way that supposed professional "experts" help social workers to remove children from their parents.

The author is professor Jane Ireland, a forensic psychologist. For the Family Justice Council, she has examined 126 psychological reports trawled at random from family court documents. She found that two thirds of them were "poor" or "very poor" in quality and that 20 percent of their authors had no proper qualifications.

Alarmingly, no fewer than 90 percent of the report authors were not practising psychologists but appeared to earn their livings, wholly or partly, from writing reports for social workers. And, featured in the second Mail piece, one psychologist, whose company has made nearly half a million pounds a year from such reports, is under investigation by the General Medical Council.

The picture prof Ireland conveys, writes Booker, is one with which he is only too familiar. He has seen (and reported) how families can be torn apart largely on the basis of highly dubious psychological evidence.

This is designed, as John Hemming MP puts it, to " suit the demands of local authorities". One mother lost her children, for instance, on the basis of a 235-page report, costing £14,000, which found that she was "likely to have a borderline personality disorder" – without the author ever having met her.

Such seems almost unbelievable – so much so that one is inclined to dismiss it, or mark it down as a tragic exception. This is what children's minister, Tim Loughton, sought to do, when Booker told him what was going on, face-to-face. And, despite the steady trickle of cases that Booker has reported on – only a fraction of those he has seen – the flatulent Loughton has maintained his stance.

Another example, for instance, was a woman found by a psychologist to be a competent mother” – so the social workers went to a second witness, who found the same. They then found one of these "rent-a-psychos" who came up with what they wanted: that the mother had, again, a "borderline personality disorder". On that basis, her three children were sent for adoption.

Then a married couple lost their daughter because the father, who had had four "psychological assessments" from these psycho-frauds, saw no reason to submit himself to a fifth. The Court of Appeal found that he seemed to be putting his "emotional needs before those of his child” " and ordered that the child be adopted.

Damning as Prof Ireland's report is, her remit was only to look at psychological assessments. An equally disturbing picture might emerge from examining other groups of medical "experts" who earn thousands of pounds from evidence which parents may not be allowed to challenge or even read.

One contentious area, for instance, is where parents are accused of having injured infants who are found to have small fractures to their bones. A fashionable theory, pioneered by a Dr Kleinman in the US, holds that such fractures are a sure indicator of "non-accidental injury", i.e., the child must have been abused.

In one case (which Booker was able to report last year because the judge, unusually, published his judgement) it was clear that all the four medical witnesses had supported this "Kleinman theory", unquestioningly accepted by the judge.

But other experts strongly disagree, citing studies which suggest that such fractures may quite often arise naturally from a deficiency of vitamin D (as tests had shown was the case with this particular mother). When Booker showed the judgement to a doctor expert in this field, he immediately recognised three of the witnesses as doctors who "go round from one court to another to support the Kleinman theory".

Sadly, since no one was in court to challenge them, the heartbroken mother – like many before her – lost her son.

What we are going through, of course, is wearyingly familiar. Several scandals have hit the headlines in recent years involving doctors struck off after making a reputation as witnesses, pushing some theory about "brittle bones", "shaken baby syndrome" or "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" which was eventually exposed as fallacious.

But these causes célèbres have centred on criminal courts, where evidence can be put more rigorously to the test than is required by the much laxer procedures of family courts, which allow the incompetence, dishonesty and self-interest to be obscured by a wall of secrecy.

And as Booker has observed before, once a court system is allowed to hide itself away behind that wall of secrecy, the chances are high that it will become corrupted. A perfect example is the role played in our family courts by many of these professional "experts".

Thus, the good work prof Ireland has begun cannot be allowed to stop there, Booker concludes. Perforce though, he is being too gentle. These faux experts can only exist in a system where the judges allow them to operate, where the lawyers support them, and the local authorities pay for them, with our money.

In Booker's conclusion, the hint is there. The whole system is corrupt, from the judges downwards. It needs to be stripped down, taken apart and rebuilt from the ground upwards. And although too much to hope for in a society that is also corrupt, those responsible should also be brought to book.

That, though, is not going to happen, a fact that should be remembered the next time the supposed protector of children, Tim Loughton, seeks re-election. He had the power to challenge the abuse, but sat on his hands and did nothing.

Filtering through - by Richard... Saturday, March 17, 2012

Slowly, hesitantly, and with some diffidence, the hacks, high and low, are beginning to realise that something is wrong. First, there is Quentin Letts in The Spectator, charting the rise and rise of Jeremy Heywood, "the man who really runs the country".

