John Evans, Headbanger — not me.

Gordon Brown’s speech at the Mansion House last night had an air of the valedictory: a last throw of a man utterly out of his depth, despised and ridiculed by everyone in sight, including his closest colleagues.

The more he bellowed about a “global society” and “global institutions”, the more he resembled some ten-a-penny dictator stamping out democracy at home while deflecting attention abroad.

His “global vision” is nothing other than the defeated international Marxism of his youth, in which a cross-borders’ working class was urged to band together to overthrow greedy capitalists. The only difference is, the workers are replaced by a political elite.

There was something almost deranged about his obtuseness and desperate attempts to cling on to a failing dream. It was “global solutions”, with no bulkheads in between, that brought the world crashing down in 2007. More of the same will not do any better.

Now he has in mind to allow the UN to tax us and impose controls on our energy usage. Thank God for the US Senate which would rather blow itself up than pass anything of the sort.

Conservatives should beware of getting caught up in this contagion. It was their own Virginia Bottomley, in 1989, who signed us up to the UN’s Convention on the Child, which led to her unworkable Children’s Act and allowed the representatives of grizzly dictatorships to criticize how we bring up British children.

The Tories should seek to emulate the US Upper House in its intransigence to global solutions. Only failed and fading politicians grasp at such straws.

Following on from my Saturday piece on, among other things, climate change, today’s Times carries an article by Dr Stuart Clark of Princeton, which brings fresh information to the argument. Writing about the continuing “sunspot crash” he makes some interesting points:

“… if the trend continues at its current rate, the Sun will lose its ability to produce sunspots by 2015. That would take it back to its condition in the latter 17th century, when hardly any sunspots appeared for 70 years — and Northern Europe underwent the worst years of the so-called Little Ice Age.”

In that case, let us hope that man-made pollutants do warm us up a bit. Cutting them back now might be disastrous.

His point though, is that it’s an ideal time to measure these effects and settle the climate debate once and for all. For that, we need open and honest scientists to take the measurements and trustworthy politicians to draw the correct conclusions.

We certainly shouldn’t allow people like Gordon Brown or the Miliband brothers anywhere near the action.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown-free zone

Some people love to stand out from the crowd. As a rugged individualist myself I have no objection to that, provided it’s an improvement on the norm, and is not done purely for attention-seeking purposes.

What BBC man Evan Davis wears in bookshops has no interest at all for me, although the last time I saw him on TV, he was so thin he could have been a bundle of sticks in a suit.

When it comes to professional activity on the BBC’s Today programme, though, some line must be drawn. This is a show listened to largely by a middle-aged and elderly audience. The programme’s content and presenters mostly reflect that fact.

Last week it was discussing the Rosetta project. Rosetta is a spacecraft designed to land on a passing comet in 2014. To build up sufficient velocity to get to the rendezvous, it has to be swung around the Earth and Mars three or four times, rather as a discus thrower will twirl around before launching his projectile down the track.

Who on earth thinks up these schemes? Surely this one must come from the same stable as our chum, the Large Hadron Collider? Yes, it’s the European Space Agency, and we are paying for it. Warm glow? Thought not.

Rosetta is currently being swung around the Earth, by the way, hence the interest.

Anyway, Evan’s contribution to the project was groanworthy. While both the newsreader and the science correspondent, Pallab Ghosh, used “miles” to describe its trajectory around our planet, our hero preferred kilometres.

Grinding of gears as ageing audience attempts to divide by eight and multiply by five, thus missing the rest of the item.

Oh dear!

A word of thanks to Google.

A couple of weeks ago I complained that I had been relegated to page 3 of the search engine’s results for my admittedly rather common name “john evans”. Top of the bill was a John Evans who could carry “very heavy weights on his head, including bricks and cars” (pictured above).

Now while I have enormous admiration for my namesake, and certainly couldn’t emulate him in the motorhead stakes, page 3 was the equivalent of a Siberian salt mine compared to the top-five slot previously held.

I’m delighted to report that the Google guys have relented and yours truly is back in third spot. Thanks to everyone at the Googleplex.

Now could you please restore our PageRank of 5 to this site?

The by-election result in Glasgow North East was welcomed by a drowning Labour party much as a shipwrecked man might clutch at a floating matchstick in stormy seas.

The idea is that they now have the incumbent SNP on the run north of the border. The newly “insurgent” Labour party believes it can retain at least some of its traditional stronghold base in Scotland at the General Election.

I’ve no doubt it can, but much good will it do them. However, I must admit to having a secret wish for a Labour wipeout in all its heartlands, even if it entrenches the nationalists in Edinburgh. Alex Salmond is reported to have a pact with David Cameron on events following a Tory victory in England, Wales and possibly Northern Ireland.

One thing’s for sure, he’s going to find it hard to win a breakaway referendum under current economic conditions. The United Kingdom is not the European Union and 300 years carries a darn sight more weight than 37.

A Glasgow smile, anyone?

Bo Jo, or Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, if you’re not in the loop, is fighting a splendid battle to save the City of London and those love-to-be-slimy bankers who burrow like Hobbits there.

He’s fighting on two fronts. Brown seems determined to give them a good kicking before he slopes off into sullen oblivion in May. The European Commission, backed eagerly by the French, are hell bent on denuding Britain of its massive colony of alternative investment managers — Hedgies, to you and me.

It looks like a lonely battle. The Conservatives are reluctant to throw their weight behind unpopular bankers and are currently hiding behind a wall of technical adjustments.

Have no fear, Bo Jo, Syntagma is with you all the way!

John Evans

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