NHS Direct ...

I got a call today from Susan, who's with her mother and the children in Gower. My in-law had left her tablets behind, but her GP said he'd fax a prescription if she could find a chemist that's open late tonight or tomorrow. Could I take a look on the Web ?

A quick Google gave me a list of pharmacies, but which were open out of hours ?

The Swansea Council website had a helpful link.

www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk

NHS Direct operates a 24-hour nurse advice and health information service, providing confidential information on what to do if you or your family are feeling ill, particular health conditions, local healthcare services, such as doctors, dentists or late night opening pharmacies, self help and support organisations.

Looked useful - followed the link. And look - there's a place at the bottom of the page to look for pharmacies by postcode.

Enter a postcode, check the pharmacy box and you end up here.

I don't know if any of you can get any results from that page, but I couldn't. I hadn't noticed the bit underneath saying :

This service is provided for people in England only. For local services information in other parts of UK please visit the NHS in Northern Ireland, the NHS in Scotland or the NHS in Wales.

Not to worry - I found another link to here.

"Enter a valid postcode or place name" - OK, "Swansea".

Apparently that's not a valid placename - after all, it's only a city of some 250,000 people.

It appears that the "National" Health Service is in practice "The NHS in England" - only unlike the Scots and Welsh, the name of the English nation is verboten. If you enter "SA3 2BT" on this page you're told :

This postcode can be classed within Wales.
Please visit the http://www.wales.nhs.uk/ for more information outside England.

Follow the link and you do indeed get a list of pharmacies - but no information on late opening.

With a sigh I dialled NHS Direct Wales - which turns out to be the same number as NHS Direct England . Fifteen minutes later I sat listening to a staff member typing in the same details on the same web pages.

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't help you"

If you want information on out of hours pharmacies in Swansea, it seems the thing to do is to ring your 80-year-old aunt there. She walks up to the local shops, where a list of out-of-hours pharmacies is displayed in the chemist's window, copies them down and rings back.

I explained my problems with NHS Direct.

"I could have told you not to bother. Everybody knows they're a waste of time".

Free Up Mi Ganga

" ... 'tis called by the Moors, Gange, by the Chingalese, Comsa, and by the Portugals, Bangue ... (it) doth in a short Time, quite take away the Memory and Understanding, so that the patient understands not, nor remembereth any thing that he seeth, heareth, or doth, in that Exstasie, but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet he is very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks Words without any Coherence, nor knowing what he saith or doth; yet he is not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances, and sheweth many odd Tricks; after a little time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh'd, and exceeding hungry ...

'tis commonly made Use of, by the Heathen Priests, or rambling Mendicant Heathen Friars, who will many of them meet together, and every of them dose themselves with this Medicine, and then ramble several Ways, talking they know not what, pretending after that, they were inspired."

Robert Hooke, describing the effects of cannabis to a meeting of the Royal Society in London, 18th December 1689. (from Stephen Inwood's Hooke biography The Man Who Knew Too Much).


(The Chingalese are the Ceylonese, and the charming and sympathetic expression 'a natural' was used until the early twentieth century to describe a simpleton or mentally backward person. There's an echo there of the concept that the afflicted one was in some way sacred or touched by God. Today a natural would be described as having severe learning difficulties.)

Compare And Contrast

The BBC hand over a secretly recorded tape to the police. It shows senior BNP guys saying things like 'Islam is a wicked, vicious faith' and 'let's show these ethnics the door in 2004'.

The police and CPS prosecute. One trial fails to reach a verdict, so there's a second trial.




Channel 4 hand over a secretly recorded tape to the police. It shows senior Muslim clerics saying things like 'Christians and Jews are enemies of Muslims' and 'Take the homosexual man and throw him off the mountain'.

West Midland Police investigate the film - then investigate the film-makers and ask the CPS to consider prosecuting them for stirring up racial hatred.

The CPS was also asked by the police to consider whether a prosecution under the Public Order Act 1986 should be brought against Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme including material likely to stir up racial hatred. Miss David advised West Midlands Police that on the evidence available, there was insufficient evidence that racial hatred had been stirred up as a direct consequence of the programme. It would also be necessary to identify a key individual responsible for doing this together with an intent to stir up racial hatred, which was not possible.

West Midlands Police have taken account of this advice and explored options available to them and has now referred the matter to the broadcasting regulators Ofcom as a formal complaint.

Boom Bang-A-Bang

At last. Sky News reports on the "largest haul (of explosive chemical precursors) ever found at a house in this country".

