I nodded off during Nick Clegg’s appearance on the Marr show this morning. It seemed preferable to listening to what he had to say … and how he said it.

I awoke with the distinct impression that he wants to import planeloads of African homosexuals and send them up to Scotland.

Why, I kept asking? Will they get a good reception in Glasgow’s Gorbals on a Saturday night? Have the fiercely nationalistic Scots asked for such bedfellows, especially as — Africa being Africa — most will be carrying the HIV virus? How will our bursting-at-the-seams hospitals cope?

It’s all very rum, if you ask me.

And then there’s his voice. It has a faintly hoarse piercing quality, without any light and shade for variation. He really should find a good Shakespearean actor to coach some depth into his delivery. With 270 minutes of the leaders’ debates coming up, watching even a short burst will be the short straw once you’ve thrown in Gordon Brown to boot.

Syntagma suggests Clegg make more use of that forever-boyish look, while developing a serene demeanour. He could also cultivate a long wispy beard, which would give him the appearance of a Chinese Taoist sage who has discovered the secret of eternal youth.

We might listen to him then.

The Conservatives promised us a furious fusillade of new policies during January. This week they have started to trickle through, topped by George Osborne’s welcome announcement that cuts in the deficit will begin soon after the election.

So, what about the NHS? Cuts in overmanning, perhaps? A new regime for the drugs companies? A major reorganization of management and unnecessary jobs? A determination to tackle the truculent trades unions?

None of the above, alas. Andrew Lansley has offered us a change in the way drinks are measured on bottle labels. Units of alcohol will be replaced by centilitres.

Is that the sound of general rejoicing I hear? Thank God for Lansley, I find myself muttering. [Heavy irony alert]. Give that man a drink!

Syntagma has a better idea. Why not boil Lansley down for soap, and distribute it free to hospitals?

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

This week has been a wretched one for British politics. All the main party leaders have performed badly and been made to look foolish and not up to the job.

It may be pre-election nerves, of course, but may also signal the truth. What if they are all dunces, destined to spend their careers on the naughty step? Gordon Brown has been on it for his entire premiership, let’s not forget.

Just look how quickly the saintly Obama has developed feet and legs of clay. How be it if no leader is capable of putting all our houses back in order?

Clegg wants more immigration because there are parts of the country where only sheep graze. Brown wants to go on playing with his toys in Number 10. Cameron has a political sushi policy where everything is sliced very thinly so it can be jettisoned without loss of face.

There are two very old traditions in Britain: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” (or Margaret Thatcher); and the return of King Arthur to save the nation from dire peril.

It’s beginning to look as if the Arthurian option is the only one left.

Syntagma has been complaining about inaccurate official information since 2005 when we challenged the Met Office’s prediction that the approaching winter would be as bad as 1962/3. It was not, and we were much closer to the truth with our tongue-in-cheek forecast.

Now a weather presenter at the BBC is saying that the Met Office’s “supercomputer” has “a warm weather bias” and seems incapable of predicting cold snaps. Interestingly, the BBC’s Met Office contract runs out in April. The Sunday Times notes that it is looking very carefully at Metra, a private New Zealand forecaster that already provides it with TV weather graphics.

Much as I hate to see British institutions dumped in their own country, such is the general lack of confidence in the Exeter-based Met Office, it’s hard to see how it can survive as a serious predictor of our climate.

The BBC should not bottle this one, or move to protect another public body. The Beeb should be made to demonstrate it will not tolerate underperforming contributors.

Since the Met Office is the world’s principal progenitor of catastrophic, man-made global warming, what then will the politicians do with their hugely expensive projects for carbon reduction?

David Cameron could be the first to move against them. It would be popular among already hard-pressed taxpayers. It’s a good sign that prospective Tory candidate and eco-warrior, Zac Goldsmith, is currently sounding off bitterly at all politicians, even though he’s about to become one.

The berries are growing thick and fast on the holly bushes, as a Chinese sage might say.

Thank you to those who wrote to me about my book, The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?. I’m delighted you found it “useful” — a word I particularly appreciate.

Readers may be interested to know that a follow-up volume is on the way. MYSTICS: The next step in human evolution?.

