Death to the "Trumblies"!

I've just driven 15 miles on a 60 mph road at 35 mph because some guy 3 cars in front (with nothing in front of him) has decided that's the speed we should be doing. A mile of cars behind us could do nothing because of oncoming traffic on the other side. Pathetic! Why do these people have driving licences?

IRAN'S NUCLEAR CABABILITY

Changing the subject, why are we all getting so worked up about Iran developing nuclear weapons? For 40 years the USA and USSR confronted each other with WMD which nobody dare use because of the unthinkable consequences. If Iran launched a nuclear attack against the West, Iran would be obliterated. It follows that Ahmed I'm-a-dinner-jacket would not use it.

Forget the Plane - go by Train!

We have just returned from a week's river cruise on the Saone and Rhone in the south of France. We started and finished in Lyon. The vacation package included first class train travel to and from the cruise ship. We made our own arrangements to get to London from York, using National Express Trains. After an overnight stay in London, we boarded the Eurostar at the beautiful new St Pancras International train station, and that took us via the Channel Tunnel to Lille in northern France.

At Lille we changed to a French double-decker TGV that whisked us comfortably down to the south of France at speeds approaching 200 mph. A short transfer by coach from the station to the cruise ship moorings and we were on board the Princesse de Provence by tea time.

After a week's cruising these beatiful rivers, visiting Tournus, Chalon-sur-Saone, Macon, Trevoux, Avignon, and Vienne, taking in the 2000-year old Roman Aqueduct Pont du Gard, and the vineyards of Beaujolais and Chateau-neuf-du-Pape we returned to North Yorkshire by the same route. We left the south of France at 10.40 a.m. and were back in Northern England within seven and a half hours. The journey was smooth, fast and comfortable, with fast check-in, passport control and security checks on the Eurostar leg of the journey.

You would be hard put to beat these times travelling by plane, with which you have all the usual long check-in times, general airport nightmares, and travel to and from airports. You avoid all this by train and, moreover, you actually see something on the journey.

Unless you have to cross a vast ocean to get where you are going, forget the plane - go by train.

Afghanistan

Why are we there?

What have we achieved?

This, from today's New York Times ..

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.

The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” the senior Western diplomat said.

We are told by the politicians that our boys and girls in uniform are there (1) to make safe the streets of America and Europe from the threat of terrorism and (2) to encourage the Afghans to take the democratic path as an alternative to the tyranny of the Taliban.

Well, with regard to keeping us safe from terrorism I haven't noticed that our world has been a safer place in recent years, and with regard to democracy, the last I heard was that democracy has nothing to do with faking thousands of votes.

So - I want somebody to tell me again - why are we there, and what have we achieved?

Torture

So now we know .. it was OK for America to employ torture on terrorist suspects so long as strict rules were applied.

The Bush/Cheney regime .. a bunch of crooks and gangsters masquerading as Christians. They deserved to be kicked out of office.

The UK government hasn't been much better in quietly acquiescing to a lot of shady practices, including some carried out by our own security agencies. Election 2010: they are for the chop next!

Incidentally, for all this effort I don't notice the world becoming a significantly safer place - quite the opposite in fact.

Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Blackrod nr.Bolton - Result

The other week on these pages I slated this hotel for poor availability of food and shoddy service (though I gave it credit for pleasant accommodation that was kept scrupulously clean).

I'm pleased to report that having complained to the management I have received an apology, some financial compensation, and a promise to address the issues I raised.

All's well that ends well.

Lockerbie Bomber

It seems that the Scottish Government is considering releasing the guy convicted of blowing up the Pan-Am airliner over Lockerbie. He has terminal cancer and might be allowed to return to Libya for his final days.

There has been an interesting range of reactions to this news. American relatives of the victims are said to be incandescent and I saw one being interviewed on today's BBC TV news. She was in no doubt that this would be a disgraceful decision. A couple of other (UK) relatives of victims have said quite the opposite, citing the fact that this guy cannot have acted alone, he has persisently maintained he is innocent and has an Appeal pending. A lot of people in the UK feel that he was "offered up" by the Libyan Government when Colonel Gadaffi decided he wanted to stop being everyone's enemy and sign up to a friendlier relationship with the UK and the USA. We should remember that for some considerable time after this terrible event it was thought that the Libyan Government had been behind it.