Four containers of sulphur - gunpowder
A packet of magnesium ribbon - flares, incendiaries
A container of aluminium powder - improves the bang of most explosives. Churchill was very cross when in WW2 he discovered we weren't putting it in our bombs. Used by PIRA.
A container of magnesium powder - flares, incendiaries
Three containers of magnesium shreds - ditto
A bottle of nitric acid - can be used with toluene and sulphuric acid to make TNT. Generally useful if you want to make things go bang.
A bottle of hydrochloric acid - pass.
A bottle of phosphoric acid - pass
A bottle of acetic acid - eh ? Maybe he knows more about bangs than I do. Diluted and coloured with caramel, it is sometimes sold in chippies as a disgusting vinegar-substitute called euphemistically 'Non-Brewed Condiment'
Four containers of potassium nitrate - aka saltpetre. Gunpowder
A container of potassium perchlorate - useful oxidiser
A bottle of dimethyl sulfoxide - pass. Good solvent.
A bottle of chloroform - for the lovely Kerena ? Deadly if overdone, of course. Not heard of it going bang.
A container of sodium hydroxide - cleaning the drains.
A bottle of acetone - TATP ? Or Kerena's nail varnish ?
A bottle of toluene - see above
A bottle of methanol - not to be confused with big sister ethanol.
A bottle of ethanol - mix with water and lime juice. Very little hangover.
Two bottles of hydrogen peroxide - useful oxidiser, once used in rockets
Five bottles of hydrogen peroxide - ditto
Two bottles of potassium Iodide supplements - in case of nuclear strikes ?
A bottle of potassium permanganate - peroxide dissociates violently in the presence of pot permang, liberating lots of heat and oxygen, also steam which is not so useful.
A bottle of ammonia - for cleaning the windows
An ampoule of methadone chloride - no comment
Three containers of iodine crystals - surely he wouldn't try nitrogen tri-iodide ?
A bottle of hydrogen peroxide hair product - see above

As far as I know it's not illegal to possess any of the above.

The alleged rocket launchers vanished from press reports quite a while ago, seemingly now followed by the nuclear protection suits.

Robert Cottage got two and a half years after admitting possessing explosives. I find that slightly odd as he didn't actually possess any. But his sentence certainly bears out my observation that "a desire to make improvised explosive devices, when mixed with right-wing politics, can be extremely hazardous to your liberty." Compare his sentence with that of Edward Mattison, who not only made but detonated some quite large devices. He got less than half Cottage's sentence.

Mr Cottage at first glance wouldn't appear to have a great deal in common with Irfan Raja and his co-defendants, jailed for "possessing material for terrorist purposes" or "having articles for terrorism" - the BBC reporter can't make up his mind. But like Mr Cottage (and unlike Mr Mattison), they hadn't actually done anything.

Among the items found was a film showing atrocities against Muslims around the world, aimed at encouraging martyrdom, the Old Bailey was told.

We seem to be in the same territory where people who report on (true) crimes committed by one or other ethnic group are accused of 'stirring up racial hatred' - the truth or otherwise of their claims being apparently immaterial. Whether a film of atrocities is 'encouraging martyrdom' is surely a subjective judgement - and in any event, English culture and the Christian faith have venerated martyrs from Samson, whose pulling down of the Temple of Dagon would surely qualify as an act of terrorism, through John Wall and the Catholic Martyrs to the names once known to every English child through Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

These prosecutions seem to lie in a strange half-world - but closer to the political offence than the criminal act.


The defendants denied having extremist views and some said they were researching ideology and other matters.

Hang on. In a matter of criminal law why should their views count one way or the other ? Why's it so important for them not to be 'extremists' ?

Because motivation is all. Possessing items "likely to be of use for terrorism" is such a broad concept that in practice the 'likeliness' is decided not by what the items are, but what the accused may have wanted to do with them. The 9/11 murderers used Stanley knives and Microsoft Flight Simulator, but those of us who possess both are unlikely to get arrested at 5 am unless we start posting on jihadi websites while simultaneously researching flight deck door locking mechanisms and when the stewards bring the pilots coffee.

Similarly Omar Altimimi got nine years despite the police admitting that "we will never know exactly what Altimimi was preparing to do". He had built up a library of terror-related literature - but on those grounds Professor Paul Wilkinson should be inside.

The sad thing for Mr Cottage is that if gunpowder was all he wanted, why not just buy some fireworks and dismantle them ? Although the banger and the fearsome mortar are now banned, you can buy multi-shot cakes at very reasonable prices these days - enough I would have thought to construct the mother of all thunderflashes. (Not that I would encourage such things, as it's almost certainly illegal under some law or other). I guess Mr C just wanted to do it himself - to be self-sufficient. Just goes to show how British initiative is being stifled ... in the Land of the Free people still play here.

Other posts on the Great BNP Bomb Horror :

Not With A Bang But A Whimper

Half A Ton Of BNP Rice

Huge BNP Bomb War Horror Shock Apocalypse

It's Tin-Foil Hat Time ...

