Bob Crow: union man

Bob Crow.  The man who rejoiced at the death of Mrs Thatcher, she who put a generation of working class people on the housing ladder, ensuring their children had something to inherit - and did not have to work down a coal pit and die early of lung disease.  Of the two, Mrs Thatcher did more for the working and aspirational classes than he who heaped endless misery and expense on aspirational people who were simply trying to get to work and earn a days pay. 

Crow spoke often of the rights of "the workers", but it was "the workers" who ultimately paid the price for his obstinate grandstanding.  And now that London Underground wages are unsustainable, his membership will be joining the dole queue sooner than they anticipated as their jobs are replaced by robots.

That said, few can say in the modern era that they were represented according to their views and ideals as well as those who followed Bob Crow.  He was anything but mealy mouthed, and refreshingly unconcerned by media image.  Unlike our modern political class, he set out his stall and brought people to him - rather than swaying whichever way the wind blows.  You don't have to respect the man's politics but there is something laudable about a man who knows his mind - and stands his ground. He did what he was elected to do. That is uncommon.

Some say that his continued occupancy of social housing, while on a salary that would make an IT consultant blush, made him little better than an NHS bed blocker.  But his view was that a decent home was an entitlement of everyone.  He lived by his own values.

He certainly wasn't the pantomime bad guy or folk-demon the Daily Mail would have us believe, but he was an economic illiterate, a Luddite and a yob. (Rejoicing in the death of anyone is an ugly trait.)  The bottom line is, he was just an ordinary Londoner of his age, and not a very bright one.  He was old enough to have lived through the worst days of British socialism, yet lacked the intelligence to see why his ideas failed, and he would have taken us back to those dark days in a heartbeat.

But beneath all that, if you can see past the persona, there was a man who genuinely cared for the vulnerable, as per his stance on the closure of ticket offices.  I happen to think that his final campaign against the closures was the right call, and for once in my life I found myself on the side of strikers.  It was a reminder that while we have put unions in their rightful place, we still need them and they do have a part to play in a democracy, inconvenient though they may be at times.

Crow was one of a dying breed and very much the embodiment of the old left, and the Left were lucky to have him.  I cannot think of an equal on the other side of the divide.  Who speaks for the right as Crow did for the left?  Answers on a postcard please...

52: No age to go

BBC funding: the writing is on the wall

BBC: Past its sell-by date

Ill-served as we are by our tax-dodging, paedophile-enabling, fat-cattery of a state broadcaster, if its television programmes don't make you weep with despair, these numbers will...

According to the most recent figures, about 70 people a year are jailed for TV licence fee offences. But the scale of prosecutions for licence fee evasion is far higher and now accounts for one in nine of all Magistrates Court cases. More than 180,000 people – almost 3,500 a week – appeared before the Magistrates Courts in 2012, accused of watching television without a valid licence in, with 155,000 being convicted and fined.

According to the Telegraph, a tabled amendment to the current legislation would mean non-payment of the annual £145.50 charge would be a matter for the civil courts rather than a criminal offence, under plans backed by ministers. Andrew Bridgen, the Consevartive MP for North West Leicestershire, who tabled the amendment, said the wide support his proposal had received showed that the government should support it.

“For those in real hardship who cannot pay the television licence fee, the current legislation is effectively criminalising them for being poor, which cannot be right,” he said. “I and many colleagues feel that the non-payment of the TV licence being a criminal offence is disproportionate. The current funding arrangement for the BBC is a Poll Tax and is one of the most regressive forms of taxation. Most of those sent to prison as a result of non-payment are the elderly and women and this serves no purpose and the huge associated costs are borne by the taxpayer."

The BBC has reacted to the amendment with predictable special pleading. Janet Daly today helpfully saves me the trouble of de-constructing their arguments.

The BBC says that it would lose a significant proportion of funding through non-payment which would result in its having to cut back its services. It refers specifically in its public statement to reducing the number of its local radio stations. It might even, it threatens, have to start charging for the now free iPlayer and maybe (the horror!) for its web content. Well, here's the thing: if the BBC were not dumping its subsidised free products onto every conceivable platform from local radio to Internet news, the commercial market might just have a hope of becoming healthier and more genuinely competitive. Independent local radio stations would have a chance to survive, newspaper websites would not be put in the impossible position of matching the mega-funded (free) BBC news website, and the web-based subscription film market would not have to suffer the encroachment of a subsidised spoiler in their midst.

Who could disagree?  There is little practical or moral reason for the BBC to enjoy the monopoly privileges it does, and criminalising the poor and conscientious objectors for not paying such a morally bankrupt, self-obsessed, corrupt, decaying media entity has no place is a modern, first-world country.

But hold your horses.  Insomuch as a criminal conviction makes you a second class citizen in the eyes of some, moving the offence from a criminal matter, (which is somewhat trivial these days since almost everything is now a criminal offence), to a civil matter, there is still potential to ruin lives and make people actual second class citizens.  The reason being that a criminal debt cannot be entered against your credit rating.  A civil debt can.

No doubt the present TV licensing system is unfair, but there is little more frustrating than the opaque world of credit scoring whereby a simple dispute over a telephone bill can prevent a person taking out a mortgage for six years or more.  The credit ratings system is the ultimate guarantor of civil obedience. It is a system where corporates hold all the cards, with few rights for the individual who has only a toothless regulator to call upon.  In some cases, under the Money Laundering Act, a credit stain can prevent an individual from taking a job in finance or insurance - and is much more damaging than a criminal record.  Moving it into the civil domain also makes it bonanza market for bailiffs and unscrupulous debt collectors.  If you thought Crapita were bad, you should read my other blog.

Some may welcome this amendment. I do not. Rather than addressing the morally repugnant position of being forced to pay for a state media monopoly, it simply shifts the goal posts. I will not be satisfied we are an enlighted society until the BBC is consigned to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

The Complete Bastard road trip to Somerset

Somerset: No shortage of trees

Today I have been out and about in Somerset taking photographs.  You don't really get a feel for the extent of the flooding by driving around. It's not up until you get to the top of the "Mump" at Burrow Bridge can you see just how bad it is. To the south it goes as far as the eye can see. And it's deep too.

In some of my photos today you can see the hills in the far distance (see above). The eagle-eyed will notice is that the hills surrounding the Levels are quite densely wooded. The arguments made by "expert" hydrologists (and George Monbiot) were that planting trees upstream is preferable to dredging. This was a ridiculous argument to begin with since once the "sponge effect" is at saturation it makes no difference (even the UN NAO says so), and secondly, there's no shortage of trees on the Somerset hills.

