Rail improvements value for money

 The government has announced £794m of investment in rail infrastructure. The headline improvements are reopening to passenger traffic a line between Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Ashington and reopening Bicester to Bletchley, a link in the east-west rail route. 

Assuming the distance covered by the latter is 19 miles, the cost of the scheme works out at £40m per mile on the government's own figures. The last significant motorway construction in the UK cost £138.4m per mile and that was ten years ago. One can add at least £30m to that figure to bring it up to date, allowing for RPI inflation over the decade. So rebuilding the railway costs 75'% less than making new motorway for at least the same benefit.

Climate change can affect us all

In my regular weekly phone conversation with my sister in the English Midlands, last Monday I shared worries about storm Christoph.  It was clearly going to dump loads of water on already sodden ground in her area in England after it had finished with us. Neath Abbey and Cadoxton will flood again, I said, they always do. But you should be safe, she consoled, because you live up a hill. 

Thursday's floods in Skewen demonstrated how fragile our confidence can be. Somewhere on the hillside above me, water burst out - probably from historic mine-workings, with which Skewen is riddled - inundating post-war housing development on the Goshen Park estate. The floods continued down Drummau Road (top left in the picture) to the main road and also flowed along Dynevor (Dinefwr) Road (left to right in the picture). The line of trees across the top right of the photo marks the line of the embankment on which the Great Western railway line was built, blocking off the road in which I live and saving a large part of Skewen from disaster.

As I write, the water is said to be still flowing. Residents have been advised not to return to evacuated properties this weekend and that it may be months before their lives are back to normal. The Coal Authority is investigating the source of the outburst and, if it is an old mine-shaft, capping it properly.

Thanks to South Wales Police for the link to this image.

Sicily 1944

 I thought I had better double-check the assertion I made last Friday, that the resurgence of the Mafia in the second half of last century stemmed in large part from the Americans naive resettlement of American Cosa Nostra barons in Sicily after the Allies' successful invasion. My source was a memory of one of the late Alan Whicker's TV presentations of his career in the media. Whicker had been an army captain in charge of a film unit, present at the landings and later. He claimed that the British had managed to set up a civil administration free of fascists which was functioning well. One of the few things which Mussolini can be praised for is virtually killing off the Sicilian Mafia, but this is just what the US government would reverse. The wartime US administration had two problems as they saw it: at home, the power of organised crime dominated by Italian-Americans and abroad, the growth of international communism. This has been a perpetual (one might say, pathological) fear on the part of the United States which had led her to support and even install dictators abroad. There was even some toleration of Hitler because of the latter's anti-communist stance until his ally Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. As HL Mencken was wont to say in several formulations, to every complex problem there is a solution which is neat, clear, simple ... and wrong. The US adopted one such in Sicily by deporting the anti-fascist, anti-communist, Italo-American gangsters so that they could rebuild their empires on the island.

In my checking, I came across this pdf of a doctoral thesis which goes into the background of the invasion of Sicily as well as detail of the British contribution to the Allied governance* of the various communes. It reveals that Mafia activity was not altogether extinguished by the Fascists and that at least one local Mafioso gained a mayoralty even before the US deportations. On the other hand, there was widespread resentment of Fascism on the island at the time of the invasion, clearly more than was realised in Washington, and a great deal of cooperation with the military government imposed by the Allies on the part of local officials. Intelligence was able to produce a schedule of those Fascists who had not fled the island, distinguishing those who were Fascist by conviction from those who were compelled to join the party in order to keep public office.

So the deportations did not help, and were anyway irrelevant to the struggle against communism which had hardly any traction on the island. Sicilians were probably more motivated by resentment of rule from mainland Italy than by political dogma. However, there would still have been a need to 

*In the Hague Convention, articles 42-56 govern the establishment of an administration after military conquest. It seems that the articles were applied assiduously and successfully by the Allies in Germany and Japan at the end of the war, had mixed application in Italy but were neglected in Iraq after the two Gulf Wars. It is a matter for debate whether the anarchy in  Iraq was better or worse than the corrupted order of Sicily.

