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.

UK Politics: A way out of this mess

It has been noticed that I kick Ukip an awful lot.  It's so unfair isn't it?  But no party gets a free pass from me.  Stupidity is never excused because I like the colour of the rosette it wears.

I don't write much in condemnation of Labour.  There is little point, because I'm crediting my readers as already having basic common sense - and would not be reading this if they had not.  And why rage at the sky for being blue?  That said, it's time to stick the boot in on the Tories.

I've not said all that much on this subject because I'm watching with a close eye while I forge my conclusions.  But here is what I see:  Back in 2004, I was among the many who could see that the Cameron Project to detoxify "the brand" was doomed to failure (as if turning politics into brand competition was ever going to do politics any favours).  Asset stripping the party of its most basic founding principles in favour of chasing the Guardian vote was a tactical blunder, and a huge slap in the face to anyone who considered themselves naturally conservative.  Where else would they go but Ukip?

Much was then said of the "Ukip effect" on Tory marginal seats, which is what produced the defeat in the polls for Cameron - as many said it would.  The dynamic was not the appeal of Ukip, but the revulsion to Cameron.  Along with A-lists and a a total disregard for grass-roots level activity, Cameron made a lot of enemies.  Those who did not vote Ukip simply stayed at home on polling day. 

Senior local Tories at the time told me they needed Cameron in order to win elections.  Except that he did not win, thus we have a coalition.  But that coalition has been largely dominated by the Tories with the Lib-dems becoming increasingly insignificant as each day passes, yet that has not stopped the Tories hiding behind them as an excuse for their timidity and lack of purpose.  It's baloney.  Can you honestly tell me that a Cameron majority government would be more red-blooded?  I doubt it.  We have not seen radicalism of any kind, anywhere.  We have seen fringe adjustments dressed up as reform, but nothing that gets the blood pumping and certainly nothing that inspires us for the future.

The economic miracle recovery could better be described as bumping-along-the-bottom, held aloft by a misplaced sense of optimism, based on flawed and phoney statistics.  Then lately, we have seen Gove and IDS stealing the clothes of radical, principled conservatives, but in the main, the state school system and the welfare empire remain largely in tact.

I have been somewhat moved to give two cheers to IDS, since dismantling the welfare empire cannot be done with a wrecking ball.  It must be done slowly and carefully, because those on welfare are not just numbers on a page.  They are people.  Welfarism took 40 years to mature into the monster it is today and will not be rolled back in the space of one or even two parliaments (much though I would wish otherwise), especially without a firm mandate.

That said, I have no particular confidence that even with a mandate they will put their foot on the gas.  The latest Tory wheeze is to boast their proud achievements via this website in which its calculator boasts that it has reduced my income tax by a staggering £150.  A somewhat extraordinary boast to make to someone who sees tens of thousands removed from their wage annually.  This government has apparently "Saved" me £182 a year on petrol by "freezing Fuel Duty".  Not cutting.  But "freezing".  How is that a saving exactly?  Who is dumb enough to buy this crap?  Nobody.  That's why voter turnouts are so low.

They also boast they have reduced crime by 21% in Avon & Somerset - "making your community safer.".  Of course it's easy to reduce crime figures if you don't bother to investigate crime and you're making the numbers up.  The Tories take us for fools.

Meanwhile, they have successfully framed the economic debate in terms of "deficit reduction", again by fiddling the figures, to proudly tell us that they have marginally slowed the rate of borrowing - which says nothing of the trillion or so in national debt and the gaping trade imbalance.  And for what little good has been done by the Conservative cabinet, it is undermined whenever the PM opens his mouth.

So this leaves us with few choices.  If one is to vote, one can either cast a vote for the ideas-free Ukip clowns or hold ones nose and vote Tory, largely because the country cannot take any more economic or social vandalism by Labour.  What chance have we at all when the best option going is to only to slow the rate of decay by a fraction?

The Tories offer no great vision for the future.  They are as bereft of ideas as all the other parties.  The Tories are not reducing tax so that one might notice.  Nor are they reducing the size of the state.  They are merely reducing public ownership of an expanding state.  My vision of a Conservative future is one of a real "Big Society", whereby government only fills the void charity leaves behind rather than vice-versa.  We see some aspects of this in the rise of food banks, but the charity sector is still hamstrung by red tape, and cannot grow to fill the vaccuum while taxes remain eyewateringly high.

Essentially, what we will end up under the Tories is a Serco-G4S corporate-state, where we pay top whack for services which we then do not receive, while paying twice in order for charities to do what little they can.  All the while, the real private sector stuggles under the mounting regulatory expenses and taxes.  To lay waste to the claim that the Tory party is a party of enterprise, one need only look at local business rates and employment law.  Can you blame the public for their "voter apathy"? 

