Old age does not give you wisdom

  - contrary to traditional belief. After all, one loses bits of knowledge as even the best of memories fail to some degree. However, it does give one perspective.

Lech Walesa is 80

 The old fighter for civil liberties and Nobel prize-winner is still protesting against authoritarian government. Happy birthday, sir!

William Windom, the personification of Thurber

  - would have been 100 today. 

The New York-born actor is probably best known (certainly on this side of the pond where the series is on constant repeat on at least two of the digital channels) as Murder, She Wrote's world-weary GP, Dr Seth Hazlitt. 

However, he has a long string of credits and first made an impact as "John Monroe" in My World and Welcome to it, inspired by the writings of James Thurber. So close was the inspiration in fact that one took Monroe to be an idealised version of Thurber himself.

Labour and the private sector

 The i newspaper earlier this week warned that Labour's plan to enlist private sector support for the NHS may not be the shot in the arm it seems. 

James Ball wrote:

Labour's plan to make more use of the private sector to tackle ballooning NHS waiting lists stands out as one of the most eye-catching policies from an often risk-averse party.

The idea may alarm those who fear it will be a thin end of a wedge leading to NHS privatisation. But the shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting's strategy could also be seen as a smart move for a party that wants to show it is up for doing whatever it takes to tackle one of the country's biggest problems.

However, independent experts have expressed major doubts about whether Mr Streeting's solution can actually cut waiting lists. They are warning that the use of  private hospitals to take on routine operations could cost the NHS too much. 

The experts argue that Mr Streeting's scheme would have to rely on paying private providers more than the NHS receives for exactly the same work.

It has already been noted by Private Eye that the Priory Health Group has sponsored a couple of Labour events, and it s probably significant that in a recent interview the CEO stated that 

Out of all the mental health beds in the country, both NHS and independent sector, Priory accounts for 10% of inpatient beds already, so we are a big and trusted provider. [...] I do see Priory as a key partner to the NHS and as someone who has worked in the NHS, I am passionate about meeting the needs of people in the UK and delivering high quality services and support.

Open Democracy lists a number of policy changes and shadow cabinet appointments linked to donations from commercial organisations. The article is clearly partial, but it does cite facts which can be checked. 

It all points to a putative future Starmer government being, like Blair-Brown, little more than a continuation of the previous Tory administration. 

Reith would not put up with Brand

 There is news today that at last the police are formally investigating the claims of molestation and worse by Russell Brand. 

I must admit that his act, which presumably got him noticed by BBC executives in the first place, and his radio show passed me by. His occasional appearances on the media more broadly repulsed me, but I thought perhaps he had something to offer his new employers which I had not seen. The nasty stunt involving the innocent Andrew Sachs confirmed me in my dislike, though. One did not need to say anything on that occasion as the BBC (rather too slowly) dispensed with his services as a result. 

I cannot claim to have spotted him as a wrong 'un, but surely executives closer to him must have been aware that his sexual behaviour went beyond the norms. Just as with Jimmy Savile, they turned a deaf ear to complaints and rumours. Were they part of his in-group, or did they just tolerate him in the mistaken belief that the laddish element among his listeners was more significant than it actually is?

At a time when BBC Radio is awash with repeats as it clearly cannot afford as much original material as it used to produce, and TV's Newsnight is facing cuts to its journalism, savings should rather be made in the ranks of out-of-touch executives.

Turning points

 Steve Richards is on a tour promoting his latest book. He fetched up on Sunday Supplement yesterday and he and Vaughan Roderick had an interesting chat about turning-points in political history. Clearly both the Labour 1945 election win and that of Thatcher in 1979 stood out as such. However, both men in my opinion understated the effect that Thatcher-Major had. It not only shattered the post-war party consensus, undoing all the reforms of the 1945-1951 parliaments (apart from the NHS), but it went further back. It abolished practically all the wages councils initiated by Churchill in 1909, municipal housing initiatives (1919), bus regulation (1930) and trustee savings banks whose roots went back to the early 19th century. The Blair-Brown landslide of 1997 was hardly a turning-point because New Labour accepted so many of the tenets of Thatcherism.

Remarkably, this Conservative government is going back to the future on municipal responsibility for public transport by allowing Greater Manchester to take control of bus regulation again. 