Then there is the Great Charles Moore, who declares that the "civil servants are the masters now", complaining that "our democracy suffers" as a result.

Actually, they are both wrong. How can Heywood, or anyone in this administration be "in charge" when so much of government has been outsourced to Brussels? In truth, no one is actually in charge – and that is the problem. Government has become so amorphous, so diffuse, spread between so many different agencies – local, regional, national, and international – that there is no discernible chain of command. And, without that, there is no accountability and no one assumes responsibility when things go wrong, as they so often do.

It is a bit rich, however, for the likes of Moore, to complain about the loss of democracy. We have never really had one in this country.

The real complaint from these "above the liners" – one higher than the other – therefore, is that the old order (of which they are part) has been degraded. The previous structures no longer exist. Thus, the politicians of old, who held some semblance of power, are no more, and the old "establishment" no longer calls the shots.

But none of these people, neither Moore nor Letts, nor the rest of the bubble, have any real idea of what is going on. All they can understand is that they and their ilk no longer have it, and thus assume that it must have gone to the next in line, the civil servants. While Witterings from Witneycan see what is happening, these great sages are struggling.

As reality nevertheless begins to filter through, Letts does make one very pertinent observation: "Much though we mock the Greeks and Italians for being run by unelected technocrats", he writes, "can we truthfully say that we are any better?"

The answer, as they say, is in the negative. Not better … different, perhaps, but not better.

The making of a myth - by Richard...

What should have been a quick job this morning, to check a few facts about the Battle of Britain, turned out to be a marathon which has leached into the afternoon and involved much labour – hence keeping me away from the blog. Such are the fruits, however, that I thought I would share some of them with you.

What makes it worthwhile is the unexpected outcome, the finding of a review of a book published in 1945 by Guy Eden called a "Portrait of Churchill". The source of the review is the Worker, published in Brisbane on 29 October 1945, describing the book as "the latest and most fulsome of these panegyrics" that "purports to be a biography". "For far-fetched flights of fantasy", it adds, "it beats superman".

Although Winston Churchill is now out of office, the review continues, his barrackers are still busily engaged in building up legends of "Winnie the War-Winner". "Alone he did it", they cry. "He won the war single handed". Not since Bill Adams won the Battle of Waterloo all on his own, has so much been claimed for one man.

Most interestingly, deep within the review we are then told that the most impudent claim in Eden's book is that Churchill and his wife "worked out a plan" for giving Londoners safe and fairly comfortable air raid shelters in the railway tube stations.

This is entirely false, it says – as Douglas Reed (who was there at the time) points out in his book, "A Prophet at Home". The Chamberlain-Churchill Tory Government did nothing for the bombed Londoners beyond providing flimsy surface shelters.

We are then told that it was not until Labour Ministers entered the Government that "a plan was worked out" for providing two million bunks, and a system of booking them, in the tube stations. Two Labour Ministers — Herbert Morrison (Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security) and Miss Ellen Wilkinson — were responsible for the plan. All that Churchill had to do with the plan was approve it.

Still, in spite of the facts, the review concludes, the Churchill myths are being fostered and elaborated by interested parties of the Tory persuasion.

It will, it says, be Miss Wilkinson's duty to see that the true story of the war, and not the Tory fiction, is told in the British school text books; otherwise the rising generation will grow up in the belief that "Winnie the War-Winner" was a kind of demigod instead of a well-meaning old gentleman, rather self -conceited, and with a gift of bombast.

Clearly, Miss Wilkinson, who had been appointed education minister in the Attlee government, failed in her duty. The "Tory fiction" has become the received wisdom.

Remarkably though, Douglas Reed (latterly expunged from history for his "anti-Semitism") has his book, referred to in the review, published in its entirety on the internet and we have but have to go to pages 197 to 199 for the antidote to the Eden hagiography. Having explored the failure to furnish suitable shelters, and the "insuperable difficulties" in providing them, Reed tells us:

But nothing ever betrayed more vividly the total lack of understanding of the people's mind that prevailed in the haunts of officialdom. First and foremost, these harassed East Enders wanted to be quite safe, and they knew they could only find complete safety deep underground.

But apart from that, they wanted, if they were to take shelter at nights for months and years, to be able to sleep, and in those surface shelters the noise would not let you sleep. Apart from that again, they wanted, and had a right to, some minimum degree of comfort, and in these dark and narrow surface-dungeons, which the devil himself might have invented, there was no hope of any.