No amount of tree planting would have made a bit of difference here. Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University, went on record to say that dredging would make very little difference to the floods. Seeing how much water is there, even by increasing capacity by another 50% in the rivers, ditches and drains, we would still be looking at floods. This has been exceptional weather. But the lack of dredging means that this water will stay on the Levels for the better part of the year, rather than a matter of weeks. Without the capacity, the escape rate is too slow.

The water stays on the land because the drains are at capacity, the rivers are at capacity, and the the bottom line is that there is not enough drainage capacity because of silt. At King's Sedgemoor Drain they are actually pumping from one field into another because there is nowhere for the water to go. Pumping into the King's Sedgemoor Drain would be pointless because it has burst its banks.

Insofar as damage to homes goes, I barely saw any, but the land is ruined. What I saw today was quite serious inland silting on the Parrett and Tone, and then out at the estuary at Bridgwater; massive mud bank meanders that slow the flow into the sea. This is twenty years of policy neglect. Consequently, farmers will miss the planting season this year and any grass crops will be dead by now. At present pumping rates, there is an outside chance of clearing it before summer, but even then, the ground will still be saturated. If we get sustained summer rains the floods will return, and it will spell ruin.

It may be the case that by the time the land is usable again, the financial risk of planting (assuming the capital is available) will be too much for farmers and insurers, and the land may be abandoned. That is what the environmentalists have been hoping for all along. They would like nothing more than to see it remain as wetlands.

As breathtaking and beautiful as it was today, I was also looking at a crime scene where the unelected have made casual calls on the property of farmers without consultation. Insomuch as the dredging will cost millions, the damage done as a result of abandoning maintenance will cost several million more. And guess who pays? One seriously hopes the farmers take legal action. And win.

Politics: Life is unfair

UKIP: Crying unfair.

Ukip is again making the news for the wrong reasons.  "Lewes UKIP councillor (Donna Edmunds) says businesses should have power to turn away women and gay people." says The Argus.

Looking at what the lady actually said, I'm hard pressed to disagree on the basis that that such laws infringe on property rights, and give power to the state to police thought.  Moreover, such laws are unnecessary. If a business wants to discriminate on those grounds, which would be a witheringly small number of them, the free market would soon be the judge whether they stay in business.

It is not the role of the state to ensure people live their entire lives without being offended, nor can the state from a practical perspective micro-manage and dictate every individual moral choice. The enforcement of such laws is what makes us such mealy-mouthed, conformist curtain-twitchers - and it makes us less free. Dick Puddlecote offers a more thorough examination of the moral aspects here.

However, politics is a game with rules.  And when your back is to the wall with the odds stacked against you, the last thing you do is feed the beast with what it needs. Ukippers seem incapable of learning this lesson. When you are aligned with a tribe, everything you say reflects on your tribe, and anything you do say can and will be used against you in the kangeroo court of British media.

The art of politics, and the skill of a good politician is to pass comment on a matter without feeding the beast. Ukippers will complain that they are a straight-talking, un-PC party and is being treated unfairly, but that is a childish attitude. If you play the establishment game, you play by establishment rules.  Crying that it is unfair her words have been twisted overlooks the fact that life is unfair, politics is unfair - and politics is a dirty business. Only those in power get to change the rules. That's life.  There is a game to be played, and there are strategies for playing it if you seek to take on the establishment.

It's not the first time Donna Edmunds has raised a few eyebrows, and has failed to learn that while you or I can get involved in internet spats, those in office cannot without somebody watching. To continue to do so displays the usual lack of political acumen and professionalism from Ukip that this game requires. Effective politicians let the party do the politics while they do the donkey work, building a constituency and building good relations in the community.  And that requires party discipline and self-discipline.  Needlessly embroiling oneself in public rows does not help matters.

But having said something that could be twisted by the media, Miss Edmunds gave them further ammunition by expressing regret for her words. That is the ultimate gift to the media.  They went for a scalp, and they got one.  The correct response should be "Read what I actually said. The voters can be the judge".  By climbing down, it feeds the story by making it look like an embarrassing debacle that then prompts further damage control from the party. If you cannnot say what you mean, how can you possibly mean what you say? As usual, Ukip has played it badly, shown an astonishing naivety of how the game is played (and how the media works), and more seriously, it has shown a complete inability to learn. It should by now have a handle on these matters.

This is far from the first time a Ukip councillor has made the news for the wrong reasons. Ukip is under close watch by the media, and is under sustained attack from an establishment who perceives it as a threat. It is playing dirty games, and setting traps that Ukip helpfully blunders into time after time. These are unforced errors.  But this comes as little surprise. The party doesn't do professionalism or strategy, and that's because Farage doesn't either and Ukip refuses to see it. Were I a europhile I would think Farage was a gift from above.

Is there still a point to academia?

It's pretty.  But what is it for?

As a maturer student, at the age of twenty two, the day I arrived at university was the day I felt, for the first time, a sense of optimism about the future; that I had finally made it to a new world where I could be among my intellectual equals and betters.  I was soon to be disappointed.  Perhaps the concept of university had been mis-sold to me. I had assumed that university was a place of academic rigor where my intellect would be taxed and my mind opened to new ideas.  I don't know where I got this notion from, but was rapidly disabused of it.

Whenever a lecturer did bother to turn up, we got a disorganised introduction followed by viewings of videos readily available on Youtube, followed by assignments of such withering inanity that they would not tax an eleven year-old, on a curriculum that would cover only a month of my expectations - stretched over an entire year.  If the weeding our process, was to bore students half to death and see who is still dull enough to continue, then it certainly worked on me.

Some argue that it is not the hard skills that one takes away from university that matters.  It is the soft skills in terms of marshalling people and resources in a group-working environment.  I am sure this works in environment where students are there for genuine reasons and have an interest in the subject matter, but when your course is a cash cow and the entrance requirements have been reduced to little more than a pulse check, "marshalling people and resources in a group working environment" translates to doing all the work yourself in the certain knowledge your fellow students have not lifted a finger.  This is a life lesson I did not need to pay thousands of pounds for.

It took a couple of years to clear the debt incurred from this failed venture into the elite world of academia, and were it a commercial agreement, I may have considered legal action.  I can think of no other institution that enjoys such immunity for false representation.  To this day I struggle to comprehend why such immense value is placed upon the experience and the qualification that comes with it.

