Imaginative Judge

David Wood, sitting at Newcastle Crown Court, on the conviction of two men for selling the stolen Sunderland war memorial plaque, which commemorates Sunderland’s Second World War victims who died when the city was bombed, to a scrap merchant.

"I imagine you both are thoroughly ashamed of what you have done."

He's wasted as a judge. With a vivid imagination like that, he should be a sci-fi writer - or a defence solicitor.

Globalisation In One Country

"In a blow to the government's plans for Britain to manufacture its way out of recession, Bombardier has placed its UK operations under review after the Department for Transport awarded a contract to make carriages on London's Thameslink rail route to Siemens of Germany, bypassing Britain's last remaining train factory. The company has called an 8am press briefing on Tuesday morning at its Derby headquarters. Senior shop stewards will be briefed on job losses in time for the end of the night shift at 6am."

I have not done the digging, but I would be amazed if the vast majority of French rolling stock was not manufactured in France, and the vast majority of German stock in Germany. (Strangely enough, railway nerdism doesn't translate into Web nerdism very well, although there are sites like this.) Only this morning someone on the Today prog was explaining how European governments can take 'other factors' into account, industrial strategy etc, when State enterprises hand out contracts. Not here.

Labour will doubtless be bashing the Tories over this, but this is just the continuation of existing policy. No government's put the British people first since 1992 (if that) - why expect Cameron to buck the trend ?

Woman Wins Ladies Singles Shock Horror

What's women's tennis coming to, when someone who doesn't seem to have spent the last five years on the weights bench (or the steroids), and who doesn't grunt or squeal like a pig on every point, can win a major tournament ?

You never know, she might even be straight as well. I know, I'm expecting too much.

Entitled Thieves of all Countries Unite !

from the comments at Steve Sailer's (the riot and looting were because of a lost hockey game):

"steve you may want to take a look at this insane rant, i mean, apology, that one of the asian vancouver rioters who got caught, has posted on her blog. this is the original post she made, before later going back and totally editing out everything because she realized she was a moron.

http://tinyurl.com/4226z6r

and the edited one:

http://tinyurl.com/65jgaw6

we will never really grasp how bonkers her real, original "apology" was. there are so many lines in there that are classic. but note the overwhelming use of modern victimology speak. generic (criminals are the real victims, i'm the hero here), racial (i'm non-white, back off), and sexual (i'm a woman, BACK OFF). "

In the first link, to quote the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers, 'there's enough material for a whole conference'.

A Forgotten Episode

Harpymarx was describing Srebrenica as the "worst massacre post-ww2" the other day, and Laban linked to a host of worse massacres, including "10,000 Arabs massacred by black Africans in Zanzibar in 1964".

The highly religious Okello was convinced he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful position of the Arabs and to found the revolutionary state on Zanzibar and Pemba. On the night before the “revolution”, Okello gave his men the order to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women, and not to rape virgins.

The coup led to the poorly-known massacre of between 5,000 and 20,000 Arabs, whose families had been living in Zanzibar for centuries, between January 18 and 20. Footage of the massacre can be seen in Gualtiero Jacopetti's film Africa Addio.

Now of course the Arabs were descendents of slave traders, while the black Africans were descendants of their victims. But isn't there a word for killing people on the grounds of their descent? They can't be blamed for the sins of their forebears.

I'd forgotten that I'd read an eye-witness account of the massacre, in Ranulph Fiennes' excellent "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread".

Fiennes is recruiting in Ziki, Oman, for his 'Recce Patrol' - part of the Sultan's anti-guerilla forces staffed by Brit officers on secondment :

A six-foot Zanzibari with a handshake that crushed my fingers and a head of fine black fuzz wished to join for original reasons. Recce Platoon had more machine guns per man than the Companies. And Mubarreq Obeid - for that was the big negro's name - had been unable to have a machine gun in his Company. With such a weapon, he said, his thick lips compressed in a snarl, he could kill many Chinese shooyooen (communists) in Dhofar and that was his desire. I protested that there were no Chinese communists in Arabia let alone Dhofar, but he was adamant.

