UKIP's prospects, and ours

In the General Election of 2010, not only did UKIP not win a single seat, it failed to come second anywhere. But it came third in four constituencies (Cornwall North, Devon North, Devon West & Torridge, and Buckingham) and was less than 100 votes short of doing the same in Dorset North.

Since then, there have been 18 by-elections. UKIP failed to field a candidate in 5 of them, though 2 were in Northern Ireland which is sui generis. Of the remaining 13, UKIP came second in 7 contests:

By-elections since GE 2010 (Click to enlarge)

- and two of the others were in Wales and Scotland, whose electoral characteristics are again somewhat unlike England's. (Did the Party miss a propaganda trick in not contesting Manchester Central, Corby and Croydon?)

The latest result in Newark, desperately spun as a failure for UKIP, actually showed a 22-point increase and a jump from fourth to second place against the Conservatives . The turnout was 53%, down from 72% in 2010, but was not negligible (even in the General Election of 2001, overall national turnout dropped below 60%). And last year UKIP achieved a similar coup in South Shields, coming from no-candidate in 2010 to 24% of the vote in 2013.

Okay, so UKIP are becoming the protest party of choice (notwithstanding George Galloway's cunningly focused and aggressively-fought win in Bradford West). But where will the breakthrough come?

Regionally, the Party turned in its best GE 2010 performance in the south of England. On average, candidates in the South-East needed a further 9-point boost to hit third place, and 8 points in the South-West. Disillusionment with the collaborationist LibDems and resentment against the austerity-for-the-oiks Conservatives, plus distrust of Labour's slightly odd leadership, may just do it for UKIP in 2015.

In Ireland, none of the mainland parties counts for anything; Scotland has its own individualistic momentum pre- and probably post-referendum; and the political history, culture and economy of Wales will continue to support socialists and Celtic nationalists. The battleground is England, especially in the parts that haven't yet become Welfare State Labour fiefdoms.

The GE 2010 results suggest that UKIP needs an increase of 27 - 30 points to win in the 10 Parliamentary constituencies where it did best; bigger than anything seen in the by-elections of the last four years. But there were 5 seats where 10 extra points would have seen UKIP become the runners-up, 36 more seats where 10-15 points would have done that, and 122 further seats that needed 15-20 points to come second. UKIP is not very far from gaining something of an audible voice, if not yet the chair. Meanwhile, the local elections have brought in many apprentices to the craft of government.

And there's work to be done.

In my view, those of the electors who are not unthinkingly tribal in their party loyalties want neither a socialist state where we have accepted ultimate failure and are reconciled to sharing the wooden spoon between us, nor the false promise of wealth that seems simply to further enrich the rich and can't supply employment to the masses. Economic dysfunction is leading to increasing social dysfunction, the cost of which is threatening to destroy the postwar safety net, which wasn't set up for a regime of vodka, broken families and armies of social workers.

EU periphery countries are suffering on the Procrustean bed of the single currency, about which Farage has spoken so blunt-eloquently for so long, but the question remains, will he also have to moderate his enthusiasm for the globalism that is likewise undermining our balance of trade? Along with undemocratic government from Brussels, economic immigration and the instability caused by unifit currency, world trade is a control issue. There has to be a realistic long-term plan for getting Britain to work and save, without reliance on temporary nostrums like North Sea oil and monetary inflation, or hope will be lost and the darkness will begin to descend.

Can UKIP serve its apprenticeship and construct its masterpiece in time to make a difference to the country?


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Honesty cannot win

It might seem ignominious to believe something on compulsion, because I can’t help believing it ; when reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons for everything. Yet this demand is unreasonable : there cannot be a reason for everything. It is mere automatic habit in the philosopher to make this demand, as it is in the common man not to make it.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith

I think Santayana was right, there cannot be a reason for everything and it is unreasonable to assume otherwise. The world is exceedingly complex and full of rational voids over which human reason cannot, and in some cases may never build bridges from cause to effect.

In many ways this is our biggest unsolved problem - our penchant for inventing spurious bridges across rational voids. I don't mean your penchant of course, nor mine. I mean their penchant - those creepy charlatans who spoil every decent human endeavour. Human nature abhors rational vacuums, so charlatans fill them to overflowing with an infinite cascade of sweet nothings.

