Friday 31 December 2021

1941 in review

I had second thoughts about filling in gaps in this blog with quotations from the Daily Mirror compendium which I received as a birthday present. It would be hypocritical to do so after complaining about the continuing, virtually continuous, programming of World War Two features on at least two Freeview channels.

Now, though, seems a good time to review the reporting of 1941 as a whole as reflected in the selected front pages by the (anonymous) compiler. 

There was no doubt that the Mirror was wholly behind the war effort and the coalition government. Although as strongly Labour-supporting then as it is now, it is difficult to find any criticism of Churchill and the Conservatives or any other party for that matter. Hyper-patriotic, the Mirror made free with the epithets "Huns", "Japs" and "Wops" in its headlines which  a present-day editor may have had second thoughts over. The tone was set in the first sentence of the lead article: "The New Year will bring decisive events in the war against Hitler and his puppet Mussolini." There is criticism of New Year Honours as consolation for several worthies who had been given public appointments but then had to be relieved of them because they were not up to the job. There was no criticism of the DSO for Mountbatten who was clearly still considered a hero for his command of HMS Kelly. It was to be some time after the war that accounts by officers and men who had served under him revealed his deficiencies, which culminated in the disastrous Dieppe Raid.

Throughout the year, the Mirror reported on progress on three fronts, naval action, bombing raids in Europe and the regaining of ground in North Africa. However, it was not afraid to report Nazi advances or the effects of German bombing, such as the Swansea Blitz in February. 

The big events of the year were covered. In May, Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland. The Mirror was in no doubt that his peace proposal was a big con. Later that month, the sinking of the Bismarck was front-page news. In June, Hitler tore up the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and, along with Axis allies, turned on Russia. A Mirror leader commented on American ambivalence. Hitler's avowed intent to strike at "International Jewish Bolshevism" struck a chord with the German and Irish communities of the US. President Roosevelt was however a friend of Britain. Later in the year, Stalin was to call for the West to open a second front as Russia, in great hardship, struggled to resist German pressure. 

A constant preoccupation was rationing, and in particular the food ration.

Two deaths caught my attention in a November edition. Frank Pick was the man credited with creating London Underground's corporate identity. The Mirror felt his contribution to government propaganda, as a former Director-General of the Ministry of Information, was a more significant headline. There was also  the death by suicide of the 24-year-old Mary Clement Davies, daughter of Clement Davies, MP for Montgomeryshire. He had, along with Clement Attlee, prepared the ground for unseating Neville Chamberlain after the Norway debate. Davies was to become leader of the Liberals after the war. One wonders whether the personal tragedy contributed to Davies's alcoholism.

Sadly, the collection of Mirror front pages finishes with the edition of Monday 29th December. This was filled with reports of the war in Europe and the Pacific, seemingly two steps forward and one step back. Doubtless there was an end-of-year message to come on 31st, looking back on Britain's survival against the odds in 1941, and with hopes for the turning of the tide which was to come in 1942. But I shall just have to imagine it.


Thursday 30 December 2021

Dr John Oldershaw

I missed the centenary of my alma mater, Oldershaw School, opened in September 1920. However, the CBE announced for its founder one hundred years ago today gives the excuse for some catching up.   John Oldershaw MD, who practised medicine in Liverpool, became a magistrate and alderman in the then county borough of Wallasey. Biographical details on the Web are hard to find, but he was clearly well-to-do as well as public spirited in order to found the new school at a time of economic privation. He must also have had some influential friends as donors, and perhaps some parents paid fees, but I do remember being told that Oldershaw was one of the first secondary schools in the country to be truly open to all. It was only later that it was taken on by Wallasey Corporation, presumably as pressure on public funds eased and the aspirations of the Education Acts of 1918 and 1921 (detailed here) could begin to be met. I remember that one of the staff at the time I joined the student body was J.A. Davidson who had been an early pupil and could be identified on a 1922 school photograph, one of those which lined the walls of a school corridor.

The wikipedia entry is regrettably scant, but I can add the names of two distinguished former pupils. Colin Morris made his name as the author of a Whitehall farce, Reluctant Heroes, but went on to become a pioneering TV presenter and producer. He donated a typescript of Reluctant Heroes to the school library, and I hope it is still there. (Francis Ernest) Martin Jenkins was the star of the school plays when I was at Oldershaw. He went on to become a stage director (giving actor Brian Cox an early starring role as Ibsen's Brand) and BBC radio producer, before going freelance. He is also an expert on trams and tramways.



Wednesday 29 December 2021

Madame de Pompadour

 After last Sunday's dramatisation of sex in high places on BBC-TV, it is appropriate to remark on the 300th anniversary of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, influential mistress of Louis XV, King of France.

Tuesday 28 December 2021

Completing GWR electrification: wishful thinking?

On the basis of an item in recently published minutes of a Network Rail board meeting, the Evening Post headlined yesterday's edition "New hope for electric rail line". The board had been told that the unit cost of the projected electrification between Northampton and Sheffield was below European rates on a like-for-like basis. Since the ostensible reason for the majority Conservative government cancelling the electrification initiated by the coalition (a decision announced after a general election, it should be remembered) was the cost of the work, the Post draws the conclusion that there is now no objection to the project being resumed.

However, Grayling's excuse always seemed specious. Yes, there had been cost overruns on the English section, but these were largely due to a faulty strategy which had been abandoned and there was no reason to believe they would be repeated in South Wales. There must have been other reasons for the cancellation. 

By all means let us put pressure on the current Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps) using this latest information as a lever, but remember this i the Department which drastically pruned the HS2 project. I am not getting my hopes up.

Monday 27 December 2021

Book recommendation: "Sultan of Swing" by Michael Crick

 If politics are of no interest to you whatsoever, then this very readable biography of David Butler is not for you. Written with the cooperation of the subject, but not uncritical, it reveals that there is more to Butler than the invention of the swingometer. He did not coin the term "psephologist", however. Crick goes into the history of the word, including a surprising link to the Inklings. Butler did give wider currency to the term, though, including introducing it to America.

The big revelation to me was that Butler was more than an expert in front of the cameras on election nights. Together with the formidable Grace Wyndham Goldie, he defined the presentation and to some extent the production of the BBC results programmes. 

For me, another item of interest was the light that Butler's reminiscences shone on the mature thinking of Winston Churchill, with whom he had two long conversations. 


Sunday 26 December 2021

Boxing Day

In lieu of a Christmas Box, I tip my hat to the people who collect the refuse and recycling for Neath Port Talbot. In addition to the year-round standard service, someone on the round in Skewen occasionally makes sure that my waste caddy is put back within the front yard after their collection when storms threaten and are liable to blow the caddy away.

-o-

There are hundreds, probably thousands of TV and movie dramas about Christmas Day and Advent, but as far as I know, no screenwriter has tackled the remaining days of Christmas - except perhaps for adaptations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Boxing Day offers some dramatic possibilities, being one of the days in the year when domestic violence rises. I have toyed with the idea of writing a Boxing Day scenario of which a family split is one of the two narrative strands, both being resolved in a hopeful ending. It needs filling out, though, and inspiration has deserted me.


Saturday 25 December 2021

Absent friends

 My cousin Chris Poole and his wife, who initially promoted his career as a Santa Claus, gave me permission to use any of the many photos in his gallery before she died. Not long after, he too slipped away quietly. So this photo brings mixed emotions, of sadness that they are not still with us but also happy memories. 