Since history is littered with unsafe convictions, I am of the opinion that this particular conviction may well come within that category. The guy is going to die anyway, so I'm not going to get too exercised about him being returned to his family for his final days.

Gone with the Wind

Here's a couple of recent news items:

News Item No.1

Seven thousand new wind turbines may rise from land and sea by 2020.

Ambitious plans to generate one third of UK electricity from renewables by 2020 form the centrepiece of government plans for a low carbon future.

Financial packages for wind and wave energy and changes to planning procedures are among key components of the Low Carbon Transition Plan.

News Item No.2

Britain's only wind turbine factory is to be closed.

Danish owner, Vestas, has blamed its decision to close the factory on a lack of demand for wind turbines in the UK market.

* * *

Surely some mistake. Am I missing something here?

Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Blackrod nr.Bolton, Lancashire

£7 for a glass of wine? Do me a favour!

We've just returned from a 3-day break at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel at Blackrod (near Bolton) - a pleasant setting in the county of Lancashire at the foot of the west Pennines, within easy reach of the Rivington Country Park adjacent to a large water supply reservoir.

We couldn't fault the hotel accommodation and it was kept spotlessly clean, but the hotel lets itself down in the matter of food and drink. Everything we had from the menu and the wine list were second or third choices because whatever we really wanted was not available, even when the menu said it was available 24 hours a day, e.g., Kashmiri Lamb Curry. When I chose that it wasn't even available for 24 seconds.

On our first night, dinner in the "Arts Brasserie" was severely disrupted by a wedding reception, in that although we had been told we could order a meal from 6 pm onwards, this was not actually possibly until 8.30 pm.

On the second night we sat down in the brasserie, (in which there were only about a dozen other diners), but no one seemed to be getting any meaningful service. Waiters and waitresses were walking around at high speed between various parts of the hotel and the bar in the brasserie achieving God knows what, and we were totally ignored for 20 minutes, until I made a point of asking for some service. We placed our order (still no "24-hour" Kashmiri Lamb!) and had to wait another 20 minutes before being told that my choice of Starter was not available. By the time we had any food on the table we had been sitting there for 55 minutes.

I have never seen so much high-speed walking around achieving so little.

Breakfast was served in a different dining room, and the fried eggs, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans made an excellent breakfast, but only if you were lucky enough to be in the room when all these items were simultaneously available on the self-service breakfast bar - which wasn't very often! Most of the time, people were standing around waiting for food to appear from the kitchen, or asking the dining room staff for this or that missing item. In three days we never saw the Chef or any member of the kitchen staff check out the current state of the breakfast bar, or stock it up with anything. It was all down to dining room staff having to go into the kitchen to get more supplies as and when they could.

Stress levels were increased by the existence of a persistent high-pitched whistling sound coming from some unidentified piece of machinery, so we were all suffering from a kind of communal tinnitus.

We shall not be returning to any Ramada Jarvis hotel any time soon.

Narrow Broadband

It's not that long ago that the idea that one could watch TV programmes on your personal computer would have seemed slightly ridiculous.

It's not that long ago that being able to connect with both information and people all around the world in a meaningful way was just a gleam in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's eye.

And when he made that possible with his HTML code that launched the World Wide Web on the Internet (hitherto a military and academic piece of international telephonic computer hardware) we became used to the idea that when connecting to this worldwide phenomenon we did so to the accompaniment a vaguely science-fiction display of beeps, tones, whirring and buzzing that was the beloved Dial-up System, and we marvelled that we were transferring data back and forth at the phenomenal rate of 56 Kilobits per second.

The other day I found myself almost transported back to those days when my Broadband connection became mysteriously downgraded to a rate of less than 0.5 Megabits per second; and although this is a huge increase on the erstwhile dial-up system it was in fact achingly slow and rendered any attempt at watching streamed media totally impossible. The BBC i-Player flashed up a message that said in effect, "Your'e wasting your time, your system is totally inadequate for this task, and you should contact your ISP".