Unfortunately rational voids have features and regularities which seem to promise rather more than they deliver so yet again charlatans jump in with both feet, muddying the waters for the rest of us. Yet if we could devise a science of imperfect knowledge then maybe we'd make some progress.

Aspects of the same situation may even contradict each other while remaining valid within certain caveats. To take a rather weak illustration, I could say it is pitch dark outside. You might say I’m going for a walk – I love walking under the stars.

Two aspects of the same situation, both valid but mildly contradictory in that they stress different aspects of a dark night. It may be dark, but there is enough visibility for a walk beneath the stars. 

Does it all begin in childhood when we reward children who give answers over those who don't? Do we condition ourselves to give answers and carry it over to situations where no answer can be given? Are we hopelessly entangled in our own conditioning?

Maybe we are, but the question itself is too complex for simple answers like this. To avoid being hoist by our own petard, we have to be tentative over the diagnosis and recognise its incomplete nature. So it isn't even possible to diagnose the problem with assurance.

Complexity may be a battleground where honesty cannot win.

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Political technology

Back in 2011, Andrew Wilson wrote a piece in opendemocracy about political technology in Russia.

"Political technology" – a term largely unfamiliar in the West - is the euphemism commonly used in the former Soviet states for what is by now a highly developed industry of political manipulation. There is a general understanding that elections are fixed in most countries of the region, from Russia to Kyrgyzstan, but we still do not look closely enough at just how they are fixed.

Although Wilson's piece mainly concerns Russian politics with it's more ruthless and almost openly fraudulent manipulation of political power, there are wider implications too.

As a term to describe the activities of modern political fixers, "political technology" is also useful here in the UK and EU. Here, political control also has its purely technical aspect. Maintaining the power of unelected stakeholders has become an apolitical matter of manipulating human behaviour rather than promoting an ideology.

From the above link.

One advantage of political technology is that it is ‘dry’. It helps regimes function without ideology, and move from one option to another. Ivan Krastev claims that authoritarian regimes may actually be more stable without an official ideology, which gives oppositions something to mobilise against.

Political technology may have an inbuilt tendency towards drama inflation, or at least towards inventing a new drama for every election, which is likely to be destabilising in the long run. The electorate can sense a lack of competition, and political technologists constantly have to fight against the declining turnout they themselves have caused – either with more drama or more fraud. 

It seems to me that Tony Blair was our first exponent of "dry" political technology here in the UK. He created the first government with no ideology and no interest in governing democratically. Not that UK democracy has ever been strong or effective - and that of course may have been the vacuum into which Blair's political technology was bound to exploit.

UK and EU political technology is undoubtedly softer than the Russian version in that it is more covert and less reliant of crudely fraudulent techniques such as vote-rigging, although that too has become an issue of concern. Postal vote scams have now become somewhat notorious in the UK.

Postal voting is open to fraud on an "industrial scale" and is "unviable" in its current form, a top judge has said.

Richard Mawrey QC, who tries cases of electoral fraud, told the BBC that people should not be able to apply for postal votes as a matter of course.

But the Electoral Commission said it would not be "proportionate" to end postal voting altogether.

The government also said it had no plans to abolish the current system, saying it had made it easier for many people to vote.

Yet as regimes become apolitical and as they base their power on political technology rather than ideology, then perhaps electoral fraud becomes politically unimportant. After all, we are now perfectly familiar with major league vote-rigging by or on behalf of the EU. From the BBC.

When it comes to rejecting European treaties, Ireland has a long track record.

Both the Nice Treaty (2001) and Lisbon Treaty (2008) referendums were lost, forcing the governments of the day into the embarrassing position of having to re-run the votes to get them passed.

This is political technology in action, but usually it isn't so transparently fraudulent. Usually, political technology here in the UK and EU seems to revolve around narratives and what Wilson calls dramaturgiia, or a fake drama designed by political technologists to manipulate popular sentiment. 

Often, as in Russia, the drama seems designed to create a dichotomy between the devil you know and the devil you don't, insinuating a sense of unease about the prospect of change.

Next year's general election should be interesting. Watch out for the political technology. If you are a mainstream voter, your party will make energetic use of it.

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President Obama and Executive Orders

It is being said that President Obama is over-fond of issuing decrees in the form of Executive Orders. The answer is yes - and no.