It is surely better to illustrate a Christmas day blog with the picture of a real person I knew, someone who enjoyed his annual impersonation, rather than with a stock photo. And it really does exude goodwill.



But once again, there are too many absent friends among the living. Once again, travel restrictions prevent me seeing either  of my daughters over the Christmas period, not to mention my brother or sister and their families. So I sympathise with those in a similar position or worse. Let us hope this pandemic will be behind us soon.

A Happy Christmas to you all.



Friday 24 December 2021

Madagascar, an unlucky country

 On top of years of drought as weather patterns off East Africa have shifted, Madagascar suffered a shipwreck this week which claimed at least 85 lives. On top of that,  a helicopter sent to inspect the disaster crashed. Only two survivors have been reported.


You have a bloody cheek, Mr Putin

 You annexed major parts of Ukraine, which had been given her independence by your predecessor. You attempt to prevent freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. You had shot down an airliner, killing 282 people including young families and several world-renowned AIDS experts. You sent agents on assassination missions to Britain on at least two occasions, and probably more, endangering British lives, taking one totally innocent, in the process. This after we welcome children of your plutocrats to be educated in our private schools and allow your people to invest in our sport and even our political parties.

And you have the gall to accuse us of expansionism and provocation? You are rather like the footballer who protested to the referee: "He assaulted my boot with his face, ref.".

[Later] Russia's latest adventure is to send mercenaries into Mali.



Wednesday 22 December 2021

More expired vaccines destroyed in Africa

 In this case, the recipient nation is hardly to blame. According to today's news story, the Covid-19 vaccines had only two weeks' viability left when Covax despatched them to Nigeria. The Nigerians managed to administer almost half the doses in the short time they had available.

Questions have to be asked about the supply chain. Were they held up within the WHO, or was a donor nation at fault? Today's TV newsreel showed that the product was AstraZeneca's and that the labelling was in English. That might indicate the source as the USA or the UK. We know that the UK has virtually abandoned the AstraZeneca product in favour of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. On the other hand, English is a lingua franca in international commerce. 

Whether or not the batch in question was belatedly dumped by the Johnson government, the prime minister and the relevant departmental ministers need to be questioned about their donation policy, just as soon as government returns in the New Year.


Tuesday 21 December 2021

Events: then, now and in the future

Sarah Dunant, in a recent "Point of View" on Radio 4 describes how she came across a set of newspapers from late 1941 lining a chest in a second-hand shop. She remarks that those on the home front in those days had only BBC radio and such newspapers to keep them informed.  The tone was striking, she says: sober, factual and does not ratchet up the sensation. She may have been fortunate in the newspapers she found; they were clearly broadsheets of the time. The Daily Mirror was quite capable of stirring emotions,  and I guess the Daily Sketch was the same. But the basic point remains that the reporting was factual and the balance of stories was not skewed. She contrasts this with the decline through "if it bleeds, it leads" of print journalism to "the lies it tells, the more it sells" of clickbait in Fleet Street online and the parameters set by Facebook and Twitter. 

What struck me most about this particular broadcast was Ms Dunant's coda, which began "I am resigned to dying soon". She is nearly ten years younger than I, so, unless she was thinking of "soon" in geological terms, I guess this must be an intimation of an unwelcome diagnosis. It certainly got me wondering as to how many more Christmases I will see if I survive this one, not to mention the pandemic and those zoonoses which are to come. 

That same week, BBC Four broadcast the Sky at Night programme's review of the year. Hitherto, I have taken on board the long time-scales of space explorations but this time it hit me that I may not see the results of the extended Juno mission (Europa fly-by in 2025), BepiColombo (not due to orbit Mercury until 2026) and maybe not even those from the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched soon. 

Regrettably, I may not even find time to read one of Sarah Dunant's books, but at least there should be one or two more Points Of View to enjoy and enlighten.


Monday 20 December 2021

Royal Mail trouble

Throughout England, mail is piling up in Royal Mail centres. The trouble is particularly acute in the Midlands and North, it seems.  From my own experience (my sister had to go in person to a Solihull sorting office to retrieve an overdue letter of some importance from me early in the year) it has built up from the start of the pandemic. However, if the Mail had still been under public control, one imagines that the effective direction of labour which has driven the vaccine roll-out could have been applied to the problem. 

If only Vince Cable had stuck to Liberal Democrat guns and insisted on the public retaining a 51% stake when the Royal Mail was privatised!


Merkel to turn down Austrian freebies

 Former German chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband have been regulars at the Salzburg Festival for many years. Her Austrian counterpart has offered her, as a gift from his nation, free access to any Festival event she chooses for the rest of her life. However, it is reported that she has expressed gratitude for the offer but will continue to pay her own way.

I don't suppose she will accept free holidays from millionaire supporters, either.



Saturday 18 December 2021

Rail travellers punished once again

 Deferring the rise in regulated train fares by a couple of months is scant compensation for a percentage increase greater than that of average earnings. The government persists in using the discredited RPI to calculate the annual adjustment, without regard to the distortions that creates.


Friday 17 December 2021

Taking control of our borders?

 Last Wednesday, a German court found guilty of a political assassination a man said to be a Russian agent. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In Britain, at least two incidents involving murder or attempted murder of political opponents to the Putin regime have gone unpunished. The agents, who in both cases put innocent British citizens at risk, were allowed to return home even though the Russian involvement was apparent at an early stage.

Germany was an EU member last time I looked.


If the Tories bleed, their story leads

 Helen Morgan's triumph in Oswestry and district yesterday clearly has to be the first post of the day here. The headlines elsewhere will be of the verdict on Boris Johnson and speculation as to how long he can last. My guess is that he will be the last person in the country to realise that the glitter has come off his image and that it will take an emergency meeting of the 1922 Committee to shift him.

So here are a few sidelights on the result. First, it reinforces the observation that there is no need for a Women's Party. There was already a female majority on the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party before Helen takes the oath on 5th January. I make the new ratio of Lib Dem men to women at Westminster as 4:9.

Secondly, there was not only a swing of 34% from Conservatives to Liberal Democrats in North Shropshire, there was also a swing of over 24% from Labour to Liberal Democrats. It must worry the Labour National Executive that Labour, who were the challengers here in 2019, should have fallen away so badly. If the sole aim of the voters had been to hasten the departure of Boris Johnson, logically Labour, as second party at the general election, should have been the beneficiaries. 

Finally, just a bit of fun: plugging those crude swings into UKElect produces a forecast for the result of a general election if held tomorrow of Labour 250, Lib. Dem. 219, Conservative 112, SNP 44, DUP 8, Sinn Fein 7, Plaid Cymru 3, Independent 2, SDLP 2, Green 1, Alliance (NI) 1, Speaker 1. 


Thursday 16 December 2021

Our mop-haired Goebbels

Most of us know the dictum that if you tell a lie often enough, no matter how big it is, it becomes the truth. Boris Johnson is well-known by now for distorting the facts when it suits him. From his time sending fictitious reports from Brussels, which eventually saw him fired by the newspaper which employed him, to claiming Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as one of our agents and thus sealing her fate as an Iranian hostage, his lies have been very damaging. Rather less damaging to our national interests, more to the public's trust in government, has been his prevarication over the social meetings at the heart of Whitehall when the rest of the country was mandated to avoid contact with others.

