Black cloth on the towbar

We're told today that round Wolverhampton, you may occasionally see a little piece of black cloth tied to the towbar of a car.

This means, "You rear-end me, I claim whiplash, we split the compensation."

A 2010 BBC news item says that this kind of fraud adds some £44 to the annual cost of a motor insurance policy.

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A child's chair

This is a Victorian child's chair in our guest bedroom. It's for clothes and suchlike, not for sitting. 

Antiques usually have something to say about their times and in the case of this chair I think it's particularly obvious. I'm not thinking of the Aesthetic Movement style here, but rather the basic design.

Firstly there are no stretchers for little George or Georgina to climb on and off the chair themselves. The chair does not encourage that degree of independence.

Secondly there are neither arm rests nor footrest. George or Georgina have to sit up straight with their legs dangling into space or they will fall off. No wriggling around, no stretching across the table for an extra slice of cake.

Ah - those soft-hearted Victorians.

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The camshaft bribe

From Wikipedia
Computer animation of a camshaft operating valves

A well-worn issue this, but still worth asking in the interests of clarity.

Decades ago, someone I knew had a camshaft problem on his car a few days before he was due to get married. Specialist work was required and there was a backlog, but the car was essential for the honeymoon. What to do?

Well he simply went round to the workshop and offered twenty pounds to the guy in charge, which was a reasonable bribe in those days.

“You’re next,” was the response and all went well.

So if an NHS patient sees an NHS consultant and opts for private treatment by that same consultant, is that pretty much the same type of queue-jumping bribe? Legally it isn’t bribery and probably the camshaft issue wasn't either, but should we see both examples as bribery to the extent of calling them bribery?

Or are they merely examples of markets doing their stuff and paying for a better service is perfectly okay? 

To my mind, many forms of legal bribery are endemic in the UK, but so is evasive language. The NHS illustration is entirely legal of course, but in effect NHS consultants accept queue-jumping bribes. Why not say so?

It's good to be explicit isn't it? 

But would I use money to jump the queue if a loved happened to be faced with a long wait for an essential operation to resolve a painful or debilitating condition?

Yes. 

Does that make me corrupt? Maybe, or maybe it is only a rational response to an imperfect world. Yet I would not shy away from the word bribe if it came up. 

So does explicit language leave us with a better situation or a worse? 

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Cameron firm on truth referendum

Prime Minister David Cameron is standing firm on his promise to hold a "truth referendum" if the Tories win the next election.

David Cameron has promised to quit as Prime Minister if he is unable to deliver a yes-no referendum on telling the truth by 2017.

He promised he would not “barter away” the referendum in new coalition negotiations, as an angry Conservative activist told him the public do not believe he will deliver on his promise to give the British people a chance to hear nothing but the truth from government ministers.

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New EU Smoke Directive

Smoke - from Wikipedia

The EU plans to control certain domestic and commercial smoke emissions which for once have nothing to do with tobacco or fossil fuels. From the EU preamble we are told :-

Certain materials with high carbohydrate content are liable to char and emit a complex range of atmospheric smokes when exposed to levels of radiant heat beyond their design parameters. Processes where this occurs are often indoor environments of a domestic or commercial nature.

The key to effective control of potentially harmful indoor smoke is threefold.

a) Controlling the radiant heat source.

b) Controlling the degree of carbohydrate exposure.

c) Standard instruction manuals and training requirements.

In addition to these three control measures, the EU intends to investigate the possibility of changes to carbohydrate formulations, specifically water content, in order to minimise the emission of potentially harmful smoke.

So that’s damp bread and low wattage toasters. I’ll post more detail on the new EU toast-making regulations as they become available.

More details here.

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Russia's big plans?

If we are to understand them, we have to look behind the horrible events in Ukraine - for which the West may turn out to be be partly responsible, if Peter Hitchens is right about the CIA's Director being spotted in Kiev a couple of weeks ago.

What's the big picture?

How about, Russia's future as a non-EU European country?

For all its vastness, the land is far more heavily populated in the West, as hardly anyone wants to live in the cruel cold of the Siberian winter:

(Source)

Then, how about the customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan that started in January 2010, which could be the seed crystal of a sort of eastern EU?

And the massive blue-sky concept, mooted in 2008, of a Trans-Asian Corridor of Development? Here's a map of how it could look:

 

(pic source)

On a less gigantic scale, there is the long-proposed Eurasia Canal project, linking the Black Sea to the Caspian via Georgia:

 

(source)

This was reportedly delayed in 2011, pending the development of cargo facilities in Kazakhstan.

A company called Yaconto LLC had ambitious plans along the same lines, with a naval base at Tuapse (two hours' drive from Sochi, on the Black Sea):

 

Yaconto (founded by a Sergey P Yakunin) appears to have ceased trading, but it's interesting to note that further up the same coastline is the port of Novorossiysk, which has indeed been developed, as I noted in an earlier post:

(pic source)

As part of his integrated plan, Yakunin also proposed the construction of a second waterway parallel to the Bosphorus, to ease shipping between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The last couple of paragraphs refer darkly to potential interference from the corrupt elite in Russia and perhaps this is what has happened after all. (Nevertheless, last year Turkey announced its determination to continue with its own similar plan for a "Kanal Istanbul".)

