Political Understatement of the Last Four Decades

"Ceartainly education has not become the great leveller that many people, including me, believed it would be"

Professional bleeding-heart Martin Narey on the Today programme, responding to the Naughtie suggestion that 'the revamping of education in the Seventies has failed to to what it claimed it would do'. Naughtie can't quite bring himself to say the word 'comprehensive'.


He also suggested that 'we need to make sure that children from deprived backgrounds go to the best schools'. Well, Martin, if all of them go there they won't be the best schools any more. At the extreme, take ASBO Community College, serving the giant Chavbury Estate, and move all the kids to fee-paying St Goody Two-Shoes, while St Goody's get to go to the comp. They'll miss the great sports facilities but they'll still get impressive results, while the teachers wonder if they've died and gone to heaven, bar a few noble souls who miss the challenge.

Back at St Goody's staff turnover will have dramatically accelerated, the Apple Macs will be vanishing from the computer suites, and results will be up - but nowhere near ASBO's, which has suddenly got a waiting list.

A better idea would be to take the brightest and most hardworking kids (not always the same population) into the best schools. How can we find them ? I wouldn't allow the primary heads to nominate the kids - the scope for corruption (by well-off parents) would be immense. Tell you what - how about an exam ?

(A sad little note from the Wikipedia entry on grammar schools :

In July 1958 the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell formally abandoned the Tripartite system, calling for "grammar-school education for all". The party's fiercest opponent of the Grammar school was Gaitskell's protégé, Anthony Crosland.

Hugh Gaitskell was educated at Winchester and Oxford.
Anthony Crosland was educated at Highgate School and Oxford.

God protect the working class from their upper-class defenders !)

Now That's What I Call A Vespa

Did the Mods of the 60s and their pale imitators of the 80s know about this ?

The AMCA Troupes Aeról Portées Mle. 56 is a M20 75 mm recoilless rifle mounted on an Italian Vespa scooter used by the French Airborne Forces in Algeria and Indochina. Produced by ACMA, a licensed assembler of Vespas in France, it mounted an M20, a U.S.-made light anti-armor cannon which could be fired from the shoulder but still penetrate armour 100 mm thick. The recoil is counteracted by venting propellant gases out the rear of the weapon which eliminated the need for a mechanical recoil system or heavy mounts, which enabled the weapon to be fired within the Vespa frame. The weapon, ammo (attached to the side) and crew were dropped via parachute into action and the weapon could even be fired on the move.

I'm impressed. Any weaponry mounted on a BSA or Matchless of the period would have been subject to the frequent maintenance needs of the bike. A mean machine indeed. But the French ended by leaving both Indochina and Algeria.

"A People Who've Lost Their Land ..."

Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, talking to today's BBC 'Sunday' programme on why the MCB won't be asking Hamas to recognise the right to exist of the state of Israel :

"you see, it is they who have been dispossessed, I've not been dispossessed, it's the Palestinians who have been dispossessed - if they want to recognise Israel it must be a matter for them, I can't tell them - a people who've lost their land - this is what you should be doing"

Now I can sympathise with any people who've lost their land. Here are some pictures of :

"Birmingham grieves for Gaza"



"Manchester protests against Gaza killing"




"Preston protests against Gaza killing"













(and FWIW, I like many others am extremely uneasy about Israel's actions in Gaza. Disproportionate seems the only word. Not in terms of aims - it seems reasonable to want to stop people lobbing rockets at you, and the disparity between the arms of Hamas and those of the IDF isn't because Hamas are nice guys. Give Hamas IDF weaponry and they'd happily lob much bigger stuff into Israel and kill as many Jews as they could. I'm pleased Dimona is a decent (though not massive - Israel's a small country) distance from Gaza.

It's the tactics - destroying a several-storey building containing fifteen or twenty people to kill one occupant, for example, bad hat though he may be. How many dead non-fighters was that worth, exactly, and how do you do the maths ? However you do it, I think the answer should have been a lower one. I'm also perturbed by reports that an early target was domestic gas and electricity supply. How does that stop rocket launches ?)

(comments off for the usual reasons)

And With One Bound ....

Rafa Benitez turns every soccer neutral (as far as the title race is concerned I don't think my Baggies are quite capable of catching up) into a Liverpool supporter.

The Spaniard said that Ferguson and his staff's haranguing of match officials when they leave the bench at half-time was so severe that his side had resorted to "marking" members of the United bench and he advised Luiz Felipe Scolari to do the same when he arrives at Old Trafford tomorrow. "We know what happens every time we go to Old Trafford," Benitez said. "Mr Scolari needs to know so that maybe he can use zonal marking against the staff of United because they are always doing man to man with the referees when they go to the bench and especially at half-time. Other managers need to know this."

Benitez detailed four instances – against Hull City, Southampton last week, his own side last April and Portsmouth in the FA Cup last March – of what he sees as Ferguson's repeated attempts to influence referees, as well as football authorities with his criticism of scheduling.