The graph below shows how many Orders each US President has issued, and it is clear that the twentieth century has seen an enormous increase in the use of this legislative tool.

I find it harder to get similar information on UK Orders in Council, but the picture is clear: the Executive has become addicted to short cuts in the exercise of power. There is certainly something to worry about, but equally certainly President Obama should not be seen as culpably exceptional.

(Click to enlarge)

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Seriously big batteries

Sackerson recently sent me this Telegraph piece on solar power. As you can see, it reads like science fiction, no doubt because that's what sections of the reading public enjoy. For example :-

Solar is for keeps. The more it expands, the cheaper it gets as economies of scale kick in.

Stirring stuff and maybe we need to be irrationally optimistic to push the possibilities to their limits, but unfortunately the claim is false.

Solar power is notoriously intermittent such that too much of it attached to a distribution grid causes unacceptable stability problems. Wind has a similar issue. There are other factors, but until the storage issue is resolved in a cost-effective way, stable distribution grids require predominantly fossil fuel or nuclear generation, quite apart from issues of cost.

So as we all know, a big problem with wind and solar energy is storage. How do we store it and how do we do so at a reasonable cost? Fossil fuel energy such as coal and gas are stored chemically in the fuels themselves, so might chemical storage be viable for wind and solar? From the same Telegraph piece we have:-

Cheap energy storage from flow-batteries (a Harvard research project funded by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency) will soon overcome the curse of intermittency, letting us absorb the sun’s rays by day and release them again as heating and light overnight.

Well it isn't just day and night is it? Especially here in the UK. For example, we have this thing called winter. I'm surprised a Telegraph writer hasn't heard of it.

So what is there to extract from the writer's runaway enthusiasm? Obviously we already store energy chemically in batteries and large scale battery storage seems to be the next big thing for wind and solar energy.Yet before the excitement overpowers our critical faculties, it is worth remembering that even with storage, wind and solar may not be economically viable anyway.

However, one option is flow batteries which are being pushed hard as a viable means of storing wind and solar energy. EnerVault has recently opened  an iron/chromium flow battery in California.

The EnerVault flow battery's two electrolyte tanks
store energy generated by a solar array
in an almond orchard outside Turlock (Stanislaus County). 

The EnerVault flow battery can deliver one megawatt-hour of energy from a 250 kW battery for four hours. Greater capacity could be achieved via more tanks of electrolyte. The battery is charged by a solar array.

There are complexities, but the nuts and bolts are not expensive and the technology is well understood. Iron and chromium salts are inexpensive and fairly safe to handle so a degree of optimism may not be out of place here. From spectrum.ieee.org.

By 2015, EnerVault expects to have multi-megawatt commercial systems installed. In four or five years, it hopes to have 20 megawatt or 50 megawatt-size batteries taking the place of natural gas "peaker plants," says Pape. The tanks that hold electrolyte solution can be very large but the footprint is comparable to conventional power generation equipment, he says.

The chemical storage medium is iron and chromium salts dissolved in water. Essentially all the battery does is pump them through a cell. To recharge, the process is reversed. At the heart is stable and durable technology with few moving parts, but it is still worth remembering that these are essentially political technologies. Not much seems to be novel apart from the cells.

Using iron and chromium electrolytes required developing a novel mechanical system for flowing the materials through the battery’s cells. The batteries have a series of stacked cells, with each one optimized for the state of charge of the electrolytes flowing through them, says chief technology officer Ronald Mosso.

Even so, I have a soft spot for human ingenuity and the spirit of invention and my soft spot hopes at least one or two energy projects such as this come to fruition.

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Cover-Up

From Alan Clark's diary, 5 February 1991, describing his induction into Her Majesty's Privy Council. Having taken an oath to the Monarch:

"... There was another oath. The old Clerk... read out a very long passage the substance of which was, as far as I could make out, was that I undertook to maintain total secrecy even, particularly indeed, about colleagues concerning whom I might hear unsatisfactory things. (The more I think about this the odder it seems.)"

