Bankers, dirty money, Russia’s war on Ukraine, Wordle, shooters and a right-wing dog

27 February 2022

My cynicism last week has been swiftly justified as British bankers are expected to collect the largest bonuses since the 2008 crash.  So much for the ‘we’re all in this together’ approach implicit in the Bank of England’s pleas to employers to keep wage increases to 3%.

Isn’t it curious how many of these greedy bankers ‘burn out’ from unbearable stress?  If they were on top of their jobs, they wouldn’t burn out, so it’s fair to assume they were appointed because they were good at interviews, not because they had any relevant skill or ability.

These divisive bonuses are being paid in a country which has now (post-Brexit) been freer to regulate itself so London is now up there with the best of the other places that turn a blind eye to investments and money-laundering by kleptocrats, drug barons and other criminals.

Coincidentally, a whistleblower has given a global journalistic consortium details of 30,000 accounts linked to Credit Suisse.  Credit Suisse has some 1.5m private banking clients so the leak is far from complete but, while some of the accounts go back to the 1940s, more than two thirds have been opened since 2000.  It isn’t illegal to hold a secret account in Switzerland but the sources of the money invested by some accountholders are questionable.  Not by Swiss bankers though.

I’ve always believed that one of the major reasons why Switzerland chose to remain neutral in the Second World War was that, because the secrecy of their banking systems was world-famous, they were taking money from both sides;  and, as capitalism and greed exploded post-war, even more money came in from the East.

Quite a lot of it still ends up in the UK where the lack of effective controls on banking systems has allowed vast amounts of dirty money to be invested here.  It’s recently been revealed that almost 30,000 properties in England and Wales, including a number of large properties whose owners are thought to be Russian, are registered in the names of companies based in the British Virgin Islands where details of the beneficial owners of companies are not public.  The government has promised to end the secret offshore ownership of UK property but hasn’t achieved much so far.

One of the difficulties faced in attempting this is that the ‘investors’ concerned are billionaires and the British legal system is extraordinarily expensive (compared with, say, France) and nobody apart from ‘Private Eye’ and a few patriotic MPs dare to risk defending a legal action whose costs would bankrupt them.  So some London lawyers make a lot of money from sources that are, at best, dubious.

Karl Marx talked about “from each according to ability, unto each according to need” as one of the founding principles of communism (although the phrase actually goes back to a 19^th century French philosopher) but the ruling kleptocrats in today’s Russia have clearly sacrificed communism to Mammon.

Anger caused by the Swiss banking leak has of course been overshadowed by Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.  At the beginning of the week, Violet Elizabeth Johnson was widely derided for his feeble announcement in parliament that, if Putin invaded Russia, he’d thcream an’ thcream an’ thcream till he was thick.  Putin was so terrified by this that he invaded Ukraine three days later.

By the end of the week, Johnson was joining America, Canada and key European countries by excluding “selected Russian banks” from the Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) international payments system. 

Russian missiles have been targeting civilian residential tower blocks, presumably because of their clear and present danger to Russian troops, and Putin has put his nuclear weapons teams on stand-by.

A Japanese billionaire, Hiroshi ‘Mickey’ Mikitani, has promised to give 1bn yen ($8.7m) to the Ukraine government, liquor stores in the USA and Canada have taken vodka off their shelves in a show of solidarity, a Ukrainian construction company is removing road signs so Russians without satnavs can get lost, Russia’s ‘friend’ China abstained rather than backing Russia in a UN resolution condemning the invasion, border guards on Snake Island received a radio message saying “This is Russian warship … Lay down your arms” and replied “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”, Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine have been reported as saying they don’t know what they’re fighting for, Hungary has said it will back all EU sanctions against Russia, Turkey is understood to be considering stopping Russian warships from entering the Black Sea, a growing number of Russian celebrities have backed international efforts to stop the war, Germany (whose relations with Ukraine have been strained since the Second World War) is sending 1,500 anti-tank weapons and other missiles, all EU countries have closed their airspace to Russian aircraft and Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is preparing a “hit list” of Russian oligarchs to be hit with sanctions “in the coming months”.  Guess which country hasn’t yet quite grasped the urgency of the situation (though, to be fair, Britain has pledged to continue supplying arms to Ukraine and the Ministry of Defence is working out how to get them there without their being intercepted by the Russians.)

Russia’s central bank has had to support the rouble as it fell to an all-time low against the dollar and, over here, BP has been criticised for its ownership of 22% of Rosneft, the Russian state oil producer and, having been publicly embarrassed, is now selling its stake in Rosneft.  In another encouraging example of nominative determinism, BP’s boss is called Bernard Looney

Talking of loonies, Donald Trump, ever a brown-noser when dealing with autocrats, described Putin’s decisions as “brilliant”, “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.

Putin himself gave an address on TV that made it seem pretty obvious he’s psychotic and paranoid, not the best characteristics of someone with the power to destroy the world.  To younger generations, this must feel like the Cuban missile crisis did to us wrinklies.

Compared to Putin, Boris Johnson looks like a bear of very little brain and has just had his second formal reprimand in a month by the UK Statistics Authority for misleading parliament.  In typical Johnsonian fashion, he told the House on Wednesday that there were now more people at work in the UK than before the pandemic began.  In fact, he ‘forgot’ to mention that this is only true if you count people on payrolls because the number of self-employed people has fallen so far that, if they’re included, the total has actually fallen by 600,000. 

He’s also now being questioned under caution by the police.  Still, nobody now believes anything Johnson says unless it’s confirmed in triplicate by the Queen.

When the Queen’s positive Covid test was announced, Kier Starmer sent her a message that was read out by a BBC newsreader who pronounced “ma’am” as ‘marm’ although, as any fule kno, this should be pronounced ‘mam’.  High time we got rid of the BBC and its pathetic attempts to avoid bias and replaced it with news channels known to be biased.  RT News or Fox News would fit the bill, or Rupert Murdoch might have some suggestions.

In New Zealand, a young bull was swept away by floodwaters on the west coast, carried downstream and over a waterfall.  It was discovered some 50 miles away, snuffling around in a blackberry bush.

Wordle, the (in)famous word game, has been getting complaints since the New York Times took it over:  ‘humor’ annoyed a lot of Brits, ‘bloke’ annoyed a lot of Americans, ‘sha-e’ annoyed everyone who hadn’t already excluded the six incorrect consonants, and some people apparently didn’t know the word ‘caulk’.