Fergie's a funny chap. I keep hearing how his Govan roots make him a natural Labour donor, but that strikes me as the one publicly visible streak of sentimentality in an otherwise pretty ruthless and focused operator who's also clever enough to know when he's bitten off more than he can chew. After all, Labour are no longer the party of those grim but golden days, having spent the last fifty years increasing reliance on the state, rewarding irresponsibility and punishing self-reliance - none of which spring to mind as core Fergie values when you see the way he runs his teams. He's IMHO more likely to think that the Lord helps those who help themselves. I don't think a Fergie Prime Ministership would have a great deal of time for benefit culture, to take one example. If he could personally interview all claimants I think we'd see claims dropping by 80% - and the truly deserving 20% would get more.

But he does always seem to need to push the envelope just that little bit more, doesn't he ? I tell you this - I would love it - love it - if Liverpool win the league this season.

Ray Fisher

1974, and Laban's in a small Leeds theatre to see the George Brassens of Yorkshire. The supporting act walked onstage, a slender, crop-haired, androgynous slip of a thing with a beautiful, crisp Scots accent and a deal of self-possession. Then she started singing Scots ballads - and I sat spellbound. I may have mentioned that I love women's voices.

I've been a fan ever since, though I've only seen her live once more - in the late 80s in a Camden pub, supported IIRC by the late Willie Scott.

Well, it was in October that I wrote of :

The glorious Scots folk singer Ray Fisher - I can see I'll have to get "Pride of Glencoe" or "Mill O'Tifty's Annie" onto Youtube.

To my delight someone's beaten me to it. Thanks to wrongwayup, whoever he be, for Pride of Glencoe, from my favourite (and almost impossible to get hold of *) 'The Bonny Birdy', recorded with Carthy, Hutchings et al in 1972. I think the backing on this track is by Liz and Stefan Sobell.


P.S. Those who have trouble with the Labanic musical taste will know enough not to click through when I point out that my post on the unavailability of the legendary Mrs Mills' oeuvre no longer applies .




* The Bonny Birdy, along with a host of other goodies like Lal and Mike Waterson's "Bright Phoebus", was recorded on Bill Leader's Leader/Trailer label in the early 70s. Alas the company (or a successor) folded, and as I understand it the contracts had no clause by which rights reverted to the artist in the case of insolvency. According to Folkopedia :

In the 1980s the Leader catalogue was sold to another record company which then went into receivership. Subsequently sold to Celtic Music, the vast majority of Leader records have remained unobtainable since then, with only a handful of tracks re-released on CD.

Celtic Music is apparently owned by a couple of chaps called Dave Bulmer and Neil Sharpley, who are sitting on a what appears to be a small goldmine of classic folk material (although a depreciating one, as the target market grows older, the tapes decay and downloadable mp3s of their products appear all over the Internet), capable of being exploited with a laptop, CD duplicators and a bit of time to set up a direct sales website.

For some reason it appears they don't want to do it. Like an aged recluse in a gorgeous but uncared-for mansion who 'doesn't want strangers poking round the house', even if they're there to stop it collapsing, they're sitting on their treasures like a hen on a bad egg. Don't ask me why. Admittedly the market for many of these CDs isn't that large - but 1,000 copies of 'the Bonny Birdy' would be gone in a month or so once word got round.

The problem is not just that Laban can't buy the CDs. While the company won't issue them, the artists, who aren't as young as they used to be, won't get any money either. Some of them are now dead.

It makes no sense to me at all. Don't they want to make some money ?

Partly because of the non-availability of the music, but IMHO more because of the financial impact on the artists involved, a lot of people seem to hate their guts (I don't think a thread headed 'photo of Bulmer required' is necessarily from a fan). I now understand why, when I mailed Ray Fisher a few years back to ask where I could buy her music, I was directed to Celtic Music but couldn't find that any was for sale. She must get fed up with people asking. Imagine having people wanting to buy your music, but the owners won't sell any !

Altogether a sad and inexplicable tale, and a depressing one. Because the mp3s are out there. When everyone who would have bought the CD has a download, Celtic Music won't make any money - and worse, neither will the artists.

Meteor

As I scraped the ice off the car windscreen at 6.48 or thereabouts I saw what appeared to be a firework rocket in the northern sky, travelling west. As it faded out in sparks I realised it was a meteor - one of the biggest I've seen in a long time.

Got home, quick google of the news - well, the Quadrantids should have been last weekend. But it was from the right direction.

Maybe a stray Quadrantid took out that wind turbine last weekend.

"80% of ethnic minorities employed in public sector"

And "17% of people going into higher education are ethnic minority".

So sayeth Sandra Kerr, interviewed on yesterdays Today programme (at ten to seven, so not archived - I have an mp3).

Before joining Race for Opportunity, Sandra worked in the Cabinet Office advising Cabinet Ministers on diversity and policies on race, disability, gender, and work life balance across Whitehall. Prior to this she worked for the Department of Work and Pensions delivering frontline services to 33,000 customers whilst managing a team of 140 staff over a 5 year period. She also spent 4 years as a personal development trainer and IT skills trainer.

In her spare time, Sandra manages to work as a part-time consultant team adviser for the Work Foundation’s Premiere Leadership Programmes which is for senior leaders working in the public and private sector.

You amaze me.

I'm not going to go into the subject of her latest campaign (2m pdf file), which as presented is basically "not enough black faces in boardrooms", as I haven't digested the report - and when asked for figures by Evan Davis on the Today programme yesterday (at ten to seven - the programme is on Iplayer, shortly to be replaced by today's - the BBC only archives the seven to nine segment) she said 'it differs' - and apparently it's growing, but not as fast as the ethnic minority population is !