All of the foregoing have been exposed, though rather too late in most cases. That is not true of another one of his favourites which he spouted twice at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, that membership of the EU would prevent us from mounting our own independent vaccination programme. This is not true. There is nothing in the Lisbon Treaty, no directive, no rule nor any convention, which forbids a member state of the Union from acquiring vaccine and delivering it to her citizens as she sees fit. Leaving the European Medicines Agency conferred no advantages, only the disadvantages of not being able to influence medicines policy across the continent and the loss of the EMA's England HQ with its roster of high-quality jobs. To be generous to the prime minister, he may be confusing the EMA with a separate initiative. Member states were invited to join the cumbersome EU Vaccines Strategy, but there was no compulsion to do so. 

There were many occasions on which the Leader of the Opposition could have put the prime minister right. But Keir Starmer is playing the populist card, not willing to say anything which might hint at disapproval of Brexit. It is left to Labour back-benchers not yet forced into the Starmer mould to call for a Brexit impact assessment, as Fleur Anderson did this afternoon.

It could be argued that this particular lie is now irrelevant, as we have well and truly left the EU. But Johnson is still using it as part of his personal propaganda, implying that it was down to his leadership that we had a vaccine programme. A few seconds' thought must show this to be fallacious. The vaccines did not come from nowhere. The two early leaders in the field came out through preliminary research and the early (December 2019) recognition of the danger of SARS-CoV-2 on the part respectively of a high-tech company set up by two immigrants in Germany and a university research laboratory in England, a lab. which, it should be pointed out, often had to scratch around for public funds. If it had been down to Johnson alone, the history of PPE procurement leads one to think that we would still be waiting for product. It is the government contention that they did not realise they had an emergency on their hands until the second week in March 2020 when they hurriedly threw money at favoured companies without thoroughly checking their ability to come up with the goods.


Wednesday 15 December 2021

Clear water, with a drop of poison

 Thanks to Nigel Rees, of Radio 4's Quote Unquote for clearing up the source of one of my favourite chess sayings by directing me to a discussion at https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/sources.html. The epigram as published by Irving Chernev in The Bright Side of Chess is "Lasker's style is like clear limpid water - with a drop of poison in it!". I had thought that the subject of the quip was Akiba Rubinstein, one of the great might-have-beens of chess, but I can quite see how it fitted the style of Emanuel Lasker. Finally, Edward Winter nails the original author as Jacques Mieses, one of the first grandmasters, a naturalised Briton and a wit. For the record, the German original is "Laskers Stil ist klares Wasser mit einem Tropfen Gift darin, der es opalisieren lässt."

One could apply the same epigram to certain authors, with or without the "opalising" bit. Christopher Isherwood and Franz Kafka come to mind.

Mr Rees was unable (yet?) to help with another quotation which has been gnawing at me. I have a dim recollection of a distinguished actuary at some function defining his profession as metaphorically waiting until the battle is over, then coming down from the hills to bayonet the wounded. If any accountant or auditor is reading this, could they help provide a source? 


Tuesday 14 December 2021

Electric vehicles are not pollution-free

 Under the dogmatic headlines "electric cars a dead-end diversion" and "Electric cars are no answer to pollution", an article in the current railwatch magazine begins:

The benefits of switching to electric vehicles to clean up our toxic air were given plenty of attention at COP26, said Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation.

However, evidence shows that electric cars still emit PM2.5 particles, the most worrying form of pollution for humans.

I would guess that the particles are abraded from brake pads and tyres, and thus a problem for any type of vehicle no matter what the method of propulsion. This is surely not insoluble. A change in the materials used could produce particles which cause less harm. 

The loss of harmful oxides, particularly those of nitrogen, is surely a positive result from replacing propulsion by internal combustion with electric power.


Monday 13 December 2021

Just one more midnight?

Inspired by John Donne's poem, I have regularly taken to musing on St Lucy's Day ahead of the true winter solstice, on the subject of the turning year. Two years ago, it marked a true crisis, the general election which decided whether the UK would thrive peacefully in the EU or fractiously decline outside it. Last year, although we were on the downward path, I was somewhat hopeful. 

Once again, we seem to be at a political turning point. Tomorrow sees a debate in which the Conservative troops may revolt, requiring the Opposition to save the government's fresh anti-Covid measures. Later in the week, the North Shropshire by-election will deliver a judgment on prime minister Johnson and Tory corruption.


Saturday 11 December 2021

UK economic recovery falters

 Third quarter 2021 economic data show the EU as a whole, and France, Germany and Italy in particular, growing faster than the UK. We were slightly ahead of the USA. France is already back to pre-Covid levels.


Friday 10 December 2021

Trust the voters

 Voters do not need to be told how to get rid of an odious government. By-elections this week, up and down England, have demonstrated that they will support the candidate, be they Labour, Liberal Democrat  or even Green, most likely to unseat a Conservative. Conservative Campaign Headquarters (formerly Central Office) takes note of local election results as well as their own private opinion research, so will surely shortly be handing Boris Johnson the proverbial revolver and injunction to do the right thing. One trusts that, with possibly three years to go before the next general election, senior figures in the party will advise a return to traditional Conservative values of probity and financial responsibility. The new PM must also address the social concerns with which the Johnson cabal was out of touch right from the date of its accession.

So pre-election pacts with other parties are not needed. Indeed, they may even be counter-productive as the Liberal Democrat leadership's abortive deal with the Green Party in 2019 proved. 


Thursday 9 December 2021

Prison reform

 The commitment by the government to restore the prison officer complement, so disastrously cut over the last decade or so, is welcome. Long term, of course, the solution to prison overcrowding is to cut back on the number of needless imprisonable offences (estimated to have been added at the rate of one per day of the Blair-Brown governments) and to implement alternatives to prison. In the meantime, the second-largest prison population in the Western world needs to treated humanely and given the opportunity to reform. More supervision will also reduce the scandalously high use of drugs in prison.

Recruitment may be difficult, but perhaps the government should look at the pool of ex-services personnel. They are people who are used to discipline and are aware of its advantages. Many have found it hard to adjust to civvy life but should fit the HMP structure.


Wednesday 8 December 2021

A fish rots from the head*

 I am uneasy about the concentration by the Opposition on the almost certain flouting of their own rules on partying by the Johnson government. After all, the transgression occurred a year ago and there are continuing scandals which need more exposure. Raab's inadequacy at Justice and Patel's draconian measures against incomers come to mind, not to mention the failure to tackle the London laundromat

On the other hand, ordinary citizens understand unfairness and hypocrisy readily, while the implications of hot money may be lost on them and their opinions may be divided on refugees and on civil rights. The disgust at their party's behaviour clearly had its affect on Conservative voters in Old Bexley and may even be telling in North Shropshire

There will be no immediate effect on party control at Westminster if the Conservative vote in by-elections continues to fall, even to the extent of losing North Shropshire. However, back-benchers on the government side will be casting anxious eyes on their prospects in the next general election. The pressure for a change of leadership must be intense.

There are reasons beyond mere self-preservation for the Conservative party in Westminster to change direction. What does it say to those people identified by a former Conservative prime minister as "just getting by" as well as those even worse off if they see their elected leaders getting away with lying, taking bribes and disobeying laws imposed for public safety? It is surely significant that recently released figures reveal a steep increase in crime, particularly in violent crime in the London area. The example of people at the top misbehaving with impunity must encourage crime at lower levels of society.

