So what Larry? - by Richard... Thursday, March 22, 2012

So what Larry? - by Richard... Thursday, March 22, 2012

Well, so what if you think it's a "shocking budget from an unfair chancellor? You would probably think that of any budget produced by a Tory chancellor, much less one produced by little Georgie. The thing is, Larry, the real problems go far deeper. And somebody has to labour this, apart fromWitterings from Witney, who is doing an exceedingly good job.

The thing is Larry, I didn't vote for this administration – nobody did. It is a coalition formed after the election. And I certainly didn't vote for George Osborne - nor could I. Only those in his constituency got that opportunity … and only 37.5 percent of the electorate voted him in as an MP. He does not even have a majority in his own constituency.

As for the budget – I didn't ask for it, and was not consulted about it in advance – or at all. My approval has not been sought, and neither has anyone else's, outside parliament. On my behalf, supposedly, it will be challenged by my local MP – but I didn't vote for him either. Neither did over seventy-five percent of the electorate. He got his seat from 24.7 percent of the people on the register.

Even if I had voted for this man, though, he is on the wrong side, so his vote doesn't count … so my vote wouldn't have counted anyway. Even if he was on the "right" side, he (or maybe she) still would not be representing me. They would be obeying their whips, and voting through the budget on the nod.

So, it's like this Larry. We have a budget produced by a man who could not even command a majority of the electorate in his own constituency. He is appointed as chancellor, rather than elected by us to the post, as part of an administration no-one voted for.

And he has producing a budget that is now going to be imposed on everyone, without consultation , lacking specific or even implied consent, with which we are not allowed to disagree, on pain of administrative action or even jail.

It would seem that being "shocking" is the least of our problems. Thus, before we address your little concerns, Larry, could we just remind ourselves why it is we call our government democratic? Or perhaps Mr Jenkin could tell us?

COMMENT: "GROVELLERS" THREAD

Share

Print ready

I missed this - by Richard... Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Can you use water cannon if there is a hosepipe ban?

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

The grovellers - by Richard...

The rather pejorative nickname for the German Navy awarded by some newspapers during the early part of the Second World War was "the scuttlers", presumably after the sinking of the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919, and the then more recent fate of the Graf Spee.

By the same token, we need to call the British people "the grovellers", after their response to the preposterous little oik, George Osborne, the man masquerading as our chancellor.

There he goes, standing in the Commons, telling us how much money we are going to give him, so he can spend it on his chums and other wastrels. And instead of telling him to foxtrot oscar, we say, "yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir", doff our caps and give him the money.

At the very least, if he wants our money, he should ask for it – and say "please". We, on the other hand, should have the power to tell him to foxtrot all by himself. That is called Referism.

Currently, of course, we go through the charade of little Georgie asking parliament for the money. But, supposedly independent of the executive, it is stacked with Georgie's chums, who simply roll over and say, "yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir", doff their caps and give him the money.

In theory, if we don't like this, we can vote them out in a few years' time, and vote the other lot back in. In practice, we can vote in Labour, who will take even more money from us, or we can not quite vote the not-the-Tories in, in which case an unelected coalition will take even more money from us.

One can imagine, though, all those people who hold up their hands in horror at the prospect of mere people deciding on how much of their money the government should have. But then, John and many other kings held up their hands in horror at the idea of nobles and then parliament deciding on how much money they should get.

Now, instead of the divine right of kings, we have the divine right of parliament. Parliament has spawned an executive which has become the king. Lacking any clear division or separation of powers, there is no longer any realistic or effective check on its ambitions.

And that is the way it will remain as long as we, the grovellers, allow it. Yet there are more of us than there are of them. Why are we still doffing our caps?

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

A sense of irritation - by Richard...

Metropolitan Police War Diary

I've spent nearly nine years blogging, trawling the newspapers and other media sources. That is over 3,000 days, almost without interruption – although I admit to taking four days off for open heart surgery, and a couple when I was banged up in jail. I feel almost guilty for allowing such exhibitions of sloth.

Add to that, constant discussions to journalists, high and low, and interactions in many different ways, and it is fair to assert that one has learned a thing or two about the media, even more so when also when benefiting (if that is the right word) from a semi-detached position within the industry.