Belgian Minister for Justice's disgrace

 In case you missed it, the story of "pipigate" is here.

An investigation for "insulting behavior" was opened after guests at Belgian Justice Minister's birthday party were accused of urinating on a police car

The Belgian Minister of Justice will surely remember his 50th birthday. Three of his guests are accused of urinating on a police car parked outside his home on the night of 14 to 15 August.

Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne appeared before Parliament on Thursday following the opening of an investigation on 23 August. He told the Belgian parliament that he had not seen three guests at his birthday party urinate on a police van outside his home and apologised for the scandalous incident.

It couldn't happen to one of our ministries ... could it?

 

Murdoch: from dictator to grey eminence?

 From a rival Australian newspaper chain:

After seven decades of building an empire, Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as the head of Fox and News Corp. The Australian-born media mogul announced that he will transition from his roles as chair of Fox Corporation and executive chairman of News Corp in November. His son Lachlan, pictured left, will become the sole chairman of both companies, while Rupert Murdoch will become “chairman emeritus”.

The 92-year-old informed staff of his decision in a letter that stated he was still in good health but “the time is right to take on different roles”. He added that he would continue to “be involved every day in the contest of ideas” and warned that the “battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense”. Murdoch’s departure follows a tumultuous period at Fox. In April, the company agreed to pay $US787.5 million ($1.17 billion) to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems after the cable TV network accused Dominion of rigging its voting machines against former president Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

While the matter never made it to trial, Murdoch made stunning admissions in earlier depositions, including the fact that presenters had “endorsed” Donald Trump’s lies of a stolen election knowing they weren’t true. Murdoch is a particularly influential figure in Republican Party politics, and his decision to step down could have ripple effects as the US heads towards a presidential election next year. Murdoch’s influence has also been widely criticised. Angelo Carusone, President of Media Matters for America, said “no one should sugarcoat the damage he caused. Making matters worse, his parting act – handing the reins to Lachlan Murdoch – is akin to tossing a match onto the kindling he stacked.”

It is widely suspected that Murdoch senior will remain the power behind the throne, though one industry insider told the BBC that Lachlan is by no means the dimbo he is reported to be.

Murdoch is seen as a monster and he is certainly not a liberal. (Sun front page attacks of 1992 killed off Liberal Democrat chances of making headway in the general election of that year. They included an accusation of Liberal Democrats being no more than a Trojan horse for Labour, and this notorious one.) But otherwise his political philosophy does not go beyond backing winners, ensuring favourable treatment from any incoming government - witness the Sun's support for Blair in 1997. On the plus side, he has maintained The Times as a (mainly) independent newspaper of record. Nor has he ever resorted to the courts to defend his reputation as many lesser but equally rich public figures have done.

Chances are that Murdoch will be as good as his word and not a Sinatra--like farewell.

Derna flood disaster: triumph for some

 Perversely, the sons of Khalida Aftar, whose dereliction of duty of care to the people of Derna led to tens of thousands of deaths and displacements, have benefited from the disaster. France24 reports:

Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. The youngest son of Khalifa Haftar, Saddam is often cited as the “possible successor” to the 79-year-old strongman who has controlled eastern Libya for nearly a decade.

As the head of Tareq Ben Zayed (TBZ) brigade in his father’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), the youngest Haftar is better known for seizing money from Libya’s Central Bank vaults, according to the UN, and “inflicting a catalogue of horrors” in eastern Libya, according to Amnesty International.

At 32, the Haftar scion has no experience in relief administration or management. But last week, he was appointed head of the Disaster Response Committee to handle a humanitarian crisis of shocking proportions.

As millions of dollars of humanitarian aid pours into eastern Libya, the international community will be forced to coordinate relief operations under a strongman’s son with a documented record of embezzlement and human rights violations. For the Libyan people, this is yet another source of despair heaped on the loss and trauma of the flooding, which was caused by decades of state neglect.
Gaddafi falls, Haftars rise

Saddam Haftar was born in 1991, a year after his father, a top commander in Muammar Gaddafi’s army, fled into exile in the US.

The youngest of Haftar’s six sons grew up in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi with his mother while his father was in the US, according to The Africa Report. “Little is known about his youth apart from the fact that he has no known secondary school qualifications,” noted The Africa Report.