Tsk Tsk

Frog Almost Boiled

Brits during WW2 were horrified at the segregation of the US armed forces and were sympathetic to the black G.I.s - as recounted in this novel.

Churchill looked at the English outrage and pronounced :

"In countries where there is only one race, broad and lofty views are taken of the colour problem."

Newly released archives show Churchill's 1951 administration worrying about the Windrush generation and social cohesion. The Guardian story is written by a David Ward to make it appear that cabinet secretary Norman Brook considered them 'riff-raff', whereas the case "for excluding riff-raff" related to the Metropolitan Police finding that 40% of those convicted for pimping in London were "coloured". But you wouldn't expect the Guardian to do a straight report, would you ?

Churchill :

"Problems which will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK ? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits."

Let's just revisit the 'nation of immigrants', shall we ?

"David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits."

Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe uttered a variation on Churchill's theme which still applies today :

"The col(onial) populations are resented in Liverpool, Paddington & other areas, by those who come into contact with them. But those who don't are apt to take Liberal view."

And those who didn't were many and influential. Maxwell-Fyfe was cautious :

" ... politically it would be represented & discussed on basis of a colour limitation. That would. offend the floating vote viz., the old Liberals. We should be reversing age-long tradition that British subjects have right of entry to mother-country of Empire. We should offend Liberals, also sentimentalists."

"Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits". Even a great man doesn't get everything right.

The strategy for years and years was 'the immigrant population is a tiny minority of the total. Anyone feeling threatened by such a tiny minority must be an evil racist'. The water temperature rose slowly and the frog stayed put.

But that's changing. Trevor Phillips' "since the migrant and ethnic minority populations are still below 10%, we have a way to go before Britons feel threatened by pure numbers" may prove to be the last sighting outside of the Guardian comments. We're more into comments like these :

Immigration to Britain today is fundamentally different from previous settlements because it is changing the composition of the nation, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality said last night.

I think the real problem is that community cohesion ends the idea that a diverse society can be built without the white majority having to change very much.

A view of multiculturalism where no single group is perceived as dominant is needed to prevent a repeat of the inner city riots of the 1980s, communities minister David Miliband argued this week.

Now you used to have to be a swivel-eyed loon to pick this stuff up. It seems to be spreading to the MSM at last. Maybe the fact that the new incomers are white has reduced the liberal guilt and fear of being called a racist.

Britain's face is changing. More than half of all babies born in London last year were the children of foreign-born mothers. Across England and Wales, the figure was approaching a quarter. The biggest winners, apart from the migrants themselves, are the farmers and hoteliers who employ them at minimum-wage rates. The losers are the British craftsmen and cleaners, farm labourers and semi-skilled workers whose wages have been forced down as they compete in the labour market.

The most remarkable impact of recent migration is shown in birth statistics, calculated by the Office for National Statistics and revealed today.

These show that out of 669,000 babies born last year in England and Wales, 147,000, or 22 per cent, were the children of foreign-born mothers. A further six per cent had British-born mothers but foreign-born fathers. Among the foreign mothers, roughly a quarter were Asian, a quarter European, a quarter from Africa or the Caribbean, and a quarter from elsewhere.

The figures also show that British-born women have, on average, 1.6 children - less than the "replacement rate" needed to keep the population stable. Foreign-born women living in Britain have, on average, 2.2 children. The highest fertility rate is among women born in Pakistan but living in Britain, who have an average of 4.7 children.

The Government Actuary predicts that by 2031, Britain's population will have risen from 60 million to 67 million, with most of the growth due to net immigration. The increase is the equivalent of six new cities the size of Birmingham.



Hmmm. 22% + 6% - nearly 1 baby in three in 2006. And from an in-depth study of the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire stores of Poundland and Lidl, I think the Poles are only just starting to sprog seriously. The frog may find it a bit late to jump out of the pot.

Guilty White Liberals

Observed in the lab.

Public School Socialists ...

Via Harry, this Prospect piece on the changing music market. As the value of recorded music drops, the value of live music increases. But it was this that struck me :

Even the less prosperous citizens of Chile were asked to pay £80 to watch Coldplay in Santiago's Espacio Riesco, a considerable sum in a city where the average monthly salary is around £250.

Crooks Escape

Imam Sajid, a former chairman of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, urged the escapees to give themselves up, but also called for a change to the way immigrants are treated. He said: "The problem we have is these people feel they are treated like criminals when their crimes are simply fleeing their own country for whatever reason".

Treated like criminals, eh ?

The Home Office has confirmed the 14 men still on the run from an immigration detention centre have all been convicted of criminal offences. The men were among 26 people who fled the Campsfield Detention Centre in Oxfordshire following a riot there on Saturday night. A spokeswoman for the Home Office said they had all served their sentences and were awaiting deportation. She said the most serious offence any of them had committed was robbery.