"You are wrong, Sahb. They are behind all the troubles everywhere. Soon there will be many like locusts in Dhofar. In Zanzibar they talked to the African how he must throw out the Arab. Then, seven years ago, they rose and murdered all they could catch; slitting their throats by night as they slept. Some of us escaped to the dhows but my parents were chased along the beach by a crowd - although my mother was African. They ran into the sea to swim to the boats but some of the crowd followed, caught them by the hair, and drowned them.

So I, Mubarreq, have no parents because of the Chinese rats."

When he had gone I looked at the others. All nodded their assent.

The book's interesting as showing the 180 degree inversion of the Left in relation to Islam since those early 70s days. The Chinese Maoist and Soviet Communist trainers of the Dhofari guerillas told them that Islam was an invention of the British, a device cooked up between the Brits and their corrupt rulers to confuse their minds and keep them subservient. The guerillas were taught to kill and torture those who put their religion before the needs of the revolution. I'll dig a few other quotes out when time permits.

Apologies

For light blogging. New work, steep learning curve, long hours, longish travel.

Inshallah at some stage the learning cliff-face will be conquered and I'll emerge either into a fertile plain of relative competence, or a bleak, windswept plateau of not quite up to it. I reckon either way it'll be another three or four weeks.

One or two things that caught my eye.

Blackburn - twinned with Abbottabad. I thought the point of these school twinning arrangements was for the children to learn about other, unfamiliar cultures - in which case why choose Abbottabad, whose culture will be familiar to the pupils of Daisyfield School, most of whom are of Pakistani heritage? If they wanted to expose the children to an unfamiliar culture, why not a school in, say, Petersfield or Winchester?

The Conservative pledge to cut immigration looks like another one of David Cameron's cast-iron guarantees.

"Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures. "

Three points here. One is that the counting immigration only in net terms is a neat way of ignoring the demographic transformation illustrated in the Blackburn link above. If all the native English were to emigrate and be replaced by incomers, net immigration would be zero and the BBC would doubtless headline that immigration WAS zero. To a large extent headline immigration figures have been reduced by the massive UK brain drain, as young natives with degrees leave to be replaced by young Afghans and Somalis.

Two is that the left and IPPR argument - "they're only here for the booming economy and they'll go home when there's a downturn" doesn't seem to have reflected reality. I'm shocked.

Three is that Cameron is so serious about cutting immigration that 5,000 jobs are going at the UK border agency. While that agency is useless, corrupt and incompetent, I'm not sure increasing its workload and reducing its staffing levels is going to improve it.


The TB jab returns? Only a few short years after declaring victory over tuberculosis, we're importing it at such a rate we've got to start all over again.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community."

"Crucially, both the public and health care professionals need to be aware that TB is back, and growing fast."

26.5% of primary school pupils are now ethnic minority, up from 23% in 2008. The destruction of what was, with all its faults, one of the best places in the world to live continues.

Still, say not the struggle naught availeth, what ?

The Power of the Dog

Ross's dog is gravely ill.

I suppose if you don't have a dog it is hard to understand why anyone would be so upset ( that isn't an insult or a judgement just a statement of fact) and if you do there isn't much need to explain.

As so often he's spot-on. I remember in my teens a girlfriend walking through the door one Saturday morning and bursting into floods of tears - and it wasn't the state of my room.

"What's the matter ?"

"They've taken her to the vet to be put down !" - 'her' being the companion of her childhood, a thousand walks and a hundred days out in the country with parents. But I didn't think like that at the time - I was properly sympathetic and held her till my shoulders were soaked in tears - but it was only a dog, a nice enough dog, but still a dog. At this distance memory fails, but I probably assumed it was just a girl thing, what with being more emotionally open and all that.