Unfortunately, one also learns a thing or two about the other side of that industry – the readers. And it is probably reasonable to assert that the collapse of quality journalism stems from the ever shrinking pool of people who are interested in it. Basically, the media produces tat because that is what people are interested in.

However, this piece is not a general lament about the media and its users – or, at least, it wasn't meant to be. That was not my mind when I started writing it.

What I actually wanted to do was impart news of a discovery, a very small one, of vanishingly little interest to the rest of humanity, but one of great importance to me – which says more about myself than I would care to admit.

The skill of journalism and now blogging - which, whether the MSM like it or not, is a branch of journalism – is to turn a collection of largely uninteresting facts, or even factoids, into something sufficiently engaging that the bulk of one's readers actually get to the end of a piece before switching off and moving elsewhere.

And so to the small discovery. This is that the National Archives is in the process of digitising its collection of microfilmed documents, and is making them freely available on-line. Only a very small proportion of the collection is so far accessible, but it can be found here.

One appreciates that this is indeed a trivial piece of information, one of limited value to most people, and most probably not at all news. It has been going on for some time, except that I hadn't noticed. That I have now done so makes it news to me, if no one else.

In a roundabout way, though, the tardiness partly explains the title of this piece. I am irritated with myself for not realising the collection was on-line. It contains a treasure which I could have used in the preparation of The Many Not the Few which would have added immeasurably to its quality.

This "treasure" is the Metropolitan Police War Diary for 1940 (other years are also available) - cover illustrated above left. And its particular value is to provide a primary source which proves that police and troops were deployed to stop people using tube stations during the Blitz. I am profoundly irritated with myself for not picking this up and using it as a source in my book.

Such, though, is by no means the full extent of my irritation. The very thing which motivated me to write the book in the first place was a greater irritation, building to a smouldering anger, that a part of our history – and one which helps define who and what we are as a nation – has been so badly told.

Entry for 10 September 1940

This is best illustrated by just one single page of my "treasure", the entry for 10 September, reproduced right (click to enlarge). Tucked in, under the report that Buckingham Palace had been damaged by bombing – on which the press was to dwell – is a stunning piece of news, which seems to have remained dormant for over seventy years.

In bland officialese, written in the neat handwriting of the age, is thus the legend that: "On evening of 9th (before the raid) some 5,000 persons attempted to rush the entrance of the new Tube Station at Bethnal Green (which was then still under construction) – order restored by Police and Home Guard".

Now, it is maybe the case that I am more interested than most in such details, but it seems to me that, even after the elapse of seven-tenths of a Century, the fact that "some 5,000 persons" stormed a tube station in a desperate attempt to seek shelter, and were seen off by police and armed troops (and yes, the Home Guard were armed), is something of a revelation.

Seen in the context of the time, this was the third day of the London Blitz, and while morale was officially described as "good" for the whole of London, it was the East End which had taken the hammering, where it was reported that there was "uneasiness and some bitterness in the East End, Southwark and Deptford areas".

Given what had most recently happened in the area, which I have charted on the Days of Gloryblog, it is not in any way an exaggeration to say that the situation was extremely fragile and could very easily have built into something far more dangerous for the authorities. Rebellion was in the air and even revolution was possible

Here now, we get to the core of my irritation, as virtually nothing of these desperate moments survives in the mainstream narrative. Despite having read hundreds of books on the period, I have seen nothing that even hints at the sheer scale of what was going on. And having 5,000 people rush an empty tube station, seeking shelter, is news in a big way. Yet history is silent on the event.

Of course, at the time, we had censorship, and one can image that the blue pencils were hard at work, excising any mention of this event. But historians are not censored, and neither are other commentators.

One such I mentioned in a piece last weekend. This was Guy Eden, a lobby correspondent during the war – the equivalent of Ben Brogan, Peter Oborne, and James Kirkup - who in 1945 wrote a hagiography of Churchill, in his book, "Portrait of Churchill".

Through the wonders of the internet, having first come across this book last Saturday, I now have a copy in my hands, and of the great events, as recorded in the police war diary, Eden tells us (p.62):

Somebody made a decision that angered the long-suffering, joking people of London. And London, angry, can be very difficult. It was decreed that the Underground stations should not be used for shelters. London took not the slightest notice of this rule. London will obey any order, however stringent, it thinks is "sense", well ignore any rule it is convinced is "rot". And the rule against using the Tube as shelters was emphatically in the "rot" class. Harassed officials reported that the crowds had taken matters into their own hands, were using the stations, permitted or not.