The Eternal Quest hinted at this strand of thought in references to “posthumans”, but didn’t go much beyond that as it was concerned solely with individuals.

It’s undoubtedly true that genuine mystics have expanded their consciousness beyond that of the vast bulk of humanity. My thesis in both books is that levels of consciousness determine evolutionary progress. It follows that mystics are the pioneers of the next step for mankind.

Humans are strangely incomplete beings, living largely in ignorance of their origins and future — neither gods nor creatures. Mystics point the way forward. They occupy a position mid-way between this world and the next, observing the passing pageant of life while knowing the seat of their own immortality.

While you are waiting, may I suggest you read The Eternal Quest as an opener, if you haven’t done so already.

Available at all good booksellers off- and online.

Swine flu is yet another case of government predictions crashing and costing us an estimated £1 billion, at the least.

It seems the drug companies have been behind the pandemic scare in recent months, prompting Gordon “any excuse to spend a billion or two” Brown to splurge our money on vast quantities of the vaccine … now useless.

Once again, he’s been shown to have made the wrong call. Is it also his idea to send this stuff to the “third world”? If the disease is not harmful, it makes you wonder what they are supposed to do with it.

Will UK.gov add dumping toxic waste in underdeveloped countries to its long list of socialist criminality?

John Evans

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An occasional look at the Conservatives preparedness for Government

We’re hearing a lot lately about people who “live and breathe politics”. There are more of them than we might imagine. I know a few who have encyclopaedic recall of almost every political event since 1832, and not only in this country. More than anything else they crave high office, or at least a national platform to write about it.

As someone who values hinterland before Westminsterland, I have to rely on others for governance, like most of the population. I can’t say I’m impressed so far.

Although I’ve always been a Conservative in a vague Burkean sort of way, I’ve occasionally disliked the party and a few of its leaders. Edward Heath stands out as one, so does John Major. Anthony Eden was before my time, Macmillan and Home hardly register as memories.

I’m afraid to report that the more I hear David Cameron and his limited intentions, the more he begins to resemble the shallower end of Conservatism. In fact, his prescriptions remind me of homeopathic medicine where tiny quantities of the active agents are diluted down until only the memory of them is retained by the water.

Don’t get me wrong. I desperately want him to be Prime Minister by early summer, and believe he will be. And I have not written him off as a great PM yet. However, I find it hard to summon up any enthusiasm for the country he wants us to be. Cameroon country is too much like Tony Blair’s vapid triangulated society, which satisfied no-one and ultimately betrayed them all. It’s also as mysterious to us as The Cameroons in Africa.

There are two pillars of the true Conservative society: 1) individual freedom, and 2) national sovereignty. Both may be threatened or neglected by the Cameron dispensation, as far as we know it.

While localism will certainly do the trick in the places where people live, his predilection for engineering what he calls “responsibility” in all manner of folk, especially those neglected by Labour — the traditional working class — is hardly a recipe for less statism. Responsibility is his big idea, as he repeated in Sunday’s Marr interview. But it won’t set the electorate alight on polling day nor during the Long March to follow.

Responsibility is a word that means many things to different people. It can mean a Victorian — dare I say Presbyterian — disciplinarian approach, or something that derives from a government charter of some kind. But once you start writing these things down, they quickly date and dissipate, and don’t always fit actual circumstances. If there’s one thing we can learn from this Labour government, it’s that the written word in the shape of thousands of laws and edicts, rarely reflects the complexity or nuances of real life, and ends up enraging the majority of the population.

Labour has tried to spread working class values into the middle classes by a deliberate manipulation of the state education system.

The Conservatives by contrast should introduce middle-class ideals into our schools as the best way to spread better behaviour and improved career prospects later on. By this I mean more academic subjects and higher aspirations. Why shouldn’t a factory worker’s offspring become a barrister, for example.

This is not snobbery, or pointless equality, it’s hard fact. The best-run countries are those with the largest middle classes, i.e Scandinavia, Switzerland, and others who please themselves rather than ape global trends. Yes, responsibility, but it should come from the community, not in top-down edicts. As Dr. Johnson said, “Example is always more efficacious than precept.”