The same blindness afflicted me with regard to the effect of children, although I think I wasn't alone in this. Our single lives were so endlessly fascinating, what friends were doing, who was with whom, the places to go, the people, the parties, that we looked on people who'd got children slightly pityingly, as if they'd been afflicted with a crippling disease (and it IS crippling to a wild social life, although I know a few exceptional people and couples who have just carried on - I'm just not exceptional) which not only curtailed their social life but made them talk about children an awful lot - as if that topic was of any interest at all compared to the important things.

You live and learn. Hopefully. Now I feel more that becoming a parent is gaining access to the secret heart of life and the long chain of familial links down the generations. Not that it doesn't have its many, many drawbacks. Susan and I looked at each other one day after #2 had arrived and said 'whatever did we do with all that time we had?".

I digress. So I finally learned about why parents are interested in kids, but still didn't get the dog thing. Our neighbours were childless but treated their dogs like their children - they slept upstairs and their doings were part of our everyday chats. Most odd, we thought.

Dog lovers ...

I'd taken my firstborn up to visit his grandpa, and grandpa and I were out walking with grandpa's dog and the pushchair plus baby. I loved that new dad bit, with bonny boy getting cooed over by all and sundry ... the checkout queue turning into a little love fest ... and he WAS a beautiful baby - he's 21 now and six foot.

Lady approaching on the pavement, breaks into happy smile :

"Oh, what a beautiful ..."

(Dad smiles modestly... he's getting used to this ...)

"Dog!"

(Smile vanishes instantly)

Then our youngest went off to Big School, and it left a bit of a gap in Susan's life. Suddenly there were no babies to care for - and she likes caring for things. One day she went off and returned with this chap (and promptly had him snipped, to my horror). Apparently Labradors were very even tempered, good with children and an all round ideal first dog for a family with no dog-owning history on either side, at least since our great-grandparents were on the farm. What's impressive is that AFAIK, apparently all dogs are descended from domesticated wolves. Just shows what breeding will do.

The kids were thrilled, promised to walk him etc etc - didn't last and soon Mum and Dad were doing most of the walks. But the exercise is great - he and we usually get about three miles a day in - it's good for an ageing chap with a desk job. I've learned most of the footpaths and circular routes round the house.

Labradors seem to eat anything - three week old bird carcases, stones, deer poo, sheep poo, horse poo - and they roll in fox poo, which is not a nice smell and means an hour shampooing him in the garden (then a shower and complete change of clothes). On the good side they love apples, blackberries, plums, the farmer's turnips - healthy eaters.

He once found a rotting, rank dead rabbit inside a plastic bag, scoffed it, then sat in his crate in the kitchen and disgorged the lot some hours later. Not a nice clean-up job - the smell at close quarters was truly evil.

They're meant to have more acid in their stomachs than humans to enable digestion of bad food - but ours pushes that way beyond the limits. The Muslims are right enough when they consider dogs unclean. They're filthy dirty creatures.

But they have a way of wrapping themselves round the heart. Always pleased to have human company, playful, cheery. All the family quickly grew to love him - even grandma, very much a non-dog person, has a soft spot.

October last year, grandma is round for Sunday tea/dinner, I'm just out in the garden using the last of the light at ten to six.

"Can he stay out here with you ? "

"OK"

The call for tea. I call him - he's not anywhere in the garden. Round the house - no sign.

"Has he come in ?"

"No"

"He's not in the garden"

Poor grandma. She was left alone in the house while everyone emptied into the darkening garden, calling, then after a quick conference and grabbing of mobiles, two cars head slowly in opposite directions, and the boys are in the local wood with torches. Daughter and I take the car across rough farm tracks, along the routes of his favourite walks, stopping, scanning the gloomy fields, calling him, on again, repeat.

Forty minutes later it's pitch black and the cars are back. The boys have been right through the woods to the fields on the other side, which we've also scanned from the cars as best we could, then back again. Up and down the village - again - half expecting to see a limp form in the headlights. Not a sight or sound.

Tea at seven in almost total silence. The only thing I can compare it with was the first family Christmas without my grandmother.