Here is what is said to be the oath, though before 1998 it was considered "criminal, and possibly treasonous" even to reveal the wording:

"You do swear by Almighty God to be a true and faithful Servant unto the Queen's Majesty, as one of Her Majesty's Privy Council. You will not know or understand of any manner of thing to be attempted, done, or spoken against Her Majesty's Person, Honour, Crown, or Dignity Royal, but you will lett and withstand the same to the uttermost of your Power, and either cause it to be revealed to Her Majesty Herself, or to such of Her Privy Council as shall advertise Her Majesty of the same. You will, in all things to be moved, treated, and debated in Council, faithfully and truly declare your Mind and Opinion, according to your Heart and Conscience; and will keep secret all Matters committed and revealed unto you, or that shall be treated of secretly in Council. And if any of the said Treaties or Counsels shall touch any of the Counsellors, you will not reveal it unto him, but will keep the same until such time as, by the Consent of Her Majesty, or of the Council, Publication shall be made thereof. You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance unto the Queen's Majesty; and will assist and defend all Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty, and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates. And generally in all things you will do as a faithful and true Servant ought to do to Her Majesty. So help you God."

Note in particular this sentence: "You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance unto the Queen's Majesty; and will assist and defend all Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty, and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates."

How is this to be squared with surrender of sovereignty to the European Union?

But here is a list of people you can't ask, for they have sworn not to tell you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_British_Privy_Council

It includes the present and all past living Prime Ministers and other senior politicians in both Houses.

And note that not even the Counsellor-to-be was advised of the oath's wording before he took it.


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Buggery and British politics

From Alan Clark's diary, Sunday 6th January 1991:

"The concept of having clever, tough, congenial people in the Whips' office* is relatively new. In former times they were just fieldsport** enthusiasts whose last and only fulfilment-period had been bullying (and in some cases buggering) Lower Boys at Eton."

* Party enforcers. Clark was a Conservative, but all major Parties have Whips, or "whippers-in" - a term from hunting with dogs.
** Which Clark hated, being an animal-lover and conviction vegetarian.

Could this combination of elite public-school sexual practices with cagey awareness of the common people's attitudes explain why nothing much has been said or done about the alleged long-standing abuse of vulnerable children by some British politicians? Perhaps they see it as merely an extension of the abuse of "Lower Boys" by older boys.


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The Three Bears, Italian-American style

The manual-typewritten text below was given to a Brooklyn-raised member of the family nearly fifty years ago. It's based on a 1960/61 recording by Lou Monte (or vice versa?), now available on YouTube, as you see - but you may enjoy the challenge of deciphering it yourself before listening!



Di Tri Berrese

Uana appona taim uas tri berres: mamma berre, papa berre, e beibi berre. Live inne contri nire foresta. NAISE AUS. No mugheggia. Uanna dei papa, mamma, e beibi go bice, orie e furghetta locche di dorra.

Bai enne bai commese Goldilocchese. Sci garra nattingha tu du batte meiche troble. Sci puscia olle fudde daon di maute; no live cromma. Den sci gos appesterrese enne slipse in olle beddse.

Bai enne bai commese omme di tri berres, olle sannbrone enne send inne scius. Dei garra no fudde; dei garra no beddse. En uara dei goine due to Goldilocchese? Tro erre aure inne strit? Colle pulissemenne?

Fatta Cienze!

Dei uas Italien Berres, enne dei slippe ona florre.

Goldilocchese stei derre tri uicase; itte aute ausenomma en guista bicose dei esch erre tu meiche di beddse sci sei "go to elle," enne runne omme craine tu erre mamma, tellenerre uat sanimabicese di tri berres uer.

Uatisuse? Uara iu goine du? --- Go compleine sittiolle ?


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Harness your own wind

From dutchnews.nl

Engineering and Technology Magazine (link may require registration) reports on a new Dutch design for domestic wind turbines.

A super-efficient and completely soundless wind turbine developed by a Dutch company aims to enable every household to generate its own wind energy.

Officially unveiled today, the shell-shaped Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine offers much better efficiency compared with conventional designs. Its shape, modelled after the perfectly logarithmic spiral of a Nautilus shell, allows the turbine to always position itself at the best angle towards the direction of the wind, achieving efficiency which is about 80 per cent of what is theoretically possible.

With an average speed of wind of about 5m/s, the turbine generates about 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy – about half of the consumption of a regular household. The Archimedes, the company behind the Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine, believes that in combination with efficient solar panels, the turbine can make every household completely energy self-sustainable.

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Getting rid of Clegg?

Mike Smithson over at politicalbetting.com thinks serious money has been spent on a recent ICM poll designed to put pressure on Nick Clegg.