Morality must be restored at the top, and the sooner the better.

* an old Turkish proverb - allegedly


Tuesday 7 December 2021

"A date that will live in infamy"

The Daily Mirror, though obviously concentrating on news of the war in Europe, throughout 1941 kept its readers up-to-date with developments in the Far East. On February 25th, a headline proclaimed JAPS WARN WHITES TO QUIT THE PACIFIC. The report began:

As Mr. Matsuoka, Japanese Foreign Minister, told the House of Representatives in Tokio yesterday that the white race "must cede Oceania to the Asiatics," Mr. Churchill saw the Japanese Ambassador, Mr. Shigemitsu, in London. [...]

Japan's conception of Oceania, it was thought by US observers, extends to the entire South Pacific, including the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and possibly Australasia.

This was based on Mr. Matsuoka's reference to the number of people that could be supported in such an area:-

"This region has sufficient natural resources to support between 600,000,000 and 800,000,000 people. I believe we have a natural right to migrate there."

There are pre-echoes there of present-day China's pretensions in the South Pacific.

In July, the Mirror stated:

Vichy [the Nazi puppet regime in France] and Japan are negotiating over French Indo-China, where the Japs want bases from which to threaten British and U.S. possessions.

The news of the talks came last night from authorised circles in Vichy soon after the British Singapore Radio had issued a blunt warning about Japanese moves in Indo-China. 

At the end of the month, it happened:

Japan began to occupy Vichy's Indo-China yesterday. Troops disembarked at ports in Cambodia [...] At the same time, Japanese military lorries entered Saigon, capital of Indo-China. Bombers roared above them. According to the Chinese National Military Council in Chungking, Japan has also presented demands to Thailand to join the "new order in South Asia".

On November 17th, there was a reinforcement from prime minister Tojo and foreign minister Togo  of  the message that Japan would risk war with Britain and America in her determination to press on with her expansion programme. On November 26th, the Mirror reported that President Roosevelt expected the Japanese to launch an attack on Thailand at any moment. All the while, Japanese special envoys were talking to the US administration.

So an attack by the empire of Japan on Western interests in Asia was not unexpected, but Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii: US territory. Moreover, peace talks were technically still in progress. What made the Japanese raid more shocking was that service families and civilians alike were preparing for Christmas at the time. Early estimates were that 1,500 Americans died in the bombing raid of 7th December, with an equal number severely injured.

In the end, it proved to be a disastrous miscalculation by the Japanese in that it brought the US into war not only with Japan but also against her Axis allies. Britain was no longer alone. Finally, the US wrought a terrible vengeance at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.



Sunday 5 December 2021

Practical psephology is alive and well in Gambia

 Students of electoral science will know that R.B.McCallum coined the term "psephology" to describe his discipline and David Butler publicised it. It is based on the ancient Greek use of pebbles to cast votes. In the 1960s, Gambia revived the practice in order to combat fraud involving ballot papers, using glass marbles (or alleys, as we called them in my young days) deposited in drums bearing candidates' names and descriptions. Despite moves to replace the system with a more twenty-first century one, it was still in use yesterday to elect a new president for the nation.


Friday 3 December 2021

Dame Margaret Hodge

 Margaret Hodge MP may not be a saint (one recalls her benefiting from a tax-avoiding family trust at the same time as she was castigating such schemes when she chaired the Public Accounts Committee), but government ministers and Treasury advisers alike will no doubt celebrate her announcement that she will not stand again at the next election. However, she will go out on a high, if she continues to keep up pressure on the government on its record of inaction against economic crime, as in the debate she introduced yesterday.

The government response to the litany of financial abuses which she and SNP speakers listed? "It is important that the Government pursue a targeted and proportionate level of enforcement, focusing on achieving compliance from companies." In other words, practical inaction.


Thursday 2 December 2021

Pandemic hastens telecommuting

 For almost as long as I can remember in the computer business, certainly since the invention of the personal computer, the future of office work was going to be distributed to people's homes. "Telecommuting" was what we called it then, but it really did not take off in any big way. A rare exception was Steve Shirley's F.I. Group which basically employed women working from home, largely those who were professionally qualified but who had taken a break to start a family. That would probably not have taken off but for two factors: the high skills of its members and the tenacity and drive of the founder. In the case of humdrum office work, too many managers had a need for the comfort of warm bodies around them. It was too easy to drip feed instructions and/or change ones mind knowing that your staff were instantly accessible, nine to five. No need to work out a coherent and detailed plan of work.

The pandemic has given many a rude awakening. The skills necessary to run a distributed office have had to be acquired. And now a new opinion survey commissioned by the i newspaper shows that "a third of millennials will look for a new job if their employer insists they return to office working full time". What economic logic has failed to achieve, a coronavirus has done the trick, probably helped by the Green revolution pounding out the message that personal travel adds to carbon equivalent emissions.


Wednesday 1 December 2021

Omicron: cause for optimism?

 The fact that a SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Netherlands which occurred before the South African announcement  has now been shown to be of the new omicron variant may give some hope. It clearly raised no special alarm at the time of first diagnosis, suggesting that omicron is not more lethal than the currently most widespread strains. The major question remaining is whether existing vaccines offer the same degree of immunity or at least protection from serious complications. However, both Pfizer and Moderna have confirmed that their vaccines can be tweaked within months to recognise the new strain specifically should it be necessary. One would expect AstraZeneca to be able to offer the same assurance.

The Netherlands analysis also throws open the question of the origin of the variant, though the dates do not rule out an infected person bringing the virus to Europe. The odds must still be on a sub-Saharan African source, given the vast pool of unvaccinated people there, a population also affected by HIV. This situation must be tackled by the major nations, acting independently of the slow-moving UN agencies if necessary.


Tuesday 30 November 2021

Solomon Islands

 To the best of my knowledge, the only mention of this Commonwealth nation on BBC TV in the last few days has been in a round of the Pointless quiz. However, recent events may prove significant in the struggle to resist dominance by the Chinese dictatorship of the Pacific region.

Australian police are in the capital Honiara at the request of the authorities after days of rioting. Discontent had been rising over the high level of unemployment, but it seems that the softening of the attitude of the prime minister towards the Xi regime is a significant factor.


Monday 29 November 2021

Eighty years ago

 The Daily Mirror reported on 28th November 1941 the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany's occupation of Libya.

FIRST ROUND WON BY LINK-UP WITH TOBRUK FORCE

With the link-up yesterday between the forces from Tobruk and the main armies, the first round in Britain's drive to crush Rommel's panzer army in Libya is won, though heavy fighting is yet to come, said a British military spokesman last night.

New Zealand forces operating with British tank formations battled through via Bardia and Gambut to recapture Sidi Rezzegh - centre of the new big battle - and occupy Bir El Hamed after stiff fighting on Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, the Tobruk forces had fought their way to Ed Duda, and there yesterday the link-up was made.

Another report foreshadowed conscription for all 18-to-50 year-olds, as a motion seeking approval for it was laid before the House of Commons. It came as something of a surprise to me, as I had not realised that conscription had started so late in the war.

Sunday 28 November 2021

Retreating from the climate crisis: wetlands' role

 According to Geoff Hilton, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) Head of Conservation Evidence, "the services wetlands provide knock spots off forests."