Eight o'clock. He's been gone two hours. We've been out in the garden and around the house again. Nothing. The feeling that he's gone for good starts to solidify.

Nine o'clock. My daughter's standing at the back door, calling his name. Nothing. I feel she's wasting her time, but in solidarity I go to the side door to call. Open it - he's standing on the step.

God knows where he'd been. One moment of tremendous pleasure - calling my daughter into the kitchen, without telling her who was there, then watching the ecstatic reunion - the boys hearing the noise and tumbling in, happy uproar. "For he was lost, and is found".

Once again Mr Kipling has the words :

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find - it's your own affair
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone - wherever it goes - for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-term loan is as bad as a long
So why in Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

It's an ill wind ...

I took an elderly relative out for the afternoon to Bristol, and on the way in this morning thought I'd call in at the shops in Bath. It was chucking it down.

The centre of town gave the impression that a massive wet t-shirt competition had just finished - most impressive. Turned out to be Race For Life day.

Worth A Read

The Far Outliers blog is currently posting lots of excerpts on some of the African unpleasantnesses of the last 20-odd years.

I think I'd take issue with this, though - from Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns (Public Affairs, 2011), Kindle Loc. 130-146:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast country, the size of western Europe and home to sixty million people. For decades it was known for its rich geology, which includes large reserves of cobalt, copper, and diamonds, and for the extravagance of its dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but not for violence or depravity.

As I understood the history, it was only when Mobutu pretty much cornered the market in violence that the Congo was peaceful. In the period between independence and military coup, it was the basket-case it's been ever since.

Sunday Night Music

The guitar's got a bit of Tumbler-era John Martyn about it, the vocals are very Bon Iver, the whole effect is not bad at all. Via my son, Bombay Bicycle Club.

Blogging may be light for the next week or so. A pity, as there's a lot to blog about.

Friday Night Music - Ramblin Man

Ever since I discovered Hank Williams I've been convinced that no one could top his versions of songs like 'Lost Highway' and 'Ramblin Man'.

I don't think his grandson, tattooed alt.country/psychobilly/punk metallist and all-round rude boy Hank III, quite tops it either - something about Hank I's slow, stately, deliberate delivery. But it's a very fine version in itself. Hank III is supported by veteran grungers The Melvins. (Del Shannon's pretty straight take isn't bad either.)

The Call of the Pipes

We're a bit strapped for cash, like so many families, so alas we pulled the mooted summer trip to Iceland, a place I've always wanted to visit and which is still pretty expensive - what must prices have been like before the crisis ? Instead we're going somewhere else I've never been, the Asturias region of northern Spain.

It was Cornwall for the last two years and Gower the year before - Susan insisted we get off the island this year. My suggestion of Arran alas was howled down.

The Spanish probably need what little dosh we have more than the Icelanders anyway. Iceland pulled the plug on its banks, took a big hit on its housing market and currency, but is now recovering rather well. The UK hosed its banks with taxpayer cash, propped up our insane property values, and we're in for a lost decade of stagflation.

Our young people are unemployed or under-employed, graduates are still living at home on £14,000 a year jobs at the age of 28. At the other end of the employment spectrum, fifty-something former project managers have been sat at home for three years, firing off ten CVs a day. Comment in today's Telegraph :

"I don’t know any extended family not supporting a distressed, disillusioned, despairing young person - often with a degree or good qualifications. And maybe sympathising with an older person, desperately jobseeking after redundancy.”

Our children, bar a fortunate few, will not be able to own the roof over their heads, something my and my parents generation could take for granted. We're going back to the days of my grandmother, who lived in rented accommodation all her life.

But compared with the Spanish, we have minor problems. 43% youth unemployment ! When you consider Spain isn't exactly flush with youths since the demographic collapse post-Franco, that's quite an achievement for Mr Zapatero's Socialists aka "the most loathsome government in Europe".

I really am surprised there's not mass civil disobedience. Their 1930s forebears - right or left - wouldn't have stood for it.