Note the theories of Evan 'Dr Death' Harris :

"It is not surprising that seemingly indefinite detention without charge or without conviction leads to frustration, misery and potential unrest".

It's only "seemingly indefinite" because of the taxpayer-funded lawyers spinning out the appeals process !


UPDATE - Martin Kelly notes the lack of descriptions for any of the men of no appearance.

Men Without Religion ...

Indie.

In the annual survey of MPs' holiday reading, released today by the bookshop chain Waterstone's, first place was taken by William Hague's biography of William Wilberforce, which was published to coincide with the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. It came well ahead of books that received more hype at the time of publication, such as the latest Harry Potter fantasy, or the diaries of Alastair Campbell.

It is perhaps not surprising that Mr Hague should be the top seller among Conservative MPs, but what is less predictable is that the survey showed the same book to be the Liberal Democrat's top summer read.

A new mood of religious scepticism seems to have taken hold of Labour MPs, who have made The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, their main choice.

You don't surprise me at all.

Also in the Indie ... (via)

We have nothing to fear from al-Qa'ida. Christian fundamentalists are the real extremist threat. That's the message from the writers of a new play being shown at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. Cash in Christ, a sing-along play satirising the modern capitalist "mega- church", is arguably one of the most controversial productions in a Fringe with the largest satirical content in living memory.

The 50-minute show, written by Van Badham and Jonny Berliner, which premieres this weekend, comprises sermons from Christian literature, television programmes and church services. The authors conducted extensive research in America, Australia and online, and also spent three months attending services at London churches, including the Hillsong Church and Holy Trinity Brompton.

The writers said that, while there is public discussion about the dangers of radical Islamic groups, the influence of the Christian far right is underestimated. "I've been very sensitive to extremists in other religions, particularly Islam, being demonised," said Badham. "I find the Christian right groups that are enormously powerful in our own culture a larger numerical threat than extreme Islam. They are somehow removed from public criticism, and that is one of the reasons we did the show.

"Bush is from the religious right and he has the bomb; that terrifies me far more than the potential of other extremists to get their hands on nuclear weapons. In the religious right it is the self-appointed moral majority that sets its own rules, and anybody opposing them is labelled unpatriotic and shouted down."

Badham said the Wisepart/Jews and Communists co-production is entirely fictitious, but reflects wider political concerns. "It terrifies me that a few religious groups were able to cause a furore around Jerry Springer – The Opera in Britain. What I find frightening about the war in Iraq is that Bush and the people around him speak about it as if it's the crusades again."

She said that although people they met at church services were kind, she felt their attitudes might foster religious intolerance. "The propaganda is intense. We have been going to these megachurches to be told: 'Christianity is not a religion. It is the work of God to rescue all of humanity.' So everybody else can basically get stuffed."

I think that Messrs Bad Ham und Berliner can basically get stuffed. But if they fancy getting their play put on at Stratford, they need to get on the phone to Dominic Cooke.

Polish Drivers

Times.

Migrant workers from Eastern Europe are responsible for a disproportionate number of fatal traffic accidents, especially on rural roads, a council has said. The concern is so great that young Polish men will be officially classified as one of the most at-risk groups on roads throughout Yorkshire.

Staff on North Yorkshire Council sought the birthplace of motorists involved in car crashes over the past year in the county after evidence suggested that such workers were putting lives at risk. They discovered that 14 per cent of all fatal accidents involved Eastern Europeans. John Fort, executive member for community safety, said that many were production workers and needed cars because public transport was limited in rural areas.

The TTC Group, which runs a drink-drive rehabilitation scheme, suggests that Eastern Europeans are proportionally higher represented on its courses. A spokesman for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain suggested that companies employing young Polish workers should ferry them around in small buses.

"after evidence suggested" - amazingly the council investigated following anecdotal evidence.

The figures have been released by North Yorkshire council after officials became increasingly concerned with anecdotal evidence suggesting immigrants were putting lives in danger.

Isn't that racist ? I heard some interesting anecdotal evidence (aka hearsay) last week about the free bottled water handed out in Gloucester over the last month (police had to supervise the distribution). But it may just be tittle-tattle. Who can tell ? I'd be amazed if it was investigated.

UPDATE - it's not just North Yorkshire - the North Sea too.

A captain has been charged with being drunk in charge of a cargo vessel which crashed into a North Sea gas platform. Zbigniew Karkowski, 56, was arrested after the Jork hit the unmanned Echo platform 40 miles (64km) off the Norfolk coast on Saturday. Mr Karkowski, from Szczecin, Poland, was one of seven people who had to be rescued from the 2000-tonne ship.

This is interesting.