This leaves us staring across the table at one another, wondering how far we have to fall before we can turn this around.  What we need is a revolution in politics.  But that is not what is on offer, not even by Ukip or the Greens.  What these parties have usefully demonstrated is that playing the party game, by establishment rules, produces the same lamentable outcomes as ever they have.  This is why we have to stop playing their games by their rules.

The process of voting is merely the asking of the establishment if we may please have a little influence in who governs us and how.  That speaks to our collective lack of aspiration.  I want more.  I want to take the power from them, and we can only do that by challenging their authority and removing their means to control us; our money.  If you are paying their wages, you are part of the problem.  Tax evasion is not a crime.  It is now a civic duty.

A general strike among the labour force would scarcely be noticed (were it even achievable), but to deprive them of their money, even for just a month, would force them to the table.  This is what a real taxpayers union would be working toward.  But instead that hole in politics is occupied by the Uncle Tom "Taxpayer's Alliance" which is essentially a Tory-boy think tank; a subservient, grovelling safety valve for "protest" but still essentially shills for the establishment, and always ready with a rent-a-quote for our dismal local media.  We have to bypass them altogether.

I'm afraid there is no glory in the coming revolution.  There is no paid internship in a think-tank, there is no cushy public office or a newspaper column - and there is no media exposure.  The death of this regime will be a death by a thousand pinpricks, from individuals each acting in their own capacity, by their own initiative, each using their wits to play the system.  And this is your blueprint right here.  This is how we force them to the table and that's when they will have to listen to us.  It is then we shall demand The Harrogate Agenda.

Ukip: A party that stands for nothing

Ukip:  The self-ridiculing party

And so it begins.  I have maintained for some time that the tabloid media was building up Farage only to knock him down when he ceased to be useful.  The steady torrent of publicity has now turned into a gradual drip of embarrassments for the party.  The biggest embarrassment yet is not the bizarre behaviour of it's ever more absurd representatives.  In this instance, it is the party's own manifesto.

When told what was on the Ukip website, Mr Farage said: ‘When it comes to websites, I’m not the expert.’ "He also claimed not to know about a compulsory dress code for taxi drivers and proposal to repaint trains." says the Mail.

Let us just digest that for a moment.  A party website is the closest thing in politics you can get to a shop window.  As much as it is your portal to the public, it is also a primary resource for activists.  If the party leader is not familiar with the content of his own website, what then can be said of his competence?  Here we have a leader who doesn't even know what his own party stands for.  Hardly surprising then that his followers don't either.

Moreover, Farage has effectively disowned his own party, because a great many Ukippers do actually think like this.  Just read the Daily Telegraph comments on any given day should someone so much as whisper the words "European Union". Farage has also admitted he has no idea what he has been fighting for since 2010.  All we have is the vague ambition of leaving the EU, without any notion of how, or what we will replace it with.

I wish not to dwell on the contents of the manifesto itself.  Who has that kind of time to waste?  But with a cursory inspection you can see it's an infantile wish-list of diktats and directives that lay waste to any claims that Ukip is a libertarian party.  Strip away these juvenile, cringe-worthy ideas and what remains simply hasn't stood the test of time.  It is a rag bag of parish-council suggestions box submissions, written with an Ikea pencil on a piece of torn up notepaper.  I'm not surprised Farage wishes to disown the manifesto.  I certainly would.  But then how did this nonsense make it as far as the website in the first place?  Somebody in the Ukip high command evidently thought they were credible ideas.

I have not made any friends by saying Farage is a lightweight who will crumble under scrutiny, but yet again, my predictions are coming true.  As we approach the euro-elections, and the prospect of leaving the EU is openly talked about, eyes will fall upon Ukip as to how credible their alternative is.  And it hasn't got one.  Now Farage is in the position of abandoning the party manifesto, and so until such a time as they produce a new one (sometime in the next 18 months, we are told), Ukip is making it up as it goes along.  Does this sound like a serious party to you?

Here is another prediction.  The next Ukip manifesto will not be a set of principles or a blueprint for a new Britain based on a philosophy.  It will be yet another rag-bag of updated suggestions box scribblings, cobbled together with a fact-free, fantasy-land exit plan.  Just for once I would like to be wrong but I fear Ukip will implode before then.  A house built on sand cannot stand.

The death of euroscepticism

I need not go to any lengths to qualify myself as a euro-sceptic. I find the Tories deceptions on the EU as crass and distasteful as any Ukiper. But I cannot support that party. The dogmatic and rude behavior of its members is a huge turn off. Just lately I had Ukipers accuse me of being a "europhile Marxist" for daring to criticise Nigel Farage. These are not serious people and they are not on the same planet as the rest of us.