Shrinking the state must be a prime Conservative cause. It can be done without decimating essential services, I believe. Cutting out the wider health/safety and diversity stuff would be a good start. Equality is an antagonist of liberty. Increase one and you reduce the other.

Labour has lacerated our traditional liberties, especially in its cretinous pursuit of equality of attributes. Freedom grows responsibility in the population, but it can’t be forced like equality. It is a natural tendency when people are allowed to be themselves.

State-managed diversity lowers expertise and excellence at all levels of performance. It would be reversed by a truly Conservative administration (in the modern sense). Only a real meritocracy has a chance of reaching its highest potential of attainment.

The BBC should be made to cease its preposterous glorification of underclass values and get back to its original role of supporting the highest and the best. The spectacle of all those upper-middle class executives on 200k a year dumbing down the national culture is not only bizarre it’s bent.

As for the other pillar of Conservatism, national sovereignty, the Lisbon Treaty took another huge bite out of it, leaving a few scraps for us to manage. If David Cameron could do only one thing to carve his reputation as a great Prime Minister, it would be to declare in the manifesto that his aim is to negotiate an association agreement with the European Union.

I do not believe it would be difficult if the other nations knew he was serious. Lisbon is not really legitimate in the UK because of the betrayals involved.

Margaret Thatcher had the Falklands War during her first period in office, as well as a nasty recession to deal with. The Falklands won her a second election. A new agreement with Europe could be Cameron’s ticket to a second Parliament, his Falklands War. And it needn’t be done indecorously, but democratically and with a gentlemanly British flourish.

Forget itsy-bitsy tinkering with EU employment laws, let’s have a big push for self-determination. The country is in the mood for a cause and an increased sense of its own nationality.

If David Cameron were to turn his back on what may be the only opportunity for decades, it would show him as a homeopathic Prime Minister. Worse, Labour will be let back in much sooner than we expect.

John Evans

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David Cameron is an unpredictable chap. Just when you think he’s shaping up to be a fine, transformative Prime Minister, he does something straight out of the Tony Blair Manual of Initiativitis.

Examples:
1. Asking prospective parliamentary candidate, Annunziata Rees-Mogg to change her name to Nancy Mogg to show she’s not a toff — even if she is. She refused, thankfully. Courting rebuffs with insulting requests is not good leadership. What on earth possessed him?

2. Having tarnished his famous cast-iron guarantee through a lack of candour about its sell-by date, it’s emerged that he turned down a most generous offer from UKIP which would have restored his honour on the Lisbon issue.

UKIP’s new leader, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, reveals he approached Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, with an offer from Nigel Farage to disband UKIP if Cameron would hold a referendum on the issue come what may.

Of course, there would be no point in having a plebiscite on a ratified treaty, but using the moment to launch one on a Norway-Switzerland type arrangement for Britain would have yielded the result a large majority of the electorate wants.

Bringing it up fresh at a later date would only sever the connection between the promise and the policy, and hence put the EU collectariat on the front foot.

Recognizing that the new Prime Minister will have a Matterhorn of issues to deal with on day one, I have suggested The Syntagma Compromise (third outing):

Embed into the manifesto now an offer of a referendum three years into the next Parliament. It ticks all the boxes, gives the party a breathing space to prepare and allows it to sort out the financial and economic mess left by Labour.

3. I won’t even get started on the “green” aspects of modernizing Toryism. Christopher Booker has covered all the bases.

What David Cameron requires now is some real edge, not girlie initiatives. He also needs the appearance of a substantial backbone. Tony Blair is off the menu for the voters. Blairish attention-seeking and cheeky side-steps will only turn them away from the Conservatives at the next election.

Step up to the plate, David, or miss out on the feast that should be yours for the taking.

Last week in this column I wrote this: “Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and write an honest Budget Report based on Treasury and Bank of England advice. He should deny Gordon Brown any input … Darling would then be the only participant in this rear-end shambles of a government who could leave office with his head held high.”

In today’s Sunday Telegraph, Political Editor, Patrick Hennessy reports that Darling is going to do just that:

“[He] will use next week’s Pre-Budget Report to paint a grim picture of severe spending cutbacks during the next four years, setting up a pre-election clash with Gordon Brown.” Brown is opposing any talk of big cuts.