The vessel, which had been bound for the River Humber, eventually sank the following morning. The vessel had been carrying grain from Lubeck in Germany. Mario Siano, of Yarmouth coastguard, said the swelling of wheat on board the ship caused its hull to burst.

Tricky stuff, wheat, once it gets wet. Didn't Horatio Hornblower have the same problem with a cargo of rice ?

"I am now going to try an experiment"

The story of Churchill and the cigars. You get the impression that someone prepared to take the risk of poisoning his Defence Committee in the middle of WW2 wouldn't have had an awful lot of time for health and safety culture.

September 1941, and the Cuban Government has made a handsome present to Mr Churchill - a hand-made cabinet containing 2,500 of Cuba's finest cigars. But people are worried that the cigars may have been got at by ill-intentioned types.

On September 23, soon after the cigars arrived at 10 Downing Street, Churchill was informed that a cigar from each box had been sent to Rothschild for laboratory testing. Colville warned him against sneaking a sly smoke from those that remained. “It is hoped that you will not smoke any of the cigars until the result of the analysis is known . . . there has just been a round-up of undesirable elements in Cuba, which has shown that a surprisingly large number of Nazi agents and sympathisers exist in that country.”

The tests took five weeks and concluded that the samples, at any rate, were safe. But it was all too late.

He ushered the committee into a small anteroom to the left of Downing Street’s hall and proudly displayed his new cigar collection.

“See, this came for me today. I have had some difficulty getting this through customs,” he said, pulling out bundles of long Romeo y Julieta, H Upmann and Por Larranaga.

Lord Balfour, then undersecretary of state for air, later recalled: “Turning to the waiting ministers, he addressed us thus, ‘Gentlemen, I am now going to try an experiment. Maybe it will result in joy. Maybe it will end in grief. I am about to give you each one of these magnificent cigars.’

“He paused, then continued with Churchillian effect, ‘It may well be that these each contain some deadly poison.’ He went on, alluding to the possible act of poisoning the entire defence committee: ‘It may well be that within days I shall follow sadly the long line of coffins up the aisle of Westminster Abbey. Reviled by the populace, as the man who has out Borgiaed Borgia’.”

Each committee member returned to the cabinet room contentedly puffing a rare Havana cigar.

Hang 'Em High

The Daily Mail shows us the barbarity of today's Iran, where executions take place in public.

Two more criminals have been publicly hanged in Iran as children looked on and people took pictures.

Flanked by masked hangmen, hoods over the heads of the condemned men were removed before the hanging, which took place in front of a giant portrait of the judge they had killed. Onlookers in the street and on the roofs of houses chanted and took pictures with mobile phones. Some laughed.

How appalling - the kind of degrading spectacle abolished in mid-Victorian times. The Mail readers must be outraged.

Oh.

"I'm all for the death penalty ..."

"A few public hangings in this country might help deter the criminals ..."

"We should bring it back in the UK and stop pussy footing around."

"Job done! this is one aspect of Iranian law that we should start using now."

"Before we criticise other countries, let's look at our own. It was great once but not anymore. We don't even have punishment now."

"Medieval and barbaric it may be, but I bet Iran doesn't have anywhere like the problems that Britain has with crime !"

"this is what we need in this country as far as murderers and other violent criminals are concerned. Jailing them is expensive ..."

The future's not ours to see

One of my pet themes is the importance of culture in economics.

Free trade is very good for those countries with high levels of education, technical skills, infrastructure etc. All these things being relative of course. You also need an government that doesn't hinder, entrepreneurial ethic among some and a work ethic among many. Britain in Victorian times had all of these and so was naturally keen on free trade.

Now we don't have the education system (with the implication for future technical skills), the government or the work ethic. Having a free market won't solve at least two out of three of those. After all, if it was possible to simply move into new areas easily, they'd have been able to make cars that people wanted to buy. Cars are as hi-tech an item as any these days, so if we can't make those what's suddenly going to make us turn out memory sticks or holographic videos ?

Conversely, with the right culture, technology and education, you can be successful with some pretty unfree markets. Japan 1960-1985 was protectionist and institutionally corrupt, but raised its game over that period from cheap plastic toys to the best cars, cameras and electronics in the world.