It did come up with a possible solution: download the programme to your own disk and run it from there. Fine - but when I started to download a 60-minute programme, after three hours it was still downloading and telling me there were another 50 minutes to go.

I gave up and e-mailed the BT Help Desk, and to be fair to them within an hour I received a phone call from an engineer. (By the way, judging by the accent of every BT advisor I've ever spoken to, their call centre is either based on the Asian sub-continent or their IT section is staffed entirely by Indians, Pakistanis, or Bangladeshis. They are all polite to an almost unreasonable degree, but sometimes hard to understand.)

They carried out line speed tests that told them what I had already established, i.e., my download speed was less than half a Megabit per second, whereas my "BT Broadband Option 3 Package" was supposed to deliver up to 8 Mbps (although the average expectation would be around 5 Mbps).

They seemed to be at a loss as to why this was happening and promised a full investigation, and I would be updated on progress with phone calls. The phone calls never came.

I checked the configuration of My "BT Home Hub" router/internet phone and discovered that it was registering the time it had been connected as 11 days. This was odd, because as far as I was concerned it had been connected for over a year! Not only that, it was apparently configured for only 0.5 Mbps downstream speed. So it appeared that some time in the past week or so it had been remotely disconnected and then re-connected with a different configuration.

I got back to the BT Help Desk yesterday and told them in no uncertain terms this was not why I was paying them £25 per month. Later I played back a message on my answer-phone from one my new "Indian" friends who said the engineers were in the process of resolving my problem, and would I please monitor my Broadband speed over the next few days. Oh, and "I hope you have a wonderful day ahead of you".

This morning I carried out a speed test and - joy of joys - found my speed up to 5 Mbps., and I successfully re-ran a TV program on BBC i-Player, streamed without distortion or interruption from continual buffering.

It got me thinking about how, in spite of how things used to be only a very short while ago, about which we had no complaint, once we move on to yet another level of technical and scientific advancement, we find it almost impossible to tolerate reverting to how things were only "yesterday".

Outdated Expression - "The camera never lies"

A friend of mine sent me a photo of himself standing next to a wartime museum exhibit. I lost control of my computer mouse hand and it finished up like this ..

Well, he said he liked it and I should put it on the internet. So here it is, and be it on his own head. I think his nome de plume is A. Nonny Mouse (possibly named after his little friend with the wooden spoon).

Death of a Superstar

So farewell to Wacko Jacko

How we marvelled at his skin.

Was it black or was it white?

(Very unlike his kith and kin).

Love or hate him, we all know his

Dance routines were far from shoddy.

And he was racial integration

Inside one multi-coloured body.

John Bercow speech to become Speaker

Since he is opposed by most of his own (Conservative) Party that indicates to me that he's probably going to be OK!

New Commons Speaker Tory MP John Bercow thanks MPs

I believe that John Bercow (even though opposed by most of his own Conservative Party) will make a much better fist of this job than his predecessor Michael Martin (who was forced to resign after presiding over the long-running MPs' expenses and allowances scandal, not to mention trying to use the courts to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act).

New Speaker of the House of Commons

Just when we were slowly being conned into believing that the Conservative Party had ceased to be "The Nasty Party" the shits have come out of the woodwork again following the overwhelming election of the excellent John Bercow MP (left) as Speaker of the House of Commons.

There are rumbles and rumours that most of the Conservative MPs were firmly against the election of this particular Conservative MP as the new Speaker. Worse still they are already talking about a campaign to remove him if and when (though they say "when") they have a Parliamentary majority after the next General Election.

So what is their problem? Well, Bercow used to have quite right-wing views when he was first elected to Parliament for the Conservative Party, but over the years he has moderated his views considerably, to the extent that his colleagues think he would be more suited as a Member of the Labour Party.

They are now miffed that his election to the (non-party-political) post of Speaker, soundly beating the nine other candidates, could only have been achieved by the combined efforts of the Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who rightly saw him as a committed reformer.

It is disgusting that the Conservatives cannot bring themselves to accept the results of a free, secret, and cross-party vote for the most important post in the House of Commons.