He was 20 when the 2011 anti-Gaddafi uprising erupted, bringing his father back home from exile. The young man’s fortunes started to rise after 2014 when his father attacked rival armed groups, triggering the second Libyan civil war, which resulted in Khalifa Haftar’s LNA controlling the eastern Cyrenaica region.

In 2016, Saddam Haftar was appointed head of the TBZ brigade, one of the most powerful armed groups operating under the LNA. “Since then, TBZ fighters have been committing violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, some of which may constitute war crimes,” noted Amnesty International in “We Are Your Masters”, a chilling, 21-page report detailing rampant violations committed with impunity in LNA-controlled areas.

Saddam Haftar’s name also appeared in a 2018 report by a UN panel of experts on Libya, which accused him of seizing control of the Benghazi branch of the country’s Central Bank in 2017 and transferring “substantial amounts of cash and silver to an unknown destination”.

The contents of the bank safe included $159,700,000, €1,900,000 and 5,869 silver coins, noted the report. “Several bank managers indicated that LNA commanders had put them under serious pressure to grant them access to cash and letters of credit. Some had decided to move abroad for security reasons,” the UN report noted.

Avoiding the ire of the Haftar family is a fundamental survival strategy that residents of eastern Libya have adopted for nearly a decade, with good reason. On November 10, 2020, Hanan al-Barassi, a Libyan human rights lawyer and women’s rights activist, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi a day after she posted a Facebook message promising that she would reveal alleged corruption by Saddam Haftar, according to Amnesty International.

Toleration of the corrupt rule in Benghazi has a direct effect on the UK and even more on southern Europe, especially Italy. People smugglers would not be able to operate from ports in/Cyrenaica without the connivance of Haftar and his sons, as this report details.

The avoidable disaster in Cyrenaica

 There is a table of twentieth century lethal dam failures in a DEFRA report (pdf here).

I remember the impact news of the Malpasset dam collapse and how it virtually wiped out the village of Fréjus. The even greater disaster of Valont in Italy four years later made similar headlines world-wide. There have been incidents in Britain thankfully not resulting in loss of life. The fatality figures above put in perspective the tens of thousands of lives lost in Derna in Libya in an area controlled from Benghazi in defiance of the interantionally-recognised Libyan government by warlord Khalifa Haftar.

Each of the disasters in the table occurred in states with a stable (though not necessarily democratic) government. Lessons were learned from each of them and there has been no repetition in Europe of a dam failure on the scale of Valont. By contrast, though Haftar rules over Derna, he has shown only distrust of its citizens and certainly no concern for their well-being. Haftar ignored warnings about the state of the dams which were breached. Even now, his forces are making it difficult for aid agencies to come to the help of Derna citizens. 

Haftar rose to power as a client of Western powers seeking to overthrow the Ghedaffi régime. He has been kept in power by an unholy alliance of Egypt, the UAE, Russia's Wagner group and, according to some reports, France, instead of being compelled to give up his weapons and cede power to an elected government  in Tripoli. Derna has paid the price for this international power game.

HS2 an expensive gesture

 Both Peter Black and John Redwood have covered much of the ground that I intended to base this post on. However, there are one or two points I would like to elaborate on. 

The HS2 project was originally conceived as an attempt to keep up with the Japanese (the "bullet train") or the French (TGV). So it was already a solution in search of a problem when the thin business case Mr Redwood refers to was concocted. The fact that millions will have been spent on PR over the lifetime of the project (over £20m by the end of the next financial year, judging by Daily Telegraph figures) tends to confirm the view that HS2 has always been a vanity project rather than a useful contribution to UK transport. Just as our ineffective nuclear arsenal has sucked funds from where they were really needed in conventional defence, so HS2 has diverted money from the completion of the electrification programme brought to the coalition by the Liberal Democrats and killed off by the Tory government which followed. Even more desperately needed were reliable trans-Pennine services and it must have been a huge kick in the teeth for local authority leaders in Yorkshire and Lancashire when it was bruited that not only the Manchester-Leeds spur of HS2 was to be delayed but that the whole of the project north of Birmingham was to be shelved. 

To my mind, the real justification for HS2 was to link the lively Midlands industrial and commercial scene to the parts of northern England which needed reviving. To take away that link leaves HS2 as no more than a memorial to British design and engineering, like the SS Great Britain, magnificent but irrelevant.