Over here, people who pay to kill things were invited some time ago to stop using lead shot because of the damage done to the environment by the toxic metal.  Unsurprisingly, the request was ignored and 99.5% of the birds they killed last year contained lead pellets.  According to the shooters, they still use lead because steel pellets are lighter and don’t scatter as well and – you’ll find this hard to believe of people who slaughter birds for fun – you actually have to aim the gun rather than just point it up and pull the trigger.

In France, the daily paper Libération saw the confidential list of the 148,000 members of the right wing Les Républicains party and identified four dead people and a Niçoise dog called Douglas who could vote for Valérie Pécresse as their presidential candidate.

My 120th birthday party, demonstrations, feminism, being woke, PC, quarrying, Brexit benefits and privacy v the media

5 December 2021

Women who clean, hoover and do the laundry are likely to live almost three years longer.

According to a recent report in the Mail on Sunday, a team from University Medical Centre in Rotterdam followed 7,000 people for decades and discovered that women who do three hours of housework a day live some three years longer.

It claims that men doing housework don’t get the same benefit but they can if they do an equivalent amount of gardening.  I was disappointed by this because, after reading the first bit, I decided that, as a 24/7 carer, I should start planning my 120^th birthday party now – you’re all invited.

(Dr Klodian Dhana, who led the research team, did admit that the differences could be explained by the ‘traditional’ assumption that most women tend to do the housework while most men do the gardening, which seems to me to be both sexist and to invalidate the whole exercise but it was the Mail on Sunday …)

People are apparently supposed to drift to the political right as they age.  I seem to have missed this and have recently been discussing demonstrations with an old friend.  Despite having taken part in a massively disruptive demonstration many years ago, he now believes that protestors who inconvenience Joe Public should be locked up;  I believe that peaceful demonstrations drawing attention to causes the protestors feel important are valid, even if Joe Public is late for work.  Yes, even if they’re loonies from the far right, but I did say ‘peaceful’.

I do wonder if we older men can remember when we could patronise women and foreigners and the state had the right to sterilise homosexuals such as the founding father of all the technology we now take for granted.  (Alan Turing later committed suicide, and who can blame him – who’d want to live in a country that did that to people?)

In the 1960s, feminism resurfaced and was belittled as bra-burning (smell the burning rubber).  Then there was Virago magazine and Greenham Common and women began to find a voice again.

Feminism is, of course, on its way to becoming integral to everyday life (I hope) and sexuality has become a matter of personal choice rather than society’s judgement.  The only problem is the ever-changing terminology.  For example, in order to be inclusive, one would refer to lesbian and gay people, then it became LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQ+ and I’m not actually quite sure what is now the ‘right’ acronym to use.

(The concept of ‘feminism’ is technically sexist by definition but needs to be to rebalance things in the right direction since, even after 50-something years, there’s still a long way to go – count the women on FTSE 350 boards.  My mother used to say she thought the world would be a much better place if it was run by women, but she died before Maggie Thatcher arrived on the scene.  Mind you, Finland seems to be doing quite well.)

Being ‘woke’ is another example.  As far as I know, nobody ever said “Hey, I’m woke” but, at some point, somebody who disapproved of a willingness to respect people who lived their lives differently used ‘woke’ as a way of disparaging their efforts.  Then they claimed they were ‘anti-woke’ to show they disagreed with people who supported groups the anti-woke themselves disapproved of.

So those of us who try to use the right words out of respect for people who are different from early 20^th century stereotypes are mocked by the ‘anti-woke’ brigade who feel that, rather than taking part in sensible discussions about particular issues, being ‘woke’ stifles one’s willingness to debate them.

It’s linked with the reactions against political correctness in the late 20^th century when some of the linguistic changes seemed, despite all the best of motives, to be taken to extremes when charities like the Royal National Institute for the Blind becoming the Royal National Institute of Blind People and the word ‘spastic’ (thitherto a perfectly acceptable and precise medical description) was dropped from all normal conversations.

It’s tempting here to venture into Health and Safety regulations but I resist it, even though I once had a school holiday job in a hospital laundry whose complete lack of hygiene regulation would today close the hospital overnight.

Down here in the sticks, good news appeared in our local paper’s front page headline this week which announced “Shock as quarry plan is rejected”.  That’s “shock” as in “Your lottery ticket’s this week’s only jackpot winner”.

For about 10 years, Aggregate Industries UK Ltd have been trying to get permission to dig a massive quarry to remove up to 1.5 million tonnes of sand and gravel over the next decade and carry it in large lorries wearing out 23 miles of local roads to their depot for processing.  A farmhouse in a neighbouring field would presumably have been left perched on an outcrop towering over the hole where all the sand and gravel used to be, knowing that someone would then decide to fill the hole with plastic, dog poo and other rubbish.

Luckily, there’s been very active opposition to these proposals throughout and AIUK have been dilatory in considering the environmental effects of their proposals so the county council’s Development and Management Committee finally rejected their application.  Their reasons are said to include “the protection of heritage assets, unacceptable impact on water supplies, unresolved road safety issues, lack of evidence of protected species, lack of surface water management plan, loss of mature trees and the impact on climate change” (in 10 years, a good old British commercial company failed to prepare their case, what a surprise).

More good news appeared in a letter to the same paper.  A defensive Brexiteer friend has failed three times to find a single benefit the UK has gained from Brexit apart from divorcing the UK from the Brussels bureaucracy but I now know from this letter that not only do we save “the billions we sent to the corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy in Brussels” but also “the immigration crisis would be so much worse were there also the free for all under freedom of movement; our post-EU vaccination programme is keeping us safe while the EU struggles under a fourth wave brought on by its own incompetence;  we are free to import cheaper food from the old Commonwealth and are able to research genetic modification of foodstuffs down further, unrestricted by EU red tape … while our erstwhile partners flounder in stagnation and decline”.  Now I know.

And Meghan Markle won her invasion of privacy case against a British newspaper which, if you put her (ex?) royal status to one side, offers an interesting precedent that further defines the respective rights of ‘celebrities’ and the media.  A statutory right to privacy was introduced in England and Wales in 2000 with public interest being one of the few reasons to publish.  While I have no particular feelings about Markle or whether she should have stayed schtum because of her husband’s royal background, I’m glad the case came up with this result since some of what was published was clearly personal and private.

We do make progress, but exceeding slow, and we need such cases to keep things moving forward.

