Good Beer Guide 2010

Roger Protz heads his introduction to CAMRA's latest Good Beer Guide, "the battle for survival". The reasons for the decline in public house numbers are various, and I had better not make my own guesses here while there is a committee of Neath Port Talbot council looking at the subject of alcohol abuse. I see that another local, the Harp, Skewen, is almost certainly finished; there is a planning application in for its conversion to flats.

Amid all the doom and gloom, the Green Dragon and the Crown & Sceptre in Cadoxton keep their doors open. Indeed, the latter continues its status in the Good Beer Guide 2010.

Other pubs in the county borough which are listed are the Butchers at Alltwen, the Pontardawe Inn ("Gwachel") and the Pink Geranium in Pontardawe, the Borough Arms and the David Protheroe in Neath, the Lord Caradoc in Port Talbot and the Wern Fawr in Ystalyfera.

Don't mention the war

Please don't go on about it. I know it's 70 years ago today that Polish resistance collapsed, but I don't recall quite this level of media coverage on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of war - and surely the 75th anniversary, in 2014, would be more appropriate.

Adrian Hamilton, in the Independent of 3rd September, gives an objective survey. "The history channels continue to be skewed to the era, with documentaries endlessly repeating the pictures from the archives, the reminiscences of the participants and the views of the armchair strategists. To the despair of, I suspect, most women, and most of the young, the Second World War lives on with a glow that almost no other historic occasion holds. Why so? It is partly that, for all the revisionist history, the Second World War has gone down as the 'good war'"

But, he points out, only the Russians celebrate the period with the fervency of the Anglo-Saxons. "For the losers, the occupied as well as the Axis, the Nazi era is still one they would rather forget. And who can blame them? There is little to be gained, even if there is much to be learnt, by trawling over a bitter and humiliating past."

It is not as if Britain's feats of arms were unique and superior. "A whole generation of historians," Hamilton writes, "has served to reinforce the point - accepted by veterans but ignored by the popular narratives - that platoon by platoon, equipment for equipment, the Germans were much better fighters than we were."

We sneer at the Americans for claiming many of the technical advances actually made by Europeans during World War II (cracking the Enigma cipher, digital electronic computers and radar for instance), but we cannot deny that mainland Europe would not have been liberated without that massive war machine. We would not even have been in the position to do so if Hitler had not had to fight the Russians. And let us not forget the sacrifices made by Australians, Canadians, Indians, New Zealanders and other citizens of what was then still the Empire.

The current orgy of self-congratulation distracts from the shortcomings in manning (except in Whitehall!) and equipment of today's armed forces. I suggest that it is thus dangerous as well as annoying.

Did Gordon Brown hold up the TUC?

Expecting to see TUC coverage on BBC-Parliament starting at 14:15, I was entertained by music which did not rise to the heights of Alan Price's mood music for the LibDems and a barely informative caption.

Could it be that the ten minutes was spent in hectic rewriting of Gordon Brown's speech?

Since the crucial parts have been trailed, and are being delivered as I write, one wonders what the problem was.

I am surprised at the claim that Brown is going to start building council housing again, at a time when there is no sign that New Labour is resiling from the Thatcherite drive to privatise council housing stock. Has he had a word with Rhodri Morgan? Has that word been passed down to Neath Port Talbot Council, which has postponed its tenants' ballot, possibly in anticipation of a change in policy?

Another statement, which may not be reported, is hugely debatable. Brown can hardly proclaim that UK is leading the way on green personal transport when Renault of France has made the most significant announcement of zero-emission cars so far.

Neath Port Talbot council to be filled in on canals

British Waterways have arranged a seminar for Neath Port Talbot councillors for mid-November on the subject of the Swansea, Neath and Tennant canals. One trusts that the Port Tennant Navigation Company will be represented, since British Waterways does not own their canal.

If any reader has an interest in the course of these canals through the borough, and wants information they cannot get from other sources, or has matters they wish to raise, please let me (or another member of the council) know within the next eight weeks.

Increased danger for war correspondents

Radio 4 this morning relayed the poignant blog of Sultan Munadi the New York Times translator and reporter who was killed, probably by "friendly fire", in a recent commando raid. He described how he spent two years among the unsympathetic glass, concrete and steel of Germany, and how he longed to get back to his birthplace in the Panjshir Valley. Having survived Soviet bombing and the "prison" of Taliban rule, he looked forward to a better situation. "Being a journalist is not enough," he wrote, "it will not solve the problems of Aghanistan. I want to work for the education of the country, because the majority of people are illiterate. That is the real problem facing many Afghans. I am really committed to come back and work for my country."

