Big Society Watch

I’ve been doing my bit for Dave’s Big Society all week as our local council has stopped performing a variety of tasks, including grass cutting, to save money.

I live in a “Clean City”, as the signs keep telling us. It also has a Beacon Council, whatever that means. I must say normally it performs quite well, dispensing both cleanliness and a civilized living space.

Out walking this morning I noticed a long line of tall weeds running along the curbs of an adjoining street. From a distance they resembled those rows of poplars that line the French countryside. Up close, they are no such thing, just rank, ugly weeds.

Grass verges are in the same state — unmowed — while most council land is a mess. I’ve been clearing up the road outside my house, and some others have followed suit. In the lane, weeds were at waist height until some of us set about them.

Now I don’t mind making a contribution if it really is necessary. The problem is, councils tend to cut costs indiscriminately, without thought for the outcome.

Today, we had a “Community Safety” event on the Cathedral Green. Dozens of police officers, fire crews and safety people were milling around waiting to answer our queries about safety. There were few takers when I was there.

Call me naive, but isn’t that precisely the sort of thing that should have been cut first instead of the grass cutting?

Here’s a suggestion for our beleaguered councillors and officials: give the Secretary of State’s office a call; if you can get through to the Great Pickles (Eric) himself, so much the better. His bluff Yorkshire common sense should solve all your problems.

Ask him, or whoever is available, if the Coalition can waive all those daft edicts issued by Labour ministers in the tangled undergrowth beneath primary legislation. They cost too much local wealth to enforce.

Anything politically “correct” or safety related can comfortably go. So-called equality and diversity nonsense, ditto. Bonfire it all away, it doesn’t need an Act of Parliament.

Then perhaps they can start cutting the grass again.

Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons (PMQs), was more than usually interesting today. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg presided in David Cameron’s absence, the first Liberal to do so since the Whigs, or at least Lloyd George.

Note he said “Liberal”, not LibDem. Is Clegg beginning to distance himself from the leftie Social Democrats in his party? He seems to be comfortable in a Conservative environment, even though his Europeanism is driving some of us up the wall.

Fate blessed him today by throwing up a ghastly Jack Straw as his principal antagonist. Ancient old Jack, voice like a chainsaw, rasped across the dispatch boxes like a soul demented. His rambling orations were mostly drowned out by a very frisky House of Commons.

Speaker Bercow acted as if he were God, batting down anyone who irritated him, including Cleggy. What a bully this little man is becoming. Time for a guillotine, methinks.

Straw was truly awful — he won’t be back. Most of the other questions were locally based and seemed trite in the national Parliament. The Labour benches disgraced themselves yet again. Don’t they know they lost the election?

But Nick Clegg was the star. He replied coolly and competently, neatly sidestepping the elephant traps. Not bad for a chap on his first outing as Prime Minister Designate Surrogate.

Watch out, Dave. Don’t leave the capital too often.

Annoyment of the Week

With the results of the European Union’s rather tepid “stress” tests of a selective group of EU banks due out on Friday, there’s much talk of the “haircut” each country’s sovereign debt is likely to take.

In financial terms, a haircut is a market-imposed discount applied to dodgy debt, in this case government bonds. Greece is said to face a haircut of just 17% — many commentators think it should be closer to 50%.

The problem arises from the bit of the debt that’s counted. Bonds issued via “special vehicles” are not taken as state debt as they are “off-balance sheet,” a ploy much favoured by the US deceased corporation, Enron and Gordon Brown. They still have to be paid up or rolled over though.

All this talk of sovereign haircuts of up to 50% must worry Prince William. He’s already lost half of his.

Alas poor Times website. I’m hearing that not many people have signed up to it, which means a sharp drop in advertising revenues not matched by subscriptions.

I have to confess I’ve not yet taken the plunge either. The application form is annoyingly intrusive and it requires a direct debit instead of a simple credit card — although the micropayment method uses cards. Confusing.

Frankly, I just can’t be bothered with the whole thing. It makes life too complicated. Imagine going through all that rigmarole for every paper or magazine you read online. The FT is a nightmare.