Hopefully later today ICM will release the detailed data [*] from the private polling that’s splashed by the Guardian this morning. The broad message of what’s been leaked is that the party stands to do worse in four key seats that it already holds without a change of leader.

The choice of pollster is interesting. ICM has over the years tended to show the most favourable position for the Lib Dems.

What struck me are not just the numbers but the fact that serious money is being spent on the effort to try to get Clegg out.

Constituency surveys like this are just about the most complex and expensive political polling that you can do. They can only be carried out by phone and the bill for this job will have been tens of thousands of pounds. It also takes time and planning. It is not the sort of thing that could have been commissioned last week.
[*] my link

Well it is easy enough to believe that powerful Lib Dem insiders want to be rid of Clegg well before next year's general election. As for the wider picture, I wonder if we are seeing the demise of the Lib Dems.

Without an obviously unique Lib Dem selling point, three mainstream parties may be one too many. The success of UKIP clearly highlights the lack of political choice in UK politics and the Lib Dems may pay the price. Dire he may be, but I suspect the problem runs deeper than Clegg's unappealing political persona.

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Splits, knives and growing up

A few days ago my wife and I both happened to mention a game called splits which we both played as youngsters in the fifties and early sixties. For those who never played splits, this is how it went.

It had to be played on grass for reasons which will soon become obvious. Two of us stood facing each other with our feet together. One had a knife, preferably a small sheath knife, but a penknife or even a table knife would do as long as mum didn’t catch us taking it.

The one with the knife threw it into the grass by the other’s feet. The blade had to stick into the ground cleanly to count as a good throw. The non-thrower then had to remove the knife from the ground and put their foot on the spot where the knife had been. Then it was their turn to throw.

The aim of the game was to throw the knife far enough away from the other’s foot that he or she couldn’t reach it – hence the name splits. However with too long a throw there was less chance of the knife sticking in the ground properly, so getting the distance right was essential.

Another rule allowed you to throw the knife between the other’s feet. If it stuck into the ground cleanly between the feet, you were allowed to bring your own feet together again.

Most older kids seemed to have at least a penknife in the fifties. They were used for harmless games like splits, carving initials on trees or school desks, sharpening pencils and other important functions. In my world it was part of growing up on a council estate and we did not see knives as street weapons.

No doubt there were accidents and possibly a few tragedies, but our role models were mum and dad and clean-cut heroes on black and white TV such as the Lone Ranger. Role models presumably strong enough for us to be trusted with knives, and tacitly allowed to play games such as splits.

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European Elections - splitting the UKIP vote?

Loki, the trickster of Nordic mythology (pic)

Odd how many Eurosceptic parties have appeared on the voting paper for the West Midlands. The Harmony Party is 2014-registered. Hmm.

Remember the "Literal Democrats", "Conversative Party" and "Labor Party" from the 1990s, resulting in an Act to stem the confusion? The first of these split the Liberal vote in 1994 and let in a Conservative.

We've all heard now of the Tories getting into bed with The Guardian to feed anti-UKIP stories into the public perception; but is there any other jiggery-pokery going on?


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Is Clegg off to the EU?

Nick Clegg seems to be using every opportunity to hone his EU credentials.

Having begun this European election campaign by challenging the UKIP leader to debate whether Britain should stay in or get out of the EU, he is ending it by insisting that being pro-Europe was the best way to be pro-British.

In a speech in Oxford, he attacked those he called "false patriots", saying:

"Ukip. Conservative backbenchers. Isolationists. They are not thinking about Britain's interests. They shroud their narrow nationalism in the language of patriotism. They mask their hostility towards Europe as British bulldog spirit. But these are false patriots. The isolation they offer is a breach of our history, of our great British tradition of engagement, and of our enlightened national self-interest. If the forces of insularity and chauvinism get their way they will ensure that Britain no longer benefits from the political and economic advances in Europe that we have shaped. And they will hand the keys to running our European continent to the Germans, the French and others, while we retreat back across the English Channel."

It seems to me that this is not genuine political campaigning so much as preparing the ground for defeat. Lining up his next job.

Clegg is rallying the troops of course, but only where the rallying cry suits his personal circumstances. He's preparing for failure. He isn't saying what Lib Dem MEPs would do for the UK, because the answer to that is nothing.