There is hope, however, that something can be recovered. It is virtually certain that Labour will be the majority party after the next general election. On yesterday's Radio 4 PM programme, a senior shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds stated unequivocally: "We will build HS2 in full and we will build Northern Powerhouse Rail in full."

In Wales thirty becomes twenty - mostly

Yesterday, the default speed limit in Wales became 20mph on restricted roads. The impression has been given, even on some BBC news bulletins, that there is a blanket limit on all Welsh highways. This is not the case. Only those roads subject to the previous limit of 30mph are affected. Indeed, local authorities have the power to vary the limit where they feel it is justified. The following message from Asthma + Lung UK puts things in perspective. 

This change could have positive effects on your lungs and well-being. Here’s some useful information why the new speed limit is being introduced. Why the Welsh Government is making this change   The new speed limit will have a number of benefits: •    It will reduce the number of collisions, reducing the impact on the NHS from treating the people who are injured. •    It will encourage more people to walk and cycle in our communities. •    It will help to improve our health and well-being. •    It will make our streets safer. •    It will safeguard the environment for future generations.   What this could mean for your lungs We already know that air pollution irritates your airways and can trigger your asthma symptoms or cause a flare-up of your lung condition. Children are more at risk than adults because their lungs are still developing. We hope that reducing speeds to 20mph near residential areas and schools will improve air quality and encourage people to walk and cycle more often. Exercise is an excellent way to improve your quality of life and help you manage your condition. We all want to walk safely and enjoy the outdoors, and slower speeds produce less noise and reduces fuel consumption. Exhaust and non-exhaust emissions are also likely to be reduced.   Protecting people's lungs from air pollution This is a great step forward in helping to protect people’s lungs from air pollution but more needs to be done. We’re continuing our fight to tackle toxic air across all of the UK. Stories about the real human impact of air pollution are much easier to connect with than facts and figures alone. Sharing your story about how air pollution affects your life could make a significant difference to our campaign – putting personal experience at the centre of the issue.

Share your story

I agree with Stephen

 There are people, including some liberals, who would like nothing better than to see the whole Tata Steel complex in Port Talbot demolished completely. They envisage it being replaced by a massive holiday park behind a splendid marina. While solving the local air pollution problem, it has a deleterious social effect in that four thousand skilled and semi-skilled jobs would be lost to be only partially replaced by mainly low-paid ones. Globally, it would do nothing for carbon emissions as it would ensure that polluting plants elsewhere would become more viable. There will always be a need for virgin steel, as it has been described, refined from the basic ores.

Diametrically opposed are those who take a more blinkered approach, believing that there is no reason for change, that traditional steel-making can continue and that "net zero is bollocks". They ignore not just the science but also the international political pressure. More to the point, Port Talbot is loss-making. Tata's balance-sheet will benefit from simply abandoning the plant. It was a mixture of family connection (a former head of Tata Steel had trained in British Steel in South Wales) and politics which kept Tata in South Wales in the first place. A more hard-headed administration has now taken over in Mumbai. 

Friday's long-awaited announcement of a deal to keep some steel-making here is some comfort. Three thousand jobs will go, but around a thousand will remain (the exact numbers remain to be announced). However, a chance has been missed as local MP Stephen Kinnock explained in an ITV Wales At Six interview last Friday (still not on ITVx, unfortunately). An electric-arc furnace will not produce the variety of product currently available from Port Talbot, so that the order book will shrink as key customers look elsewhere. Mittal (that other Indian conglomerate) has already embarked on the path to 100% hydrogen-based iron reduction at its Hamburg plant and Tata itself was reported last year to be considering the process for its Dutch works. Admittedly, both would rely initially on "blue" hydrogen, sourced from natural gas and requiring carbon capture and storage, but in the longer term more environmentally-friendly methods of extracting hydrogen would surely become viable.

So a chance has been missed to save more jobs and at the same time make a global contribution to carbon reduction. It could be that the deal struck by the Sunak government is not the final word and the opportunity remains for a new administration in Westminster to extend the deal in a more positive direction. That day cannot come soon enough.

Ancient beauty as well as lives were lost in Moroccan earthquake

 Pliable mourns the loss of a mosque which stood in the Atlas mountains for nearly a millennium before last week's tragic earthquake struck. You may find the Wagner link a little strained, but it is well worth visiting his post for his several images of architecture which will never be seen again materially.