Murdering politicians, assisted dying, HS2, wealth gap, NHS betrayed again, and crapology

17 October 2021

Why do people murder MPs?  What do they think they’re achieving?  Sir David Amess isn’t the first – Airey Neave and Jo Cox immediately spring to mind – and I fear he won’t be the last.  My disdain for politicians in general is a well-kept secret but many of them do a lot to help and support people in their constituency and Amess was a committed constituency MP for almost 40 years and was at an ‘open advice surgery’ when he was stabbed to death on Friday.  Surely nobody who isn’t in the armed forces should fear being killed while they’re doing their job?

On the subject of death, the Assisted Dying Bill has its second reading in the House of Lords scheduled for this coming Friday.  If it becomes law, it would allow people with terminal illnesses to decide when they die and avoid the pain, dislocation and discomfort that too many people have to suffer as they approach the end of their lives.  The Bill incorporates safeguards that require the approval of two doctors and a high court judge so you won’t be able to get a dose to save money on vets when an old dog nears its end.

Assisted dying is already legal in a number of other countries and provides much comfort to people with terminal illnesses.  It’s thought that about a third of people who have been confirmed as eligible don’t follow it through;  the simple fact that they knew they had the power to control their death provided comfort enough.

I believe that everybody should have the freedom and ‘safety net’ this Bill will provide if it becomes law, not least because I have some personal experience of what it’s like not to have the ability to die painlessly.

I’ve written about my mother before:  she’d been suffering severe and chronic pain for a long time, took an overdose of pills she’d been hoarding and died alone on 4 April 1972.  She was 54.  The post-mortem confirmed what she already knew:  she had carcinomatosis from her neck to her knees and the coroner thought she’d anticipated her ‘natural’ death by only 2-3 weeks.  She left a note which she was still writing as she died.  She’d told nobody of her intentions but she’d always said she would do this if the need arose and we were proud of her courage rather than shocked and, with our father’s approval, we made sure her death notices and the death certificate made it clear she’d committed suicide.

At the time, I thought a lot about how I could have helped her and decided I would have liked to stay with her while she died but I couldn’t have helped her take the pills, and I would have been happy to accept the legal consequences of sitting with her instead of stopping her.

Leaving aside my own responsibilities as a carer which rather complicate things, I have no fear of being dead but I am frightened of an extended and painful dying, not just for me but for all of those who are closest to me who’d have to watch helplessly.  In an ideal world, I’d love to have a ‘death party’, surrounded by all my nearest and dearest who felt able to be there while I took the lethal dose and died peacefully with one last deep breath.  I just hope I wouldn’t snore as I slipped away …

If anybody else feels that we should, subject to safeguards, have the right to decide when to die if we have a terminal illness, Dignity in Dying is urging people to write to peers asking them to attend the debate on Friday and support the Bill;  for more details, and suggestions of the leading peers to contact, see (https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/take-action/write-to-the-house-of-lords/).

We’re all going to get older and die so let’s make it as comfortable as we can.  Even the Queen was seen using a stick in public last week and it made front page news.  For heavens’ sake, the woman’s 95, give her a break.  What sort of headline is “95-year old seen using stick”?

Meanwhile, in Middlesbrough, a 6-bedroom detached house can cost about £250,000.  In Knightsbridge, a small parking space, not even a garage, just the right to leave a smallish car between some lines painted on the floor of a communal car park, was advertised last week for the same sum.  And somebody paid £18,582,000 for a partly-shredded picture by Banksy as the needy Universal Credit recipients were beginning to feel the pain of having their income cut by £20 a week.  There’s something very wrong somewhere.

Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, proudly announced a £250m “GP rescue plan” which aroused such anger that he withdrew from a scheduled appearance at the Royal College of General Practitioners’ annual conference.  Not only has he misremembered the promise on Boris’s Brexit bus but he doesn’t have the bottle to face his critics and explain his decision.  Even Jeremy Hunt, one of his predecessors, criticised his plan.

Isn’t it interesting that people now seem to be in denial about the pandemic despite there being 45,000 new cases every day last week, an increase of 7% on the previous week, and 145 Covid-related deaths every day? 

Even knowing these numbers, the NHS website still says that, in England, the maximum waiting time for non-urgent, consultant-led treatments is 18 weeks.  Just over 4 months.  According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “5.3 million people were waiting for treatment in May 2021, up from 4.4 million in February 2020” with a marked increase in the number of people who have been waiting for over a year and the Health Secretary has warned it’s “going to get a lot worse before it gets better” and could increase to 13 million.  I’m on waiting lists for two unrelated procedures so I hope I haven’t been double-counted, or else he should have said 12,999,999.

HS2 Ltd has also failed to impress people yet again, this time with its reluctance to accept the law.  They’re having problems with the protestors who have tunnelled under land in Wendover which has been leased to the company by Bucks county council.   However, an HS2 spokesperson said “This land is legally owned by HS2 Ltd and needed for construction of the railway.”  Leased?  Owned?  Who cares?   I hope the legal advice they’re given* on other aspects of the work is more accurate.

Coprologists have discovered that, some 2,700 years ago, salt miners in Austria drank beer with their blue cheese sarnies, which showed the hidden benefits of fermentation were known that long ago.  Imagine meeting the queen and, when she asks what you do, having to say “I analyse ancient turds”;  she’d probably just say “Like dodos I suppose.  How fascinating!” and move on.

Southern Water was fined a record £90m this summer for deliberately releasing billions of litres of untreated turdfilled sewage into waterways and their CEO said he would swim in the rivers and sea in his patch.  Note the careful choice of words – “would”, not “will”.

I don’t understand why people are getting so exercised by a foreign country buying Newcastle football club.  I realise the country concerned is Saudi Arabia whose rulers are widely believed to have been responsible for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder but they’ve been buying armaments from us for years and, for all I know, the bone saw they used to chop up Khashoggi’s body was made in Britain.  I’d rather they bought into football, not killing.

*          When was legal advice ever given?  Normally, one pays through the nose for it.

Multi-culturalism, political integrity (not), being British, wetlands, King Cnut

19 September 2021

After my piece on Emma Raducanu last week, I was shocked to see how many people were getting exercised about multi-culturalism.

Apparently, the US Open women’s finals was no longer about two brilliant players demonstrating outstanding tennis skills, it was about a Brit with a Romanian father and a Chinese mother playing a Canadian with an Ecuadorian father and a Filipino mother.  Raducanu’s Twitter bio apparently says “london|toronto|shenyang|Bucharest” or, in plain English “Up yours”.  I feel proud to live in the same country as somebody who answers critics so simply and unassumingly.