Wetlands can absorb water like a sponge, filtering out pollutants from our drinking supplies and slowing down the flow from river catchments to prevent flooding downstream. They can also provide coastal buffers against sea-level rise and storm surges. What's more, they can be some of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet, with peatlands alone storing twice as much carbon as the world's forests. And they are even good for our health and wellbeing - an imperative that has never felt more urgent than during the pandemic.

 - Waterlife magazine #217

Saturday 27 November 2021

Stephen Sondheim has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html refers. It seemed as if he could go on forever, but it was not to be. The Broadway family which embraced him as he escaped from his chaotic natural family will miss him, as will the thousands - possibly millions - he entertained as well as stimulated over the years.

He acknowledged a special debt of gratitude to British audiences who appreciated many of his shows before they became established in America. I'm glad the NYT obituary mentions his love of cryptic crosswords and word games. I recall an interview (probably on Radio 4) in which he confessed to seeing anagrams everywhere. He had recently passed a cinema showing "2001: a Space Odyssey" and spotted instantly that "Cinerama" is an anagram of "American". He was the best of America.



Friday 26 November 2021

The new variant: timely action for once

 The United Kingdom's response to the news of a new SAR-CoV-2 variant with multiple mutations, dubbed omicron, has been commendably swift. Travel from South Africa where the variant was detected as well as from five adjoining countries has been interdicted. One of those countries is Botswana, the source of the sample analysed in South Africa. The SA authorities themselves are also to be commended for speedy notification to the WHO of the situation. It is unfortunate that their government has described the UK response as rushed.

On the contrary, if prompt action had been taken in January 2020, either preventing the return of travellers from known virus hotspots, or at least quarantining them, thousands of deaths would surely have been prevented. As for the UK, so also for SA. It is probable that the initial infection there was brought in by returners from ski holidays in Europe. Even under apartheid, there would have been sharing of space under the same roof; afterwards, there was even more opportunity for the virus to spread.

According to a WHO expert, the reason for the unusual number of mutations in the omicron variant is the compromised immune system of so many people in sub-Saharan Africa. This in turn can be traced back to the ignorant response by South African and other governments to the spread of HIV at the end of last century. 

[Updated 2021-11-27 00:15]


Thursday 25 November 2021

How other nations infringe civil rights is none of our concern - unless they are Islamic, of course

 Two interchanges at Business Questions today were instructive:

Later:

No doubt Messrs Shannon and Rees-Mogg will argue that the Pakistan breaches of international norms are of a different scale, but surely the principle is the same in both cases.

Wednesday 24 November 2021

Liberals oust ANC from control of SA's four largest cities

- and install first female mayor of Johannesburg

As a result of this year's local elections in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance (DA)  controls, either alone or in conjunction with the socialist EFF, the four largest cities in South Africa. Riven by faction fighting and facing indictment of some of its historical leading figures over a bribes-for-arms-contracts scandal, the African National Congress (ANC) is in retreat. Nevertheless, the ANC national government is still pushing its Zimbabwe-style land seizure programme.

The Liberal International-affiliated DA is the result of a merger of several parties including the South African Liberal Party which throughout the apartheid-era had a racially-blind membership policy, while the ANC was still a black-only party. (The only other multiracial party was the Communist Party of South Africa.) Although still seen as a white-dominated organisation, the DA appointed the first black parliamentary party leader in South African history in Lindiwe Mazibuko in 2011. 


Tuesday 23 November 2021

Johnson's green mask slides off, revealing the petrol-head beneath

 Almost immediately after spouting fine words in Glasgow, prime minister Johnson supported his chancellor in reducing the tax on internal air routes. He followed this up with shamelessly promoting the M4 by-pass scheme which would encourage motoring and take acres of the carbon-absorbing Gwent Levels out of use.

Now we learn that he is pumping £4.3m into flights from Cornwall airport to Gatwick (handy for his new MPs in south-west England) and from Gatwick to Dundee, which will clearly undercut Scotrail's recent improvements there. 


Monday 22 November 2021

Natonalists to keep Labour in power

So a deal has been struck with Plaid Cymru to ensure that Mark Drakeford will be assured that his Welsh government will be virtually untroubled in getting its business through for the rest of this parliament. Plaid were hardly negotiating from a position of strength and seem to have gained little apart from s couple of special advisers - presumably additional to the current roster, and at taxpayer's expense - in the government machine.

Some of the agreed policies are worthwhile. Making school meals free for all primary children will remove the stigma of poorer families having to apply for them. There are some hopeful noises about improving council tax and fair votes for the Senedd, but no firm commitment to doing away with the former in favour of local income tax or introducing STV for our national elections.

At least there will be no cut in the NHS budget as there was under the One Wales Government.


Saturday 20 November 2021

Earl Attlee and convict illiteracy

It is always pleasing when a distinguished politician coincidentally gives voice, and more coherent voice, to an idea which one has been mulling over for ages. So it was when Earl Attlee, grandson of the first post-WWII prime minister, himself a former government minister though on the Conservative side, stood up in the Lords last Wednesday. Attlee moved an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which would make a massive inroad into the illiteracy of prisoners. It would mean virtually that an illiterate prisoner - with some exceptions - would have no time off his sentence until he (or presumably she) had taken steps to correct their deficiency.

Earl Attlee said: When we debated short sentences and Amendments 212 and 213, I think that most of the Committee was sure that the current prison system was largely ineffective at preventing reoffending. After looking closely at our penal system during 2018 and 2019, I would say that the current system is not able, or even designed, to secure an improvement in education, training and conduct. Without improvements in these areas, reoffending is inevitable. Noble Lords frequently berate Ministers for the poor state and ineffectiveness of our prisons. Rather fewer noble Lords have been prepared to suggest significant reforms and how we could do very much better.

Internationally, we need to be an exemplar rather than a laggard in prison reform. Although there are many areas of potential improvement in our prison system, none is as pressing or potentially beneficial as the management of prolific minor offenders, or PMOs. I am sure that the Committee will accept that it is almost impossible for a functionally illiterate or innumerate young person to secure legitimate employment. At YOI Feltham, I have seen high-quality, well-motivated teachers with good facilities struggle to get illiterate offenders even to sit down in a classroom, let alone learn. I am not convinced that a conventional classroom environment is the right one for these youngsters. Furthermore, they need exceptionally strong incentives to improve their standard of education as well as their conduct. Unfortunately, there can be cultural issues pulling in the opposite direction.

Several factors militate against securing an improvement in their education, training and conduct. Most significantly, within conventional prisons, there is a drug and gang culture with a huge illicit economy, coupled with an illegitimate hierarchy. All this is facilitated by illegal mobile phones. In recent years, I have come to hugely admire prison officers and governors for their work. They do their very best, but it is the regime we ask them to operate that is a problem.

With my Amendment 241, I propose a new sentence for PMOs, and that is detention for training at Her Majesty’s pleasure, or DFT. Release would be dependent upon achieving the required, objectively measured improvements in education, training and conduct, and the level of improvement required would be set by the courts. If the offender fails to make reasonable efforts to comply, the court would be able to require the whole of the rest of the sentence to be served in the conventional secure estate. That is a very strong incentive.

I would like to be clear that this is not a rehash of “short, sharp shock”, a scheme that was designed to be beastly to offenders in order to deter them from reoffending; nor is it a boot camp. With the former, little was done to improve offenders’ skills, so it was not surprising that they continued to reoffend.