 So we have to go back to basics.  What is Academia for?  The Institute of Ideas complains that;

"It often seems that all spectrums of the education debate – whether for or against higher fees - accept the idea that university education should be to give value for money, should ‘deliver improved employability’ and increase ‘social mobility.’ Voices arguing for the value of learning in and of itself are too rarely heard and, when they are, are often shouted down as harking back to ivory-­tower elitism. Yet it needs to be pointed out that treating subjects as investments in future earnings can hardly be an invitation to study the liberal arts and humanities."

The promotion of liberal arts and humanities is for loftier intellects than mine to pontificate on. But given where I presently am in my career, compared with my graduate peers, I think it quite important to address those more pragmatic questions before we get into subjects of existential navel gazing.

Figures still point to lifetime earnings of graduates being higher than non-graduates, but can we say for sure whether the university experience has any bearing on it?  In terms of technical training, I have found better, more rigorous courses on the commercial market, which while very expensive, are still more use than a degree, cheaper than a degree and come with better course material, taught by people who have succeeded in the field - and have a demonstrable impact on income. It seems that universities are no better at providing technical teaching, and their equipment is often obsolete, difficult to get access to, and exists in an insular environment that is slow to respond to changes in industry.

I am a firm believer that institutions and governments should stick to what they are good at and leave the rest to the open market if the market proves better at providing. With that in mind, I think it time to abandon our fixation with academia, trim it back down to size and put it back in its proper context; that it is largely an elitist ivory tower, for the sorts of people who can think of nothing better than to listen to Frank Furedi giving a lecture on Edmund Burke and morality.  Let us lose our hangups about it.

If that is really what sets some people on fire then let universities do their thing, and let the rest of us attend to our own social mobility, employability and getting value for money.  Perhaps then those who are interested in existentialism, moral relativism and self-realisation can be free to sit in the university Starbucks, scratching their beards while reading 17th century literature on their Kindle - without being interrupted by us plebs and ignoramuses.

The conventional wisdom is that polytechnics should never have been turned into universities and the distinction was an important and valuable one. I could not disagree.  The academic rigour in order to pass through the doors was also a necessary function to obtaining the most from the experience.  If there is any point at all in parting with ones own money, it is to exclude the mediocre, the lazy and the stupid.  But somewhere along the way, that control mechanism has been broken down in the name of egalitarianism.  The prevailing view that brought about the Blair reforms was that universities were elitist and exclusionary. But that's the point of them isn't it? If any halfwit can enter on a whim, the whole experience is reduced to the lowest common denominator.

It was assumed the introduction of higher tuition fees would go some way to eliminate these problem.  But it seems the same morons are still admitted but instead leave in year two with larger debts. The control mechanism of academic rigour simply exists no more outside of Oxford and Cambridge - and given the people they churn out, I'm starting to have my doubts about them too. Academia certainly isn't producing people who can any longer think for themselves.

We now live in an age of zero hours contracts, with a highly mobile, fluid workforce where experience and skill matter more than academic prestige. More so now that universities have cashed in on their prestige and in many respects have jumped the shark. It seems they now exist solely to validate stupidity. It is difficult to see how such institutions improve social mobility, they certainly don't 'deliver improved employability' for the majority, and few would argue that it was value for money.  If anything, choosing a private course with ones own money de-facto excludes the mediocre, the lazy and the stupid in ways that no university ever could.

My own view on liberal arts and humanities is somewhat philistine, in that I was gifted my own mind with which to ponder aspects of morality and philosophy, and thanks to the marvels of the modern age (the dishwasher*) I have the time to sit and peruse the internet at leisure and set a curriculum relevant to my own agenda.  If there is a point to academia as it stands today, it sure as hell escapes me.

Enquiring minds will always seek enquiring minds, with or without cosseted, obsolete, archaic, failing institutions - and the internet bypasses them altogether.  Perhaps without universities, credibility will not be afforded to idiots simply because people call them "professor".  That is a world I would prefer to live in.

There was a time when universities were the custodians of knowledge and that university was the place you went to expose yourself to new ideas and seek out those with similar passions.  The internet has upset that whole apple-cart.  So I think academia must offer more if it is to survive. And it could start by offering some credible justification for its continued existence.  I sure would like to know - and so would my wallet.

*I don't actually have a dishwasher.  I have the spare time because I seldom ever do the washing up or other household chores.

Teaching: The special pleading of the incompetent

I dislike professional teachers as a rule.  Imbued as they are with a sense of importance, you'll not find a more pompous breed. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the debate surrounding unqualified teachers. A typical conversation with a teacher on such matters (should you dare to offer an opinion different to the herd) will elicit this classic response:

"It shows how little you know about the myriad skills involved in teaching a class-room teaching. I would not want my kids to be taught by unqualified staff - I have seen unqualified people in classrooms and they have been rubbish - absolute rubbish."

I don't doubt that for a minute. I have seen unqualified people in classrooms who have been "rubbish". But by the same token I have also seen very, very qualified people in classrooms who are immeasurably worse.  

While schools may differ in ethos and specialism, management style and teaching style, there is one universality that unites all schools: Kids are bastards. They can smell weakness, run rings around the gullible, and drive the timid to the brink of mental breakdown - and sometimes over the edge. No qualification can prepare a person for this. Either you have the right stuff or you don't. It may take a short while to deduce if a person has it, but if not, it's a non-starter - and that is that. A qualification in teaching should not be protection from being weeded out. But the profession seems to think it should - and that is at the very heart of this debate. 

The modern teaching profession believes that only they posses the ability to communicate with children, and impart information to them in such a way that it will not damage their oh-so-fragile blossoming minds. So much so, they can often be found comparing themselves with surgeons and lawyers.  As in "you wouldn't want a brain tumour removed by someone unqualified who just fancied giving it ago".  Fatuous though that argument is, it has been around the block once or twice in the comments of the Guardian. This suggests that heads of Free Schools are so blasé and uncaring that they will drag anybody off the street who fancies giving it a go. That has never been the case, nor is anyone suggesting that it should be.

The purpose of the policy is to find and develop people who show a natural aptitude for holding children's attention and teaching them something.  If they have that much ability, then that's material you can work with. Aptitude is the essential qualification. Certification ought to come after, if only to save wasting a lot of people's time; especially those who qualified - but don't make the grade as a teacher.  Better to find out if they have the right stuff before they commence with certification.