Predictably, Nigel Farage was one of the first out of his cage, picking on her Romanian blood to claim that Londoners would be “concerned” if “a group of Romanian men moved in next to [them]”.  We’d happily swap the man in the house behind ours, who is almost certainly of Anglo-Peasant stock, for a bunch of Romanians.

To be fair, Farage doesn’t seem to be pureblood racist:  his first ex-wife was Irish, his second German, he has some German and French roots himself, and he has always maintained he’s anti-EU, not anti-Europe or racist (apart from the Romanians of course).

Whatever, I wouldn’t want him as our neighbour.

(My DNA shows I’m of Anglo / Celtic / Scandanavian stock, something that inspires me with complete indifference.)

My only slight worry about Raducanu is that, at 18, she’s become world-famous overnight and won £1.8m.  The pressures that this puts on anyone must be immense but she comes over as being well-grounded and had enough insight to pull out of this year’s Wimbledon championships to deal with the stress rather than crash and burn in the tournament, so let’s hope she can return to as normal a life as possible.  She’s said she’s going to let her parents look after the money and hasn’t yet bought anything special, so she’s made a good start.

We can only hope she can live with people in the street recognising her but, if she’s seen the film ‘Hard Day’s Night’, she can use the John Lennon defence when people say “Aren’t you …?” and say “No, she’s six inches taller / shorter than me”.

On this week’s cabinet reshuffle, I can’t top Lucy Mangan’s wonderful summary:  “a variety of ministers are redeployed to stress-test the theory that things can’t get any worse”.

Other worries this week include two more rejections of promises in the manifesto on which the Conservatives were elected.  They’d already reneged on their foreign aid commitment and have now broken their pledges not to increase taxes and to retain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions.  This is on top of Boris Johnson’s pledge last year that there’d be a border in the Irish Sea over his dead body (another promise he still has to keep) while the deal he finally agreed with the EU effectively does just that.

I’d always thought that people voted for political parties because their manifestos said what they would do if elected and breaking such commitments has traditionally been considered a fundamental betrayal of voters’ trust.  Of course circumstances change but manifestos don’t include a clause in small print saying that none of this manifesto will be binding if they do.  Surely any honourable party would now fess up, admit the world has changed beyond their expectations and call a general election with new manifestos?

They’re also insistent on reducing universal credit by more than £1,000 a year on the grounds this was only intended to provide temporary help during the pandemic which they obviously want to believe is over, ignoring the medical experts who disagree.  This loss will plunge an estimated 800,000 more people into poverty (according to the Legatum Institute, a charitable think-tank set up by the Conservative Baroness Philippa Stroud “to create a global movement of people committed to creating the pathways from poverty to prosperity”) and has been condemned by the UN’s poverty envoy.  Johnson still has to explain how this is “levelling up” rather than down.

Shamima Begum has made another appeal following the removal of her British citizenship for a decision she made while still a minor and now regrets.  Why can’t we give her back her UK passport, allow her to return to the country of her birth and let the UK courts decide what should happen to her.  I, for one, have more faith in our justice system than in the judgement of our politicians?

Let’s also get back Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, another Brit the government has abandoned.  Her husband has already contacted the new foreign secretary but, since her predecessor achieved nothing positive and another, earlier predecessor contributed evidence (in Iranian eyes) to her support her original conviction, I’m not deeply optimistic.

And, while the Taliban men have taken one small step forward, Afghan women have taken a Great Leap Backwards and are now to be denied secondary education, presumably in case they turn out to have studied the Qu’ran and prove the Taliban’s oppression of women wasn’t actually ordained by Allah.  (Thinks:  why don’t we give all Afghan women UK passports and bring them over here?  That would finish off the Taliban within a generation.)

On a cheerier note, rewilding projects at Cwm Ivy on the Gower peninsula and the River Tamar have opened areas previously farmed behind embankments, allowing them to flood at high water and revert to sedimentary marshland.  Since the Gower project started in 2013 when it was decided not to repair a breached sea wall, the area has become rich in varied wildlife and attracts migratory birds such as passing ospreys.

So King Cnut was right and, 900 years later, the Victorians who built the sea wall were wrong.  Contrary to the story I first heard about Cnut being seen as weak (or stupid) because he couldn’t stop the tide coming in, it’s generally believed that he was showing people that not even a powerful king had any effect on the sea.  “Out damned tide, out I say”, he shouted at the waves, which didn’t affect them at all but did give Shakespeare a good line to adapt 500 years later.

Good and hopeful news with lessons for us all, and the value of kindness

15 August 2021

With the big hairy misogynist Taliban men re-taking Afghanistan (I wonder why they’re so frightened of people – such as women – who have different views), I’m looking at the good news this week.

The recent report from on climate change the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t contain any great surprises about just how close we are to the point of no return.  All the world’s governments have accepted the views of the hundreds of the world’s top scientists who contributed to the report that the climate emergency has unequivocally been caused by human activities and is unequivocally already affecting the planet’s land, sea and air.

But, it says, there is still hope that, if we can get to net zero CO₂ in time, global warming should stop and might even go into reverse.  It’s a big IF, of course, and it’ll need international cooperation to cut emissions to zero before the 1.5^oC increase which will be reached by 2050.  This means halving emissions by 2034, which seems likely to need a complete change in the mindset of politicians and businesses worldwide.

If every one of us does what we can, however small, and if politicians start to look beyond their chances of re-election, and if fossil fuel industries start thinking of their grandchildren rather than spending every evening counting the bawbees in their piggy banks, it can be done.

We can each make small changes at home (such as using green energy tariffs, LED lighting, improving insulation, replacing gas boilers with electric heat pumps and so on) and if the motor industry can improve electricity-powered vehicles, especially HGVs and PSVs – and reduce their cost – we’re making a start. 

I wonder if anybody has done any sums that relate the number of vehicles using UK roads and their annual mileage to the time taken to recharge their batteries so they’ll know how many charging points will be needed and the maximum distance there will need to be between them.  You only need one battery to go flat in a queue for a charging point …

On house prices, there’s good news and bad news.  The good news is that you can buy an average house in Londonderry for 4.7 times the average annual salary there;  the bad news is that an average house in Winchester costs 14 times the average salary there.  (In London, you ‘only’ need 11 years’ salary.)  