What struck me was

a) her remark about the ethnic minority percentage in higher education (17%), which is congruent with the 23% of ethnic minorities in English primary schools, although I'm pretty certain the schools figure is for all minorities, whereas Sandra's only concerned about dark-skinned ones. I'm pretty sure some minority groups (Chinese, Jews, Parsees, Jains spring to mind) do rather well in business.

b) her throwaway statement that 80% of ethnic minorities are employed by the state. This seems an enormously large percentage. What happened to all these hard-working chaps of whom private employers are in such desperate need ? Perhaps the racist state is discriminating against the natives in employment - without the hard figures it's hard to tell. It would be worth a look. I wonder where she got that number from ?

The whole thing falls into the standard mode of liberal campaigning, viz :

i) tax everyone
ii) recycle the tax to favoured pressure groups (see the list of sponsors for Ms Kerr's pressure group)
iii) produce report which is amplified by state-owned (BBC) and state-sponsored (Guardian) media.
iv) et voila ! Thus minority views get majority cash - as long as they're the right views.

Such techniques eliminate all the hassly bits of campaigning, like finding people who agree with you, getting them involved and getting them to put their hands in their pockets. Like so many other things, political activism has been contracted out by the State to its preferred suppliers.


Elsewhere, unbelievably, the natives are still fleeing London faster than incomers arrive :

Almost 1.8 million people have moved to London from abroad over the last decade, new figures revealed today. However the city proved less popular with British residents, and lost the largest number of people through internal migration of any area in the UK.

The Bank of Scotland research, published today, showed that between 1998 and 2007 nearly 2 million people moved out of the capital to other parts of Britain, while 1.6 million moved to it. This two million was equivalent to more than a quarter (26%) of the city's population in 2007. London was the only region of the UK to experience a net population loss, which was 344,558.
However, the capital's population was boosted over the 10 years to 2007 thanks to international immigration. London experienced by far the biggest level of net international migration, with almost 1.8 million more people moving to London from abroad than have moved from the capital to live outside the UK. However over that decade deaths in the city and internal migration from London meant that the capital's population rose by only 370,000.

The South East of England was the most popular region for people to move to from elsewhere in the UK, leading to a net increase of 550,889. More than 2.2 million people moved to the area, while almost 1.7 million left. The South West recorded the second highest level of net internal migration, gaining 514,511 people. Northern Ireland gained 10,681 residents through internal migration. The North East and North West were the only UK regions to see an overall decline in their population, losing 26,000 and 27,000 respectively.

Martin Ellis, Bank of Scotland Chief Economist, said: "There have been significant population movements across the UK over the past ten years. Regions in southern England saw the largest gain from internal migration with the South East proving the most popular region for people to move to from elsewhere in the UK."

Internal migration has boosted Scotland's population by 157,757. Between 1998 and 2007 the report showed that 542,524 people moved to Scotland from other regions of the UK, while only 384,767 left.

The report was based on data sourced from the 2008 Population Trends published by the Office for National Statistics.

Kevin Myers noticed that last time he was there :

What most struck me while watching BBC television news reports of the Christmas sales in the West End of London, was firstly obvious, and secondly, it was something that no-one with the BBC would ever have remarked on. It was this. The shoppers -- and there were thousands of them -- were overwhelmingly of Asian or African origin. In the vast throngs of faces, there was barely a Caucasian face to be seen; and when there was, of course, that was no guarantee that it was British.

Yazza gives us her own idiosyncratic take on Hazel Blears' tears for the poor whites.

A new government report finds that they feel "betrayed" and abandoned. Ruined by "ethnic minorities" they cry into their antimacassars and threaten to vote for fascists. The British working classes include people of every shade. But only white grievances matter. Nobody seeks to find out what life is like for the incomers living in the fog of nativist bitterness.

Antimacassars ? When did you last see one of those in a native household ?

Government Continues To Surprise

Blogging's light - too much work, alas. I'm too busy earning a living to make any money, as the saying goes.

I think almost every day that our rulers can't get any more despicable. Then I pick up the paper.

Hundreds of bail hostels are being opened in residential neighbourhoods without public consultation as part of moves to ease jail overcrowding.

People living next door to properties earmarked for suspected criminals and prisoners released early from jail are only told when the premises are about to take their first inhabitants.

Since the privately run hostels will not have live-in staff, neighbours are given a number to phone in the event of problems, according to a document leaked to The Times. Local councils will only be consulted on the “suitability” of a building to house up to five ex-prisoners and suspects granted bail.

I see. At least you find out about the new traveller camp. (Resistance is useless)



I see the government have officially denied reports that they're printing money. So it is true then. Obviously you can't call it printing money, with its resonances of Weimar and Zimbabwe. "Quantitative easing" is the approved expression. "Easing" is so much gentler a word than "printing".

So those on fixed incomes, already stuffed by low interest rates if they have investments, are simultaneously going to see their pensions eroded by inflation. Look at the BBC's example of Mr Routledge - a 77-year old bloated plutocrat with no less then £15,000 of savings.