At Brussles Journal, Marc Huybrechts gets the crystal ball out :

It is often argued that authoritarian/totalitarian regimes inevitably breed high levels of favoritism and unaccountability, and therefore prove to be inferior economically and militarily in the long run. It is also claimed (or, rather, hoped) that authoritarian capitalist regimes will tend to democratize after passing a certain threshold of development. In a recent article in the July/August issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, entitled The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers, the Israeli academic Azar Gat examined these and other claims. He notes that higher levels of social discipline can offset the inefficiencies of favoritism and of unaccountability, and that a transition to democracy by today’s authoritarian capitalist powers is not inevitable. Indeed, some of the differences between now and much of the past century are striking. For instance, the previous totalitarian capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were crushed in war and threatened by soviet power, and subsequently lent themselves to major restructuring and democratization. Also, many smaller countries that chose capitalism (and to some extent also ‘democracy’) over communism, did so in part because of the absence of a serious rival economic and political model and also because of Western liberal hegemony on the world stage. Today’s geopolitical situation is quite different. China and Russia represent a return of economically successful authoritarian capitalist powers, but they are much larger (and thus potentially much stronger) than the defeated authoritarian capitalist great powers of the previous century. The risk is real that a powerful authoritarian capitalist order is emerging in the world that “allies political elites, industrialists and the military” (writes Gat). Such an order is likely to be ‘nationalistic’ in a negative sense, i.e. in the sense that it will not favor liberal democracy and individual freedom.

I see exactly what he means. Those who wittered on about the US 'military/industrial complex may not have seen nothing yet. And that doesn't necessarily mean their economies will fail. We have pretty free markets, a ruined culture and education system, and our economy seems to me to be running on empty. As Elliott and Atkinson put it :

Hardly noticed in last Thursday's excitement was the release of the latest set of trade figures from the Office for National Statistics. These showed that in March, the UK imported £7bn more goods than it exported - more than 6% of GDP. This figure alone gives the lie to the notion that Britain under Labour has cracked the age-old problem of inflation, since a trade deficit is merely disguised inflation, evidence of excess demand that can only be met through imports.

It's not difficult to see why the UK is running a trade level of this size: consumption has been rising fast while manufacturing output has flat-lined. Unlike Germany, Japan, Sweden - or even the US, which has a huge trade deficit itself - Britain is no longer an industrial nation. Is this worrying? Well, it scares the life out of me, but not it seems the government. The fantasy here is that we can cope with living beyond our means at a national level through the profits generated by the City and by building up Britain's "knowledge economy". A £7bn trade deficit suggests we have some way to go; hardly surprising since the fastest growing job in the 1990s was hairdressing and the UK now has as big a slice of its population working as servants as it did in 1860.

Sorry about the pessimism. It was Ecclesiastes at Mass again tonight.

Bestwood Update

I wrote about Bestwood in Nottinghamshire last year :

According to Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service in August 2004 - way before the Stirland convictions - "there have been over 200 arson attacks in the last 12 months alone in just three streets in Bestwood – Raymede Drive, Leybourne Drive and Andover Road".

200 arson attacks in a year ? In three streets ? No one apprehended ? What the hell is going on on that estate ?

All is now made plain :

Bestwood Estate in Nottingham was ruled by Colin Gunn - a man who was feared by some and revered by others. His Bestwood Army policed the streets - and murdered and tortured for revenge and respect, residents said. He was Mr Big - some would say the Godfather - but he is now in jail serving time for murder and corruption.

The Bestwood riots were Gunn's supporters - many of whom left messages (mow mostly deleted) on the Policeman's blog. Presumably the fires were a control/punishment tool.

The strange thing is that I keep hearing how tough punishments for criminals will "only make them worse". Doesn't seem to apply to Bestwood.

In Nottingham-itself, Bestwood, according to figures, is the city's burglary "hot spot" - making the careworn square mile which is home to 3,300 people Europe's break-in capital. Certainly, the statistics tell a depressing story.

In April, out of 688 burglaries reported in the city, 141 were in Bestwood and neighbouring Sherwood. However, only eight of these crimes have been solved - a pathetic detection rate. In the same month, there were 84 burglaries reported in the same area - a year-on-year increase of 67 per cent.

So if 360-degree CCTV cameras can't prevent Bestwood being the European burglary capital, what on earth will ? The answer is a shocking indictment of law and order in this country and a deep embarrassment for the police. For many householders in the area say that the greatest deterrent to the casual burglar used to be the presence on the estate of one of Britain's most ruthless crime families ... a major police effort in the past 18 months has seen two of the main figures in the organisation - both of whom lived in Bestwood - jailed for murder and drugs offences.

And while justice may have been done, the shocking truth is that burglary statistics in Bestwood have gone through the roof since the two were put away - whereas they had been falling. Locals say it was the absence of the police that enabled the family to take control of the estate, after the uniformed presence was reduced from regular bobbies on the beat to the occasional patrol car.

The trouble is that the State has surrendered its function as 'the nutter of last resort' - the organisation that you really don't want to cross. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Note well. The Gunns had bent policemen trawling the national police computers - on one occasion Gunn's missus got beaten up because a spelling error in a name gave him the idea she had a prostitution conviction.