This is one example:

 

Gwynedd moves for more control over second homes

 The effect of Gwynedd County Council's two-pronged attack on the proliferation of second homes, particularly on the Lleyn peninsula, has just dawned on the Mail/Express class. So property prices in Gwynedd will fall? Bloody good.

The conservative parties are not committed to the triple lock

 Although the state pension triple lock will remain in place for next year's uprating, the prime minister did not commit the Conservative party to including it in the next general election manifesto. Similarly, deputy leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner refused to say that Labour would keep it if coming to power. 

The IFS points out that the triple lock has a ratchet effect. As I understand it, this was deliberate planning on the part of David Laws and the other experts who devised the original Liberal Democrat policy. It meant that over time the income of state pensioners would come into line with those of other European nations. We had fallen significantly behind. If and when parity is reached will be the time to reconsider the percentage floor of the triple-lock, but not before. 

In addition, the next government will have the problem of counteracting the Bank of England's anti-inflation policy, so loudly applauded by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt. The Conservatives' traditional recipe for stimulating the economy has been to lob money to the big banks, which has had negligible effect. Far better to uprate pensions, social benefits and the national minimum wage which will feed into the economy swiftly, where it is most needed. There will then be a "trickle-up" effect as the service industries - and the banks - feel the benefit.

One trusts that the forthcoming conferences which still have influence on their parties' manifestos will maintain their commitment to the triple-lock.

 

50th anniversary of Allende's fatal overthrow

 Chile is not yet at peace. Al-Jazeera reports;  A half-century on, the country struggles with revisionism and denial as survivors continue their quest for justice.

[...]

Many in Chile credit Pinochet’s rigid privatisation policies and free-market values for boosting the country’s economy and making it one of South America’s wealthier nations.

But Consuelo Contreras Largo, director of Chile’s National Human Rights Institute, believes such comments are deeply troubling, evidencing the persistent spread of misinformation.

“You still hear people condemn the violence of the dictatorship, but then defend the economic progress of the time,” she told Al Jazeera.

“To me, it’s not only inconceivable that someone would say something so brutal, but it’s also false. After the dictatorship, [around 40 percent of] Chileans were living below the poverty line.” In such circumstances, “you can’t talk about a successful country”.

Broadcast media in the UK have not made much of the anniversary, possibly because of the shameful way the Thatcher regime and local FO staff at the time supported Pinochet.

Michael Steed

 News has come through of the death of Michael Steed, psephologist, electoral reform campaigner and a great Liberal. Along with Robert Mackenzie, he followed the path of scientific election forecasting beaten by David Butler and continued by John Curtice. My only two meetings with Michael Steed were at the Liberal Democrat Federal (Britain-wide) Conference held in York over a decade ago, when he and Gordon Lishman were trying to revive DAGGER, an electoral reform group. The two of them appointed me Treasurer, but since HSBC bank has managed to mislay all the documentation relating to the DAGGER account, there is practically nothing to be custodian of. 

There is a Liberal Democrat biography by William Wallace here.

Updated 2023-09-12

Mike Yarwood: a personal carp

 Contrary to some of the glowing tributes in the media (some, one suspects, written by people who were not born when Yarwood was in his prime), he was not that great an impressionist. He was not a patch on the young Peter Sellers, or a man who seemed to be Sellers' natural successor, Peter Goodwright. His material was unsophisticated, but he endeared himself to the rising generation who put Mrs Thatcher into power by lampooning their hate figures, Harold Wilson, Denis Healey and Edward Heath. 

To be fair, one has to acclaim a Cheshire lad who made it to the top of his profession.

Ukraine war: Russia loses Cuba's support

 Long-time ally from Soviet days, Cuba is refusing to support Russia's illegal actions in Ukraine. AP reports: 

Cuban authorities have arrested 17 people in connection with what they described as a network to recruit Cuban nationals to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

The head of criminal investigations for Cuba’s Interior Ministry, César Rodríguez, said late Thursday on state media that at least three of the 17 arrested are part of recruitment efforts inside the island country.

He did not identify the alleged members of the network but said they had previous criminal records. Some families started speaking up about the case on Friday, and at least one mother said that her son was promised a job in construction in Russia.