No doubt this is the kind of thing the Lib Dem faithful wish to hear from their leader, but as ever with Clegg, the focus is tightly trained on his own situation.

Here are my credentials. I'm on your side. Always have been, always will be. I'll fight tooth and nail for the EU.  

From a suitably prestigious office over at your place.  

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Climate, CO2 and cooling

A very interesting and detailed take on climate change is to be found in this fascinating post by E M Smith, aka blogger The Chiefio. Written back in December 2012, it is long and detailed but well worth reading. This brief post is merely my take on his ideas.

Firstly the role of CO2.

Most people interested in the climate change debate will know that CO2 in the stratosphere is thought to have a cooling effect as opposed to its supposed warming effect in the troposphere. The cooling effect of CO2 may also be causing the stratosphere itself to cool.

One key finding was the importance of the impact of CO2-induced temperature change on stratospheric ozone in estimating temperature trends. The decreased stratospheric temperatures due to a CO2 increase slowed stratospheric ozone destruction; the higher ozone concentrations caused heating that slightly offsets CO2-induced cooling.

Although simple physics suggests CO2 could act as a so-called greenhouse gas in the troposphere, it doesn’t tell us the magnitude of any resultant warming. A possible warming effect may be swamped by other processes – the physics doesn’t tell us. Many have tried to torture the data into telling them what they want to hear, but so far none have succeeded.

Yet many climate sceptics and all orthodox global warming proponents agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 should cause some detectable warming in the troposphere. Put simply, both groups think CO2 must slow down radiative surface cooling because of its capacity to absorb outgoing infrared radiation.

The crucial difference in views between the two sides is how much warming we should expect - the so-called climate sensitivity to CO2. Yet the current global temperature standstill shows both views to be wrong. Climate sensitivity to CO2 appears to be as near zero as makes no difference.

So instead of bodging the thing with ad hoc hypotheses why not assume that heat transfer in the troposphere is primarily driven by convection, evaporation and condensation? Hardly a radical assumption given our knowledge of weather. There are many other factors to consider such as clouds, El Niño, volcanic activity and ocean heat capacity, but to avoid an impenetrable fog of complexity we first have to stand back and look at broad possibilities.

Next the tropopause.

The tropopause lies between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Smith sees understanding the nature of the tropopause as a key to understanding how global heat transfer from the surface occurs in two distinct bands in two distinct ways.

The troposphere where heat transfer is primarily driven by convection and water vapour.
The stratosphere where heat transfer is primarily radiative.

Of particular interest is how the height of the tropopause is influenced by the amount of heat which has to be transported from troposphere to stratosphere. As a result, the tropopause is higher at the equator than it is at the poles.

Source 

Even if CO2 does warm the troposphere by an amount we can’t yet measure, the heat may be transferred upwards via convection, condensation and evaporation - not radiation.

Stratospheric cooling rates: The picture shows how water, cabon dioxide and ozone contribute to longwave cooling in the stratosphere. Colours from blue through red, yellow and to green show increasing cooling, grey areas show warming of the stratosphere. The tropopause is shown as dotted line (the troposphere below and the stratosphere above). For CO2 it is obvious that there is no cooling in the troposphere, but a strong cooling effect in the stratosphere. Ozone, on the other hand, cools the upper stratosphere but warms the lower stratosphere. Figure from: Clough and Iacono, JGR, 1995; adapted from the SPARC Website. 

Note the above picture of stratospheric cooling rates. The red bit in the bottom left below the tropopause (dotted line)  is heat being dumped into the stratosphere by water vapour. The narrow pale blue band to the right of that and also below the tropopause – that’s CO2 doing nothing much.

Above the troposphere, convective heat transport ends, radiative processes take over and CO2 plus ozone are kept busy radiating excess heat into space. Those are the two colourful elongated oval shapes.

I’m not suggesting Smith's overall schema is what actually happens because nobody has that sorted, but I like his style. Climate conjectures are all vulnerable in one way or another, because that's the nature of the beast, but even in outline these ideas feel coherent to me. They do not seem to violate any scientific laws and fit well with observation.

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Leo Abse's attack on Tony Blair

"The Man Behind The Smile: Tony Blair And The Politics Of Perversion"



In 1972: Tony Blair and Alan Collenette, Richmond, West London

1996: two years after Blair became leader, a year before his landslide electoral victory and triumphal entry into Downing Street. Veteran Welsh MP Leo Abse, Old Labour and proud of it, gives TB a working over with fists of Freudian analysis.