The essential qualities of a good teacher are primarily an air of authority, a love of their subject and an unbridled passion for what they do. The obedience of children can be forced, but their respect must be earned.  A clean cut, middle-class recent graduate, fresh from teacher training, who has never spent a day outside the state education system, is unlikely to command respect, and with a head full of teaching theory, from a curriculum very much infused with a political agenda, is even less likely to be a fully rounded and developed human being. In the same way that our politicians have become bland and sterile people, the same is happening to the teaching profession. They are institutionalised replicants.

In many cases teachers have to deal with children going through lives far more complex than they have ever experienced, and consequently carry little weight as a role-model or confidant.  Especially if every door has been opened for them. Above all, children must be able to relate to their teachers. Children will not learn from adults whom they do not respect, and there is little to respect about the limp, spineless, cosseted, self-entitled, politically-correct wussies our academic establishment vomits upon us.

As a teenager, I certainly took my share of scalps where incompetent teachers were concerned. Sadly, much though they should have been drummed out of the profession, they were promoted to school management, but so far as I was concerned, so long as they were not teaching, that was fine by me. In almost all instances, the teachers I paid attention to were newcomers from the world of business or the armed forces. They possessed a certain gravitas a lifer could never hope to acquire. One listened to those people because it was in ones own best interests to do so. If the lesson was that getting good grades and going to university meant ending up back at school, then it was not a lesson worth hearing.

Clearly, we need more teachers from the real world. One of the obstacles is clearly pay. Anyone who can make a go of the private sector tends to stay there. Who would take on more work for considerably less money? This is why schools need to be free to set their own pay-scales to get the human assets they need.  While it remains in the hands of government, we will be strong-armed into coughing up more eventually, but always to pay the same drongos we should have ejected early in their careers.

The world of education has become a claustrophobic, insular bubble. One which actively seeks to fend off prying from the outside world - who demands to know what is going so horribly wrong that we need to teach remedial English skills in universities. An ugly aspect of the profession is the view that members of the public should be excluded from the debate, because they are not 'qualified' to comment.  In their view only teachers are fit to offer insight on education, often complaining that everyone else seems to think they are an expert. But in a way, almost all of us in the UK are experts in the education system, by way of having spent more than ten years of our lives within it - and being a product of it. The nomenclature and technology may have changed, but the culture has not. They view it as their own exclusive kingdom, and never may reality intrude.

It is little wonder then that Michael Gove refers to the profession as "The Blob"; An amorphous mass of cowardice, pomposity and self-righteousness that destroys all in its path. Their opposition to education reform is born of the fear that the mediocre could well be drummed out and be replaced "unqualified" people. They fear competition and fear they may have to up their game - and get results.  They have long enjoyed immunity that no other profession enjoys; they are next to impossible to fire on competence grounds and seem to think that a teaching qualification grants them a right to stay in teaching.

Mediocre teachers have a lot to fear. This explains the unhinged nature of their loathing and bile for Michael Gove. Free Schools are a direct threat to their dung-hill. The notion that schools should be run for the benefit of parents and children and not teachers is, for them, a bridge too far. But if we want good schools, we are going to need good people running them. That means fishing in a pond where the waters have not stagnated and the fish are not suffocated, and more importantly, clearing out the dead wood.

Kidding themselves

HMS Eagle:  A proper aircraft carrier.

I need to get this out of the way.  Ever since the debate on intervention in Syria, and now Ukraine is in turmoil, various dimwits have sought to make political gain from the recent defence cuts, drawing particular attention to our lack of an aircraft carrier.  At the very pinnacle of such douche-dom is Con Coughlin at the Telegraph.

Mr Putin’s room for manoeuvre is more limited than many people think, because much of the Russian military is ill-equipped and poorly trained. But that is about to change, thanks to a £400 billion, 10-year modernisation programme. Meanwhile, cuts to our own defence budget mean that the Army will soon be nearly half the size of the Russian forces currently deployed along the Ukrainian border. As for the other Services, Philip Hammond’s overzealous application of spending controls at the MoD has seen the RAF’s frontline combat squadrons operating at a rumoured 50 per cent capacity, while the absence of a functioning aircraft carrier severely limits the Royal Navy’s ability to stand up to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and others.

Is he really suggesting that had we an aircraft carrier we would have positioned it to go toe-to-toe with the Black Sea fleet?  Assuming that were a remotely plausible diplomatic avenue, can anyone enlighten me as to what use a clapped out cruiser with a dozen ancient Harrier jump-jets would accomplish?  Leaving aside for a moment its limited range and loiter time, there's that small matter of it being utterly useless.  In three leaked e-mails in 2006, Major James Loden, of 3 Para, said that the RAF, with particular reference to the Harrier, had been "utterly, utterly useless".

He has very unkind words for the RAF: "Controlling and directing air, arty and mors [artillery and mortars] is the best way to influence the battle. The RAF have been utterly, utterly useless. "Twice I have had Harriers in support when c/s on the ground have been in heavy contact, on one occasion trying to break clean. A female Harrier pilot 'couldn't identify the target', fired two phosphorous rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], and then strafed our perimeter, missing the enemy by 200 metres."  In "contrast" to the RAF, the US air force had been "fantastic". He adds: "I would take an A10 over Eurofighter any day."

But what about the Falklands?  The Harrier was the victor of the hour wasn't it?  Er... not quite. The few air-to-air victories needs to be measured against the fact we lost seven ships for lack of Airborne Early Warning aircraft, and fighters with adequate endurance and all-weather capability.  Even for ground-attack missions, Britain was pressed into a last hurrah from the thoroughly useless Avro Vulcan, on a needlessly perilous mission, to mostly miss the target at Port Stanley.  All for the lack of carrier based strike capability.

In this regard, Britain has not been a major world power with any real carrier capability since the Seventies.  To lose seven ships to a vastly inferior enemy is not a great British victory.  It was an embarrassing loss and should be remembered as such.  But in the instance of Syria, if our thought-free, idle hacks could navigate a map, they might discover a small island by the name of Cyprus, which is home to RAF Akrotiri.  What use then would a thirty year old rust-bucket Harrier carrier be?  As to fighting Russia, who are they trying to kid?

The West's moral confusion over landmines in Africa

Guest post by Brendan O'Neill*
 *NOT a guest post by Brendan O'Neill

Africa's right?