Now, I have no idea whether the Chancellor took his cue from Syntagma, although it is a possibility — I find quite a number of our ideas thread their way into the public domain days or weeks later. Take this case:

On November 14, I wrote the following column: Saturday Ramble: Poor information is destroying the quality of our lives:

“In the 21st century, the terrors haven’t gone away. They have re-emerged in the form of phantoms arising from surges of narrowly-based information, largely created by computer-generated mathematical models, … [such as] the fantasies of catastrophic man-made climate change. When even the Prince of Wales claims ‘we have 90 days to save the world’, you know that a new psychological contagion is upon us, and spreading fast.”

A week later, these fantasies are all over the press, thanks to bloggers like James Delingpole spilling the legumes on Climategate — the falsification of climate data.

See if you can spot the story in this column which will make news next week.

Vanity, all is vanity.

Annoyment of the week
A Gordon Brown freeish zone

Gavin Essler’s Newsnight interview with Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, was a red-mist moment for this diarist.

Referring to the Beeb’s “competition” (ha!), Thompson sneered at their “commercial self-interest”.

It’s the “self-interest” bit that pings me, commerce being generally held respectable. To attack everyone in the wealth-creating sector, which pays his fat package, as primarily self interested is not only wrong, it’s a hell of a cheek.

Let’s see, Thommo’s BBC “remuneration package” includes a salary of more than £800,000, plus various perks and generous expenses reimbursements, including a piffling parking ticket.

No self interest there, then?

PS: a few readers have said that their annoyment of the week is this annoyment snippet. Why? Because the word annoyment doesn’t exist!

It does now.

False data is again in the public eye with the sickening story of filthy wards and poor nursing at Basildon NHS Trust.

This is one of 11, and possibly many more, NHS hospitals that were recently inspected and pronounced “very good or excellent”. Clearly something catastrophic has gone wrong with the data-capture systems at these State institutions. It has also emerged that “cause of death” is rarely investigated, thus removing inconvenient information from the public domain.

This is a Labour party culture that has been obvious from Year One of its period in office. It has contaminated whole areas of public concern by skewing conclusions to the benefit of the government.

It is crude, nasty, and despicable. Alas this cult of truthlessness has infected most of the nation, like veins in a blue cheese.

A reprise on the BBC’s two current history series: Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm BBC2), and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The History of Christianity (Thursdays, 9pm BBC4).

I gave them a bit of a hard time after their first episodes. Andrew was a mad Dervish, as I remember, while the Prof was fixated by his hat. Not what you might call deep journalistic critiques.

However, I’ve come to enjoy both programmes in the meantime, despite their quirks. I’m told that the Prof’s hat is not a white trilby, as I reported, but a Panama of an indeterminate straw colour. How wrong can you be?

AM meanwhile is still mucking about like a schoolboy — last week he plunged into a mud-dark sea in the kind of bathing costume last seen on Edward VII. Not a pretty sight.

The episode on the Great War was the turning point for me. Brilliantly put together, with extraordinary footage of the trenches, it caught the mood of the time perfectly. And the presenter kept his jokes to a minimum. Since then, it’s gone from strength to strength.

As for the Christianity series, it has become a majestic tramp through the long history of the “universal” church and its fragmentation into a myriad pieces — Protestantism alone is said to have more than 20,000 denominations. Unmissable compared to the rest of the Beeb’s output.

There, I hope that resets the balance after my scrappy start. I’m not right all the time, you know.

Like many law-abiding citizens, I carry a compact digital camera with me wherever I go. If something catches my eye, like the Monet pattern in the river you can see by scrolling down this page, I whip it out and train 8-megapixels on the subject matter.

Alas, I’ve known for some time that photography is another innocent pastime now demonized by the ‘elf ‘n’ safety tyrants. And not just them. Ever since the Madeleine McCann case the public has become jumpy if they spot a camera anywhere near their children. You can’t blame them, of course, but it’s yet another example of the innocuous becoming tarnished by a small number of evil men — and increasingly, women — in our age of intolerance and total exposure.

Predictably, a BBC cameraman was questioned last week under Section 44 of the Anti-terrorism Act for taking photographs of a sunset close to St Paul’s cathedral.