There is an old Chinese philosophical saying: "man is greater than anything that comes out of him." I find elaborate schematics of the human soul unconvincing. The insights of psychologists are illuminating and suggestive, but I don't think you can tie them all together with threads into a neat bundle. There's lots of ends of speculation poking out of it. For example, the foetus hears its mother's heartbeat, but that isn't necessarily why we respond to the rhythms of rock music, for we have heartbeats of our own.

I think it was Karl Popper who observed that much of psychoanalysis was unfalsifiable. Yes, Leo Blair had a debilitating stroke, but we don't know what the son read into his father's mute gaze. Yes, TB's mother was reportedly unassuming and the "cement" of the family, but no, we don't know that tending to her disabled husband's needs starved her son of affection; nor that "cement" should be read as cold and hard, rather than binding. One can certainly postulate that intimations of mortality galvanized Blair, but then he said that himself.

Explaining a public figure like TB is an even bigger challenge, because policy and presentation are at least as much about other people as one's own personal history. The vagueness of Blair's manifesto may be, as Abse suggests, to do with an immature reluctance to accept one's own aggressive impulses and enter into combat with opponents; but it may have more to do with making the broadest possible appeal to a public that wants pain-free answers.

As early as the 1960s, there was concern about how presentation had trumped policy in American politics - see Joe McGinniss' book "The Selling Of The President 1968." Then there's Robert Redford's 1972 film "The Candidate", in which the challenger's successful strategy is to get the incumbent to commit to policy statements, losing a percentage of the voters each time, without doing the same himself, so when he wins, the new President is lost:



Blair's "consensus by diktat" approach to his Party must have been a contrast to the divisions among the Conservatives, and the emphasis on youth helped to make Labour's opponents seem old and out of touch. Did Blair like Jagger? Wilson made much of the Beatles. Abse should have swung his bow round and loosed his penetrating shafts at an electorate infantilised by dreamlike media and by a government that promises to do all for us because it takes everything from us.

Mad, or cunning? The smile of a politician may be that of a pervert afraid of his own violence; or it could be to disarm you while being perfectly aware of his aggression - here is Chris Mullin's diary for September 13, 2001:

"To London on the 18.47. David Miliband was on the train. He is in a similar situation to the one I was in when I was first selected - enemies occupy every office in his constituency party, although in his case it is nothing personal.

"He says The Man - who was once in a similar situation in Sedgefield - advised him 'to go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them'. Advice that The Man seems to have applied throughout his career."

But in 1996, there are elements of the coming Labour government that Abse correctly identifies as sources of trouble: the Wilson-style "kitchen cabinet" of four powerful men, the increased power of Brown's Treasury, the failure to think things through (despite protestations of "joined-up thinking") that led to the graceless Baroness Jay curtly dismissing the hereditary peerage without having a generally agreed alternative, the continuing obsession with presentation (endlessly "making sure", "shaking up", "rolling out").

It was all Bakunin, the impulse to destroy justified as a creative urge. It was rock, but it spilled out of the concert hall. Think of Lindsay Anderson's 1968 "If...": moral outrage at finding the pickled foetus in its school jar, but then mortaring and machine-gunning the assembly at Speech Day. Think of the 1970 film (based on 1968) "The Strawberry Statement", students destroying the academics' lifetimes' work and screwing among the filing cabinets. Or "Zabriskie Point". The Paris Riots of 1968. The revolutionaries who took over the Establishment, cannabis fumes rolling down the BBC's corridors.Tariq Ali, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary. Fun. Millenarian madness. The once-a-generation collective testosterone tension that explodes into war, civil war or rebellion. It wasn't just Blair, it was a whole culture ready to take on its parents, who had had enough of real, bloody conflict in their lifetime and who were dazed at the reaction from well-fed youngsters with money in their pockets. A culture ready for a Leader. "Don't trust anyone over 30", said Jack Weinberg.

Assisted by biased reportage, the public saw a divided, dithering and venal Conservative Party. Time for a change. Blair was on the boat when the tide turned.

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Does the Conservative Party defend the Union? Does it want to?

Despite its name, the Conservative and Unionist Party has reasons to permit the breakup of the United Kingdom.