That raid also took the life of one of our own, Corporal John Harrison, as well as three Afghans. It succeeded in its prime objective of rescuing the Anglo-Irish journalist Stephen Farrell. It transpired that Farrell had been warned that his trip was fraught with danger. There were calls from fellow-journalists for the New York Times to withdraw him from war zones in future. There is a line between bravery and foolhardiness.

It is this thing, the World Wide Web, which has done most to jeopardise the lives of reporters in conflict zones. There was a time when journalists were as untouchable as holy men or diplomats. When the only mass media were the newspapers and radio, their correspondents were valued by all sides as the only people who could provide an outlet for the combatants' cases.

Now journalists are as disposable - or as usable as hostages - as any other citizen. Any insurgent with a computer or even a mobile phone can get his views onto the Internet within seconds. The blatant slanting of news by some US TV news channels does not help the safety of Western journalists, either.

Tories

Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) has ticked me off for describing him as a Tory, proudly saying that he had never been a member of the Conservative Party. My defence is that I was harking back to the early, pre-C0nservative and -Liberal days, when there was no recognised party structure.

Ivor Bulmer-Thomas in "The Growth of the British Party System" (1967), wrote:  "The name Whig was properly given to adherents of the Presbyterian cause in Scotland in the latter half of the seventeenth century and was applied to the exclusioners [supporters of a Bill to prevent James, Duke of York, from succeeding Charles II] in derision. The term Tory, an anglicized form of an Irish word meaning a pursuer, was even less polite. In its original sense it was used in the seventeenth century to denote one of the dispossessed Irish who became outlaws and lived by killing and plundering the English settlers and soldiers. It was equivalent to 'bog trotter', and was applied to their opponents because they noticed that the Duke of York tended to favour Irishmen for his friends. Narcissus Luttrell in 1681 wrote of the duke's supporters and the exclusioners: 'The latter party have been called by the former whigs, fanaticks, covenanteers, bromigham protestants, &c.; and the former are called by the latter tories; tantivies, Yorkists, high-flown church men, &c.'"

High-church man? Pursuer with Irish connections? Fits Guido to a T, I would say.

Nor would he disown the company of Dean Swift, Alexander Pope, Isaac Newton or Samuel Johnson, I suspect. They were all identified as tories (though Johnson was not that political).

Perhaps I was at fault in using a capital letter, since latter-day Conservatives are happy to describe themselves as "Tories". I shall be more selective in future.

Incidentally, I was pleased to note that "Narcissus Luttrell" defeated the major search engines. I do hope that Bulmer-Thomas did not invent him or her.

CAPITAlising on paedophile fears

On top of respected authors visiting schools being compelled to pay for CRB checks and the faults in the enhanced CRB checks system on which Bury councillor Richard Baum has been campaigning (latest posting here), BBC Radio news has just reported that parents who car-share the school run will be required by the government to be checked. It would be interesting to see the evidence on which this is based. Almost certainly the immediate result will be to increase the number of car journeys (one assumes that parents who drive only their own children to school will not be affected) increasing congestion and exhaust emissions, as people will be reluctant to pay for the privilege of helping out their friends and neighbours.

It's all more income for Capita, who run the checks.

Update: the situation is not as bad as the original short report implied. According to Liberal Vision, informal arrangements will not be affected. My question about the evidence base remains, though.

The Phoenix Four

So John Towers and the rest of the Phoenix consortium (Nick Stephenson, John Edwards and Peter Beale) are to be debarred from running public companies? The BBC has the background story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8244497.stm. There is a LibDem connection: John Hemming MP was involved with the Phoenix bid before being pushed aside.

John has been reluctant to say much about the Phoenix/Alchemy contest, but reading between the lines of his communications on the subject, it seems to me that the Alchemy bid was always going to be the most realistic.

The Phoenix prospectus would not have stood up to close scrutiny. But ministers were not prepared to accept the Alchemy medicine of slimming down Rover to make it viable, preserving some jobs for the long term. They were seduced by Phoenix's promises to keep all the workers on.

How about being consistent, and banning those politicians who were taken in from ever being in government again? The guilty team at the DTI in 2000 were Stephen Byers, Richard Caborn and Patricia Hewitt.