Recently I have been wearing rose-tinted glasses when looking at David Cameron and his team, but (1) their opposition to reform of our electoral system, and (2) this latest show of bad feeling against John Bercow have restored my eyesight to its former state.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/lg9jz/?t=1h01m22s

Speaker of the House of Commons

Continuing my theme of Electoral Reform, today, as a result of the enforced resignation of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons, the House is electing a new Speaker by secret ballot.

Not only is the secret ballot for this Post a new and welcome innovation to the proceedings of the House, but I am struck by the fact that the successful candidate must received more than 50% of the votes cast. At the time of writing this has already led to the initiation of a second ballot, as the candidate with the largest number of votes (John Bercow) nevertheless did not achieve the 50% rule.

Is it asking too much for the voting system used in our General Elections to be reformed in a similar way? Why should our MPs be elected even when they command well less than 50% support just because their votes might have beaten the next highest by a few votes?

Electoral Reform & the Conservative Party

Having almost reached a point where I might have considered voting Conservative at the next General Election I read in today's papers that they are opposed to reform of the voting system.

So long as they are content with MPs being elected on a minority vote I shall not support the Conservative Party, since it cannot claim to be democratic. "First-past-the-post" has served both them and the Labour Party well over the years, and I see the Conservatives' opposition to change as being entirely self-serving. I am not asking for full-blown PR with Party Lists. A simple one MP per constituency is fine, so long he or she represents more than 50% of the vote. We all know there are ways of achieving this.

Conservatives .. please wake up to the basic idea of democracy.

This makes me angry when politicians are supposedly wondering why people are disenchanted with politics.

BNP - Bigots and Nutters Party

A lady in the north west of England was interviewed in the street yesterday and asked how she voted at last week's European Elections. She said, "BNP - I'm ashamed to say". It was a protest vote.

My own region (Yorkshire & Humber) returned one BNP Member of the European Parliament, making a total of two from the UK.

Only 34% of the electorate bothered to vote, and only 6% of those voted BNP. So this Party actually represents about 2% of the population eligible to vote. It's good to put them into a proper perspective.

I loathe the BNP in all its manifestations, and have nothing but contempt for all those who support them with their politics of fear and hate.

The Government has a lot to answer for in making a complete hash of their immigration policies which have encouraged the bigots to inflame feelings.

A feeling that illegal immigration is out of control masks the fact that some immigration is (and has always been) socially and economically beneficial to the UK, and also blurs the distinction between legal immigrants and asylum seekers.

Unless Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians get to grips with this, then the BNP will pick up votes.

We have to be encouraged by the fact that 98% of British people aren't falling for their particular brand of garbage. Some say we should just laugh at them. I'm trying, but it's difficult.

Open Letter to David Cameron

Dear Mr Cameron,

Even before the Daily Telegraph blew our political system out of the water I had come to the uncomfortable conclusion that, for the first time in my life, I had no idea how I would vote at the next General Election. I had even contemplated not voting at all.

Having spent my life enthusiastically opposing the Conservative Party in all its manifestations by supporting the Liberal Party, the SDP, the SDP-Liberal Alliance, and “New” Labour, I now find myself in the unusual position of calling for “Two cheers for David Cameron!”

I award you “one cheer” for your quick and strong response to the recently-exposed wrong-doings of Members of Parliament, in particular to those of your own Party who have been found wanting.

I award you the “second cheer” for your public commitment to widespread reforms of our parliamentary system.

This is far as I can go, however, because everything you are now calling for will come to nought until or unless you accept the need for a democratic voting system. It is manifestly obvious that in any constituency election involving more than two candidates the “first-past-the-post” voting system is undemocratic. And yet ever since I have been old enough to vote (50 years) I have listened with increasing despair to politicians like yourself making statements like (1)“Our system provides strong government” and  (2)“Our system has served us very well”.

On the first, “strong government” is not necessarily democratic government, and on the second, what you and your colleagues mean is that the system has served you very well!

Although it is clear that the general public’s growing apathy and cynicism towards the political process has been increased by the current expenses revelations, I would ask you to consider the possibility that we have become heartily disillusioned with the whole process because, for the most part, our votes count for nothing, and even when they do, the results are not really democratic.

