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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Aren’t you just sick of Charles Darwin? On his 200th birth anniversary he’s all over the media like measles.

On the BBC (where else?) David Attenborough sheds a discreet tear and religiously places a bust of the great one in the National History Museum, replacing a more deserving scientist. Richard Dawkins, the Ayatollah of Darwinism, hurls fatwas at anyone who disagrees. Even Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has a go in The Times (London): “In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry”. Pass the collection bucket!

And we still have Andrew Marr’s “film” about Darwin to come — stick to politics, Andrew, there’s a good chap.

The fact is, Darwin was wrong in his central assertion: natural selection.

Consider the development of the eye. By the minute stages of natural selection, it would have taken thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years to evolve. For most of that time the eye wouldn’t be functional. It would not carry any survival advantage at all. Clearly, it wouldn’t have survived, according to the theory of natural selection.

Unless, of course, it was deliberately protected during the long prototype stage, which would suggest a creative agency at work. I suspect Darwin himself might have preferred that outcome.

The problem with both “natural selection” and “Creationism” is that neither stands up to common-sense scrutiny. The newer, more sensible, version of Creationism, Intelligent Design — damned and blasted by the jihadists of Darwinism — is also wrongly named.

The word “design” suggests activity of the cerebral cortex, and therefore a human agency. “Intelligent” is open to the same critique.

Syntagma is happy to suggest an alternative to this “mis-seeing event” to solve a needless dispute.

Purposive Evolution. Teleology for the televisual age.

Happy to be of service.

I’ve written here a few times about the Czech Republic — currently holding the rotating Presidency of the European Council — and its inspirational Head of State, President Klaus.

Yesterday, Peter Hitchens provided us with a wide-ranging and revealing account of just what is going on inside that country for which Britain went to war in 1939: How the Czechs are fighting the marshmallow EU tyrant.

It still astonishes me that the British are reduced to depending on President Klaus — and the Irish electorate — to keep us out of the despised European constitution, currently masquerading under the pseudonym, “Lisbon Treaty”.

What does that say about our own cowardly Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who lied and lied again in the service of the nation they were meant to protect?

Klaus is ten times the man they are.

If you listen to some commentators, President Obama has failed already. Some journos even compare him to Tony Blair, as I did early in the campaign. From a British perspective, that comparison is by no means favourably intended.

Even now he reminds me of Blair in his first year of office when he said: “It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be”. Blair couldn’t have given it much prior thought, even if he had any to spare.

But there are some aspects of Obama I warm to:

“I screwed up” and “We’re in for dangerous times ahead”, are almost impossible to imagine coming from Gordon Brown.

Ditto: “We’ll do this ourselves. We won’t wait for others to act”.

The Syntagma honeymoon, such as it is, remains intact. Just.

If you’ve ever clicked on the polls at dailymail.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they usually split around 90 percent to 10. The Mail appears to know its reader demographics very well — not surprising for such a profitable newspaper.

Whenever I have a go at any of them, uncannily I always come out on the 90 percent side. I don’t think I’ve ever missed the winning mark.

Imagine, however, if identical polls were run on the Guardian/Observer site. I suspect the split would remain at 90/10 but in the opposite direction of opinion. At the muddled Independent, 50/50 would probably be the boring outcome.

So the Daily Mail polls serve no psephological purpose beyond reinforcing known attitudes and prejudices. Aren’t they just a distraction from all the pictures of semi-clad women?

President Sarkozy of France intends to cut the country’s notoriously bloated public sector and spend the money on tax cuts and shoring up essential infrastructure.

He criticizes Gordon Brown for mismanaging the British economy by piling up unprecendented levels of public debt. He also sneers at his derisory VAT cut and the waste of money propping up non-jobs in the public sector.

Brown has apparently called for an apology, and got one.

For what, precisely, was Sarkozy meant to apologize — his hurt feelings?