It will come as no great surprise to many. Despite the tutting of the West, and the efforts of Africa's small and brave anti-landmine community, the use of land-mines and cluster-munitions has the backing of large numbers of Africa's leaders, who are not exactly in the Lambeth Palace school of right-on thought.

The Foreign Office has condemned a recent move to promote their use across sub-Saharan Africa which is clear provocation and finger-wagging against developing countries.  But this is no longer just about landmines, but about the West lecturing an African country on how to slaughter it's own people.

That, of course, is an accusation that the Foreign Office is normally anxious to avoid. Whenever I've met diplomats in my time as a journalist, they are at pains not to sound like a colonial viceroy. But on the question of cluster-munitions and other maiming explosives, it's fair to say that, in recent years, the Foreign Office has not been scared of causing of offence.

At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Mugabe, I think this policy is a little misjudged. For what may sound perfectly reasonable in metropolitan London does not come across as such in many other parts of the world, be it Africa, or the Arab world with its conservative imams.

All too often, they view opposition to cluster-munitions with utter incomprehension, to the point where I fear it discredits other Western messages such as the need for good governance. And it's a gift to loopy African leaders who are able to con their people that it's Western governments that are barmy, because they do not support the use of M18 Claymore mines.

I also a detect an inconsistency here. After all, on many occasions, Britain avoids open criticism of other countries for fear that we will be seen as interfering. For example, after last June's military coup in Egypt – in which an elected Islamist government was ousted, William Hague pointedly declined to call it a "coup". Clearly, HMG's unspoken view was that in order to have any sway with the new regime, it was best to keep criticisms private. So why be diplomatic on some issues and outspoken on others?

I am not suggesting that land-mines are not a cause worth defending. Apart from anything else, minefields and other Western explosive technologies are a welcome sign of rising living standards in the region's better-off nations, but I can't help wondering whether this is a battle not for social progress but a battle to curtail Africa's right to maim civilians in the way that it chooses? 

It is a symptom of a much deeper Malthusian spite. Western leaders see Africa's traditional machete slaughters as more sustainable and eco-friendly than mass-produced booby-trap explosives. Our leaders in the West are suspicious of the potential of modern technology, and in their miserablist fervour seek to deprive Africa of its right to lose limbs in a modern and progressive fashion.


Brendan O'Neill is editor of Spiked Online.

Self-censorship is killing journalism – and the truth.

In the wake of the phone hacking scandal, Twitter arrests and the Snowden affair, there has been much debate surrounding press freedom, censorship and freedom of speech. It is a very necessary and timely debate. But there is always a major component missed entirely by the legacy media and our oh-so-wise commentariat. In this instance, local media is the stealth pachyderm in the room.

Insomuch as a free press is vital to a healthy democracy on a national level, it also applies on a local level. We need a truth hungry local press to hold our local authorities to account. We have never been well served by our local media, and it has always been a pillar of the establishment where descent is licensed and limited within a narrow set of parameters, but it is now in a worse state than ever.

As local media struggles for relevance and budgets are squeezed, journalism suffers. Instead of being bold seekers after the truth, local hacks merely rearrange copy supplied to it by local authorities and the police; they who pay the bills. Local authorities have advertising budgets that dwarf most SMEs, and a big part of local media revenue comes from council advertising. It is for that reason our local media is not keen to rock the boat, and has become an Uncle Tom to our local fiefdoms.

While major local publications are waking up to the dynamic that news is now interactive, the dismal provincial rags still see themselves as the fount of all truth. They are still wedded to the notion that they still control the message. Their copy is less an interaction with readers, more a Sermon on the Mount. Try adding a comment relevant to an issue (that names council employees) and see how long that lasts on their websites. Be it in fear of inciting “trolling” or offending their paymasters, our local media has become timid and subservient, and the truth is left to fend for itself.

One might be tempted to conclude that the demise of local media is entirely a consequence of the digital age, or that people are simply not interested in local affairs. Not so. It comes down to one principle; Media follows power. Now that our councils are merely regional agencies, implementing Whitehall policy, the media averts its gaze from them and goes to the source instead. And who could blame them? But in so doing, it is left to the back pages of Private Eye and local loony-blogs to chart the misdeeds and grubby shenanigans in our own back yards.

While this may provide titillation and intrigue, it ignores the fact that councils regularly speak with each other, and if they find a scam that works, they will replicate it rapidly across the country in the pursuit of further revenue. If our national newspapers had the investigative ability, they would be able to capitalise on those morsels of stories and turn them into national news. It may just get people on the streets if they knew just how badly their interests were served - and how much it was costing them.

As much as one could say journalism is a dying trade, it is one that is committing collective suicide as it feverishly repeats everything it is told, without the capacity for research and detailed analysis. Only the now matters, and anything off message must wither on the vine should it be inconvenient to the narrative.

While the great and the good follow the legacy media like a rabbit in headlights, and make their names on issues of national significance, our media is being voluntarily hollowed out from the inside by self-censorship - without coercion. And because it starts in such obscure publications as the Oswestry and Border Gazette, nobody seems to give a toss. But they should.

If the recent flooding has shown us anything, it is that decisions that affect us directly are taken by the unelected, without consultation or consent, with the full co-operation of our councils. One wonders how much of the damage could have been averted with a local press unafraid to that "journalism" thing.

Hubert Wolfe said “You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.” In the case of local media, you most certainly can bribe and twist a British journalist. But in a similar vein... there is no occasion to.

Guardian surrealism

Liberating experience?

"Natalie Hynde, convicted on Monday after supergluing herself to a fellow anti-fracking protester at Balcombe, says more people should stand up against the risks" says The Guardian.

"Getting arrested for taking part in direct action at Balcombe was the most liberating experience I've ever had. Nothing I've ever done in my life has made me feel so empowered and alive." says she.

Y'see this is the fundamental difference between most normal people and environmentalist lefties. I have been arrested. They put you in a concrete cell with a big metal door on it.  In my top 100 list of most liberating and empowering experiences, being locked up for eight hours waiting for a duty solicitor to show up is really not among them.

In fact I could describe it as distinctly un-liberating and extremely disempowering experience. Only in the feverish brain of a Guardian illiterate could it be described as such. Perhaps this tells you that the limited horizons of a leftist brain make a small, bare, empty cell a vast lebensraum by contrast. If being locked up in that cell pictured made me "feel alive", then it would mean my day-to-day existence was so dull that I would have self-terminated long before now.