Priti Patel still doesn't get it

It is all very well for the Home Secretary to seek to justify her position (are there rumours that she is to be reshuffled?) by claiming that if it had been up to her, UK's borders would have been closed in March 2020. By March, the damage had already been done and Covid-19 was already running free in most of England and Wales. Ideally, the lockdown should have been imposed on New Year's Day as it was in Taiwan. However, one accepts that detailed knowledge of the virus, only suspicions, were available at that time, so there is some excuse for Western governments to await developments.

But there was no doubt by the end of the month. It was enough for New Zealand to close her borders at the start of February and we should have done the same, at least to the countries where the virus was known to be circulating. They included France and Italy. The first three SARS/CoV-2 patients identified in the UK, late in January, had returned from these two countries and Singapore. At the same time, it would have been realised that we no longer had a viable contact tracing system. Years of false economies in the NHS and GIG had rendered a previously exemplary service unfit for purpose. Yet the people who ran it were still out there and would have returned like a shot to rebuild it, given a chance. That they were not is down to the Tories' dogmatic belief that private enterprise is always better than public service. By the time the epidemic is over in the UK, over 70,000 people will have paid for that prejudice with their lives.

Simulmatics: a warning from history

 Computer prediction of voting patterns or mass purchasing decisions is not that recent a development. It was fascinating to hear last week's Radio 4 serialisation of Jill Lepore's If Then. (The nerd in me kept wanting continuity announcers to pause between the two words, because they are two parts of a conditional sentence in COBOL, and some other high-level procedural programming languages: IF [condition] THEN [action].) The story goes back to 1959. As Waterstones blurb says:

Charting the history of Simulmatics, the first corporation dedicated to the prediction of human behavior and manipulation of data, If Then reveals the mid-twentieth century forebears to the companies rising out of Silicon Valley.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge - decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense.

In If Then, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, unearths from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.

If they had not overstretched by attempting to predict the future of Vietnam, Simulmatics may still be with us today and as the holding oompany for Facebook. Cambridge Analytica would not have arisen.  Rather like Babbage in the 19th century, the moving spirits of the company foresaw the future of computing but were limited by the technology of the time.

That worked out well, didn't it?

 

This is from a Conservative campaign letter addressed to my younger daughter who came on to the Neath electoral roll in time for the 1997 election. It is a reminder that it was that nice Mr Major who was responsible for the worst of the privatisations (British Rail) and for initiating the post office closure programme so enthusiastically continued by Blair-Brown. Time has also shown how specious were the original arguments for privatisation.

Government protects slave-owner statues

 Well, actually it doesn't. The proposed changes to planning legislation will have no effect on "baying mobs". Besides, the worst of the hysteria has passed. A reasonable compromise, relying on the good sense of local authorities and of their electorate seems to have been reached. Memorials to the most egregious exploiters of slaves have been removed from public view while statues of those whose involvement with the trade is more tangential and far outweighed by their good works have been allowed to remain. Context has been added in many cases. 

The Conservatives used to highlight a policy of "town hall, not Whitehall". They rightly mistrusted putting too much decision-making in the hands of a central authority. That began to change under Thatcher and has been decisively reversed under Johnson. The principle of good governance has been forgotten in favour of throwing red meat to those who want to strike back at the Black Lives Matter movement. The proposed legislation is at best pointless. It also adds to bureaucracy. At worst, it is tendentious.

We once "owned" Panama

According to one source, on January 18 1671, Welsh privateer Henry Morgan captured Panama on behalf of England and was knighted in spite of his ruthless techniques. Wikipedia gives the date of completion of the capture as 27th January but casts doubt on the value of the enterprise. The date discrepancy may be due to the fact that England and Wales did not change to the Gregorian calendar until September 1752.