Where was I ? Dunno. But in solidarity with the young unemployed of Spain (sort of), we’ve booked a house this summer near the magnificently named Villaviciosa, famed as one of the very last towns to surrender to Franco’s forces, as well as being the birthplace of bagpipe maestro José Ángel Hevia Velasco. Be interesting to test the political waters.

Here's the man himself. Very Celtic - didn't realise the influences in that part of Spain - and it's cider country, too. The massed pipers at the end could be the Men of Lonach. You get a feel for the forebears of the Native Brits, making their way North from the Iberian Refuge as the last Ice Age glaciers retreated before them.

Invincible Ignorance

Polly Toynbee on "chavs" :

"Wrapped inside this little word is the quintessence of Britain's great social fracture. Over the last 30 years the public monstering of a huge slice of the population by luckier, better-paid people has become commonplace. This is language from the Edwardian era of unbridled snobbery. When safely reproduced in Downton Abbey, as the lady sneering at the scullery maid or the landowner bullying his workers, we are encouraged to look back smugly as if these shocking class differences were long gone. The form and style may have changed – but the reality of extreme inequality and self-confident class contempt is back...

Chav is used to mix together anyone of low status the speaker wishes to despise - and that includes the entire working class - on matters of taste as well as morals. Just go to the dreadful ChavTowns site and see how the two are elided."

Polly is so far off the truth you wonder if her ignorance is deliberate. She hears some posh person (in this case a Lib Dem politico tweeting unwisely) using the term and conjures up a conspiracy to demonise an entire working class.

The contributors to ChavTowns are overwhelmingly themselves working class people (and by the spelling and grammar, people who have been failed by our comprehensive system).

Working class people detest the chav/underclass far more than middle or upper-middle class people do, because they live among them and are exposed to their behaviour on a daily basis. That's why the contributions to ChavTowns are so bitter, angry and heartfelt.

Scarborough

The great Dalrymple has been at it again, taking aim at Scarborough. He should have gone to Whitby - plenty of impoverishment of spirit there, too, but in a more picturesque setting.

But there is no disguising the very considerable impoverishment of the town, an impoverishment that is actually characteristic of a high proportion of the country. This impoverishment is as much of the spirit as economic: nowhere in the world (at least nowhere known to me, including very many poorer places) do you see such a concentration of people who have given up on themselves, or rather, who never had any self-respect to give up on.

What one sees is a purely materialist society that is not even very good materialism, for it does not promote even those mental and moral disciplines that promote material success. A large proportion of the population has been left to the mercies of a popular culture whose main characteristic is the willing suspension of intelligence, and which does not merely fail to inculcate refinement, grace, elegance and the desire for improvement, but actively prevents them and causes them to be feared and despised.

I remember that my first awareness of Dalrymple was outrage in the Wolverhampton Express and Star and Brum Evening Mail at a piece he wrote some ten years back, on the new art gallery in Walsall.

Councillors in Walsall have leapt to the town's defence after a critic writing in an American magazine described it as like "Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets". Walsall council leader Mike Bird dismissed as nonsense claims published on the internet that the Black Country was one of the "most depressing areas of urban devastation" in the world.

If you've been to Walsall lately (I have) you'll know that his description was harsh but fair.

I digress. Among the outraged defenders of Scarborough in the Spectator comments, the dissenting voice of one Harry Hutton.

"A great article from Dalrymple. No one with any self-respect or decency would live in Scarborough. The inhabitants are dirty, dishonest, gap-toothed swine.

My family left Scarborough when I was five, to seek a better life in the Gaza Strip. My parents were aid workers, and I spent my childhood in Palestine, Somalia, Yorkshire and the Congo. I met some rough diamonds in Mogadishu, let me tell you, but I never truly saw a society in collapse, where savages have the upper hand, until I returned to Scarborough. I was beaten and robbed by the villainous local peasants within an hour of getting off the train, then they tied me to a mule and I was dragged through a turnip field.

You simply can't treat people like that and expect to have a thriving tourist trade. Not for nothing did King John describe the town as "a weeping pustule'' on his realm."