The survey was done by Halifax, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender, and shows the north / south divide to be alive and kicking:  of the ten most expensive towns, Cambridge was the furthest north while, of the ten least expensive towns, six were in Scotland, one was in Northern Ireland and the other three were Carlisle, Bradford and Hull.  The lowest average salary was £27,730 (Hull) and the highest was £59,391 (St Albans).  There’s something very wrong somewhere.

How did I get here while doing good news? 

Let’s think about beavers.  Not only do we have two local colonies (in Dartmoor and East Devon) but beavers are becoming increasingly established in Scotland with a survey by NatureScot, the government conservation agency, estimating a wild population of 1,000 beavers in Scotland, and their river management skills have been proved to reduce flooding with minimal loss of farming land.

Advised by the indigenous Klamath Tribes, America’s Nature Conservancy (a not-for-profit body, roughly equivalent to a UK charity or social enterprise) has preserved the Sycan Marsh Preserve, a 30,000 acre wetland thick with ponderosa pines in Oregon.  When the recent Bootleg fire rampaged through the forests, it slowed right down when it reached the Preserve, giving firefighters time to get ahead of it and steer it away from a research station.

The Klamath Tribes have also been working with the US Forest Service to bring back their pre-colonial forest management techniques such as clearing out undergrowth and lighting small, controlled fires that rejuvenate the soil and make firebreaks that limit ‘natural’ fires.

America’s Senate has finally passed Joe Biden’s $1tn infrastructure bill with bi-partisan support which included the infamously inconsistent Mitch McConnell.  Its aim is to update the country’s power grid and to support greener policies such as expanding networks of charging points for electric vehicles.  And a group in the House of Representatives want to allocate even more money for elderly care, childcare and other social welfare policies so there’s hope there too.

Incidentally, did you see that a tobacco company is trying to take over a vaping specialist so it will not only produce highly addictive cigarettes but also the chemical infusions that are supposed to be so good at stopping people smoking.  Why does this make me think of the ouroboros?

A man from Leroy in Canada (wouldn’t it be great if his name was Leroy?) wanted an ice cream cake so – as you do – he hopped into his helicopter and flew to the nearest town to buy one.  He parked in the Dairy Queen’s car park and was apprehended as he proceeded in a southerly direction towards his vehicle in possession of the said comestible.  He appears in court in September charged with dangerous driv operation of an aircraft.

As Cop26 nears, the UK government has discovered that another problem caused by Brexit – the queues of lorries waiting to do the paperwork in Dover – can easily be solved by converting one lane of the main route to Dover into a lorry park, and they have now removed the original time limit on this arrangement so it can become permanent.  This will naturally increase costs for UK and EU transport companies which will make them look at alternative ways of getting goods across the Channel and they will obviously think of using trains which will dramatically reduce the contribution Kent currently makes to global warming.  Brilliant!  And I believe in fairies.

Meanwhile, a right-wing American broadcaster was urging his audience not to get the vaccination right up until June, when he got Covid and changed his mind.  He died on 4 August.

During the Olympics, Hansle Parchment, a Jamaican hurdler, went to the wrong place and a volunteer paid for him to get a taxi to the Olympic Stadium, where he won a gold medal.  Afterwards, he traced the volunteer to thank her and repay the taxi fare.  Jamaica’s minister for tourism, Edmund Bartlett, has offered her a free trip to Jamaica saying “We want to reciprocate the kindness shown to one of our own.” 

That’s what kindness does.  It brings rewards that can be far greater than the original act, not necessarily to the same person but if you get a warm feeling from a kindness that somebody’s done you, you’re more likely to be kind to others and, in time, kindness will spread through society like a pyramid, from a small point at the top right down to the bottom where it covers the entire earth.  That’s my vision anyway.  Will you tell the Taliban or shall I?

Somebody else’s vision was neatly illustrated by a women’s rights demonstration in America which featured a woman holding up a placard saying “Men against abortion?  Have a vasectomy”.  Perhaps those of us who have had one should be given a badge saying “I’ve been done”?

After the horror of the shootings in Plymouth last week, I asked my Conservative-voting friend if he thought that anybody who’d had a gun licence suspended until he’d taken an anger management course should never ever be allowed to own a gun again even after taking the course;  he said he thought only police and the military should be allowed guns.  This would also prevent people who get their kicks from going out with guns to blast the heads off gods’ creatures (which he said was “silly”), a benefit I hadn’t thought of, though I’ve always worried about the mental health of people who actually enjoy killing things.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that perhaps all drugs should be legalised, controlled and taxed.  After I’d written this, I realised that big pharma, who would have a vested interest in protecting their profits, would suddenly start using their international power to prevent the production and distribution of drugs that they hadn’t manufactured, thereby putting drug barons out of business overnight.  Go for it people!

PC and ‘woke’, stupidities, Nigel Farage turns charity fundraiser, the failing NHS, the climate crisis and methane

8 August 2021

Does political correctness polarise views and make sensible discussion harder?  A friend asked this question recently and it made me think, particularly since the sensitivities around ‘woke’ are so similar.

My instant, unconsidered response was yes it does because, if you use the wrong word or phrase, somebody will correct you and the whole point of what you were saying gets lost in semantics.   I realise that using the ‘wrong’ word may upset people or reveal an unconscious prejudice against whatever but I think it’s much more often the product of what was normal vocabulary when one was younger (which, again, I accept might itself have been the result of prejudice).

In both cases, the main problem seems to be that both were labelled.  I’ll bet that whoever first used the terms “political correctness” and “woke” would now, like whoever first used the term “health and safety”, deny it three times before the cock crows.

In fact, all three are used with the best of intentions but sometimes go too far and people then attempt to belittle their importance;  and the power of the ‘anti-PC/woke’ voices are amplified by the ever-changing nature of what actually is PC or ‘woke’ at any time.

For example, as homosexual adults first started to get society to admit their equality as people, the definition of sexuality became more detailed and some other groups wanted equal recognition so the PC acronym grew and is now (I think) LGBTI(+) and includes non-binary people.

We also need to use the right words, which also change and some are group-specific.  For example, the word ’queer’ is now acceptable, but only if you’re within a queer group;  or that horrid word used to describe people whose skin is darker than that of the average Scottish midge farmer is now used amongst themselves by gang members.