I'm not going to dig into the respective merits of fracking.  That is for others.  What is important is the mindset on display.  It's not about the righteousness of the cause, nor even the outcome.  It's not about convincing people to change their minds or inspiring people to act.  What matters is how "direct action" makes one FEEL.  All bow before the cult of me!

As to fracking causing "spontaneous abortions in livestock", I always thought cattle were pro-life?

A disease of the mind

If I said the MoD has lost the plot completely, you would not gasp in surprise or bat so much as an eyelid.  But here is an especially glaring example of the Malthusian dismalist mindset that now infects all branches of government.  Today the MoD suggests the military may have to "abandon flood-prone bases".

"Many of the military’s most important facilities, including RAF Brize Norton, the Royal Navy bases at Plymouth and Portsmouth, and the Ministry of Defence’s headquarters in London, face a "direct impact" from floods by 2020. Defence chiefs must move away from the “Canute syndrome”, a reference to the 11th century English King reputed to have unsuccessfully ordered the sea to retreat, and decide whether to “abandon, manage retreat, or defend robustly” in the case of the most vulnerable sites along the coast."

Now, for those not familiar with defence affairs, the Royal Navy has a great deal to do with ships.  They are large ones, specifically built for the defence of our rainy little island.  Unsurprisingly, this does mean the Royal Navy will have to maintain a number of coastal facilities.  I am not sure how one "manages retreat" with such a specific mission brief.  Perhaps the MoD is suggesting we move the Royal Navy further inland?  You can see the obvious and immediate cost savings there, though it is difficult to see how they can be an effective military deterrent unless China is attempting to assert it's global supremacy over Lake Windermere and to fly the Communist flag proudly over Cumbria.

Further entrenching this absurdity is the notion that Brize Norton should be surrendered to the elements, given that only recently has the entire logistics and refuelling operation of the RAF been relocated there from the now semi-defunct, (recently modernised) RAF Lyneham  - which sits upon a big hill in Wiltshire.

Of course, the lack of joined up thinking is nothing at all new, but here we see yet another symptom of the defeatism and lack of vision that has now spread into the popular narrative: We are but helpless animals, defenceless from the tides and the winds.  We have decided collectively that surviving as a nation costs too much and is unsustainable, and there is little point in maintaining the basics that protect us from the elements.  Staying alive, prosperous and healthy is far too much effort.  The future is bleak for humanity, but looking on the bright side, there's never been a better time to be a British crested spoonbill.

Who will rid us?

It's something about those hats.

Lefty bishops are absolutely nothing new, though this one does surprise me.  I remember an interview with Justin Welby on Radio 4 shortly before he became the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, and I was struck at how eminently sensible he sounded - and a refreshing change from the dreary leftism of his dullard predecessor. But there must be something in those hats that sucks out a man's intelligence.  Welby has blundered into the welfare debate again.

There is little I could add to Simon Heffer's view on this, in that there is nothing at all moral about our welfare state. Aside from the obvious, it runs counter to what I always believed were the objectives of the modern CofE.  The Church, if anything, is supposed to encourage people to act selflessly, with neither praise nor recognition, of their own volition.  The welfare state is the very antithesis of this.  Not only does it create the very problems it was designed to solve, it also replaces the free will of the individual to act in a selfless and charitable way.  It replaces spontaneous community action with the dead hand of the state.

If anything, the Church of England should have embraced the ideal of Big Society, because that would have cleared the way for it to encourage and support communities in co-ordinating and addressing their own welfare needs, while also bringing a renewed sense of relevance for the Church.

We don't need another shrill, leftist voice in the debate.  We have any number to pick from, including the BBC, and it is out of step with the public in any case.  The volume of the far left message far exceeds its natural support among the people of England, and the way that the church has aligned itself with the far left speaks volumes about about how isolated and out of touch it is.  They mistake the voice of the NGO's and charities begging them for money, on behalf of "the poor", with the legitimate voice of the public.  As it grasps in the dark for relevance, the Church seemingly believes that bowing to media-land populism will slow the attrition rate on the pews.  But it is not saying anything we cannot get elsewhere.

Rather than taking a moral stand on idleness and want, as indeed the Church should, the Church has given way to fad, fashion and sentiment.  The Church is so unsure of itself and its role, that it has lost the confidence to preach morality. And if a church is not preaching morality, then what on Earth is it for?  But we have seen this before; an out of touch institution, struggling for relevance, perceived to be unpopular - and, in desperation, grasps for populist bandwagons.  Did someone say Prince Charles?  Or were you thinking of husky hugging David Cameron?  Anything for acceptability in the eyes of the rogue state broadcaster, who thinks the CofE, the Tories and the Royals are toxic brands.

It's not difficult to see how British society has lost its moral centre.  If the monarchy, the Conservative Party and the Church of England does not know what it believes in or what it stands for, then how can they be defenders of that which is right and good?

Flooding: the anatomy of failure

Before I start, I would like to point out that some of this article is made from recycled, renewable material, as some of my readers may notice.

If ever you wanted an example of how lightweight our drive-by media has become, it is the coverage of the recent flooding.  The more egregious examples come from the Mirror which squarely and predictably takes the simplistic "Tory cuts" line in furthering it's own moronic agenda.  But perhaps the biggest disappointments have been from people who really ought to know better.

Simon Jenkins is more often right than wrong, or at least not as wrong as the rest of the vessel for which he writes, but the notion that no-one is to blame for the floods seems to be a recurrent theme among those who cannot trouble themselves to take a more nuanced look at the matter.  Similarly Rob Lyons at Spiked offers a similarly lightweight article, albeit not entirely wrong. And while one could not disagree with Brendan O'Neill, this is the obvious and easy approach to the story.  Scratch the surface of the story and the link between "climate change" and the floods becomes so completely fatuous, it seems barely worth the effort to say so.  If one really wants the low-down on that, you can ask one of the nerds over at WUWT.

It is especially disappointing to see Spiked drop the ball on this one because it speaks to a number of recurrent themes on their site.  Rob Lyons's central premise is that "There's something backward about the hunt for the one thing or person who might be blamed for England's flooding.".  To me this is a lazy and incomplete assessment of the facts at hand.  There is plenty of blame to go around, but the multi-faceted issues surrounding the floods are not in isolation of each other, and they are symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself.  This is a failure of policy, and a failure of governance, and it starts in the Somerset levels, with just one simple picture.