They had bent BT guys who found the ex-directory phone number of the Stirlands, an innocent couple who were murdered bacause of their son's crime (btw, one of the functions of a decent criminal justice system is to prevent vendettas, by general acceptance that punishments are just. If Michael O'Brien had been hanged would the Gunns have wanted his parents dead too ? Unlikely).

ID cards, anyone ?

Who's Matthew Syed ?

And does he always write as much nagombi as this ?

The prototypical argument for black athletic superiority can be found in Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk about it by Jon Entine. Entine’s central assertion is that it is not blacks as a whole that are good at sprinting but rather a subset who can trace their origins to western African coastal states. Indeed, he makes the point that “no white, Asian or East African runner has broken 10 seconds in the 100m” (my italics).

Yes. Nowt to argue with there. That's why Premiership clubs are signing players from Nigeria or Ivory Coast, why there are so many great black American athletes. People from that neck of the woods seem to have a slight edge in acceleration and pace over a shortish distance, and such small differences are magnified at the margins - in this case, the top end of sport.

East Africans, it turns out, have a rather different skill set: distance running. As has been well documented, Kenyans from well-defined areas in the Rift Valley are strikingly successful at running 3,000m and above. Up until 1993 the Kalenjin tribe won 317 medals and the neighbouring Gussi people won 78. These figures amounted respectively to 63 per cent and 15 per cent of the 506 medals won by Kenyan athletes in major competitions.


Yes, again. Oh, my Keino and Bikila long ago !

Let us assume that these results have genetic causes. Is Entine entitled to conclude that blacks are naturally better athletes ? Well, no. All he is entitled to say is that East Africans are naturally better at distance running and West Africans are naturally better at sprinting and that whites are probably somewhere in the middle at both disciplines. So why make the further claim that “blacks” are naturally better at sprinting and distance running ?

Does Mr Entine actually argue this ? He says that 'black athletes dominate sport' - very different from saying that all blacks can run - and something that happens to be true in America and fast becoming true in the UK - look at the enormous over-representation (and equally enormous under-representation for Asians) of black strikers in the Premiership. Mr Syed seems to be afraid of anyone saying that there are any differences between anyone at all. Lighten up, old chap.

UPDATE - Who's Mr Syed ? A failed Labour candidate for one thing - and a top table-tennis player.

Funny. He doesn't look Chinese.

BBC Then And Now ...

Nick Ross in Thursday's Times remembers his early BBC days in Belfast :

Before that, he had been on The World Tonight, where he reported in some detail on army brutality in Northern Ireland. He was summoned by the managing director of radio. "I thought I was going to be congratulated and I got the most terrible dressing-down: I was unpatriotic. I was putting soldiers at risk."

They were right, whoever his bosses were. I disapprove of brutality by police or soldiers against unarmed or disarmed people. But although you can't count the bodies, there's no doubt that, say, the reporting of Abu Ghraib has had negative consquences for the US military. The only way the snaps should have been published was if the top brass was aware but took no action.

"Anyway, I don’t think things are worse. I just think there are different pressures now." Ratings, he means. "Oh, you’d put that story out without a thought now. There’s no way that the MD of television or the Director-General would pull it. They’d say ‘great story’."

Another brilliant BBC programme - if you can get it

Blimey - two great R4 programmes in a couple of weeks.

I missed the first part, and haven't had time to listen to it online yet, but parts two and three of the four-part The Crime of Our Lives - which covers crime and criminal justice in the UK from the dark days of the 1950s to our present nirvana - have been enthralling stuff. If you want to know how we got where we are it's a must-listen.

Unfortunately the BBC's 'Listen Again' feature seems to be having some technical issues - as a result of which parts 1 and 2 are no longer available online. I do hope they fix this - it would be a crime not to have this available. If amyone's got an mp3 of Parts 1 or 2 please let me know, although I hope the BBC will restore the online versions.

Part 2 covered the real disaster years of the sixties and early 70s - the Roy Jenkins era, the abandonment of preventative beat policing for reactive squad car patrolling, what happened to the Probation and Prison services (for which see here). A great deal of the history will be familiar to readers of Peter Hitchens 'A Brief History of Crime'. Remarkably, all shades of opinion were represented - for example, ex-probation officer David Fraser, a fierce critic of the changes, talked about the Probation Service.

You can't take underlying BBC bias out completely - an armed robber talked about how the long sentences handed out to the train robbers made criminals more prepared to kill, as the sentences wouldn't be any different, without anyone pointing out that such an attitude was only made possible by the abolition of the death penalty around the same time - but still a great programme.