The use of ‘woke’ is slightly different in that, as far as I know, people who are woke generally don’t consider themselves as part of a ‘woke’ group the word is used extensively by people who are mocking them for trying to respect others by using the ‘right’ words.  The mockers are usually people who themselves retain some level of prejudice, conscious or unconscious, against people who are different in some way, whether it’s because they’re disabled, or ‘foreign’, or their skin colour is different, or their gender, or their sexuality, or they just don’t talk English proper like wot we do.

(I’ve always had a feeling that the reason young men – and they are almost invariably men – who despise gay men is that, deep within them, they’re frightened that gay men might find them so irresistibly attractive that they will get seduced, and discover they enjoy it.  Wouldn’t it be fun if things could be reversed so that men had to put up with whistles and offensive comments about their bodies and general sexual innuendo;  not, sadly, that I could ever imagine anybody shouting more enticing than “ugly bugger” at me.)

The ideal is, of course, that we should treat everybody the same so we like or dislike people regardless of their race or skin colour or prosthesis;  which means we need to be clear why we dislike them and make it clear that their race, skin colour or prosthesis are irrelevant.

The people who find it difficult to do this tend to be those with particular hang-ups, such as those who want to keep England English.  The trouble is that, while this is almost as good a slogan as Boris Johnson’s Brexit bus promising £350m extra a week for the NHS, where do you start?  Who are the English?  Or rather, when did the various invaders stop being ‘foreign’ and become English?  Why not start from when England first called itself England, somewhere round the 5^th or 6^th centuries CE?

(See how PC I am:  I used CE for Common Era instead of AD for Anno Domini so I don’t offend people who are happy to use the supposed date of Christ’s birth as the baseline when numbering years but don’t want to attribute it to him.)

Some of the changes obviously improve things when some people were described just by an adjective.  For example, the Royal National Institute for the Blind is now called the Royal National Institute of Blind People because the noun at the end makes it clear who it benefits and you don’t have to ask if they help blind llamas.

Having said all that, we must accept that, at least in a democracy, there is a governing group that has its own rights and, while the rights of minority groups must be respected, we foreigners (I have some Swedish genes as well as the Scottish ones) must live within the laws and customs set by the government, such as the fact that England has an established church although only a small (and declining) number of people actually attend its services.

We must also remember that people who take their own personal hang-ups seriously can take things a step too far, given the incomparable lead of H&S regulations which, for all the sensible restrictions they impose, also tend to outlaw common sense.  But then, I’d much rather be stuck in a lift with Sophie Ward than Tommy Robinson or an H&S expert.

The most shocking example of political stupidity this week was Boris Johnson’s confining himself in a small space which recycles the air, sharing it equally around all those present regardless which end of the cabin they were sitting in, with a member of his team who had tested positive for Covid-19. 

The Washington-based Commonwealth Fund regularly compares the health systems of 11 rich countries and has just reported that the NHS has dropped from first to fourth place, below Norway, the Netherlands and Australia.  I wonder if this might be linked to the huge cuts in government funding during the Osborne austerity era and private sub-contractors now skimming off vast sums of our money to give their directors and shareholders, or whether it’s just the government’s incompetence in handling the pandemic.

However, Nigel Farage has had a real achievement, having recently described the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (a charity which isn’t allowed to take political decisions) for acting as a “taxi service for migrants”, which led to a 3,000% increase in donations to the RNLI.  Perhaps I could get him to slag off my favourite charity.

The RNLI’s response was that they are there to save lives and, as far as I know, they don’t ask about drowning people’s politics or nationality before lifting them to safety.  But worry not, Nigel, the Home Secretary will deport them if they’re foreign as soon as their clothes have dried.

The Transport Secretary Grant Shapps’ decision to improve 8 miles of the A303 has been overruled by the High Court because he’d made a “material error of law” in the process and had not presented the required evidence of the impact on each individual asset in the Stonehenge area. 

In the run-up to Cop26, hosted by Britain, Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry gave a major speech at Kew Gardens and Boris Johnson demonstrated his complete ignorance of the climate crisis by not sending a single senior member of the government.

At Cop26, the world’s biggest countries will discuss how to reverse its causes but Britain has maintained an embarrassed silence on the subject and Allegra Stratton, the government’s spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit, has admitted she still drives a diesel car because she drives long distances to visit family and suffers ‘range anxiety’.  The government, already way behind its previous promises to reduce emissions, has already scrapped the grant available for insulating homes and has been trying to open a new coal mine …

It’s generally agreed there’s a very real risk of catastrophic and irreversible changes to the world’s climate (if it isn’t already too late) and scientists have warned that methane is 25 times more dangerous a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Way back in 1997, research carried out by Duke University in North Carolina published by the American Journal of Physiology found that methane comprised only about 7% of the gases in human farts (yes, I know, I don’t like to think about it either) and that the total human output is dwarfed by the methane contained in cows’ burps (bovine farts don’t contain anything like as much).

Climate scientists have also detected signs that the Gulf Stream is becoming unstable and, if it stops circulating, the consequences would be catastrophic:  it could reduce rainfall in India, South America and west Africa, increase storms in Europe, raise sea levels, further endanger the Amazonian rainforest and the Antarctic ice sheets, and lower temperatures in Wolverhampton (remember the UK is on the same latitude as Nova Scotia where the wintertime seas freeze).

It all reminds me of what seems to have become the government’s sole sustainable policy, neatly summed up in Garrison Keillor’s comment that “There comes a point where you have to stand up to reality and deny it”.

Football, racism, “levelling up”, foreigners, goldfish and Britney Spears

18 July 2021

Before last Sunday’s football match, an England supporter wedged a flare into his bum and lit it, to the delight of his mates (and a wider internet audience).  What a good job he inserted it the right way round.  On the other hand …

In the event, Italy won the 2021 UEFA European Championship after extra time and a penalty shoot-out.  If two teams have drawn after all that time, it surely says that they were evenly matched and both teams played equally well so it seems very unfair to pick five members of each team to kick a ball to decide the result.  Why they don’t they replay the match later (didn’t they used to do that?) or just accept it’s in the lap of the gods and toss a coin, or agree they’re both the best and share the prize?

Imagine how you would feel if you’re one of the ten kickers and miss and your team then loses;  wouldn’t you feel you’d personally let down your six team-mates who didn’t have a go, and your manager, and the club, and the fans, and your country?

What was so sad about the aftermath was the reaction of a certain senior politician who said that, if footballers kept out of politics and stuck to footballing, they’d play better*, and a small minority of bad losers tried to assign the ultimate loss to something about the players that had nothing to do with their footballing skills.