So, that day, we saw appalling sights. Though it was early morning, long queues of miserable people, clutching shapeless bundles, shivering in the rain, stood at the entrances to the underground stations, waiting for nightfall, when they would stream down into them.

The police, the world-famed London police ('Your police are marvellous!'), had been given no better task to do, in this, London's greatest ordeal since the Plague and the Great Fire, than to stop them from entering. But that was vain.

When night came the people bought the cheapest ticket they could and just stormed the stations. Nothing could have stopped them. Good, that the attempt was never more than half-heartedly made. The "insuperable difficulties" were quickly overcome.

Nothing survives in any of the official records that I have seen. But here again, we have confirmation of the accounts I record in The Many Not The Few that in the early days of the Blitz, police prevented people taking shelter in the Underground.

But what is also glossed over is that, when people were forced to make their own provision, in the absence of government planning, the conditions were appalling. Writes Reed, his book published in 1941:

For long enough, the scenes in these underground dens were beyond description by pen or portrayal by brush. A man might have put his hand over his eyes, rather than contemplate them. People lay huddled together, tiny children in their midst, on the platforms, under the railway arches, in the vaults. There was no food for them, unless some local priest militant foraged and found some and brought it to them. There was no heat or water. There was no place for them to relieve themselves in decency. There was no care for their health. Pestilence immediately began to crawl about and breed.

After the War, Churchill wrote in his own book, "Their Finest Hour", that he had been "deeply anxious about the life of the people in London". But not only do the War Cabinet minutes not support his claims, this review and the Reed book add to the already substantial evidence that the people of London were initially left to fend for themselves. "True, we were 'all in the front line' in this war", said Reed, "but the English front line had its first, second and third class compartments, like the English railways".

So it was then – and to a very great extent, so it is now. And government is not and never has been an organisation on which you can safely rely, any more than you can rely on the record telling you the truth of what happened, or is currently going on.

Robbing us blind - by Richard...

A total of £64 million was wasted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in its abortive attempt to get built a demonstration carbon-capture and storage (CCS) plant up and running.

The competition, says the National Audit Office(NAO) in its latest report (pictured right), was launched in 2007 with insufficient planning and recognition of the commercial risks.

Four companies were invited to compete for funds but, by last year, there was only one left, Iberdrola SA (IBE). Developers including BP Plc and EON had shelved their projects. Then, in October, the final bid was scrapped in as Iberdrola was unable to build its proposed Scottish plant within the budget or agree to the contract terms.

"In the context of value for money, developing new technologies is an inherently risky undertaking. Taking calculated risks is perfectly acceptable if those risks are managed effectively; but in this case DECC, and its predecessor, took too long to get to grips with the significant technical, commercial and regulatory risks involved", the NAO adds.

But no one has been fired. No one has resigned. No one has lost so much as a ha'penny from their pensions. All we get from the NAO is the weak-as-dishwater comment that DECC "must learn from the failure of this project".

Actually, by comparison with the Ministry of Defence – which wasted more than £100 million on theVector project alone, this is small beer. And, at least on this project, no one died. Furthermore, if the project had gone ahead, with a budget of £1 billion, so we would have lost much more. In a sense, we (the taxpayers) have got off lightly.

But this is not the end of it. Unfortunately, it is not only DECC which is incompetent. The NAO is as well. Gulled by the propaganda, it has failed to look into the technicalities of the contract and appreciate that CCS is not technically feasible. Thus, it has not understood that the real reason why the £1 billion contract did not go ahead was because it could not work.

All the NAO does, therefore, is bitch that "Four years down the road, commercial scale carbon capture and storage technology has still to be developed". It is now standing aside as DECC prepares to make another bid to become a major-league money waster alongside the MoD.

Then, what can you expect from Mr Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office. Paid a miserable salary of £210,000 per annum, the poor man is so close to the breadline that he obviously cannot do better, preoccupied as he is with working out how to make ends meet.

But, if this £64 million had been his money, and it had been the very last £64 million he had, would he have been so relaxed? Would our MPs, who so glibly approved this lunatic scheme have been so keen on it, had the funding come from their own pockets?

And there we have it. As long as these mad, reckless creatures can raid our pockets, and the supposedly independent auditor stands by and does little but whinge about the detail, and as long as there are no personal consequences for grand theft, it will continue.

This is your government. For sure, it has not killed anyone this time – for which we should be grateful. But it is still robbing us blind.