Since a heart complaint forced him to take early retirement from his job with BOC, Mr Routledge has received a company pension - now £96 a month - on top of the couple's combined weekly state pensions totalling £150.

They receive housing and council tax benefit but lose out on the full amount because of the very savings they put aside to fund their retirement.

A couple with less than £16,000 in the bank qualify for the benefits and can hold £6,000 in savings without affecting their payments.

But for every £500 they have saved over that amount, the authorities assume they earn £1 per week in "tariff income" and reduce the benefit payments accordingly.

The Routledges' tariff income is calculated at £18 per week, or £936 per year.

But with their interest payments falling well short of covering this, Mr Routledge said it has effectively left them hundreds of pounds a year worse off.

In other words, the Government is assuming (for benefit-slashing purposes) a 10% return on the £9K of their savings over the £6K limit. It's grotesque. They're being punished for their attempts at self-reliance.

Roger Bootle was on the Today programme this morning saying 'nobody is worrying about inflation'. I see a new capitalist myth in embryo here. For the last 20 years all economics correspondents presented rising house prices as indubitably and self-evidently a Good Thing - apparently we talked of nothing else at "our dinner parties". It was only early last year that someone actually organised a poll which reported that no, people didn't see it as a good thing. Not surprising really, given that no one on a low or even average income could afford a house any more. What the myth screened was a slow-motion asset transfer of the housing stock to the wealthy.

Looks like the 'nobody is worrying about inflation' myth will attempt to cover the slow-motion destruction of private pension assets. After all, they've already been destroyed quite successfully at the front-end, the paying in end. Where are the final salary schemes of only eleven years ago ? Now it's time to have a go at the back end, at the people already receiving pensions.

(And is inflation that low ? Energy prices, council tax - the big hits on the fixed-income budget ? I don't think my council tax is likely to decrease - do you ?)

Who profits ? Well, if you have enough money, in such an environment working to preserve it is pretty much a full-time job. Hence my point at the front of this post about being too busy working to make any money. Those with a lot, and the time to shuffle it around, should make hay even in this economic climate. It's Mr Average who'll be stuffed.

Harry Robinson

Blognor Regis tells me that the latest Maynards wine gums ad features the magnificent "Hoots Mon", the 1958 classic by Lord Rockingham's XI.

Lord Rockingham's band were the creation of a son of Elgin, one Henry Robertson aka Harry Robinson, whose full life included marrying the aristocratic The Hon Myrtle ("Ziki") Olive Felix Arbuthnot, 11th Baroness Wharton (producing four children including the 12th Baron - it also makes him a distant relation of the Guardian's ultra-left Felicity Arbuthnot), music for most of the Hammer horror films and the fine string arrangements for Sandy Denny (on her 'North Star Grassman, 'Old Fashioned Waltz' and 'Rendevous' albums) and the late Nick Drake.

None of his arrangements for Sandy Denny are on Youtube, alas. Maybe I'll put a lo-fi version of 'Carnival' or 'All Our Days' up one of these days.

Fortunately Nick Drake's 'River Man' is. And it's gorgeous. Voice, lyrics, guitar, strings. As near to perfection as a song can get.

Labour Boost For British Industry

The vitally important gambling industry, that is. Those of you who actually make things can swallow the latest National Insurance increase.

Gamblers will be able to bet more and win bigger prizes on slot machines in pubs, clubs and amusement arcades after successful lobbying of the Government by the gaming industry.

Prizes will double from £35 to £70 and the maximum stake will rise from 50p to £1, the second rise in two years, under the plan authorised by Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary.

The relaxation of gambling rules is expected to provide a boost to the industry in the downturn by generating an extra 20 per cent in revenue. The Treasury will also benefit from an additional £27million a year in VAT. However, critics fear that it will increase levels of gambling addiction.

Ministers were originally going to raise the maximum stake to 60p and the prize limit to £60 but ministers were told by the gambling industry that this would not be enough to reinvigorate the market.

Funny. Not every industry can tell the Government what they want and expect to get it.

There were questions last night about the morality of encouraging people to gamble more during a recession.

It must be that old-fashioned son-of-the-manse Old Labour morality I hear so much about these days. I didn't think it possible to despise this lot any more, but they retain the capacity to surprise. I wonder how the payback money's being routed to Party funds ?

The Bad News Is ...

The police may be hacking your network without a warrant.

The good news is - well, let's hope they've outsourced the project to a large IT consultancy, in which case it will go in five years late, 300% over budget, and have lost 80% of the envisaged functionality - you know, all the features which sold it to the government in the first place (on that somewhat hazy consultancy-funded 'evaluation week' held on a private estate with hot and cold running women) .

According to a Times commenter IPCop, TrueCrypt, PGP are the things you need to ward off the baddies. Trouble is that for many of us, it's all a bit of a hassle.

More Labour Sleaze

I don't know why Labour want legislation to facilitate State (i.e. taxpayer) funding of political parties. They seem to be doing quite nicely as it is.

“Taxpayers’ money has been recycled into the coffers of the Labour party through a children’s charity,” said Nick Hurd, shadow charities minister. “It is very disappointing that the truth is having to be dragged out of the charity and the government bit by bit.”

Labour has already returned £15,000 to the charity. It said this weekend that it was “in the process” of returning the rest of the charity cash.