In a different context, the irrelevance of these types of prejudice was neatly encapsulated by Lucy Mangan in a review of the recent Channel 5 series ‘Anne Boleyn’:

“Holding it all together they have a superb Anne [Boleyn] in [Jodie] Turner-Smith … Turner-Smith’s casting caused a stir because she is of Jamaican descent.  If you are someone who is bothered by that, well then you are probably the kind of person who is always going to be bothered by that and we need not detain you here.  For what it’s worth, I am aware that Anne Boleyn wasn’t black, but I’m also aware that she wasn’t Claire Foy, Merle Oberon, Helena Bonham Carter or any of the other women who have played her over the years, and my brain is not unduly upset by any of it.”

Then, on Thursday, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and I watched part of his speech until I became so incensed I had to leave to burst into tears somewhere quiet. 

It was obvious from the speed with which he flipped over the notes he was reading it that it was written in very large type so even he couldn’t ad lib his way through the smaller print (why don’t people just push sheets to one side instead of flapping them up and over – it doesn’t matter what order they’re in after they’ve been used does it?).  And it was still so toe-curlingly feeble that even his front-benchers had to turn their faces to the wall.

There was even a reference to recovering like “a coiled spring”.  Have you ever seen an uncoiled spring?

It’s roughly two years since Johnson announced his “levelling up” policy so he’s had about 730 days since to decide the detail of how he will achieve this but all we got was political soundbites about rich areas not getting poorer, more support from government, more to encourage businesses, more jobs and more opportunities, more power to local government and other vague improbabilities.

I thought one journalist who described his speech as being “light on detail” was being over-generous but I was more worried about the things he didn’t mention, like how to fund the recovery; or the reducing state benefits;  or people who are unable to work because of medical conditions or family commitments or lack of local opportunities;  or homeless people;  or his broken promises about foreign aid for people (foreigners) starving to death overseas;  or increased powers to reject refugees (foreigners) seeking safety in the UK and to deport those who have been here for decades (foreigners) to countries they’ve never even seen.  I wonder if those who came over on, say, the Windrush and have since died (late foreigners) will be exhumed and returned to their country of origin, freeing up more space for jerry-builders to throw up cheap, nasty micro-houses on tiny plots which can be sold as “affordable” because cheap, nasty materials make even more profit for them.

Transparency International, an organisation whose mission is “to stop corruption and promote transparency, accountability and integrity at all levels and across all sectors of society” works “in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption”.  They recently reported that the Conservatives have an “unhealthy financial reliance” on property developers and more than 20% of their income in the last decade came from the residential property sector.

This obviously doesn’t prove that their policies were influenced by these donations but the report makes the point that such reliance on housing-based donations creates “a real risk of aggregative corruption” but it could of course be sheer coincidence that the government is now supporting the construction of housing estates on SSSIs, AONBs, ancient woodlands and floodplains.

As for the NHS, education, the global climate emergency and trying to rebuild relations with our neighbours (yet more foreigners) after Johnson was/is so dishonourable and/or incompetent about the Brexit deal he signed …

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research unit, NHS funding increased by an average of 6% a year while we had a Labour government, and National Insurance contributions were increased by 10% to help pay for it.  Since 2010, the Conservatives have refused to increase raxes and limited NHS funding increases to just over 1% despite a survey by the King’s Fund in 2016 showing that 70% of us are willing to pay more tax if the extra revenue was ring-fenced and spent only on the NHS.

Unfortunately, the government has this delusion that private companies, particularly those who once poured a senior politician a beer, can do things better so there’s no need for competitive tendering or probing too deeply, and certainly no need to ask why companies claim money from the government under the furlough support scheme but then give it to their senior management and shareholders.

What’s most surprising is that quite a few of the intelligent Conservative MPs feel that’s it’s more honourable to support and be loyal to their elected leader than to call out his continual lies and failures;  the only consolation is that quite a few even more intelligent Conservative MPs are becoming willing to stand against his more extremist ideas.

Witness the government’s approval of the Nationality and Borders Bill, although this could actually be a worthy attempt to ensure that England keeps its reputation for low-IQ, drug-fuelled English football ’fans’ unsullied by closing its borders to foreigners who are just trying to find somewhere they can live and work and stay alive.  (According to some specialist lawyers, the Bill is apparently worded so badly that RNLI lifeboats could get prosecuted if they’re found in coastal waters saving people from a sinking ship.)

Still, I gained some small comfort from the fact that we still have enough freedom to set up a new right-wing TV channel under the leadership of Andrew Neil, the man who converted me from the Sunday Times to the Observer when he became the former’s editor all those years ago.  I was even more encouraged by its initial impact and viewing figures – hardly anybody watched its lunchtime programme on Wednesday and Neil’s own ‘flagship’ show has disappeared while Neil disappears for a holiday in his main residence in the south of France and other executives have resigned.  To recover these losses, they’re now bringing in two beacons of undoubted objectivity and integrity:  Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan.

Our new health minister, Sajid David, has tested positive for Covid so the entire Cabinet including Johnson will now presumably have to self-isolate, along with all the top people at the Department at Health who actually do the work.  Let’s see if we miss them.

The fascinating leak of Russian documents confirm that, in January 2016, they assessed Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex” and they apparently confirm that the Kremlin possesses potentially compromising material on him.  Their conclusion was that “It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump’s] election to the post of US president”, predicting that this would lead to “the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system and see hidden discontent burst into the open”.

How right they were.

The world can only hope that enough of the umpteen charges now being levelled against Trump both corporately and personally will prove enough criminal malfeasance to merit a prison sentence that would prevent him ever standing for president again.

Interestingly, it appears that owners of fishponds and aquariums in Minnesota have been transferring surplus goldfish into local waterways where they grow huge and destroy local ecosystems.  They remain bright orange and immensely stupid but latest reports imply that none of them are planning to stand for president in 2024.

And finally, I have to admit that I know next to nothing about Britney Spears or her father but her recent attempts to be freed from her father’s control, which extended even as far as contraception, did make me wonder if the courts would have allowed a 39 year-old man to be so controlled by his mother.

Anyway, she’s finally won and has said she’s happy to work with the other conservator, which – in my ignorance – pleases me no end.

*          How I wish some politicians would stay out of politics and just play football

Amazon, buying books, tolerance, political hypocrisy, Scotland, property developers and gun control

28 March 2021

Amazon has a problem which discourages potential buyers.  It isn’t a huge problem for me because I only use Amazon when there’s no alternative but I want a book published online by Amazon which I can’t get anywhere else and it’s written by a friend so I really do want to read it.