I buy the Sunday Times print version anyway, so it’s a little less for me to read during the week. Now where did I put my bookshelves?

Andrew Marr has signalled on the BBC website that he will use the IPad 3G download alternative, which is more convenient. Amazon’s Kindle has a similar scheme for newspapers. Iain Dale has also balked at the News International sign up process. And there are many others.

When might we expect that particular paywall to come down?

Immortality Quest is a new website I’m in the process of setting up to concentrate my online content on the topic.

There are articles and links available from the header tabs and newer content will appear regularly on the frontpage. I’ll also try to source other writers’ quality content from time to time.

So, if you’re interested in all things immortal, especially yourself, head on over and take a look:

www.immortalityquest.org

PS: don’t forget the “org”.

Pic of the Week

A swan that thinks it’s a giraffe:

Photo: DCO

John Evans

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David Miliband is said to be odds on favourite to win the Labour Party leadership. That’s assuming, of course, that the AV system of voting doesn’t promote a rank outsider to the job, as it has a tendency to do.

Frankly, Diane Abbott would serve them right.

But let’s take Monsieur Miliband’s chances at face value. He is thought to be smart. At least according to a smitten Hilary Clinton, who took an immediate shine to Senor Miliband on a trip to America. We will investigate his “smartness,” or otherwise, in a moment.

His supporters claim he has “bottom,” that is to say, gravitas, presence and leadership qualities coming out of his … well, you get the picture.

The problem for Herr Miliband is that no-one really knows who he is, or what he stands for, and what kind of leader he would be.

Is he authoritative? A Churchill? Clearly not. A thinker, like Harold Wilson, who had so many thoughts he virtually paralyzed himself? A doer, like Clement Attlee, who built a crypto-communist state in this green and pleasant land?

We simply don’t know and would have to take him on trust, as we did with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. That’s not a reassuring thought.

So let’s look at his alleged smartness. In a speech a few days ago, he produced a kind of personal manifesto that he wants to enact across Britain. He thought Gordon Brown would achieve it first, which is why he supported him as Prime Minister. Brown did precisely the opposite, demonstrating that the new would-be Dave does not have good judgement.

I’ve removed the padding from the following passage, leaving the Miliband concept structure in place:

“… we [need] renewal … greater moral seriousness and less indifference to the excesses of a celebrity drenched culture … greater coherence as a government, particularly in relation to child poverty and equality … party reform and a meaningful internationalism … civic morality to champion civility when confronting a widespread indifference to others … optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope.”

Compelling, isn’t it? (Heavy irony alert). It reads like an assiduous, but vacuous, student’s manifesto, packed with nebulous aspirations, but no hard policies, nor any notion of what paying for these empty dreams will cost the nation. Just imagine him on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den trying to raise funding for his scheme.

“Er, what exactly is your product, Mr Milibond?”
“It’s band actually.”
“It’s a rock group?”
“That’s my name.”
“Rock group?”
“No, you don’t understand …”
“We need to know what you have to sell.”
“I don’t want to sell anything. I want to improve society, Europe and the international community.”
“Through rock music?”
“No, politics!”
“Ah, you’re a think tank?”
“No, a party.”
“So you want to set up a party organizing business for … whom exactly: kiddies’ birthdays?”
“No! For the benefit of the people.”
“Which people? We need to know your market demographics.”
“We’re going for the centre ground, plus any minority grouping we can bri… er, persuade to back us.”
“What do you estimate your profits at for years 1, 2, 3 and 4?”
“We don’t do profits, we have deficits every year, so we beg and borrow the rest, mainly from the trades unions.”
“So you have no intention of making money, just surviving on debt?”
“Like the country.”
“You are not a country, Mr Multibond. You are a non-existent company, with no money, no plans, no product, just idle hopes and dreams that have no relevance to the modern business world.”
“Exactly, it’s called the Labour Party. And the name is Mili not Multi.”
“Mr Mili, you’re fired.”