This may be a signal to other third-world client states to review their unthinking support for Putin's post-communist Russia.

Can Lisa Nandy drag international development back into the spotlight?

 The media (broadcast as well as print) immediate response to Keir Starmer's move of Lisa Nandy to the shadow portfolio of international development was that it was a demotion. That is a sad reflection on the little-England mentality which seems to have grown under the Tories. 

For too long, the UK's international development arm has operated in the shadows, markedly less interested in the positive development of the third world. I see Starmer's appointment as a positive step, bringing the sharpness of the Wigan MP to bear on the attitude and practices of an operation which needs investigation. The wikipedia article suggests that it has still not changed direction sufficiently since its exposure by Private Eye in the previous decade.

From progressive municipality to knuckle-dragging failure in a century and a half

 It is sad to see a great institution brought low by a wilful failure to move with the times. Birmingham Online summarises it:

Birmingham City Council leaders have today announced the city is all but 'bankrupt' as its failure to cut out discriminatory pay practices for years comes back to haunt it.

Local authority trade unions, council officers who should have known the legal position and councillors themselves all share responsibility. What were they thinking of, seeking to skirt equal-pay legislation and agreements, not to mention morality, by the use of bonuses? Surely they knew they would be brought to account eventually.

It is all a contrast from the days of forward-thinking Liberal Birmingham of the 1870s. Form the Journal of Liberal History:

The reforms in municipal services that Joseph Chamberlain introduced during his three-year mayoralty of Birmingham in the mid-1870s marked a turning point for British Liberalism as well as in the governance of industrial cities.

Municipal, or gas-and-water socialism it was called; and it signalled, if not a departure, at least a deviation from the principles and fundamental policy of Liberalism that Gladstone was instilling in the Liberal party at the national level.

Chamberlain began in 1874 by inducing the town (Birmingham had not yet received designation as a city) to buy out its two gas companies, till then in private hands. The next year he used the profits from this consolidation of service to enable the town to buy out the local water companies. In this case his objective was not further profit but reduction in the price and improvement in the quality of the city’s water supply, in the interests of public health.

These measures, the validation of their extraordinary financing and accounting by Chamberlain’s earlier success in business as a metal manufacturer, and the forceful leadership with which he pressed his proposals forward won dazzled approval from the ratepayers and both parties in the town council. But that bipartisan support broke down when he pressed on with an improvement scheme for centre of Birmingham that combined clearance of the inner-city slums with their replacement by a broad artery for commerce and attendant legal services. It was named Corporation Street in honour of the governmental power that brought it all about. Opposition was aroused by the huge debt with which the scheme encumbered the town, to be turned into a profit only slowly as the leases of the shops and offices on Corporation expired and their ownership reverted to the municipality. Furthermore, regardless of its boldness in other regards, the scheme made woefully inadequate provision for the housing of the dispossessed slum dwellers. The costs and limitations of the improvement scheme were accentuated by the onset of what came to be known as the great depression. Still the improvement scheme along with the municipalisation of gas and water aroused much more pride than dismay in the town and won admiring approval in Britain but abroad. For a while Birmingham was heralded as the best-governed city in the industrial world.

Birmingham has recent action to be proud of, such as making a success of the Commonwealth Games taken on at short notice. Let us hope that the city can be rescued from its current mess and that such initiatives can continue.

Biofuels

 It is good to see that our council (Neath Port Talbot) has a DARE (decarbonisation and renewable energy) strategy in place and is progressing it. One of the tactics is a joint effort to create commercial biofuels:

The council is working with 'Lanzatech' which specialises in the re-use of waste gases from industrial processes to enable conversion into biofuels. The company plans to deliver a pilot project within Neath Port Talbot which will utilise waste gases from TATA. It is anticipated that once fully operational, the plant will generate 30 million gallons of biofuels for the aviation industry each year.

May I also press them to respond to yesterday's call for councils to consider switching to biofuels, converted from food wastes such as by this company, for their vehicle fleets? Biofuels from waste may only be a stopgap before an age when virtually all energy will be renewable, but in the meantime they save on resources and make a net contribution to carbon reduction.