Could These Stories By Any Chance Be Related ?

Karl Marx, 1847 :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

Story 1:

Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures.

: The number of foreign workers increased by 1.7 million in the last decade and accounted for all the increase in employment levels over the period.

: Work visas increased by six per cent in the year to March 2011

: Asylum claims increased by 11 per cent

: Migrants granted settlement in the UK increased by four per cent

Strange. I seem to remember being told that it was the booming UK economy which was the lure, that we should think of mass immigration as a tribute to our economic success, and that anyway, they'd all go home if there should be a slowdown. Most odd.


Story 2 :

The average wage taken home by 11 million British workers will remain 'roughly the same' until at least 2015, experts have warned. Think-tank Resolution Foundation said low and middle-income earners were not likely to benefit from the expected economic recovery. It predicted workers' pay in four years time would be the same as in 2001.

The Contradictions Inherent In One Sentence

At Comment Is Free :

"The likely indictment of John Edwards for misuse of campaign funds is the final blow for a rare champion of economic justice"

Against The Odds

Anna Davis, the Standard's Education correspondent (who describes an undergraduate as a a schoolgirl), reports :

A London schoolgirl praised by Michelle Obama during her visit to Oxford told today of the First Lady's "unbelievable presence". Clarissa Pabi, 20, who grew up in Islington and is now president of the Oxford Poetry Society, was hailed by Mrs Obama for succeeding against the odds.

During her speech at Oxford University, the US President's wife told pupils from Miss Pabi's old school: "If you start to doubt yourselves, I want you to remember Clarissa. Remember her story if mine does not resonate. Success is not about our background - Clarissa knows that."

Miss Pabi, educated at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington and now studying English at Oxford, said: "It was unbelievable being in her presence and hearing her talk."

What an inspiring story. I presume Clarissa's parents, only semi-literate, raised her in dire poverty - but the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School brought out her full potential.

Yes ?

Miss Pabi was inspired to go to university by her mother, who has a doctorate in chemistry. Her father and grandparents were educated at university and her younger brother is at the University of East London.

Hmm. I don't know if Mrs Obama was just badly briefed, but if you could draw any moral at all from the story (to date) of Clarissa Pabi, it would surely be that success is about your background.

Those Dreadful Tory Cuts

"Spending in April was 5 per cent higher than a year ago at £54.1 billion. This was mainly caused by a 26 per cent rise in interest payments to £1 billion as the Government services its growing debts and interest rates rise along with inflation.

The Government's deficit reduction plans were dealt a blow today after official figures revealed that last month's borrowing figures were the highest ever recorded for the month of April.

Public borrowing, excluding financial interventions such as bank bail-outs, hit £10 billion, compared with £7.3 billion the previous year, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS)."

I don't understand. Gilt rates don't seem to have risen - where's this extra 5% spending coming from ? And anyway, 'Daily Mail Reporter' can't do maths - if interest payments rose 26% to £1bn that means they rose by £206 million. If spending rose by 5% to £54.1bn then it was £51.5bn a year ago - a rise of £2.6bn, of which less than 10% is attributable to increased interest payments.

So where's the extra spending going ?

Daily Mail really are no good. Page 4 of this pdf shows :

Central government account
April Financial year
2011 2010 2010 /11

Current expenditure
Interest 4.6 3.6 43.2
Net social benefits 14.7 14.0 173.2
Other curr expndture 34.8 34.0 387.1
Total curr expndture 54.1 51.5 603.5

So interest is £1bn more, social benefits £0.7bn more, other £0.8bn more, total £2.5bn extra of which 40% is down to increased interest - presumably not because of increased rates but because of increased gilt issuance.

You expect most journalists, as Arts grads, to be functionally innumerate. But they could have found someone who could add up for this story.

(sorry the formatting's no good. And H/T Brian for the pdf)

More Grooming ... on a Sunday afternoon

They had picked up the girl – whom they had never met before – after seeing her in a drunken state outside the care home as they drove around the city.