Quote of the Week
“You can never tiptoe lightly enough once you start building a world of eggshells. PC makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history — irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even obsolete comic stereotype — are all suddenly suspect.” Mark Steyn

Article of the Week
Global economy nears abyss as central banks dither by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

This is white-water rafting now, with Niagara ahead.

John Evans

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In the aftermath of the Jeremy Clarkson affair (another one?) in which the Top Gear presenter called British Prime Minister Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot”, I’ve reached for a word from Old English to say more or less the same thing.

“Puddled” means “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED). In common parlance that translates as, batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

Mind you, a few months ago I pioneered the Clarkson approach by quoting Rudyard Kipling: “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu …”

Well, Downing Street is north of Khatmandu.

So is Gordon puddled? He’s obviously quite clever, and has some abilities, none of them of a personable nature. His problem is that he carries a series of assumptions that most of us find totally barmy.

Each age has its set of assumed truths around which it frames its policies and actions. Future ages usually look back in horror at what their ancestors thought, while imagining their own assumptions to be the height of sense and modernity.

Their children and grandchildren will think otherwise.

Just read contemporary accounts of medieval witchcraft trials or the very detailed archives of the Cathar Inquisition, and you’ll visit another planet.

But that’s the point. Historical records are a kind of time machine allowing us to escape the pin-down effect of the assumptions of our age. Great figures in history are usually Time Lords who roam freely over the past and project themselves into the future with ideas ahead of the game.

Bad Prime Ministers and Presidents are stuck in the rut of “modern” thinking on a range of issues. They are so much of their time, they become ridiculous in less than a decade.

When the baby boomers came to power in the 1990s, something changed radically. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought the 1960s with them into office. It was all informality, “Call me Tony”, and that most typical cry from the era, by Danny Cohn-Bendit, “We have no policies, only demands, and when they are met, we will have more demands” — the wail of spoilt children everywhere.

In the spirit of the age (1960s), nobody must be offended, even if they are highly offensive. Under Blair and Clinton, society was divided into small segments. Some were chosen for special treatment, especially members of the tribe and those who could be counted on to vote for the new settlement. The rest were demonized.

The prevailing Marxism of that former era was enshrined in law as the Equality Agenda — no-one was allowed to stride ahead of the crowd on merit or effort. Every area of life was dumbed down, and continues to be in Britain under Gauleiter Harriet Harman.

Gordon Brown fits into the pattern. A baby boomer to his armpits, he devotes a great deal of time and thought to the Trotskyism and Soviet tractor plans of his youth, and runs the country accordingly. Moreover, his Scottish accountant’s mentality contributes heavily to his dour, pernickety personality.

A new generation of politicians is already taking over. They reflect society in general by rejecting baby-boomer thinking with contempt, especially as it has brought the entire planet to its knees in under a decade.

Brown’s espousal of “global solutions”, by which he means the shabby superstructure created after World War II: the UN, EU, World Bank and other doddery examples of the model, is completely counter-productive in an age of the internet and face to facebook communications.

Much looser arrangements, with greater freedom for individuals, where genuinely democratic units, like Nation States, will regain their purpose, are just around the corner. The wired age will not be pushed about by people like Brown, and the roaming political sherpas of another era. They will be seen for what they are, a branch of liberal-left fascism.

Global “solutions” will shatter into a mosaic of bilateral agreements that satisfy each party involved. The world will become a more interesting, diverse and complex place to live.

And that’s exactly how most of us like it.

So is Gordon Brown puddled? Remember the definition: “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED).

Or in common parlance: batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

I rest my case, M’lud, and ask for the Court’s indulgence for my client, Jeremy Clarkson.

John Evans

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Our person of the year 2008 does not exist … yet.

This person, however, should exist, and we are the poorer because of the absence. So, who is it?

By all logical analysis it should be Barack Obama. Even he might agree, though, that he’s had quite enough publicity for one year already. Besides, The Times (London) has inevitably made him their choice.