A system that can elect an MP with less than half the votes cast can in no way be described as democratic. I am not arguing for Proportional Representation, with all the disadvantages that it brings with Party Lists and so on, but merely a system that ensures that the person elected in each constituency commands a real majority; there are a number of ways this can be done as you know, and I don’t need to rehearse them here.

How is it possible to defend a process whereby Candidate A might receive 20,000 votes, Candidate B might receive 19,980 votes, Candidate C might receive 19,500 votes, which then results in Candidate A becoming the duly elected Member?

This charade of a voting system, and the frustration born out of being subjected to government after government after government with large majorities in the House of Commons, but commanding the electoral support of well under half the voting population, and the common knowledge that governments stand or fall on the say-so of a couple of dozen marginal constituencies, all provides an unsavoury mix of cynicism and apathy.

The day on which you publicly acknowledge these truths and commit yourself and your Party to doing something about it could be the day on which I decide – for the first time in 50 years – to vote Conservative.

I hope I can look forward to being able to award you your “third cheer”.

With best wishes,

Lionel Beck.

Ryedale Constituency – (whose Conservative MP has claimed £500 of our money for pot plants and bushes at his London home before selling up for £280,000 profit. I hope he is also grateful for my contribution towards his matches and firelighters, bags of compost, a trellis and plant food, not to mention cups and saucers, a lavatory brush and a casserole dish.)

The US Republican Party

It would appear that the soul of the recently defeated Republican Party is now been fought over between Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.

From my side of the herring pond I feel bound to pray that the soul of what's left of George Bush's legacy is kept well out of the hands of Cheney.

Powell is a fundamentally decent man. No wonder one or two right-wing bigots have wondered if he is still a Republican.

Don't get me started on Cheney ..

The Party's over!

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act all the juicy details of our MPs expenses and allowances were due to be exposed next month, but thanks to the Daily Telegraph's ability to get their hands on the details in advance we have now been treated to several days of gory details, firstly those relating to the Government, from the Prime Minister downwards and through all his Cabinet members, and now it's the Conservative Party's turn to be blown out of the water in today's Telegraph.

We have seen how thousands and thousands of taxpayers' pounds have been expropriated under the stupidly lax system of expense allowances for such things as gardening, patio furniture, mock Tudor beams, items of clothing and toiletries, cleaning services, soft furnishings, kitchen appliances, plumbing work, electrical re-wiring, toilet seats, and so on and so on. Assistance with mortgages are given on second homes. Nobody denies the need for second homes when an MP's constituency is several hundred miles from London, but many of these MPs who have second homes turn out to be living within easy commuting distance of Westminster.

Many MPs have been getting second homes improved and enhanced at taxpayers' expense and then selling them in order to buy yet another one and start the process all over again.

The sickening thing is that a good deal of this has been achieved withing the "Rules" and so it is patently obvious that the rules need re-writing and overseen by a totally independent body.

Barbary Follett - a Labour MP - claimed £25,000 p.a. for personal security. She was told by the officials who vet these claims that it might look a bit odd if it became public, but allowed it anyway. Now it has been made public, and yes - it looks a bit odd. Follett claims she doesn't feel safe living in Soho. Well, nobody made her live in Soho! And in any case, if she wants personal security she is married to a multi-millionaire husband - author Ken Follett - and so should be able to afford her own damned security!

The public at large is getting hugely angry by all these revelations about snouts in the trough. And so far it has been made obvious that they are both Labour and Conservative snouts. It remains to be seem whether the Liberal Democrats turn out to be any less pig-like.

I'm guessing - even hoping - that at the forthcoming local and European Parliament elections voters will make a special point of voting for anyone other than the Parties currently wallowing in pig swill. At the same time I hope that such a feeling will not lead to people voting for extremist parties like the BNP. That would not achieve anything useful.

It is a shame that those MPs who are honest and are claiming only what is fair to claim will be tarred by the same brush.

I think that Parliament should be dissolved and we should start all over again with a snap General Election. The public could then make a point of not voting for those greedy and (sometimes) fraudulent MPs and put them out to pasture.

There was a nice Matt cartoon in the Telegraph the other day: two MPs walking together outside Parliament, and one says to the other, "I went into Politics to improve my living room".