RAAC in schools

 Frank Little, local LibDems secretary, writes:

In a week in which it is revealed that there will be no new money for RAAC replacement in England, and hence no extra Barnett consequential for Wales, Liberal Democrats in London have condemned Sunak's priorities.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had promised on Sunday to “spend what it takes” to make classrooms safe after many were forced shut at the start of the new term over concerns about reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). However, HM Treasury later confirmed that the money to make classrooms safe would have to come from the Department for Education's existing budget. So there will have to be cuts elsewhere in education in England and no extra money for Wales.

Today, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey accuses Rishi Sunak of putting “tax cuts for big banks over children’s safety"

Analysis by the party shows that Sunak rejected pleas by officials for an extra £900 million a year for school funding in the 2021 Spending Review.

Officials in the Department for Education asked the Treasury for an average of £4 billion a year over five years for new buildings and school repairs. They did so despite this being less than the £5.3 billion they estimated was needed to “mitigate the most serious risks of building failure.”

Then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak turned down their request, allocating just £3.1 billion a year on average.

Rishi Sunak shamefully chose tax cuts for the big banks over children’s safety.

It is staggering that in the very same Budget in which he slashed taxes for the banks, Sunak couldn’t find the cash needed to urgently repair crumbling schools.

The West might have dissuaded Russia from invading Ukraine

 There was a story Vic Feather told of his younger days when he was a rugby league player. In a particular match, a forward - built like a brick outhouse - took a delight in fouling the youngster at every opportunity. Feather took this for just so long until he finally thought "in for a penny, in for a pound", drew himself up to his full five-foot-and-a-bit, and punched the forward on the nose. The blow clearly hurt Feather more than his opponent, who exclaimed: "You cheeky little bugger!" - but left Feather alone for the rest of the match. I guess Feather told it to illustrate his approach to negotiation on behalf of his union and later as general secretary of the TUC, confronted often by much better-endowed organisations. This is all from memory. He told the story on either Desert Island Discs or in a Parkinson interview or both, but the BBC has not made either freely available. (The Parkinson session is particularly intriguing. The other guests were impressionist Mike Yarwood and famous concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein.)

The opportunity to punch Putin on the nose metaphorically came in 2014 when Russian elements shot down a Malaysian Airlines airliner on flight MH17 over internationally-recognised Ukrainian territory. This was a time to send in the SAS to secure the crash site, gather evidence and act on behalf of the relations of those on board, most of whom were from friendly countries. It's the sort of thing that Paddy Ashdown would have pressed for if he had been alive at the time. But perhaps the SAS is no longer capable of such action because of defence cuts.

The subject of deterrence came up on the airwaves last week as 29th August was the tenth anniversary of the vote in the House of Commons on whether to intervene in Syria after Assad and Russian forces had used chemical weapons in the civil war there. One or two MPs  then on the "ayes" side (which lost narrowly) suggest now that if the West had shown itself ready to take military action against the Assad regime, then a signal would have been sent to his Russian allies and Putin would not have gone ahead with the annexation of Crimea and the downing of MH17 a year later. 

Crippling Assad's air force and other military infrastructure may well have begun the demolition of his family's rule in Syria. But to be truly effective in restoring democratic rule, air strikes would have to be followed up by a force on the ground, as was shown in the action in former Yugoslavia. This was not an option for an over-stretched British army and was highly unlikely to be approved by US Congress affected by the sight of body-bags coming home from previous conflicts. So the most likely outcome would have been a continuing civil war and an eventual takeover by Da'esh (or ISIL as they like to call themselves), one of the most vicious and bloody actors in the history of guerrilla warfare. Judging by their earlier actions against Christian and Yazidi communities, a Da'esh administration would have wasted no time in eliminating non-Sunni-Muslim populations.

Russia may well have been inhibited after a 2013 intervention by the West in Syria. However, peace in Ukraine would have been bought at the cost of the lives of thousands of Syrians.

Pots preserve a slave's name

 Clay is a marvellous medium for historians. Fired, it can preserve images or text down the ages more surely than most other media. As well as reaching back to the dawn of history, pottery can also bring to light people who have been almost deliberately anonymised. Such is Dave the Potter from the days of slavery in the US, remembered in a Jstor article.

From the trenches of the Antebellum South, enslaved potter David Drake (ca. 1801-1874), otherwise known as “Dave the Potter,” constructed hundreds if not thousands of functional pots while working on plantations and in factories in Edgefield, South Carolina, a region now famous for its ceramics. Dave was heralded for his enormous storage jars and for writing on his pots.