You may have noticed we are not a downmarket tabloid so, contrarian as ever, we’ll resist the obvious, with ideologically correct genuflections in his direction.

During this year of wild oscillations of policy, prediction and actuality, one person was missing from the chattering soup here in Britain. Someone with national reach and influence who can say, “Hold on, we tried that in the 1960s/70s and back in the reign of Ethelred the Unready. It didn’t work then, why would it work now?”

We have a national statistician, a national poet, a national medical officer, a national musician, a national scientist, so why not a …

And here is Syntagma’s Person of the Year 2008:

The National Historian.

It may be a blank space now, but it would make some difference if we had one in the future. But who should it be?

The post could be decided by a BBC TV series of shows: Strictly Historical. Votes would come in turn from a panel of eminent judges, a studio audience and, yes, you at home. The comperes would be Vince Cable and Michael Portillo.

In the absence of that this year, we have held our own competition here at Syntagma Towers.

Here are the results:

In second place, Niall Ferguson, whose TV programme, The Ascent of Money on Channel 4, performed some of the tasks of a National Historian by reminding us how the credit crunch came about, and of similar situations and outcomes in the past. It was a creditable perfomance.

The winner, with greater support among our studio audience, was Andrew Roberts, the conservative historian deemed necessary as a counterweight to the prevailing Marxist drift of the nation.

Although the contest was very close, with major voting irregularities, by common consent there was no dance-off.

Congratulations to Andrew on his shadowy victory as the future National Historian of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Syntagma Person of the Year in reality in 2009.

Note of caution: You may think the above piece is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I can assure you, we are deadly serious!

John Evans

It came, we saw, it went … er … POP. The Apple iPhone hit Britain yesterday with all the force of a gentle breeze from the Azores.

The Apple store in London was hardly beseiged with eager geeks and fashionistas (see pic below). As the “crowd” was let in at 6.02 (O2, gettit?), they were easily outnumbered by Apple store staff and bouncers, all in dark suits, and forming a snaking double-line honour guard for the hapless hopefuls to march through.

The first bunch ran through like Olympic athletes winning Gold. In fact they looked just like actors straight out of Chariots of Fire. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were.

Less that ravenous hordes outside London’s Apple emporium

Make no mistake, this piece of kit will sell on price. Strip away a few poor little rich girls who “must have” it — for ten minutes, and a handful of geeks, the big numbers will come from ordinary Johnnies who will balk at the price. If you buy the top of the range locked-in deal it will cost you $2,654, plus call charges, over 18 months. No way, Jose.

The experts are telling us to wait for the iPhone to be launched in France in a few weeks where French law bans lock-ins. Jonathan Morris of What Mobile magazine said, “People who don’t want to be tied to contracts can simply wait until the iPhone comes out in France. Under French law there has to be an unlocked version so people would be able to bring it back buy a Sim card and use it like any other phone.”

Although the codes are different from the U.S. version, we’re told it’s already been hacked. Most geeks will get this done within a week. It’s interesting that the first thing the BBC reporter did when he got his was to head off to the hacker’s yard to boot out O2.

Steve Jobs is making criminals of us all.

Many of us have been saying it for years : “The BBC is not what it used to be.”

The reasons are many but one stands out. As London has gradually separated off from the views and values of the rest of the nation, so the Beeb has followed suit.

The once proud Corporation is now generally seen as run by a cadre of “metrosexual Guardianistas” — after the clunkingly leftist newspaper. The joke is that they are all balding 39-year-olds called Tristram. Not true, of course, but it strikes a real chord.

In fact, the Beeb is the biggest pensioner in the land, receiving around $6 billion (£3bn) in benefits every year in the form of the licence fee. This licence is levied on everyone in the country who watches television of any sort — even if they never sample the dubious delights of the BBC itself.

The Corporation is now so bloated and privileged — think of the International Olympics Committee where the President is addressed as Your Excellency — that it’s almost impossible to manage or control, especially by the small-beer programme-makers drafted in to do the job.