Catz Club , which has received £200,000 of lottery funding and a £1.3m loan from a Cabinet Office fund, first handed Labour £15,000 in the summer of 2007 for a “platinum” table at the Wembley function. A large chunk of its government loan was written off in March 2008.

Last year it again paid Labour £15,000 for the party’s sports dinner at Wembley. The charity has told the Charity Commission that it paid to attend the event to “lobby” politicians for funding for after-school childcare facilities. Out of total payments of £30,000, only £7,500 was declared by Labour as a donation.

One of the former trustees of the charity is Margaret McDonagh, a former general secretary of the Labour party, who stepped down from Catz Club in April 2006. Amanda Delew, who helped Lord Levy to raise funds for Labour, worked as a consultant for the charity until May last year.

The Charity Commission has now launched an investigation into the charity. It has already published a critical report on the second dinner in 2008. But it discovered only recently that the other dinner donation had been made in 2007. Both Catz Club and the Labour party had failed to disclose the payment.

Catz Club, which operates as Schoolfriendetc, was registered with the Charity Commission in 2004 and runs about 100 breakfast, after-school and holiday clubs catering for about 25,000 children.

As I said a long time ago :

You don't think the student union guys who made these state-funded parties possible were going to stop when they went into politics or local government and got access to some real money, do you ? One of the things I really wish Civitas would devote a researcher to for a few months is the enormous taxpayer subsidy to the cultural Left. You could start with the Guardian and BBC.

Charities are a favourite way of laundering taxpayer money to the Left.

What ?

At first this looked insane :

A teenage golfer who has represented Wales has been sentenced to eight months youth custody for possessing an imitation firearm. Mold Crown Court heard police were called after Keith Torrence was seen in a car holding what looked like a gun.

The weapon turned out to be cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun.

Torrence, 19, from Wrexham, who has represented Wales both at home and abroad, admitted affray and possessing an imitation firearm in public. The court heard how members of the public and staff at shops in Wrexham town centre became concerned when they saw Torrence sitting in his car, holding the "gun" one afternoon last summer.

Another adult and children were in the back of the vehicle. A witness in a cake shop told police how he realised that he had been seen - and seemed to move the pistol around even more. Another witness heard someone in the car telling him to stop it because he was frightening the children.

What ? Waving a toy gun around inside a car gets you eight months ? Thank heavens sentencing was lighter in the long gone days when my brother and I were waving these around Redcar. What would have happened had he one of these ?

But it seems the BBC are, not for the first time, a little light on the actualite.

Judge John Rogers QC told him the possession of a firearm, whether real or not, caused fear and distress among those who saw it.

Torrence had caused such distress members of the public called the police, he said.

A custodial sentence was inevitable and he had considered whether it could be suspended.

But he had committed the offence while subject to a community sentence for affray, and the day after his arrest for the imitation firearm he had been involved in an offence of battery.

“It is quite inappropriate now for me to again impose a sentence which does not involve immediate custody,” he said.

The affray conviction was his third and he was supposedly serving a sentence' "in the community". While I doubt he'd have gone down but for the 'gun', it looks more like it was the straw that broke the judge's back.


(and another story from the Daily Post - showing journalistic invention at its best :

Shockingly, when the door of an industrial freezer was opened in the basement of Llandudno’s Sakura Japanese and Korean restaurant, officers found the sleeping quarters of the Sakura’s chef – an illegal immigrant from China.

They opened the door and found him ? Very shocking, because :

Officers were amazed to see his bed laid out inside the industrial freezer with its door removed.

)

A Few Bits of Wrapping Paper From The Curate's Bedroom Floor

A happy, secure and prosperous New Year to you, although my head tells me it's more likely to be an 'interesting' one.

Just a few stories that caught the eye but no time to blog thereon :

The policy of fighting 'child poverty' by throwing extra benefits at low-income 'families' is certainly having an effect - as the least-educated mothers opt for more children.

The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45.

They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible.

The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the "low education group", equivalent to an extra 45,000 births compared with 670,000 across Britain as a whole.

Overall there has been a steady rise in the birth rate since 2001, and although some of this is down to higher fertility among immigrants, even among women born in the UK it has risen from 1.68 births per woman in 2004 to 1.79 last year.

Well, even 'women born in the UK' will increasingly be the daughters of migrants. I'd love to see a geographic or ethnic split for the figures. We know already that the largest number of births are in the areas with the largest numbers of immigrants, and that the most educated women have fewest babies. This latter trend appears to have been reinforced by Labour's reforms. The full report (pdf) is here.

Surprise surprise. The massed ranks of Guardianistas in the Probation 'Service', as well as other liberal do-gooders, don't like the Government's latest vote-grabbing scheme (a scheme I agree with, while having no illusions about what's driving it).

Plans to make criminals wear high-visibility jackets while doing community punishments face being undermined by a probation service “institutionally on the side of offenders”, the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser said.

Louise Casey said that she was afraid it would use health and safety reasons as an excuse for offenders not to wear the jackets, which will bear the words “Community Payback”. She said that it was a “no-brainer” to make offenders wear them, because they showed the public that there were consequences for criminals who were given non-custodial sentences. She said also that she wanted leaflets put through letterboxes to tell people the outcome of crimes in their area.