John Evans

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I’ve decided not to read Peter Mandelson’s self-serving memoir, or even name it here. He might imagine he’s Harry Lime, but some of us think more of lemons when he pops up.

After enduring 13 years of Labour’s rancid internicine warfare, conducted within the portals of the British Government, it’s a relief not to be a political historian and have to crawl through the muck and the ricocheting bullets all over again.

God knows what they got up to in Downing Street in that time. Only a combination of Mandy’s pandemonium and Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party gives us fleeting glimpses of the Devil’s Kitchen that our centre of government became under those putrid, fake personalities.

Former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, became a Baron last week. After a lifetime of condemning the House of Lords he recanted in his own interest, even blaming his long-suffering wife Pauline, who “wanted to become a Lady.”

As some sort of exculpation, he cited Lord Hoffmann, once a Law Lord, for a complex speech he gave on a point of law. “We don’t get speeches like that in the Commons,” he wailed.

What does he expect with characters like him entrenched there?

Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons (PMQs), is taking on a familiar pattern. Acting Leader of the Opposition, Harriet Harman, asks a narrow, niche question about a topic she knows has not yet been fully resolved, or is part of a much wider, complex issue that doesn’t allow a simple answer.

When David Cameron talks around it, she accuses him of not answering the question. This continues for most of the session, with the PM appearing to flounder. Eventually he gets angry and accusations start to fly. However, the impression remains that Harman has won the encounter.

Today, it was about whether the Coalition will stick with Labour’s two-week consultant appointment target for cancer patients in the NHS. Cameron’s obvious retort was: On past form it’s unlikely that the target would be met and that quality of treatment would suffer because of dishonest reporting. This area, he could have said, is still under review, as she well knows.

Instead, he waffled and claimed that for some patients, two weeks was too long, implying an even tighter target.

There aren’t many of these PMQs left now until a new Labour leader takes over. He needs to improve his technique before the autumn when replying to questions of this type.

Annoyment of the Week

William Hague’s instructions to the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, in which the British Tories sit, were decisive in securing a crucial positive vote on the European External Action Service (foreign embassies), according to EurActiv.

“The Tories, known for their Eurosceptic views, helped to save Europe’s future diplomatic service, Parliament officials said.”

Why is William Hague now supporting a European diplomatic service in direct opposition to our own?

I suspect some stitch-up has been arranged behind the scenes whereby Britain gets something it’s persuaded it wants in return for letting go of something it already has.

Don’t British politicians ever do the maths? The overall result of these deals is that we lose core competencies, and hence sovereignty, in exchange for trivial hand-outs in matters of the moment.

I believe William Hague is now fighting to keep open some British embassies threatened with closure. How does this square with his support for a very expensive EU diplomatic service?

Anyone who is still wondering how the financial crisis could happen in a reasonably regulated world, should read economic historian Niall Ferguson’s recent article on the subject. Here’s the bit with the eye-opening revelations:

We know from the hubristic emails of the Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre just how out-of-control things were on the eve of the financial crisis. Tourre positively gloried in selling the quintessential toxic assets – “synthetic abs” (asset-backed securities) and “cdo2s” (collateralised debt obligations “squared”) – to “Belgian widows and orphans”, knowing full well that the subprime mortgages on which these assets were based were already “totally dead”.

With its sly winks and surplus exclamation marks, Tourre’s email perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the age – an age in which clients were merely “counterparties” and conflicts of interest were there to be “embraced”.

Terrifying, isn’t it?

How fast this summer is passing by. Punctuated as it is in England by great sporting occasions: the Test matches, Wimbledon, Royal Ascot, I usually feel a chill in the air when the Open Golf hoves into view, quickly followed by the First Night of the Proms.

With the hottest weather normally yet to come, for some reason mid-July always feels like a slippery slope back to winter.

We’ve been lucky this year. The Cathedral Green in Exeter is a straw-coloured desert. Not a sight many of us have seen before.

Nevertheless, the Open is about to begin. Batten down the hatches, and prepare for autumn’s gales.