On this morning’s Marr programme he explained what happened. It seems two police officers were obliged to approach him over the “incident” and judge whether or not he was a terrorist casing the joint, if you can do that with a sunset.

Sounds like sunset for our culture and liberties to me.

John Evans

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Harriet Harman, or “Wor Hattie” as she’s probably known in some parts of the country that talk like that, was on Andrew Marr’s show this morning. Actually, it was temporarily the Stephanie Flanders show.

Whenever Wor Hattie appears on TV, the phrase “life’s too short” leaps to mind. I’m trying to recall anything she said that 1) I didn’t know, or 2) was remotely interesting. Another 20 minutes of life wasted, then.

Why don’t these top-ranked political shows (Today is another) find guests with the imagination and insight to say something different, and who at least engage our intelligence?

Stephanie has a brain and education three times the size of Wor Hattie’s, yet restraints and “guidelines” prevented her from even denting the Harman body armour.

It was like trying to get orange juice from a lump of coal.

A term we are going to have to get used to in the future is E8. And that’s not a postal district of London.

It’s a shape, apparently found in nature, with eight dimensions, that has 248 points, or intersections where the planes meet. You’ll need to remember that.

A description of E8 in very small print would cover an area the size of Manhattan. It’s now part of a new Theory of Everything — Albert, what have you started?

Yes, we’re into particle physics again.

The computer model of E8 predicts 20 new particles, mainly because there are 20 points on E8 that can’t be fitted up with ones “we” know about. It seems the Large Hadron Collider may well throw some light on these.

This is the same collider in Geneva that broke down earlier last year soon after it was turned on for the first time. Some predicted it would destroy the universe. So far, the only thing destroyed is its budget, with scientists asking for an even bigger collider since the £5bn one they’ve got is not up to the job. The current model will not now be cranked up again until next year.

To save them the trouble, here’s the Syntagma Theory of Absolutely Everything:

All is mind, so nothing physical or energetic is fixed absolutely. Big Mind (the whole of it), or little mind (each of us, including particle physicists), can alter anything locally or generally to fit new circumstances that arise out of the evolution of consciousness across the Mindspace — which is the whole purpose of existence.

Any theory that computes and extrapolates from current conditions is not worth the Manhattan it’s written on.

You have not heard the last of the Syntagma Theory. Come to think of it, there’s something rather similar in the ancient Upanishads, and in many other cosmogonies that don’t rely on telescopes, colliders and computers, but on human experience.

Heck! shouldn’t I get a Nobel Prize or something?

A few political obsessives have written about the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson’s, moonlighting spree on Newsnight. In particular, his interview with the indestructible Peter, now Milord, Mandelson.

I agree with everything Iain Dale wrote in his blog. It was feisty and right on target. Mandy’s Godfather expression at times said it all. Robbo was getting through the star wars defence shield.

On this form, Nick is emerging as The Man Who Can Save Newsnight From Oblivion.

Like many, I’m guessing, I rarely watch it now unless prompted by a comment in some medium or other. Newsnight’s current political editor remains a comedian, its economics editor is sound theoretically, but hopeless in a live studio.

Remember the days of Martha Kearney and Stephanie Flanders?

Take the plunge Thompson. Give merit its due. Or, I predict, a Draft Robbo movement will soon emerge.

What is it with the modern Post Office? Why does it try so hard to compete with flashy private companies when most of us preferred the shabby, slightly shambolic, but dedicated, and mostly reliable, older version?

Take Exeter’s central post office, now part of the Princesshay shopping and leisure complex.

Inexplicably, it has converted itself into a kind of airport terminal, with bucket seats, four kinds of ticket to queue up for even before you wait your turn, and ceaseless announcements of ticket numbers and letters of the alphabet.

Not surprisingly, elderly people, who use it most, seem rather bemused with the whole set-up. They may well exclaim, “I only came in a for a stamp, not to fly to Malaga.”

However, try to avoid the airport experience and you’ll find almost all the comfortingly familiar sub-post offices have been closed down.

Over decades, governments have feather-bedded them with subsidies but are now withdrawing from the marketplace at the speed of a scalded hand.