Ms Casey told The Times that she was astonished at the level of opposition within the probation service to the jackets idea. “[The plan] will have to be driven very, very hard, but this is just the beginning to opening up the criminal justice system. I think the other thing that will meet huge resistance is sharing information about what happens to criminals.”

She added that there was a huge gap in providing information to neighbourhoods about what had happened to suspects taken to court and the punishments handed down. If people were told more about what had happened in the courts, they would have more faith in the criminal justice system.

I didn't know HMG had tweaked the law a few years back to make it legal for bailiffs to break into your house. Where the hell were the Tories ?

Now they want the bailiffs to be able to beat you up as well.

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog.

From last year - a Muslim convert to Christianity gets full police support ...

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.

Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.

A blog wholly devoted to the great Dalrymple. He is published in so many places it's hard to keep track. The Skeptical Doctor is the place which does all the work, and so I forgive the American spelling.

Britons once had the right to bear arms just as did Americans. How did it disappear ?

In a salami stylee - a slice at a time. "All the way down the slippery slope" follows the history.

It's not just the jobs that Poles flock to the UK for. While our electronics and space manufacturing sectors may not be too hot (when did anyone last buy an item of consumer electronics made in the UK ?) our thriving abortion industry is a (admittedly tax-subsidised) world leader.

Ten thousand Polish women had abortions in Britain last year, it has been reported, in procedures which are thought to have cost the NHS between £5million and £10m.

Thousands of the women are thought to have come to Britain specifically for the procedure, which is illegal in Poland.

People coming to Britain as temporary workers are given a National Insurance number, which allows them to register with a doctor and have NHS treatment.

Britain is thought to be a particularly popular destination as terminations can be carried out as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy. In several other EU countries, abortions can not be carried out after 12 weeks.

A pill given to women under nine weeks pregnant costs the NHS about £500 while an operation necessary for those further into pregnancy costs about £1,600 including after-care.

Magistrate quits because "he recently jailed an offender for six months but saw him walking about the town just six weeks later".

Dr Soper said: 'My greatest frustration and that of my colleagues is the very early release of prisoners.'

He said virtually all offenders are released automatically halfway through their sentences, while emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding means many have another 18 days knocked off their sentences. Yet the judges and magistrates who heard their cases have no say over their early release.

Dr Soper said magistrates considered 'very hard' how to punish criminals, and added: 'It is frustrating when that careful thought seems to be undermined. It has certainly reduced my confidence in the system.'

Community service and unpaid work have been trumpeted by ministers as punishments to help ease jail overcrowding, but Dr Soper said his own research locally showed only 60-65 per cent of offenders bothered to turn up.

Police were increasingly preferring to deal with offenders through cautions and on-the-spot fines rather than charging them and sending them to court, he said - undermining the principle of public and media scrutiny of justice.

Dr Soper said: 'It is not just minor cases they deal with - theft and violence are included and this court recently had a violent offender who had previously been cautioned by the police for causing grievous bodily harm.'

In his years as a JP, Dr Soper said, the number of courts in West Suffolk had dropped from six to three - and will soon be cut to just one.

'The idea of local justice, one of the strengths of the system, is disappearing fast,' he said.

'Now I hear that the courts budget is to be cut further, so what next?'

Blimey. When Micael Portillo, who lost his political stomach in 1997 and has since reinvented himself as touchy-feely Mr Nice Guy, says "Britain has lost the stomach for a fight" I think we should take notice.

It raises questions about the stamina of our nation and the resolve of our political class. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that Britain, with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers and the latest generation of fighter-bombers, is incapable of securing a medium-size conurbation. Making Basra safe was an essential part of the overall strategy; having committed ourselves to our allies we let them down.

The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.

But be fair. One of the strange contradictions of NuLabs regime is the willingness to upset Muslims overseas while bending over backwards to avoid upsetting them in the UK (apart from the said overseas upsets). The retreat from Basra would at least be a mark of consistency, of bringing foreign policy into craven line with domestic, were it not for the fact that the withdrawal is almost certainly aimed at facilitating an additional troop movement into Afghanistan. Our boys will go from being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Iraq, to being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Afghanistan - all so that little Nooria can go to school.

Madness

"Way-oy,
too much madness upon the land,
I've got to wonder,
if it's because the times so hard,
yes I've got to wonder
if it 'cause of too much drinking
or it 'cause of too much smoking,
I don't know
I want to know ...

Most of this madness
comes from the wickedness
of our own people ..."

In 1976 the Mighty Maytones were singing this about Jamaica. Admittedly there's a fair amount of wickedness about today that doesn't come from 'our own people', but the natives are doing their bit to make the song a lot more applicable to the UK than it was in those days ...

(if you liked that, try Owen Gray's 'Bongo Natty', of similar vintage. Unfortunately the youtube poster, a chap called wikidub, has seen fit to improve it with random gunshots and other effects - can't be helped).

Youtube and the internet are wonderful things. I love Bulgarian singing, I love pipe music (be it Highland, Border or Irish) . But I had no idea what absolutely wonderful, haunting pipe music they had over there. Try this. Suddenly you realise where a lot of the little trills and inflections in Bulgarian singing come from. Gorgeous.