Not rocket science is it?

From this picture, you can see that maintenance of the waterways, particularly dredging, has been completely neglected.  The question is why?  We have documented this in detail over on EUReferendum.com whereby drains, ditches and rivers have not been cleared as part of the Habitats Directive, along with other regulatory interventions governing the disposal of river silt, too complex (and dull) to go into any great detail here.

The first conclusion you may reach is that we are blaming it squarely on the EU as Ukip would have it.  Not so.  EU regulations are not plucked out of the air.  As Richard North has written at length, regulation is often written by agencies of the UN, nations states, NGO's and international committees.  The EU is merely the mechanism by which they become law and the EU is not at the top of the food chain.  In many respects, unelected, unaccountable NGO's are.

Insomuch as the environmentalist agenda is a useful tool for national governments and the EU to grab ever more powers, NGO's have a significant role to play for them, in that they are the fig-leaf of grass-roots approval.  Hence why the EU uses our money to fund Friends of the Earth and a myriad of other famous (and not so famous) NGO's.  The NGO's are not just embedded in government, but also in academia and schools.  There is good reason for that.  The children of today are the "experts" of the next generation. Spiked has repeatedly made the case that NGO's are corrupting the curriculum, and who could disagree? As a child of the eighties, we were spoonfed NGO's from an early age through BBC Comic Relief and Blue Peter, and Oxfam propaganda packs could always be found in schools.

What all these poverty concern and environmentalist NGO's share in common is that of the Leftist, Malthusian mindset, which is beautifully characterised by Brendan O'Neill in The Guardian and elsewhere.  By maintaining an iron grip on education, they have engineered an academic class of "experts" and teachers who speak to that same agenda, some knowingly, some not.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the debate surrounding the Somerset Levels.

The conventional academic view of dredging is that speeding up the flow of rivers increases the erosion of riverbanks, and causes flooding problems further downstream.  These are entirely plausible statements, and in the context of the River Severn or the Thames, they carry some water.  However, the Somerset Levels are an entirely man-made agricultural system where the normal rules of hydrology don't necessarily apply. Man-made drains require regular clearing. 

What we discovered last week was that the Environment Agency (also stuffed to the rafters with the product of our NGO ridden education system) had made the decision to deliberately surrender parts of the Levels to flooding as part of it's policy of "Water Storage" (deliberate flooding) and "Managed Retreat" (doing bugger all) for the sake of "restoring" wildlife habitats.  Now that the public, who were never consulted, are demanding action, the EA has plenty of rent-a-quote flapping mouths to wheel out onto the BBC Politics show.  We have clown car full of experts to draw upon, all singing from the same hymn book.  In this instance, the NGO influenced Janet & John Book of Hydrology, saying that dredging would have made little difference.  Exactly what the Environment Agency wants to hear.  Even the great Moonbat sticks his oar in.

I have also had the misfortune of bickering with a PhD student of Hydrology (who arrived at the same dullard conclusion as Simon Jenkins) who actually said in the comments "As a tax payer my personal opinion, based on my scientific knowledge, is that dredging would be a massive waste of my taxes and not only that, it would give floodplain residents false security."

As ever the "experts" have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to soak up information without question, but very little capacity to think and analyse. His knowledge is of generic theory, not the reality of the Somerset Levels. Eventually, the man-made rivers, if not dredged again, will choke up completely – because they are not natural watercourses. If he is saying dredging makes no difference to flooding in the Levels, then he is essentially saying the people who built the River Huntspill and the King's Sedgemoor Drain in the first place were wasting their time, and didn’t know what they were doing. As a mere layman I am accused of ignoring the experts, but it is he and his ilk who are disregarding the real experts, not I.  How we got to a state where academics lack the capacity to think is too big a discussion for the scope of this piece, and perhaps I will explore that another time.

Every aspect of our society has in some way been contaminated by the transnational NGO agenda.  At this point, I must take a slight tangent to properly contextualise this phenomenon.  The climate change religion and it's army of NGO priests has its tentacles in just about every area of policy.  Nowhere is it more obvious than in the energy market.  James Delingpole, Christopher Booker and many others, (myself included) have been banging on about the consequences of the Large Combustion Plant Directive for years, which has essentially forced an energy supply gap upon us, quite deliberately, for a number of reasons.

Insomouch as the EU wants a single European energy market and an EU wide super-grid, the driver of this is Co2 reduction.  The ethos behind deliberate shortages is to bring about emergency measures for "demand side management".  This is essentially Orwellian doublespeak for energy rationing through smart-metering, with the overall aim of reducing our carbon footprint. Deliberate shortages are part and parcel of how the EU creates a crisis in order for the EU to supply the solution.  It is what we now know as the "beneficial crisis".

This dynamic comes into play with the flooding in Oxfordshire and Windsor.  These places have flooded before, but these areas are also susceptible to droughts.  There have been submissions in 2002 and 2007 for an extra five reservoirs which got as far as planning, but again were rejected on the basis of on overall EU policy to manage demand, rather than meet supply. (ie make us all go out and buy super efficient washing machines and take communal showers). These could have been used as run off storage for flood prevention/mitigation.

Floods are nothing new but as we become a more densely populated country, our flood management strategy needs to keep up with the times, but has been hobbled by competing agendas, inter-agency bickering and an overall Malthusian EU strategy of "managed retreat". - Something that is worked into the academic curriculum, which perversely balances the needs or wildfowl with our need to eat.  By the same token, they demand we cut down our food miles and produce food locally for "food security", yet in the same breath are happy to write off huge tracts of prime farm land to the sea.

All of this stems from the belief that mankind is destroying the earth and that we have reached our peak as a species and can not be permitted to grow any further.  That is the prevailing idea of our time.  At one time we spawned engineers like Brunel who wanted to open up far reaches of the country (and the world) to the people, and to open up new markets.  Now the engineers we breed are set the task of reversing his work; to ensure we travel less, consume less of what we enjoy, and know that our place in the universe is secondary to wildfowl and badgers.

What we are looking at here is an imposition of global governance at UN and EU level, implemented by the Environment Agency, essentially a policy implementation unit of the EU, which is separate from our own government. Once the media caravan moves on, things will revert to normal, with the EA taking visible remedial action - but only within the constraints of the laws that got us here in the first place. Nothing in policy will be changed, or even up for negotiation.