Such is the chaos at the new model Heathrow-style Post Office, I predict we won’t have any at all within five to 20 years.

Adapted from my piece in: Devon & Cornwall Online

So now we have a whole month of minimal political activity.

Gordon is up in storm-lashed Scotland watching videos of old sporting occasions, while Dave is flitting around Europe having a good time.

Who would you choose to be Prime Minister?

What am I doing for August? Thanks for asking.

I’m about to launch a new website — tomorrow, actually, since you enquired — covering Devon and Cornwall.

I’m embargoed until then (self-imposed, I might add) so can’t tell you anything about it. However, if you’d like a press release, just email:

john(AT)devoncornwallonline(DOT)com

And I can promise you that, unlike Jeff Randall’s email newsletter link on Sky News, this one really does work.

And finally … have a great August. The Met Office is rarely right about hurricanes and rain storms.

Happily, as it is one of the world’s principal proponents of catastrophic man-made global warming, we should give thanks for the human frailties of this Exeter-based national institution.

Remember, all is Mind — and in the mind.

John Evans

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Standing back to survey Gordon Brown’s Britain, it’s clear to me, and to many other observers, what the main problems are.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband and that banana

The main areas of concern cluster around two characteristics of Brown’s personality:

1. Stultifying complexity
2. The inefficient allocation of scarce resources from wealth creation to an expensive raft of State programmes — most of these arising from neurotic knee-jerk responses to little-understood undercurrents in society.

Can all that be put right? Yes, but not by Gordon Brown or the Labour party, and it will take three Parliaments to do it.

We really do need a reforming Conservative Government now. It has become so urgent that it could be described as a National Emergency.

Not everyone will agree, of course, especially the hordes of folk who have done well out of the Brownian settlement: mainly those working in central and local government bureaucracies.

Simplicity
Let’s take simplicity first. What does it mean? Essentially, it’s about clearing the desks of almost everyone in Whitehall and transferring competencies down to local level. The Conservatives made a tentative start on that yesterday with their “localist” proposals. They did not go nearly far enough — but it’s a positive opening shot.

In my recent article Public failure and Superdemocracy, I suggested determining first, the Level of Maximum Competence for each critical decision made in the public realm, and then the Point at which it should be taken at that level, i.e. the person with the most experience to take it.

Since decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, have a tendency to rise to the top, it would be necessary to bring in a degree of routine maintenance for this process. A small team of decision-deciders (for want of a better term) could carry out this task at both central and local levels. It should not become a bureauracy in its own right, more a practical exercise based on the simplicity principle.

All centralized directives to local councils forcing them to provide services of a busybody or intrusive nature should be scrapped.

I recently spotted a van emblazoned with “Exeter City Council” and “Community Patrol”. It had a rotating video camera on top intended to pick out anyone who misbehaved. And we now have a dizzying array of crimes and misdemeanours to oversee, most of which are not even guessed at by the public.

Aren’t the police meant to do that? This is yet another layer of quasi-policing by ill-trained civil servants given power over us by the vast, flaccid Home Office and an increasingly brutalist Home Secretary, often on the back of idiotic directives from Brussels.

Allocation of resources
The State should never allocate more than 25-30 percent of national income. Easier said than done? Not really. A scheme of mandatory private sector social insurance for health, welfare, and possibly education, would strip away much of central government’s tax take and transfer ownership in these areas back to individuals on their home patch.

Policing should have much more local control through the election of senior officers, and elected Mayors for everyone made a top priority.

The Conservatives need a three-Parliament plan to redistribute not the nation’s wealth, but the nation’s decisionmaking back to the people.

The great advantage to David Cameron and his team is that they will not be blamed for everything that goes wrong as is the case with Labour.

The aching elephant in the broom cupboard, Britain’s membership of the failing European Union, also needs a firm hand to negotiate an Association agreement for the country, as former French President Giscard d’Estaing recently suggested.

The BBC’s Today programme will just have to make do without a constant stream of boring, and mainly false, government announcements on a daily basis. It will be a better experience without them, especially as the BBC should be made to survive without its oppressive licence fee.

Are you following the excessive fuss they are making over Charles Darwin? Time to shape up, lads.

John Evans

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