The reason I avoid Amazon is not because I dislike the company – their service is actually very good and they handle complaints well – but because I’m unhappy about commercial monopolies and the power it gives them to abuse their staff:  their delivery drivers often have to pee in bottles because they get fired if they leave too many packages undelivered at the end of the day.  (When I heard a former Amazon driver had said this, my first thought was what on earth their women drivers do.)

If I’m logging in to Amazon, they send a code to my phone.  I’m used to this elsewhere, but instead of a number Amazon sends a 274-digit (no I didn’t actually count them) http address to my phone and says ‘tap here’.  It may work on a Smartphone but there’s nothing to tap on Thickphones.

They can then send you a number by email but guess what happens – there’s nowhere on the login screen to enter a number so you end up circling back to blah-di-blah tap here.  After half an hour of teeth-grinding, I phoned them and spoke to someone who didn’t know how it worked and sent me an email saying I can email them so they can ring me back but, in order to do this, you have to log in …  At this point, I lost the will to live and went to bed.

Incidentally, about a year ago, I mentioned the Big Green Bookshop which ran a ‘Buy a Stranger a Book’ scheme.  I sent the money for a signed copy of a book I wanted and topped it up with enough to buy books for two strangers.  The book duly arrived but it was unsigned so I queried this and got an offhand reply saying they’d run out and would a signed bookplate do?  Yes, I said, and never heard from them again, despite two subsequent reminders.  Avoid!

Instead, for books, try https://uk.bookshop.org/, “an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops” where you can buy books and choose the local bookshop you want to have the profit on your order.

Elsewhere, a school in Batley, West Yorkshire is in trouble because one of its teachers used a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad while talking about the Charlie Hebdo massacre carried out by Muslims who were offended because some believe their faith forbids depictions of their Prophet.

I find myself conflicted by this.  I have no problems with the principle of gods and prophets being lampooned or pictured in any way but I’m unreligious and I’m not in a position to judge the validity of other people’s beliefs.  However, I do believe that displaying something which is known to offend some people is tactless and insulting;  we should be able to accept that others have different beliefs which we should respect.  We should also try to learn about their beliefs and understand them even if ours are different. 

Boris Johnson has at last admitted he wished he’d done some things differently and regrets not having locked down earlier but he didn’t say ‘sorry’ and he went on to say there would be a “a fitting and a permanent memorial to the loved ones we have lost and to commemorate this whole period”.  He apparently thinks it’ll comfort people who have lost friends and relations to know that their names will appear somewhere on a memorial.  Sod the memorial, I’d rather have the people back. 

Still, I’m sure he won’t let his ‘regret’ prevent future dithering and delays.  Indeed, while Professor Chris Whitty is warning of another increase in infections and there’s a full-page NHS advertisement on the back of today’s paper saying “Every online meeting is making a difference … Stay Home”, Johnson’s urging people to get back to work.

We’re also seeing Rishi Sunak reverting to type.  A year ago, he took a firm hold of the money and said there’d be “whatever it takes” to support people through the pandemic but he just blew it when he insulted NHS staff who are working their backsides off, risking their lives and dying, with an increase of 1%; his boss confirmed “it’s all we can afford” while simultaneously announcing £1.5bn of support for companies struggling to pay business rates and a huge increase in our stock of nuclear weapons.

Johnson even admitted that “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed” which is true but even he realised this should never be admitted in public and, immediately afterwards, he tried to withdraw what he’d said.

Further north, after falling out with his former sidekick, Alex Salmond is forming a new party, Alva, which sounds like a Caledonian washing powder.  His only reason to do this seems to be to divide Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP supporters.  I wish someone would do the same with the Conservative Party.

Some of their protégés are currently are trying to convince Horsham district council it would be really great to build lots of houses on a world-famous 3,500-acre rewilding project on the Knepp estate, endangering the rare white storks that have raised chicks there alongside peregrines, turtle doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies.  The estate is also believed to house the densest population of breeding songbirds in Britain and provides a vital, protected wildlife corridor linking the estate with the St Leonard’s and Ashdown forests.

But there is good news.  As we all know, developers will happily fell protected trees that have been growing for centuries and infringe any planning restriction they don’t like, pay the fines (which can theoretically be very large but usually aren’t) and carry on with the building work. 

In early 2015, the foreign-owned developer CLTX Ltd was refused planning permission to demolish the 94-year old pub Carlton Tavern in Kilburn, London so they popped in when it was closed over the Easter weekend and knocked most of it down, expecting to pay a fine and get on with the work.  They were then amazed when, immediately following its destruction, Westminster council wrote to CLTX demanding that the Carlton Tavern be rebuilt exactly “as it stood immediately prior to its demolition”, brick by brick.  CLTX’s standard reply to such demands was that this would be impossible because the details had been lost.

Unfortunately for them, a canny bunch of locals didn’t trust property developers (I wonder why) and had anticipated this so they’d asked English Heritage to list it and a plaster cast had been made of every tile, bundles of pictures were taken and everything was fully documented.  So CLTX had to rebuild it and now, six years later, the Carlton Tavern will (lockdown permitting) reopen next month.

Is it wicked to enjoy a feeling of schadenfreude?

Joe Biden seems to have started well in an understated, unshouty way and is even starting on gun control and calling for a ban on assault weapons.

The NRA believes that most murders are committed using handguns and knives rather than assault rifles, and that focusing on gun ownership neglects the killers’ motives for killing someone.  There are also very few ‘mass shootings’ and they account for less than 3% of all the people who are shot to death.  They see this as an argument for not banning assault rifles.

Their opponents see it as an argument for controlling all guns.

From over here, it seems that right-wing Americans fail to recognise the significance of the second Amendment the NRA uses to justify the right to have guns.  It’s clear that most of them have never read the opening words which say “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State …” and nowhere does it even hint that individuals have the right just to shoot people they don’t like.

What people also seem to forget is that, when it was written, the “Arms” mentioned in the amendment were muskets, cumbersome things that fired one shot then took several minutes to reload.  Revolvers, which could only hold up to eight bullets before needing to be reloaded, and self-contained cartridges weren’t invented till some 30 years later, while the latest weapons can now shoot at the rate of 6,000 rounds per minute and can empty a magazine holding 30 rounds in half a second.

Isn’t it sad that so much thought and engineering goes into producing something so unnecessary.