During the nineteenth century, life on some plantations revolved around pottery making: Jugs, jars, pitchers, and kitchen wares were generally made by hand, by the enslaved in the rural South. Most of the potters at this time, those who were enslaved as well as the white laborers who were not, did not inscribe or mark their work in any identifying way. Dave was different. He signed his name on the walls of his pots. He engraved markings, for example, such as forward slashes and circled X’s that may have been a way to keep inventory, or that hearkened to ancestral roots. Dave also wrote dates, the location where he fashioned the pots, lines of poetry, and Christian proverbs. All of these practices set him apart.

A battle has been won, but the war against computer hackers continues

 TechRepublic announces that a major malicious botnet has been taken down. A botnet is (summarised from wikipedia), a logical collection of Internet-connected devices, such as computers, smartphones or Internet of things (IoT) devices, each of which runs one or more bots (software applications that run automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet). While it is conceivable that there legitimate uses for botnets, the majority are built on the PCs etc. of unwitting victims of a computer virus.

Bots can be used to create multiple synthetic personalities to sign on to the various social media. This is probably their most blatant manifestation in creating the appearance of a multitude of people praising a particular product, or pushing a dubious opinion like denying climate change or anti-vaxxing. There are more malign applications, though. In the case of the Qakbot network which has just been cracked by the FBI:

Over the course of its more than 15-year campaign, Qakbot (aka Qbot and Pinkslipbot) has launched some 40 worldwide ransomware attacks focused on companies, governments and healthcare operations, affecting some 700,000 computers. Qakbot, like almost all ransomware attacks, hit victims through spam emails with malicious links, according to the Justice Department. The DOJ noted that over just the past year and a half, Qakbot has caused nearly $58 million in damages. As part of the action against Qakbot, the DOJ seized approximately $8.6 million in cryptocurrency in illicit profits (here’s the department’s seizure warrant).

According to the DOJ, the action represented the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure leveraged by cybercriminals to commit ransomware, financial fraud and other cyber-enabled criminal activities.

“Cybercriminals who rely on malware like Qakbot to steal private data from innocent victims have been reminded today that they do not operate outside the bounds of the law,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a statement.

But the fight is not over.

Will Qakbot reappear after some retooling to sidestep new defenses? [Richard] Suls of WithSecure said it could happen. “The creators of these botnets are often highly skilled (sometimes nation states and/or APTs) and to that effect, we have seen botnets return from the grave, often with modifications,” he said, pointing to Kelihos, which was sinkholed In September 2011 and returned in January 2012 as a new version.

“One way we’ve seen botnets reconfigured and resurrected is when their source code is leaked,” said Suls. “For instance, the Zbot malware, whose source code hit the internet, allowing multiple actors the ability to view, update and use the base code for their own botnets. There is no doubt in my mind that botnet code is available for purchase in the darker corners of the internet.”

Jess Parnell, vice president of security operations at threat intelligence firm Centripetal, said the success of Qakbot proves the weakest link is the least sophisticated.

“Some might think that a simple spam email or SMS message is harmless, but as we are constantly seeing, organizations all over the globe are getting hit daily by major cyberattacks that are oftentimes disguised as something else,” he said. “By staying informed, proactive and collaborative, organizations can significantly reduce their risk of falling victim to cyberattacks.”

Tory Government suddenly aerated, but hardly reinforced or even concrete

 Something which has been known about since the mid-1990s, that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) "has shown to have limited structural rebar integrity in 40 to 50 year-old RAAC roof panels" has suddenly dawned on politicians. In other words, roofs of hundreds of schools and hospitals constructed in the UK from the 1950s on are liable to collapse as the reinforcing fails. The man left standing as the music stops is Nick Gibbs, junior minister at the Department for Education. The Minister, Gillian Keegan, will return to answer to parliament next week, but blame should be apportioned to their predecessors and Treasury ministers over the last three decades for not taking action which would have avoided the current emergency. 

And, as far as I am aware, the Health Department has not responded publicly to the crisis in England's hospitals.

 RAAC has been found in Withybush hospital in Pembrokeshire, but the Welsh government has stated that no schools or colleges in Wales have reported any trouble with the material.

[updated 2023-09-02]