Today, we hear that the police may be called in to investigate alleged widespread fraud and misrepresentation.

The last Chairman, Michael Grade, a man of some stature in broadcasting, left suddenly to head up ITV, the Beeb’s main rival. Did he sense the disaster waiting to happen?

The previous top management was effectively decapitated by a rogue Government spin doctor for telling the truth about Iraq intelligence. So the Beeb is penalized both for telling the truth and for falsifying it. The lesson is that Government makes a poor bedfellow for any media organization priding itself on its integrity.

After the fiasco over the false allegations about the Queen, in which footage of a photoshoot with American photographer, Annie Leibovitz, was shown in the wrong order to make it look as if the Queen was storming out of the session when, in fact, she was coming in, the BBC has all but collapsed.

Its shaky amalgam of internal bureaucrats and outside production companies has been shown to be grossly inadequate. The once rigorous ethos and in-house training regimes have been largely abandoned in favour of roving freelance operatives who work on short-term contracts for every other broadcaster.

The oddly named BBC Trust has ordered an immediate suspension of all phone-in and interactive competitions after an internal investigation uncovered a string of editorial breaches. They include the flagship charity shows, Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sports Relief.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson (pictured) presented the findings of an internal audit to the Trust yesterday.

The Trust said it was “deeply concerned that significant failures of control and compliance within the BBC, and in some cases by its suppliers, have compromised the BBC’s values of accuracy and honesty.

“The Director General’s interim report to the Trust about additional editorial failings shows further deeply disappointing evidence of insufficient understanding amongst certain staff of the standards of accuracy and honesty expected, and inadequate editorial controls to ensure compliance with those standards.”

The recent debacle over the trailer for a documentary series about the Queen was just one example of many editorial breaches. It has also emerged that RDF Media, which made the series, used the same footage at a festival in Cannes, France, earlier in the year.

It’s now known that the BBC put fake winners on air during phone-in competitions for Children In Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief and other programmes. It was fined $100,000 (£50,000) only last week for a similar event on the once much-loved children’s show, Blue Peter.

No word yet, though on sackings or resignations of senior BBC personnel, but after this catalogue of woes, it seems almost inevitable. At the least, Mark Thompson, the DG, and Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC1, should be participants in the head-rolling reality show.

Let’s hope they don’t have a phone-in competition for that.

Good news for those of us in Britain delicately poised between buying a Blackberry (I know I’m behind the curve here) and waiting for Apple’s iPhone to arrive. O2 is about to sign the much sought-after contract for the UK and may have it out for Christmas.

It means switching mobile networks for me — I’ve always bought Richard Branson’s Virgin-Motorola phones, and stuck with BT for broadband and landlines. O2, which started off at BT when I worked for them, is now owned by Spain’s Telefonica.

The BBC posted this at midnight last night, after spending most of yesterday at the top of Techmeme :

The agreement with O2 is reported to include Apple receiving a continuing share of the revenue generated for the network operator. The handsets are expected to be sold for about £300 and O2 will be hoping that the lure of the fashionable phone is enough to win customers from rival networks.

It certainly will — has done in my case — and will be a terrific boost to lacklustre O2.

I’ve been watching the hysteria around the iPhone in the states, and read so many reviews of it through the usual suspects, it would be hard to ignore the tiny beast when it arrives. And £300 is only $600, a smallish premium on the U.S. price. Normally, we can expect to pay double.

I wonder though why we have to be so far behind America in these launches?

Update: The Register has just published a piece claiming that the components in the 8Gb iPhone cost $220. That makes the expected UK price of $600 pretty fair taking everything into account. The $220 doesn’t include the cost of assembly, shipping, marketing, or the price of the software that makes the iPhone work. Clearly Apple is relying on lifetime revenues from O2, and sales of other media to make its fortune with this gadget.