I also know that Ukip is not a winning party. I have maintained for a long time that populism has a glass ceiling in terms of appeal, and the more you go down that line, the uglier it becomes. Ukipers used to suspect infiltrators sabotaging the party, but now the other parties don't need to bother. Ukip does that all by itself.

But then Ukip is a cul-de-sac anyway. It's unique selling point is EU withdrawal but has nothing to offer in place of it. Sure, they have policies but they are along the same old tired lines of spend a bit more here, spend a bit less there, with some other fringe tinkerings without any intellectual substance. It has no coherent overarching vision.

If you were to listen to the mood music, there is a strong desire for fundamental change in the UK. But Ukip is not that fundamental change. I have said it many times, but most Ukipers think that EU withdrawal alone will take us to sunlit uplands. This is not grown up politics.

Thirty years of integration is not undone over night, and isolationism is not an option, nor is the scorched earth libertarian view of letting the chips fall where they may. In many cases international regulation is not a barrier to trade, but a facilitator. What matters is having a voice in who makes it and how.

But aside from the technical minutia which seems beyond the grasp of the average Ukiper, there is an appetite not just for change, but for a revolution. Just about anyone I talk to thinks the current regime is running as much on borrowed time as it is borrowed money. Yet not one single party is offering real change or offering us a real voice in how we are governed - and who we are governed by. Nobody has a blueprint for a new society, nor a means to achieve it. Unless such is on offer, I cannot see myself moved to vote for anyone. We need fresh ideas based on a coherent philosophy, not a rag-bag of reactionary policies with no connecting thread.

We are never going to arrive at a set of policies that everyone can get behind - and that is why no new party can ever win. This is why we have a political process, to hammer out compromise. The problem being that the process we have no longer works and is corrupted beyond redemption. We need a new framework for governance and an agenda for change.

However, such will be achieved not by the ballot box. Too many have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo. It will come about through becoming ungovernable, as I have set upon with this A&S Police trial. (which most of you couldn't be any less interested in, and would rather "re-tweet" Nigel Farage if he so much as farts).

My view is that they cannot spend what they do not have, and frustrating their means of collecting funds gives us more power than any vote does. Shouting at one another over Twitter and forming tribes behind celebrity politicians is more part of the problem than the solution.

It is for this reason, I am rooting for a total implosion of the Ukip vote (which is inevitable at this rate), and I will do what I can to help bring it forth, so that something worthwhile can rise from the ashes. What we want is real democracy, where we are listened to, we run our own affairs and we say how much of our money they can take - and what they can spend it on. A vision whereby leaving the EU is not the end in itself, more a necessary stepping stone on the way to something bigger and better. The EU will die of its own accord eventually but without something to fill the vacuum, we won't enjoy any greater freedom.

This is why most of my efforts will be directed at The Harrogate Agenda from here on in, and we have an interesting year ahead of us.

Welfare state: A fascist ideology

This video is interesting. Lefties like to tell me that without the welfare state, there would be no welfare at all. But here, Beveridge says that the creation of the welfare state was to be an amalgamation and confiscation of existing welfare provisions. Essentially it was the monopoly nationalisation of independent and municipal welfare to bring about the post-war utopian socialist vision.

The very same was done to our utilities, transport, manufacturing and housing. It was a fascist ideology from the outset; the blueprint for the social component in Le Corbusier's planned society, where the needs and desires of people as human animals were secondary to their craven lust for order, directed from the centre.  

If you find elements of this video at all reminiscent of the propaganda films from Hitler's 1930's nation-building programme, you shouldn't be at all surprised. They are essentially the same thing: Confiscation of private assets, forced nationalisations, state-directed capitalism and repression of individual rights, with power wielded only by a select few, who thought only they knew what was best for us. Sadly, much of that mentality in our rulers survives today.

The NHS and the welfare state are the last dominoes to fall in the dismantling of this grotesque, failed experiment. The folly of mass social housing is behind us, along with the dead hand of socialism on our manufacturing, and the writing is on the wall for the bloated and decaying NHS. But the damage wrought by welfarism will last for generations to come. We can privatise industry and we can bulldoze the tower blocks, but sixty years of social programming is not so easily undone, even with rapid cuts to welfare.  The mindset is still spoon-fed to children through state run schools.  All the more reason why we do need Free-schools, so that we may be free of this cancer forever.

Polly: A masterclass in stupidity.

Toynbee:  Dogshit for brains.

Polly T is a colossal wheeze this morning!

"This realm of squalor and exploitation seemed all but abolished by the 1970s after decades of government building under Attlee, Macmillan and Wilson."

Oh you mean the damp, concrete tower blocks that smashed up long standing communities and forced everyone to live like lab rats in a vertical filing cabinet, that became hotbeds of mugging, murder and rape?