Part 3 (RealAudio till next week) was even more revealing to a born-again rightie like me - after all, it's received wisdom that Roy Jenkins civilised society led directly to today's shambles. What was an eye-opener was the revelation of the utter uselessness of a succession of Tory Home secretaries during the Thatcher years. You can see why the culture wars were lost during the Eighties - these people literally didn't have a clue. We hear of Tory Home secretaries pleading with the judiciary to send less people to jail, not to charge young first-time offenders - did you know that youth crime (as reflected by the stats and presumably by a new reluctance to charge) actually went down between the 70s and the mid-eighties ? - while continuing to throw red-meat soundbites to the poor bloody infantry at Conference. And as for the new street cultures springing up - well listen to a Home Secretary (Hurd ? I'll have to listen again) describing sitting in a Belgravia apartment, hearing the police sirens go past on their way to Broadwater Farm or Brixton and asking 'who are these people' ?

I'm looking forward to part four, which I predict will include a reference to the Broken Windows theory of crime, and should feature strongly the arrival on horseback of the white knight, the first post-war Home Secretary to reduce crime - the Blessed Michael Howard.

Blessed Is He ...

I'm still trying to work out if these people are serious (if offbeat) Christians or whether it's all a cunning marketing device.

"My husband and I went away for our 10th anniversary and for the first time we decided to visit a high street sex shop to liven things up a bit," she said. "But we were really shocked at the price of things in there and the things on offer which seemed to focus on pornography and bondage, which is not what we see as fitting within a Christian marriage. A few days later, Stan came to me and said, 'Let's set up a Christian sex site'.

"At first I thought he was mad, but then God changed my opinion and I thought it was a great idea."

Little Lamb, Who Kicked Thee Over A Cliff ?

Some wee scumbag from County Durham, that's who.

The boys had entered the field and began chasing a flock of sheep, including lambs. As the cruel game escalated, the boys started striking the animals with sticks and corralling them closer to the edge of the quarry. In the culmination of the incident, Mr Thomas told the court how one of the boys managed to catch a trapped lamb, and kicked it off the edge of the cliff.

Mr Thomas then passed a photograph of the dead lamb to the 12-year-old boy, who started to cry.



That sort of thing can happen to the best of people, mind you. I was drinking cider down at the old malthouse with Gable Oak last winter, and he told me this sad story.

Another Day ...

Another Home Office initiative overturned by the courts.

The government has been acting unlawfully by keeping prisoners in jail longer than necessary, judges say. The Appeal Court ruling came in a case brought by a sex offender who had been handed an indeterminate jail sentence. Under the sentence offenders are given a minimum tariff, but must prove they are no longer a danger to the public before they can be released. David Walker argued he cannot be considered for release because his jail does not offer a parole course. The Court of Appeal ruled there "was a general and systemic legal failure".

Jon Silverman illustrates the traditional BBC bias.

The High Court judgement will have come as no surprise to ministers. They were put on notice by the chairman of the parole board, Sir Duncan Nichol, six months ago that increased use of the indeterminate public protection sentence (IPP) by judges was having serious implications for prison management. He revealed that official projections showed that, if unchecked, the number of IPP prisoners at any one time would reach 12,500 within five years, far outstripping the "lifer" population of jails in England and Wales.

Either Jon Silverman is talking nonsense, or the High Court are breaking the law, surely. Since when have the number of prisoners banged up under a given law affected whether an individual can be released ?

"given the sheer number of IPP prisoners - the latest government figure, given in May 2007, was 2,547 - it is impossible at present for every inmate to complete a course before their tariff expires."

I see. These are serious offenders, considered likely to reoffend - and there are a lot more of them than the CJS thought, and the people aren't there to deal with them (obviously in my ideal world they wouldn't need so many staff. How many do you need to turn a key ?). Now where have I heard that before ?

Known sex offenders are living unchecked in the community because there are too many of them to be monitored regularly, according to research commissioned by the Home Office. The rapidly growing number of people registered as violent criminals or sex attackers is threatening to overwhelm the police, probation officers and social workers who have to keep them under supervision.

The number of people on the sex offenders register in 2005-06 was 29,973, a 4 per cent increase on the figure for the previous year. In the same year there were 14,317 violent offenders who were supposed to be subject to regular supervision, a rise of 13 per cent on the 12 months before. Another 3,363 offenders were deemed to require supervision after sentencing or after release from prison.

The number of offenders required to register is certain to increase, with ministers widening the scope of the sex offenders register to include more sexually motivated crimes.

Like this evil pervert.

A man who pinched a Channel 4 News presenter's bottom during a live broadcast is being sought by police. Sue Turton was speaking to the camera from Oxford's flood-hit Osney Island when the man was seen on film walking past her. She said she found the incident "quite humiliating" but continued reporting. She does not wish to pursue the matter.

The Guardian, stern foe of sexual harassment, thoughtfully provides a link to Youtube footage.

It is understood the force wanted to press for a tougher penalty and was "not particularly happy" about giving the man a fixed-penalty notice but that Turton's refusal to press charges limited their action.