So Earl Attlee continues in the social work footsteps of his grandfather and of prison reformers from across the parties. Sadly, although the scheme would pay off in the long term in reduction not only of crime but also of demand on our prisons, it would need extra resources now. One cannot see the Johnson government whose horizon extends only as far as the next Daily Mail headline taking the necessary action.


Friday 19 November 2021

Lib Dems opt out of orgy of virtue signalling

 If you were a Liberal Democrat MP, bearing in mind that there are no safe Liberal Democrat seats and there are always trouble-makers who complain that you are never seen in the constituency, on being told that a rare private members' bills day was coming up today but that all the measures were unexceptional and would pass or be withdrawn for government action, would you break your normal weekend routine and stay in Westminster? 

Thus it was that no Lib Dem (or Scottish Nationalist, or Green, for that matter) was present today. The Labour official spokespeople stood in for the whole of non-government MPs in effect. It was just the situation in which Sir Christopher Chope would normally have stood up and called: "Object!" in order to stop discussion on Bills in a poorly-attended House. But of course Sir Christopher had his own Green Belt Protection Bill on the list of Bills for Second Reading. Ironically, it was not reached partly because of the excessive speechifying which was to come.

Nor would Sir Christopher have wanted to block the passage of the first measure on the agenda, the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill aimed at forced marriages, which would belatedly bring England and Wales in line with a United Nations recommendation of 2016. It was a pity that it had to be left to a private member, Conservative Pauline Latham, to bring in the reform, but at least there was no dissent from the Tories present. It was welcomed by Sarah Champion and Andy Slaughter, supported by Virendra Sharma, on behalf of Labour so that there was surely no need for a couple of self-congratulatory speeches from the other side which added little while prolonging the debate.

The reason for the unusually large contingent of Tories became obvious during the debate on the next item The Planning (Enforcement) Bill was introduced by Dr Ben Spencer representing Runnymede and Weybridge. Dr Spencer currently has a 34.8% majority, but the constituency would be redistributed under current boundary commission proposals. It was noticeable that many of those present represented Home Counties constituencies or those otherwise under threat from Ed Davey's "Blue Wall" attack. The tone was set in an intervention on Spencer's introduction  by Anthony Mangnall (Totnes):

I find it extraordinary that in this House we spend a great deal of time on these Benches being attacked by the Liberal Democrats over planning and the lack of accountability of developers, yet on the day he brings forward a Bill that holds developers to account, the Liberal Democrats are nowhere to be seen

Speech after speech from the Conservative side hammered the same point while not adding much to the debate on the Bill. I suppose (for instance) Sarah Olney representing Richmond on Thames could have stood up to applaud the ambition of the Bill while pointing out its ineffectiveness, but it needed only Ruth Cadbury for Labour to expose basic misunderstanding of the nature of planning permission on behalf of the Bill's drafters and other inadequacies. In the end, the Bill was withdrawn.

Perhaps if the Bill had addressed the underfunding of local authorities' planning enforcement, Liberal Democrats would have come out in support.  Maybe it could have provided a right of appeal to ordinary people at the wrong end of a planning decision, a right currently denied while developers with deep pockets are able to appeal, and appeal, until they get the decision they want. Maybe the punitive nature of costs against local authorities who resist those appeals could have been mitigated. But of course those well-heeled developers tend to be contributors to the Conservative party. We shall see how much the Mangnalls and Spencers stand up for the little fellow when the government's own planned streamlining of planning law comes to the Commons.

Thursday 18 November 2021

Building back better?

 Treasury minister Lucy Frazer was on dangerous ground in drawing a parallel between reconstruction after the second world war and the current situation under this government when she introduced Tuesday's debate on the Finance Bill. People with memories of those days and those born later who trouble to look at the parliamentary record will note a Conservative party of the 1950s which accepted the necessary reforms of the Attlee government, while reversing some of its excesses, like the nationalisation of steel. It did not sell off utilities, the National Grid or parts of the NHS, It did not fragment the railways. The Macmillan government also attempted to recover lost ground in Europe after Labour's big mistake in refusing to join the ECSC - it was not Macmillan's fault that he failed. It was so different from today.

I fear that the economic rebound from Brexit, both the event and the mishandling of the subsequent treaty with the EU, and also from the pandemic (mishandled by Johnson and company as no government of the 1940s or 1950s would have done) will be nothing like that from the end of the world war.


HS2 truncation

Dame Cheryl Gillan, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

A selling-point of HS2 was that the high-speed line in being extended to Leeds would speed access from London and provide extra rail capacity at the same time. The case for HS2 was always marginal and many saw it merely an expensive way to increase commuter traffic from the Birmingham area to the capital. With today's announcement by Grant Shapps, that looks increasingly to be the case. One wonders how easy it would have been to pass the original legislation on the basis of today's truncated scheme. This also increases the cost per mile of all the consultants' work commissioned since the start.

Bringing forward improvements in rail connectivity between Lancashire and Yorkshire, as announced by Shapps, is clearly welcome. But why did the long-suffering commuters have to wait this long? These steps could have been taken ten years ago.

Electrifying the Midland Main Line is also welcome. But Shapps was less than honest in blaming Labour for holding this up. True, the Blair/Brown government did virtually nothing for new electrification south of the Border, but it was a Conservative transport minister who put a halt to the coalition's electrification scheme - in the case of the Midland Main Line, disgracefully just after winning an election.

And if the Midland Main Line electrification can be revived, why not Cardiff to Swansea? As I understand it, the required upgrade to the signalling has been completed and the Hitachi service facility in Swansea awaits. (If any of my facts are wrong, I welcome corrections.)



Wednesday 17 November 2021

Destination double-take

 About to get on board my regular 34 bus back from Neath Victoria Gardens this morning, I nearly had a fit when I looked at the display panel at the end of the bus bays. (It is one of only two which are easily readable, by the way; others, mounted in the roof so that one has to crane ones neck, catch the sun which renders the computer-generated characters unreadable.) 34 - Merthyr Tydfil it showed. Had the route been changed to extend the service beyond Neath? No, it was clearly an updating error by a clerk, presumably in an office in Bristol, who was unaware that several localities in South Wales had that route number.

One despaired long ago of Neath Port Talbot councillors in the Civic bubble, most of them with a virtual job for life, mixing with the ordinary people who cannot use a car all or some of the time. But perhaps they might once or twice a year try a survey of the travelling public and take note of the findings. They might also consider greater local control of passenger information. After all, they are keen to encourage more visitors. It is not a great advert for NPT to confuse them or leave them in the dark.


Tuesday 16 November 2021

Who will take the knee for cricketers of colour?

I have just come out from watching on TV a session of the DCMS Select Committee taking evidence on racism at Yorkshire Cricket Club. Principal witness Azeem Rafiq came close to breaking down several times during his moving testimony. Chair Julian Knight eventually granted him a five-minute break, at which point I broke off to record these immediate thoughts. 

Rafiq professed himself a proud Yorkshireman, in spite of having been born in Pakistan. When he first broke through into first-team cricket he had the support of the then captain and of the coach, Jason Gillespie. There was an undercurrent of racism, but Rafiq did not realise how serious it was to become. Later captains and coaches were racially prejudiced. When Gary Ballance came to Yorkshire from Derbyshire, Rafiq felt some sympathy as a fellow-outsider and for a time they formed a bond. Later Ballance was to become one of Rafiq's chief tormentors. Two events seemed to be key. 