Update 2: Bob Cringely is now reporting, “It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service.” Let’s hope O2 is up to speed on that one.

It’s never pleasant deleting or permanently archiving poorly-performing sites that have become a drain on a network, but it has to be done. Apart from good housekeeping, they affect the bottom line and reduce the profitability contributed by other hard-working sites.

I’ve been pruning and paring for a while now, but the next couple of weeks will see a final push towards a more balanced network.

To begin the process, I’ve started with my own personal blog, which has been up for all of a week. Why? I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write about ideas, phenomena, events and things. I never like to write about myself, so I’m not much use as a blogger.

Blogging, in its native sense of web log, is writing about yourself. Any other form of writing, even on blog platforms, is really reportage and commentary. To me, blogs are introspective and usually egotistical. Twitter is full of bloggers who imagine there’s an audience for their “tweets” : I’m going to the coffee shop … I’m having a latte … I’m sending an email to Fred … etcetera. There are even feeds for this stuff. Birdseed for birdbrains.

Why do they do it? Dunno, but it must be cathartic to imagine there’s an audience hanging on your every move. It’s the everyday equivalent of the celebrity who won’t leave the house without a film crew in tow.

It’s the same with blog posts. When I moved Syntagma to its present domain, I read through 500 or so old posts intending to bring them over. In the end I transferred 50 or so. The rest simply didn’t stand the test of time. They were either hopelessly wrong, or just plain batty.

Blog posts are essentially conversations — one-way most of the time. If you were able to replay your recent voice conversations with other people, would you actually want to?

So when I read an article by Dave Winer yesterday on the BBC website, I was surprised that he’s prepared to pay a largish sum of money to Google or Amazon to host his online bloggings “in perpetuity”. He even suggests they might be beamed into space so they’ll last forever.

Interesting that he chooses Google or Amazon. Google is less than a decade old, and Amazon can’t have been more than 15 years in the online retail business. Can you imagine either of them being around in 50 years, let alone 50 centuries.

Ancient Alexandria was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria was a wonder, preserving the knowledge and science of the ancient world. To have your work on a scroll or codex in that place would ensure it lasted forever.

Then a bunch of fundamentalist Christians came along and burnt it to the ground. After that “success” they did it again later, with the works of the Gnostics, which were only rediscovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt where they were hidden underground in pots. The pots proved more durable than all of man’s artifice in protecting ancient knowledge.

Why would Google or Amazon fare any better than the Great Library of Alexandria? They won’t, for course. Nothing lasts forever.

I would suggest Dave carefully sifts through his online archives, choosing only the bits that are still interesting today, and have them printed into durable books on quality paper and in robust bindings. He should then donate copies to libraries around the world, like the British Library, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, etcetera. He would then have a better chance of his work seeing out the next 500 years than relying on Google and Amazon.

He should also bury a few copies in earthenware pots, in Death Valley, California, the Negev and Sahara deserts. Somewhere hot and dry, or they’ll rot over time. Climate change is the big imponderable here, of course.

On balance, I think he should just delete them, as I’ve done with my personal blog. Then, like Shakespeare and Homer, his work may be preserved in living memory by public demand, not by hosted servers paid ahead until the end of time.

Chronicles of wasted time … in praise of ladies dead and knights sublime. After Shakespeare

News hot off the presses of three new series starting on Syntagma inventory :

1. If you’re an aficionado of the BBC’s top-notch, mega-hit TV series, Life on Mars, you’ll be interested to know that Syntagma author, Guy Adams wrote the BBC book of the show, and is just beginning on the second volume, which covers the second series.

Read Guy’s story over on The Hack’s Progress.

2. As it’s Edward Elgar’s 150th anniversary in June, Steve Newman is publishing his play : A Summer Garden, over on Classy Classical in eight parts.

Start reading here.

3. The fourth in our Zen Masters series has begun over at Spiritual Nirvana. Catch the biography of Hui Neng, the sixth Chinese Patriarch of Zen, here.