Can't work out if this is corny or beautiful - perhaps it's both. Inga and Anush Arshakyan are surely the Clannad of the South Caucasus. But where else other then the web would you get an Armenian lullaby - with dancing - at short notice ?

And for anyone who liked the medieval Sinfonye music, here's head honchette Stevie Wishart producing some more modern sounds - in her electronic bondage outfit.



(Apologies for the lack of serious posting when there's so much serious/unpleasant stuff happening- apart from the usual Christmas shenanigans, I've been decorating a room. "Just" got the flooring to do tomorrow.)

What Does it Say ...

- about the Level of Debate on Domestic Violence in This Country...

... that I have just watched the most sensitive and informed treatment of abusive relationships I have ever seen on British television, and it was in Wallace and Grommit?

Fluffles was the archetypal battered partner, and Paella the archetypal abuser. It was harrowing ...

Laban's immediate and ungallant thought was that her Significant Other needs to keep an eye on the sherry bottle. Has anyone else any ideas about What It Says ? After all, if she's right, the Organisation Formerly Known as Dr Barnardo's Homes has just frittered away a lot of the punters dosh on expensive representations of Real Domestic Violence as envisaged by Bartle Bogle Hegarty's finest - when it should have been giving us Mr Park's gentle allegories.


(I must admit to preferring Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which I'd not seen before. Paella was too obviously a villain from the off. But will the lovely Fluffles become a fixture in the W/G menage ? It occurs to me that Gromit is a hero in the Gary Cooper mould ..)

Belated Christmas Joy To You All

A couple of years back I mentioned this lovely Marian hymn. My daughter put this together with the freebie XP movie maker and Google, Vivien Ellis sings beautifully - Gloria in excelsis !

(post backdated to the appropriate day - at the time I was just too busy !)

Tariffic !

The trade barriers are starting to go up. While the company formerly known as British Steel, now Indian-owned, faces 30% production cuts, India is raising steel tariffs to protect its domestic production capacity. At the recent G20 meeting, participants swore to uphold free trade - then went home and raised duties on steel (India) and cars (Russia - a decision which provoked protests).

The Economist is distressed.

Tariff increases may be the protectionist’s barrier of choice, despite limits agreed by members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This is because in the past decade many countries have unilaterally cut tariffs to well below those limits. They have plenty of room to raise them without breaking any rules.

If all countries were to raise tariffs to the maximum allowed, the average global rate of duty would be doubled, according to Antoine Bouet and David Laborde of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC. The effect could shrink global trade by 7.7%.

China has announced tax rebates for its favoured exporters, as well as pegging its currency at what America sees as an unrealistically low level. In many countries there's pressure for more import duties.

“Post-imposition of the duty, the prices for imported zinc would go up, thereby inclining buyers to opt for domestic variants,” an official of a zinc company said.

He seems to have grasped the concept pretty well. The Economist is reminded of the 1930s and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. In fact, the increases weren't that hefty compared with the already-existing tariffs. But :

Smoot-Hawley did most harm by souring trade relations with other countries.

And that's the point. America was then the great world exporter. By provoking retaliatory tariffs, she cut off her nose to spite her face, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, again in Cassandra mode, explains :

There has been much talk lately of America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which set off the protectionist dominoes in 1930. It is usually invoked by free traders to make the wrong point. The relevant message of Smoot-Hawley is that America was then the big exporter, playing the China role. By resorting to tariffs, it set off retaliation, and was the biggest victim of its own folly.

Britain and the Dominions retreated into Imperial Preference. Other countries joined. This became the "growth bloc" of the 1930s, free from the deflation constraints of the Gold Standard. High tariffs stopped the stimulus leaking out.

It was a successful strategy - given the awful alternatives - and was the key reason why Britain's economy contracted by just 5pc during the Depression, against 15pc for France, and 30pc for the US.

Could we see such a closed "growth bloc" emerging now, this time led by the US, entailing a massive rupture of world's trading system? Perhaps.

Interesting to see that the 1930s depression in the UK was apparently nowhere nearly as bad as in the US, thanks to Imperial Preference - the policy of making the British Empire as nearly as possible a free-trade zone. Some remnants of Imperial Preference - like the favourable UK import regime for Caribbean bananas - only vanished relatively recently. Not that depression was a picnic for those affected - my grandfather was unemployed for pretty much the whole of the 1930s, with occasional labouring work on Government relief schemes, and his daughter went to school with cardboard in her shoes.

We have no Empire any more, so that avenue is closed to us - and America is not the world's exporter any more, so the lessons of Smoot-Hawley don't necessarily apply to them either.

Protection can work pretty well for a nation with a devastated economy and infrastructure wishing to rebuild. Japan and Korea did pretty well out of it - can you think of any candidates closer to home ? The South African and Rhodesian economies under the impact of sanctions did not collapse, but substituted imports and became self-sufficient.


I must admit I had M. Sarkozy down as a Brit-style price-of-everything sell-the-grandmother merchant. Maybe not so, although he's probably just playing to the gallery :

"We cannot be the only continent in the world that does not support its builders and manufacturers. We have to help our industrial infrastructure," Sarkozy told the assembly.

"Otherwise we are going to see an industrial wasteland."