The EU has assumed competence and legal supremecy over what were perfectly adequate regional authorities, who by contrast knew what they were doing, because their management techniques were tailored to the specific needs of each region, but because the real culprits will not be identified by our lightweight, superficial media, we will be back here next year as the Levels once again give way to the rains.

The individual and diverse problems that brought about these floods, are merely the symptoms of a diseased mindset, which starts in the UN and feeds through to the EU. Until we address the democracy deficit, and the lack of constitutional constraint, we will get nowhere.  What is wrong with the Environment Agency is the same thing that is wrong with every other ministry or quango; government operating to a foreign agenda without transparency, accountability or democratic consent. THAT is your culprit, and if we don't get serious about that, then everything else is just waffle.

News: UN 'must immediately remove' child abusers says Vatican

UN: Child abusers

The Vatican has said that the UN should "immediately remove" all aid workers who are known or suspected child abusers.  The Vatican watchdog for children's rights denounced the UN for adopting policies which allowed aid agencies and peacekeeping troops to sexually abuse thousands of children.  In a report, it also criticised UN attitudes towards homosexuality, contraception and abortion, by channelling aid and weapons to known Islamist terrorist groups.

The UN responded by saying it would examine the report - but also accused its authors of interference.  A group representing the victims of abuse by aid workers in the Middle East and Africa welcomed the report.  In its findings, the Vatican Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) said the UN should open its files on members of the UN who had "concealed their crimes" so that they could be held accountable by the authorities.

Strikers: Good for them

I never thought I would say this but I wholeheartedly support the Tube strike. Removing ticket offices will not make the tubes cheaper because the bosses and the private sector parasites will pocket the difference. The only direction of travel for fares is upward, meanwhile these cuts are not for our convenience, it's for theirs.

Londoners take for granted the ease of Oyster cards and ticket machines but foreigners and out-of-towners, and people with sight/learning difficulties (and techno DJ's on a massive acid comedown) find those infernal things impossible. Assuming they don't randomly switch themselves off when you get to number 2 in the queue after waiting 15 minutes. At the ticket office I always get served faster, and always get the right ticket. And that reduces queues which is an efficiency in itself. Paddington is often choked and it can be a bewildering experience. If anything, a couple more manned ticket offices would improve matters, and would be a great deal safer. It's only a matter of time before we have a Hillsborough event on the tubes.

I often get the wrong ticket from vending machines because I don't know the tube nomenclature and to the occasional visitor to London, the Tube is poorly signed, and often illogical. It is difficult to see how removing the few remaining humans from the system is likely to improve matters. If Londoners think this will lead to greater efficiencies and reduced ticket costs, then Londoners really are every bit as thick as I always assumed they were. If you actually believe the "reassurances" then you were born yesterday.

This is one example of strike action having the ability to make it cost them more than they "save" with air-headed cuts, and I support that as a principle because this strike is in the public interest. I'm not overly impressed by the short-sighted, petulant whining from mildly inconvenienced Londoners, who think their journey to sit in some tube-lit office to shuffle paper (in the internet age) is soooooo important that they couldn't possibly take a couple of days off. So yes, take a screen-shot now folks, cos this is one libertarian conservative showing solidarity with the workers. You won't see this very often.

Can we shoot them yet?

This story has more traction than it deserves.  Not because of the gravity of the offence but because of what it represents: A further tightening of the state noose around the neck of liberty.  Somehow the state seeks the right to intrude on the personal choices of others on a microscopic level, on the basis of some spurious over-hyped findings that pander to pre-existing anti-smoking prejudices.

Not for one moment does anyone stop to ask how big the problem is.  Who doesn't know that smoking is bad for them? Who actually smokes with kids in the car? Is it even a major issue? How will they enforce it?  - and where do we draw the line on perpetual intrusions into our lives, by the state?  But reality has little to do with this. This is more the usual display of politicians showing off their moral probity than anything else, seeking to police every aspect of bad parenting, 

You won't get any argument from me that it's an ugly thing to do to a child, but we cannot start harassing people and fining them just because we disagree with their mostly harmless choices.  The moment we consent to this level of nannying, next will be compulsory inspections in the home, and then it will be dietary inspections and who knows what else from there? This is how tyranny is born. Little by little they salami slice our capacity to live as adults.

What is also lost in this is that we are at critical mass with hectoring by the state. Just last year it was reported that attacks on traffic wardens have rocketed by 400 per cent in some areas of Britain as "furious drivers lash out" after being issued with parking tickets.  You could argue that the traffic wardens are being oversensitive and recording even the vaguest abuse as an "attack", but the fact such news is greeted with cheer and not concern tells you rather a lot:  The public have reached saturation point. 

Everywhere you turn there's a fine or fixed penalty notice - and today we learn via the Daily Mail that "stealth" cameras installed on motorways are now to be used to enforce the 70mph limit, when the vast majority of drivers agree that the 70mph limit on motorways is a stupid anachronism. My own research of late, including an enquiry to the West Yorkshire Chief Inspector, demonstrates the Mail is, as usual, hyperventilating in that the police apply a certain level of discretion in whom they prosecute, but the capability is there, and the temptation to apply the iron fist will overcome them eventually.

But that is in addition to the record numbers of CCTV cameras pointed at us, and now the state is deciding what is acceptable internet viewing. Every single aspect of our lives is being recorded and scrutinised, and justice goes out of the window because rather than facing a magistrate, jury or judge, we are in an era of legal absolutism where a computer decides if you are guilty or not. We have even reached the state where cops and traffic wardens (and soon all public servants) will be wearing cameras on their hats. Is this the society you want to live in? I prefer freedom, warts and all. I've seen the future on our present trajectory and it is a very ugly thing to behold.

If we go down this avenue, people will begin to hate public servants and the police (more than they already do), and the police cannot then secure the co-operation of the public when trying to keep the peace. That is when the covenant between the people and the state is broken and we start seeing a fracturing of society where people no longer call the police and deal with community issues inside their own system of laws. It is already happening. By overreaching its authority the state divorces itself from us and becomes the enemy rather than a protector.

As harmful as that is, we're making all these petty laws that the authorities are more than happy to exploit as a means of revenue collection - to the detriment of enforcing serious crime. People barely bother to report burglary now, nor fraud because nothing will happen. Criminals get a free ride, and the plod then become administrators and revenue collectors for the authorities, rather than public servants. And that's when we will see a serious breakdown in relations between the public and the police. It is already acute and I won't be surprised if people start hurting coppers over things like this - and I wouldn't blame them either.