It is interesting to see from this that this political correspondent's grasp of events is no better than that of his successors for, to use Eden's own words, this report falls very much into the "rot" class.

But one should also note the use of the anonymous "somebody", who made the decision to exclude people from the Underground. That "somebody", as Guy Eden, lobby correspondent, must have known full well, was Home Secretary John Anderson who, as Eden must also have known, had the full confidence and support of his master, Winston Churchill.

What is terrifying, though, is how much of the Eden view of the world survives. Safely inside the bubble, he is "above the line" and the pastiche he has to offer is far more attractive than the dry, dull accounts in the official records.

The reason for this, most probably, is precisely that - the myth is more attractive than the reality. The soap opera is more engaging than the messy, complex and confusing events of the real world. And so people retreat to their fantasy version.

What thus remains to be asked, though, is whether this really matters. Should we actually care what actually happened seventy years ago or, for that matter, what is happening now?

The answer is the same for whatever period you might consider - then or now. To assert that it does not matter means that you must be content with a situation where most of what you are told, in your newspapers (and now on your radios and televisions), is only a fraction of what is actually going on.

You must be content that it is heavily biased to the point of distortion. You must also be content that these distortions are carried over into the history books, without correction, to become myths which bear very little relation to reality, yet which shape our perceptions and behaviour and influence how we see ourselves, and how others see us.

On the other hand, few with argue with the sentiment that information is power. And if you really do believe that your diet of distortion doesn't matter, then you must be content that others should, by their manipulations and distortions, control the flow of information and thereby retain their power over you.

And if you are so content, go and watch the budget speech, lap it up and believe it is real.

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

The fluffy budget show - by Richard...

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory coal gasification demonstration plant at the Rocky Mountain Test Facility near Hanna, Wyoming. This is part of the technology which will be used in the UK for the modern equivalent of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, wasting money faster than George Osborne can collect it.

Today, I am told, is Budget Day, when the preposterous George Osborne is going to tell us how our administration is going to screw us this year. There will be some changes around the margins, and some people might end up being slightly less screwed than they have been, while others will suffer more.

As such, the actual budget speech has largely become a media event, missing from which will be any serious indication that Osborne and his merry little men have any grip at all on our public finances. And those who need an illustration of this need look no further than the Proverbs 26:11type situation with carbon capture, where £1 billion of our money is poised to make its final nose-dive to oblivion.

This follows only too quickly the NAO Report which complains that £64 million has already been wasted on the modern equivalent of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers but, having already entertained one disaster, DECC is now preparing for a repeat.

However, this time, rather than see an attempt to retro-fit an the National Grid and gas services firm Petrofac teaming up with a US partner, Summit Power. The group is planning a new coal-fired power plant, named Caledonia Clean Energy Project, based at the Scottish port of Grangemouth. And this time, the project will rely on coal gasification.

In order to bid for our money, the plan is to use technology developed for the Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP), in which "syngas" is produced from coal. This is then further processed to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the latter being separated – pre-combustion, as far as I can gather – with the hydrogen then being used to power a turbine.

What makes one deeply suspicious is the paucity of data on energy losses for the system, compared with high-efficiency supercritical coal plants, which themselves could deliver up to 40 percent cuts in emissions, compared with existing plants – while needing no taxpayer subsidy.

Unfortunately, the only site at which that technology was on offer – Kingsnorth – is now to be closed down, leaving the Caledonia Clean Energy Project as the only game in town, when it comes to the continued use of coal. Over term, this is going to cost us countless billions, with a direct impact on our pockets far greater than anything the preposterous Osborne is going to do later today.

If the man masquerading as our chancellor really wanted to do something to kick-start the economy, he could dump the Climate Change Act. and all that goes with it. But he can't do that, any more than he can stop £1 billion being spent on this fatuous scheme.

Such is the nature of the media circus, though, and the triviality of its coverage – together with the administration's ability to set the agenda – that the news headlines today (and tomorrow) will be dominated by budget fluff, while our wealth pours down the drain virtually unrecorded.

And, hard though it is to believe, very few people will even notice, preferring as they do the soap opera to the cold wind of reality .

COMMENT THREAD