Rafiq had built up some standing within the club when he and a number of fellow-players felt that Tim Bresnan was a bully and that his behaviour had gone so far that a complaint had to be made to the Committee. Minutes of meetings, recently made available in evidence, reveal that Rafiq was singled out as the complainant and that from being regarded hitherto as a future leader he was thereafter seen as a trouble-maker.

The other, and probably significant, turning-point was Rafiq's treatment after the death of his infant son. He noted how the club had gone above and beyond in supporting fellow-players who had gone through similar distressing personal tragedies. By contrast, the harassment of Rafiq if anything got worse when he returned after his loss.

A disturbing part of his testimony was his observation that things were no different in other county clubs. For instance, former Lancashire captain and later TV pundit David Lloyd was revealed as a closet racist.

One thinks back to the days of the Khans as captains of county cricket clubs. First Majid at Glamorgan and later Imran (now Pakistan prime minister) at Sussex appeared untouched by racism or Islamophobia. Partly this must be because both were scions of leading families back in Pakistan and carried an air of untouchability if not noblesse. But, partly, the 1970s through to the 1990s now seem to be a high point of inclusivity, in the top level of cricket at least.

A Yorkshire work colleague back in the 1980s explained the dearth of players from a sub-continental background in Yorkshire on economic grounds. Most local clubs, he said, relied largely on members with cars to get to away matches and car ownership in the Asian community was low. That is no longer true, and players of talent fill the county academies - but somehow few make it up to the professional level.

The appointment by Yorkshire Cricket as its new chairman of the consensual Lord Patel is an excellent move and one trusts he will effect changes in organisation, and, what is more difficult, attitudes at the club. Other county clubs clearly need to review their own situation with regard to players of colour.


Monday 15 November 2021

Jeffrey Epstein and Barclays Bank

 Private Eye's In the City details the links between the American former CEO of Barclays Bank. Jes Staley, and the proven procurer of girls, Jeffrey Epstein. 

Staley ran the JP Morgan private bank from 1999 until 2009, when he took over the investment bank. Epstein played an important role in Staley's rise, steering clients to JP Morgan and facilitating the $1bn plus Highbridge Capital hedge fund purchase in 2004. Epstein reportedly earned $15m from the deal.

Staley remained close to Epstein even after his conviction, visiting Epstein while he was serving his 18-month sentence [in 2008 for soliciting sex from a minor] which allowed Epstein to work at his Palm Beach office on day release.  In 2011, Staley was photographed at Epstein's New York mansion along with [Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. There were a number of mansion meetings.

Enough, one would have thought, for Barclays to avoid Staley like the plague, rather than pull strings to have him waved through by the UK authorities as the bank's chief executive. But one also has to question JP Morgan's ethics in taking Epstein on as a client in the first place. Even before news of his sexual empire broke, Epstein had been a partner with Steven Hoffenberg in Towers Financial, which turned out to be a glorified Ponzi scheme. In 1995, Hoffenberg was jailed for his part in the enterprise. Epstein got off scot free for reasons which remain unclear. Perhaps he was innocent - but in that case why employ a man who was totally oblivious to a massive fraud carried out for years by his partner? It is unlikely. Clearly, Staley and JP Morgan were not going to question the methods of a man who had a gift for attracting wealthy investors,  and Barclays - that once-principled Quaker bank - were similarly seduced by Staley.


Sunday 14 November 2021

Paterson sleaze: the story gets worse

 I assumed that the companies which Owen Paterson lobbied for had a previous connection with the former MP for North Shropshire. Not so. It turns out that they did not even recruit him. He actually touted his services around. The Open Democracy web site says:

Owen Paterson, the disgraced former Tory minister, did a “ring round” weeks after leaving government in an attempt to get a second job as a consultant [...] He was paid for consultancy work by a health diagnostic firm, Randox Laboratories, and a meat processing firm, Lynn’s Country Foods, both of which are based in Northern Ireland.

Randox Laboratories, which went on to win £479m in COVID-testing contracts, paid Paterson £120 an hour to act as a consultant. The firm told The Times the contracts, which were awarded without competition, were won ‘on merit’. But it has now emerged that Paterson also tried to get a consultancy job at CIGA Healthcare Ltd, another health diagnostics firm based in Northern Ireland.

The company’s owner, Irwin Armstrong, told openDemocracy he was “quite friendly” with Paterson after getting to know him when he was secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

“He did ring me up asking if there was anything available,” Armstrong said. “I said we’re a small company and we can’t really afford to be employing people as PR people or whatever.”

He said the conversation took place in 2014, “a few weeks” after Paterson left his final position in government.

OpnnDemocracy draws the conclusion that the practice is common among MPs. To my mind, they have not yet made that case, but no doubt their research continues.

[Later: on Sunday Supplement this morning, a former anti-sleaze campaigner and MP for Knutsford, Martin Bell quashed speculation that he might stand again: "at the age of 83, and walking on a stick, it would not be fair on the voters".]


Friday 12 November 2021

Speaking truth to power can lead to loss of one's job, or liberty, or worse

The ICIJ has listed countries and territories from Honduras to Hong Kong where journalists have been put in jeopardy for exposing financial misdeeds. 

In this country, of course, the rich and powerful are less crude. But there is the legal cosh of the libel suit or the slimewash of a general denigration in the nation's "free press".


Thursday 11 November 2021

US indirectly helped controversial Wuhan research

Proof of concept research into the ease with which viruses from other animals could be made transmissible between humans was being carried out at the Wuhan international research centre. There is a tide of opinion, strongest in the States, that such an altered bat virus escaped through poor lab. security to cause the pandemic of SARS/CoV-2 from which the world is now suffering. This is, however, by no means proven and the original view that the virus mutated naturally in its bat host has not been refuted.

Now Anthony Fauci, for long regarded as one of the good guys in the States for standing up to President Trump's anti-science directives, has been caught out in not telling all the truth about US support for research into engineered viruses. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

 ‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it,” tweeted GOP Sen. Rand Paul this week. In a scathing exchange earlier this summer, the Kentucky senator accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of not being straight with Congress about whether U.S. taxpayer dollars had been used to carry out a risky type of coronavirus research in Wuhan, China. “The NIH [National Institutes of Health] has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” responded a clearly perturbed Dr. Fauci. 

A lack of transparency has undermined trust in public health officials and scientists, who are not only dealing with the current pandemic but also trying to understand how to prevent future ones. At issue was research overseen by a New York-based organization, EcoHealth Alliance. Together with its partners in China, EcoHealth has worked extensively on identifying bat coronaviruses that could spill over into humans, with the idea that such work could help researchers get ahead of and thus prevent a pandemic. Dr. Fauci has long been a proponent of such research, and EcoHealth funneled at least $600,000 of NIH grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to carry out this research since 2014. But many scientists see such work as unnecessarily risky, especially when carried out in foreign labs that don’t have the same safety protocols and reporting requirements as in the U.S. 

 In a new twist, the NIH admitted this week that the U.S.-funded research had produced “unexpected” results. The agency, which wrote a letter to Republican lawmakers who have been demanding answers for months, maintained it had done no wrong. But it blamed EcoHealth Alliance for failing to immediately report back when a bat coronavirus it was tinkering with started killing humanized mice at an unusually high rate during the fifth and final year of its grant in 2018-19. EcoHealth filed its progress report on that research on Aug. 3 of this year. NIH told the Monitor it requested the belated report in July, and EcoHealth Alliance said it was working with NIH to address a “misconception” about its research and the reporting requirements. The NIH letter fuels mounting concerns about funding and oversight.