Video of the Week

Some shaky video of the dragonboat racing at Exeter’s Quay on Sunday by yours truly.

John Evans

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It is the centenary of the death of William James, the Harvard professor who wrote deathlessly about the psychology of religious experience. He is something of a luminary to me, but I didn’t expect much fuss on this side of the Atlantic.

Just occasionally the BBC plays out of its socks though. Back in May, Melvyn Bragg featured James and his signature book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature on his Radio 4 Thursday morning programme, In Our Time. It covered most of the bases.

Martin E. Marty captures James’s literary essence perfectly in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition: [The book] is a classic that is too psychological to have shaped most religious inquiry and too religious to have influenced much psychological research.”

James was a pioneer of a fusion genre that took in C.G. Jung, D.T. Suzuki, writers such as Colin Wilson and, dare I say, yours truly, who believe that the truth lies in the cracks between the tidy categories invented by pseudo scientific researchers.

William James was a natural-born phenomenologist, taking experience at face value and placing it before torrid theoretical exposition.

Here’s part of a section on James from my book The Eternal Quest for Immortality, which illustrates the point:

The author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had similar moments of revelation:

“I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God — I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it — as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether … I think I may add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, colour, odour, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied by no determinate localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of the usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.”

James was a practised observer of psychological and mystical states, yet when the “thing” happens to him, he is almost rendered speechless. The clunky phrase, “spiritual spirit” typifies how his powers of expression deserted him in the face of transcendent reality. He does grasp the essence of the state, however, in his telling phrase: “… he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.”

As a scientist, albeit a 19th-century one, he would have been disconcerted by the fact that he experienced the fullness of the moment while yet deprived of sensory perceptions. The existence of inner senses, distinct from the body-mind senses, was probably unknown to him. Nevertheless, he reported the strange facts just as they came.

William James died on 26 August, 1910. His big book was given as a series of lectures at Edinburgh University. He should be remembered for his agility of mind and pioneering spirit in a field only now coming into its own, one hundred years after his death.

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?

Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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I always enjoy reading Daniel Hannan’s* Telegraph blog mainly because I usually agree with him.

Take this short post: Britain should rejoin EFTA [European Free Trade Association]:

“You really can have your cake and eat it. Switzerland managed to strike a deal with the EU which gave it full access [to the] market without pressing it into common political structures. The Swiss export more than twice as much per capita to the EU as the British do. Yet they control their own trade policy, foreign policy, borders, home affairs and employment law. Being outside the EU, they are free to disperse power through cantonalism, referendums and competing tax jurisdictions. Result? They are the wealthiest people in Europe.

“Do we really imagine than 60 million Britons couldn’t negotiate at least as favourable a deal as seven million Swiss? We are, after all, a larger market for EU exporters. We are an existing member state, with commensurate leverage. And, of course, we buy far more from the rest of the EU than we sell to it. It isn’t normal, in any transaction, for the salesman to have the upper hand over the customer.”

The Dutch bank ING calculates that any defaults within the eurozone — which in my opinion are inevitable — will spread deflationary shocks and depression around the world. It also suggests that the one-off effects of eurozone break-up “would dwarf Lehman Brothers collapse”. Isn’t it time we distanced ourselves from this dangerous organization? Whichever way the dice fall, Britain is going to lose trade.

Better at arm’s length than in the thick of it.

* Daniel Hannan is a British Conservative MEP and joint author of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain.

Update: Read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s brilliant blog post over at the Telegraph tonight. Excerpt:

“In a sense, the Verfassungsericht [German Constitutional Court] has become the defender of democratic freedom and liberties for the whole of the European Union since other national courts are largely craven (Though not Ireland’s supreme court) and since the Hegelian ECJ [European Court of Justice] has demonstrated in a series of key cases that it has no respect whatsoever for human rights and acts a mere enforcer of authoritarian power-grabs by the EU’s executive machinery. As such, the ECJ is a dangerous organization.”

I do hope David Cameron and William Hague are listening to this debate.

John Evans

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