What do you mean "are going to see" ? M. Sarkozy obviously hasn't taken a train between Birmingham and Wolverhampton or Sheffield and Leeds.

Pity The Poor Banker

Robert Peston reports Bank of England deputy chairman John Gieve as follows :

"If we'd used interest rates to try and address this asset-price credit growth, we would have been holding down the level of activity elsewhere in the economy, in manufacturing, in other services, holding down the level of employment at a time when consumer price inflation and earnings were stable and reasonably low. And people would have said, you know, 'this is a wilful reduction in the prosperity of the country'."

In other words, they feared the political reaction to what they knew was the right thing to do, so they didn't do it.

So much for the political independence of the BoE, for which Chancellor Brown was given so much credit, and which seems to have left him with the power while passing the responsibility to the BoE.

And the kindest expression for the BoE personnel involved would be that they "fell below the level of events".

It's not "that the Bank of England does not possess the proper tools for dealing with incipient booms in assets and lending". It's that it doesn't possess the proper bankers. John Gieve sounds like one of those chaps who would have trundled through less interesting times without trace. Instead he seems to have a CV covered in red ink and blots.

BoE website :

Sir John Gieve was appointed Deputy Governor in January 2006. In addition to his membership of the Monetary Policy Committee, he has specific responsibility for the Bank's Financial Stability work ..

That's unfortunate. Financial stability seems in short supply ...

He oversaw one Home Office shambles :

Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor General wrote

To inform Parliament that the Home Office has not met the statutory reporting timetable in respect of its 2004-05 resource accounts;

[...]

I cannot form an opinion on the truth and fairness of the Home Office financial statements for 2004-05

[...]

That is as strong a condemnation of incompetent financial management as any auditor is likely to utter.

It is as astonishing as it is unacceptable, that a major Central Government Department like the Home Office cannot be trusted to account for the money it spends on our behalf.

If a private sector organisation had mismanged its financial affairs as badly as this, then the people in charge would be out of a job forthwith.

Will the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, whom in theory bears resposibility for this David Blunkett legacy, have the honour to resign ?

What about the "Sir Humphrey" , the Permanent Secretary and therfore the Accounting Officer of the Home Department at the time. i.e. Sir John Gieve.

Sir John is now the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, with a vote on the level of the Bank of England's official Interest Rates, which affect the entire UK economy !

And another :

Last week the 56-year-old career civil servant returned to Westminster for a grilling by the Home Affairs Select Committee about why more than 1,000 prisoners were not even considered for deportation after serving their jail sentences. "There were failings in the handling of foreign prisoners which I regret," Gieve told the committee. "I am not trying to excuse the inexcusable."

Gieve has also been criticised over the running of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and his failure to give a full account of how the nanny of Kimberly Quinn, David Blunkett's former lover, was given a visa.

In recent weeks, the Home Office has come under fire from several corners. Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, called the department "dysfunctional", while Clarke's successor, John Reid, recently judged it "not fit for purpose".

You have to be impressed with a chap who can preside over so much disaster and is still prepared to share his wisdom with us on prime time TV (tonight's Panorama). What's Hebrew for 'chutzpah' again ?

To be fair to Gieve and his colleagues, house prices were roaring ahead long before 2006. It was around 2005 that I started to get unsolicited invites to buy-to-let seminars at snazzy hotels, one of the signs that the market is heading for a peak. And doing the right thing would probably have cost the members of the Monetary Policy Committee their jobs. Instead it'll cost ours.

Gods of the Market Place

In my Amazon post I got comments from people who seemed to think I was a disciple of free markets. Up to a point, I am. As a general principle, free markets seem a pretty good way of 'making us better off' - although that phrase covers a multitude of sins and ideas - what exactly is 'better off' ?

But only up to a point. People are not always rational. What JFC Fuller called the myth of the Heroic Man is to a greater or lesser extent always in conflict with the myth of the Economic Man. Neither myth is terribly healthy, as we're not all one thing nor all the other.

Unfortunately both major UK parties are full subscribers to the myth of Britons as Economic Men.

Labour see that 'you are what you have' - and it doesn't matter how you got it. Hence the idea that being poor is somehow in itself a stigma and disgrace - to be removed by state transfers of cash. Pretty much the direct opposite of their founding beliefs, that an honest working man, no matter how poor, could - and should - be able to look anyone in the eye. But it's a long time since Labour was the party of the honest working man.

Tories see that 'you are what you make' - and it doesn't matter how you make it. Wasn't David Cameron's previous existence spent doing PR for upmarket vertical drinking establishments ?

I'm more of Martin Kelly's mind (he's quoting here) :

"(Economics) has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives."

Which, as he says, is how we end up with Billy Aitchison and Sonny Devlin.

It's not one or the other, it's more or less. Don't forget Heroic Man, don't forget Original Sin and don't forget Original Damn Foolishness - the unwise decisions of clever men are likely to impact us much more then the unwisdom of the stupid, because clever men will be in positions to make decisions which affect us all. Vortigern thought he was maximising his utility when he hired Hengist and Horsa, but it turned out they had their own ideas about utility.

The worshippers of the Gods of the Market Place should ponder the end that attended Gabriel Oak's dog George, shot in "another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise".

Trouble is, we may by then have suffered the fate of his sheep !