And three days ago, President Putin told officials to come up with a plan to develop Russia's Black Sea fleet.

Like China, Russia is under pressure to maintain economic momentum, like a fox with its tail on fire. Her aim - perhaps unattainable - is to achieve 7% pa GDP growth to 2020: have a look at these briefings from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There's a long list of challenges to be overcome, including corruption and ineffective law and regulation.

As with China, a rapidly-growing economy is needed to tackle a host of problems, not least demographic challenges. There's a danger of collapse if their economies stall.

We can only hope that this is not the West's intention.

Some previous BOM posts on Russia:

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/battle-for-black-sea.html

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/ukraine-belarus-gets-message.html

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/ukraine-never-mind-fascism-taunts.html

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/ukraine-is-it-just-business-plan.html

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/from-sochi-to-sevastopol.html

 

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UK voter apathy - why?

Source: UK Political Info

"Apathy could destroy democracy. When the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger." - Tony Benn, Maastricht debate in Parliament, 20 November 1991.

The landslide Labour victory of 1997 was not just because of voters switching parties; it was also owing to the drop in voter turnout - the lowest percentage since World War II. It's dropped further since.

And then there's the skewing caused by the FPTP voting system. Have a look at the figures below:

Data: UK Parliament, UK Political Info, BBC

Comparing 1992 and 2010, voter participation dropped by 3.9 million. Between them, the Big Three parties lost 5.48 million votes - and only five seats!

If seats had been awarded strictly in proportion to percentage of votes cast, not only would there now be 150 Lib Dem MPs, but a further 77 from minority parties - whose votes over the same 18-year period increased by 79%, and more than doubled as a percentage of turnout.

Of course, both turnout and party choice would very likely alter if every vote counted equally. (For further discussion of our democratic deficit, please see here.)

Rogue representatives

But here I'd like to add another strand: the quality of our MPs. "They Work For You," says the website - but do they?

Here's an anecdote related to me about the Conservatives as they were in 2002:

"A  lady-friend who was active in the Conservative party convinced me to come to a few debates [plush venues, fine wine and senior politicians/civil servants]. The whole thing was a big disappointment, even then everyone was close minded, refused to acknowledge facts or party member opinion but worst of all clearly had self-interest or personal enrichment at heart. I saw whole rooms of highly intelligent young Conservatives, bankers, lawyers, surgeons etc. walk away in disgust time after time; even my friend left the party afterwards.

"The Conservatives think they are losing young people because they are not interested in politics, my impression was that they were dismayed [even made furious] by the lack of care for our collective futures. Twelve years later we can see what their self-interest has wrought."

And from the Mail on Sunday, here's Liberal Party insider Des Wilson on the 1980s:

"I was not only at the centre of the party in the country at that time but, for a crucial General Election year, the party’s president, allowed to attend the weekly parliamentary party meetings.

"In their innocence, party members may have assumed these meetings on Wednesday evenings throbbed with passionate political debate as the issues of the day were hammered out by men whose lives were devoted to the common good.

"Instead, week after week, I listened with mounting dismay and recoiled at the spectacle of this self-serving, self-pitying bunch (with, I should emphatically add, half a dozen honourable exceptions, such as Archy Kirkwood, Alan Beith and Matthew Taylor), spending an hour or more whining and whinging as parliamentary chores were handed out.

"They endlessly complained about the behaviour of the party’s so-called ‘activists’ – ie members – whose hard work and sacrifices helped them win their seats.

"The ‘activists’, committed to a campaigning party, looked to the parliamentary party for leadership and action. By concentrating on a few activities, they argued, and using all of the opportunities the House provided, the MPs could have more effectively promoted Liberal causes and been a constant thorn in the side of the two old parties.

"But that assumed the MPs saw themselves as the frontline force of a campaigning party, whereas they were a semi-detached pack, disloyal and disunited, self-regarding and self-seeking promoters of their own cause – their own re-election.

"On those Wednesday evenings there was minimal discussion of policy, and when there was, decisions were taken almost entirely on the basis of members’ constituency interests. I never left those meetings without a sense of shame. Week after week I went home thinking, ‘Thank God the rest of the party don’t see this lot in action’. "

Wilson hasten to add the "all a long time ago" rider:

"As for the parliamentary party, that generation has largely moved on (most knighted or sent to the Lords, and several of them dead) to be replaced by a generation who are a world apart from the 1980s lot."

Yes, of course. Though I have spent quite some time over the past nearly two years trying (and failing) to get my Lib Dem MP to stand up and ask questions in Parliament about protecting savers from what I think is the eventual arrival of high inflation (long since arrived, if you look at the price of assets such as residential property).

As to the Labour Party, we have no end of material from the Blair-Brown years (despite their habit of not allowing minutes of many crucial "sofa government" meetings) and more recently there was the internecine strife of the two Miliband brothers who have a strange sense of entitlement, rather like Lord Mandelson and his vaunted descent from Herbert Morrison. It is most odd that the hereditary principle seems as strong among socialists as others, perhaps more so.

(Addendum, 12:20 pm: see Craig Murray today on his experience of standing against Jack Straw, here).

 

Lewis Carroll's Walrus and Carpenter, with their supporters (pic source)

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said.
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter.
“You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none –
And that was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

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