Rather like "climategate" over the supposed manipulation of data, which BBC security correspondent has examined on Radio 4 recently, this is liable to tarnish both the reputation of Dr Fauci 


Wednesday 10 November 2021

Green road blocks

 It is all very well for the Westminster government to make sweeping decisions but they clearly do not have the capacity to think through the consequences. Banning the production of internal combustion vehicles is all very well, but all-electric vehicles are limited by the availability of charging points, and in particular rapid chargers. The Johnson government has provided no overall strategy, instead leaving it to local authorities in England to arrange the facilities. The result is piecemeal and unsatisfactory implementation as shown in this Liberal Democrat release.

The overall picture is summed up by Rob Hastings in the i last week;

There are now around 25,000 public charging devices available in the UK. But that number will need to be installed every year for the next 14 years if we are to hit the 480,000 devices and two million power leads that it is estimated we will need by 2035. That is on top of the 19 million home charge points needed, according to the energy regulator Ofgem.

The Welsh government has been more strategic, setting up its Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle Transformation Fund and last month publishing a plan to provide charging points at appropriate intervals along our key highways. The scheme needs to attract private-sector money to succeed, but at least it demonstrates forethought.

Now another limiting factor has come to the fore: the shortage of qualified mechanics to service electric vehicles. The outlets which sell the vehicles do not necessarily have the ability to maintain them. A recent TV news broadcast highlighted the case of a man who bought an electric car in Llandudno Junction but has to drive to Chester for its regular servicing. Will UK transport minister Grant Shapps rise to the challenge? Is this another area where Wales will show the way?


Tuesday 9 November 2021

Parliamentary standards and outside jobs

 The immediate BBC TV news coverage of yesterday's standards debate in the Commons was disappointing. Laura Kuenssberg presented the session merely as a test of prime minister Boris Johnson. Note that there was no criticism of the Conservative party as such, and of course no acknowledgement that the emergency debate had been obtained by a Liberal Democrat. There was a more balanced report this morning from Adam Fleming, who in the short time he had available outlined the various strands of argument for and against an overhaul of the standards system and the extent of any changes. He also pointed out that there was substantial cross-party agreement on a number of points.

The first of these was laid down by the Speaker in his introduction: that the debate not be personalised. No aspersions should be cast on the prime minister or the leader of the Scottish Nationalists for their absences, of which notice had been given to Mr Speaker. This admonition was largely followed, though one opposition MP had to be sharply brought to order when he crossed the red line in an intervention.

Secondly, there was consistent support for the Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone, and condemnation of the death threats she had received. Even the few MPs who thought she had too much power did not want to remove her, merely to have her responsibilities redefined. One trusts that she feels able to carry on and will not be forced out of office as a previous Commissioner was. Elizabeth Filkin suffered for carrying out her work on policing expenses claims too rigorously and transparently.

Thereafter, opinion divided as to whether Owen Paterson had been denied natural justice in being sanctioned by the Committee on Standards. There was surprisingly little support on the Conservative benches for his behaviour, but some doubt as to the process. The main contention was that it was wrong that the Committee itself should rule on appeals. The argument that an independent outside panel of high court judges should be the final arbiter was most exhaustively argued by Alberto Costa and Jeremy Wright who are unsurprisingly both lawyers. The model was the mechanism for handling complaints of bullying and harassment of parliamentary staff.

Such a final tribunal, ruling on the narrow point as to whether a sanctioned MP had received a fair hearing, would be preferable to the scheme that the government had in mind: another committee of MPs on which there would be a built-in government majority. As Conservative Kevin Hollinrake put it in an intervention on Steve Barclay's response to Wendy Chamberlain's opening statement:

My right hon. Friend has set out a gracious apology for what happened last week, but will he concede that one thing that was not right with the amendment the Government supported was that the members of the proposed Committee were hand-picked? If the standards of this House are to be reformed, would it not be better for such a Committee to be chaired by somebody who is elected by this whole House and for the Committee members also to be elected in the normal way for Select Committee members?

The fact that Barclay effectively ignored the question suggests that Johnson and Rees-Mogg are intent on pursuing their anti-democratic line. However, they may not have their own way judging by the number of Members on their own side who clearly rejected it.

The only major defender of the disgraced Owen Paterson was Sir Bill Cash. I find it increasingly difficult to follow Sir Bill's arguments. He seems to have progressed from debating the number of angels on the head of a pin to querying the metallurgical content of the pin itself. However, he seemed to be a supporter of an American legal type of system, where a defendant can continue to appeal to higher and higher courts until he or she gets their way or their money runs out.

Chris Bryant, chairman of the Standards Committee, in his response to the debate, rebutted the argument that the committee could not in justice rule on an appeal. He also pointed out that the Committee is in the middle of a review of the Code of Conduct, a regular duty which is part of the Committee's remit but which has had to be deferred in recent years by the frequency of elections. 

It seems to me that the government should now retreat from interfering in decisions which are properly the concern of the whole House. The House itself should wait on the recommendation of the Committee's review and any relevant significant independent assessments before proceeding. I trust that by the time this screed appears, the Leader will have drafted Motions to restore the status quo before the Leadsom amendment was passed last Wednesday.

Second jobs

In the debate yesterday, there were calls from several Labour members to ban MPs from paid employment apart from their work in parliament. Richard Burgon was first to make the point:

Let me attempt to help the Government. Is not the root cause of all this MPs trying to get paid even more than the £82,000 a year that they already get? I should not have to remind the Government that 95% of the public get paid less than MPs, nor that being an MP is a full-time job. Chasing corporate cash is, quite simply, short-changing the public. Will the Minister agree to help to clean up politics by backing my Bill to ban second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh jobs for Members of Parliament?

Revelations over the weekend of the eye-watering amounts some Conservatives received in outside employment added ammunition to the calls. However, I am with Steve Barclay (on this point only) and Alistair Carmichael in rejecting an outright ban which would in the latter's words

have the unintended consequence of making more people see this as an occupation from which there would never be any departure. The idea that people can come here for a term or two and then return to whatever profession or occupation they had beforehand is good and sensible

There does seem to be an assumption on the Labour benches, especially from safe seats, that being a MP is an elected job for life in the profession of politics. Moreover, it is relatively easy for a Labour member voted out of office to move into work for which no special skills are required other than those which they have honed in the chamber. Charities, trade unions and even friendly media organisations provide friendly berths for such people. 

For those who give up a profession in which skills have to be constantly kept up-to-date it is another matter. There is also the specialist knowledge which a practitioner can bring to parliamentary discussion. When I was on the local council, I did not begrudge those Labour members who continued to serve in the health service even after election. Their up-to-date experience was valuable. 

Obviously, parliamentary business takes precedence and no outside job should get in the way of that. Nor should sinecures or positions awarded simply because the recipient is a MP be allowed in future. That seems to have been the case with Paterson and is still prejudicial to the behaviour of some remaining MPs. 

I cannot resist adding that in 1867, when MPs were not paid for being Members and had to rely on income from estates or a profession to sustain themselves, Parliament sat only between February and August with an additional 16 days in November and December. They still managed to pass around 200 pieces of legislation including the important North America Act and the Second Great Reform Act.