The girl fell unconscious inside the car due to her intoxicated state, but when she awoke she found herself in a state of undress.

OK, maybe this one shouldn't be under grooming but a more serious offence - although the two are often related.

"Just because a child does not live with their parents, it does not mean no one cares"

Unfortunately it all too often does. Care homes have always been a target-rich environment for predatory males both inside and outside the institutions.

In other Lancastrian news, this week's prize for politically convenient ignorance goes to Detective Inspector Dave Massay of Oldham CID :

A 27-year-old woman was walking along Cooper Street in Oldham when a small white van pulled up. The passenger grabbed her arm and swore at her, telling her to get in the car. The woman managed to escape from his grip and ran off. The incident happened between 10.10pm and 10.20pm on Wednesday, May 18.

Hmm. Two young men attempting to abduct a young woman at ten o'clock at night. What could possibly be their motivation?

Detective Inspector Dave Massay, based at Oldham CID, said: "The intentions of these men are not clear: they might have been playing a prank and trying to frighten people for their amusement and, in this case, they have succeeded in terrifying this woman.

I guess he'd rather be thought stupid than suggest the most likely possibility.

(I wouldn't want to give you the impression that every groomer, abductor or rapist in Greater Manchester is Asian. Far from it. The native Brits have a fair bit of form - especially those evil knife-carriers - what ever happened to the mandatory jail sentence? But there is a tendency, no more than that, although I'm sure a statistically significant one, for the varieties of Mancunian crime to reflect the diversity of the area.)

Up To A Point, Mr Allison

Lincoln Allison at the SAU blog is touring that fascinating country, India :

So there are two Indias, as there have always been two versions of Italy. One bristles with enterprise, the other with Soviet stupor. There are the hotels which cannot do enough for you and the tailor who will do a perfect alteration in ten minutes flat. And there is (or was) the guy who sold me my first Indian railway ticket. I slowly and dismally became aware that there was nothing in it for him if I reached Pune, but a certain amount of power, satisfaction and schadenfreude if he could stop me. Of course, he probably just wanted a bribe; the more complicated the form or procedure, the more likely you are to make a mistake which you will have to pay for as atonement or rectification. And seen in its broad context corruption is not a redistributive mechanism because the big guys do it big, the little guys do it little and the poor don't get to do it at all.

I think Indian enterprise will triumph in the end, but I'm an optimist.

He certainly is :

I don't buy the idea that India has put the Raj behind it, an idea which is dutifully trotted out by many western writers... I'd have liked them to sit with me on the Shatabadi Express last week, Delhi to Amritsar, first class compartment, with four English-language newspapers to choose from, all stuffed with IPL cricket reports, all to be digested with the free Indian Railways Morning Tea biscuits as you listen to the English conversations going on between Punjabi and Hindi speakers.

It may not be the India that the post-1858 full imperialists imagined? I don't know. But it is surely a world that more Liberal or earlier, less racist, imperialists would have happily conceived. It involves the greatest cultural exchange in history because they got cricket and we got curry, without any of us losing what we had in the first place. Globalisation at its best and anybody who tells me that curry is un-English should get as short shrift as anyone who says that cricket is un-Indian.

Globalisation at its best, eh ? A 50-50 swap from which we all benefit and no one loses?

Well, none of us have lost what we had in the first place - except the former native inhabitants of large parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester and larger parts of Leicester, Bradford, the Black Country and the former mill towns of the Pennines. Over the last 30 years I've been able to observe first-hand massive demographic change in Bradford and Birmingham.

During the Raj there were doubtless similar demographic changes to a few very small areas of India and Pakistan - I have a 1902 Guide to Simla with maps showing large areas of housing which could, from the names, be in suburban Surrey. But these involved very small numbers of people in a very large country - and were substantially reversed after independence. The demographic changes in England (and a few towns in Wales and Scotland) involve the movement of very large numbers into a very small country, and not only is reversal very unlikely, but the process, with its accompanying loss of native habitat, shows no sign of abating.