In Scotland and Wales, the Labour Party has a strong and enduring dominance. It would benefit the Tories greatly in Parliament if these became independent countries; and Northern Ireland is an idiosyncratic electoral landscape, an irrelevance as far as the two major Westminster parties are concerned, except in straitened political times when their (and other minority) votes must be courted.

The shifting balance between Labour and Conservative means that minor parties can wield disproportionate influence. Leo Abse's 1996 book on Tony Blair reminds us that in the late 1970s a weak Labour government gave nationalists the go-ahead on devolution in exchange for their support; only Abse's "reasoned amendment" led to the requirement for referenda beforehand. This was profound long-term change made for fleeting party political reasons.

None of Northern Ireland's 18 MPs belongs to any of the Big Three, so aside from their ability to lobby they merely serve to raise the bar for an overall majority in the House, from 317 seats to 326. Changing demographics in the Province suggest that, ever so slowly, Northern Ireland is moving to a closer relationship with the South.

Without Scotland, the Conservatives would have had an 11-seat margin in 2010 (306/591); without Ireland also, it would have been 20 seats; and had Wales too been independent, the Tories would have had a comfortable 32-seat margin in an English Parliament.

Wales and Scotland are effectively Labour fiefdoms (and I suspect that if Scotland does secede, there may be a winnowing of Salmond's currently strong faction in the Scottish Parliament: what's the point of a nationalist who has finally got what he wants? The SNP will have to rebrand itself as a second socialist party). Northern Ireland is drifting away into a different future.

But even in England, the Conservative Party has no guaranteed dominance, and its seats are much more liable to swings than Labour's. In 2010, the 50 constituencies with the biggest winner's vote margin over the runner-up were all Labour. Conversely, in the 50 seats with the narrowest margins, 38 were Conservative, of which 17 are expected to switch to Labour next time and 1 to a minority candidate; 1 is and is expected to remain in Labour hands; and the remaining 11 were Liberal, of which 6 may go to the Tories and 1 to Labour. The Tories have to work far harder, and make more concessions, than the Labour Party. Only a long period of incompetent or tyrannical rule under Labour could propel the Conservatives to victory as in 1979.

Electoral Calculus is predicting a slaughter of the Liberals next year, with a loss of two-thirds of their current seats. If the UK fragments, the English tug-o'-war between Labour and Tory under "first past the post" looks likely to shut out minor parties much as in American politics; and as in the USA, the tussle is on common ground, though here the political territory is more redistributionist than there.

The Tories are doomed. They can remain a party only in name, if at all. They may slow their decay by jettisoning unprofitable (to them) parts of the Kingdom (as the EU keenly desires), but their ultimate future in a ruined economy is in some form of rapprochement with the socialists. Meanwhile their bandit-cronies strip-mine what's left while they can and sock it away abroad. Like Blair, like Clegg, Cameron will be a Lord Jim when the storm-tossed ship of state heads for the rocks.
.

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Tipping point

Source: http://www.justintarte.com/2012/10/leadership-and-your-tipping-point.html

"When looked at objectively each merger or take over is a loss of economic activity. This becomes painfully clear when we have a look at the unemployment rates of some countries...

"The pillar Prosperity of a society is about to fall again. History has shown that the fall of the pillar Prosperity always results in a revolution. Because of the high level of unemployment after the second industrial revolution many societies initiated a new transition, the creation of a war economy. This type of economy flourished especially in the period 1940 – 1945.

"Now, societies will have to make a choice for a new transition to be started."

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/current-problems-associated-end-third-industrial-revolution.html


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Gogol on German competition

A shoemaker, indeed? 'As drunk as a shoemaker,' says the proverb. I know what you were like, my friend. If you wish, I will tell you your whole history. 

You were apprenticed to a German, who fed you and your fellows at a common table, thrashed you with a strap, kept you indoors whenever you had made a mistake, and spoke of you in uncomplimentary terms to his wife and friends. 

At length, when your apprenticeship was over, you said to yourself, 'I am going to set up on my own account, and not just to scrape together a kopeck here and a kopeck there, as the Germans do, but to grow rich quick.' 

Hence you took a shop at a high rent, bespoke a few orders, and set to work to buy up some rotten leather out of which you could make, on each pair of boots, a double profit. But those boots split within a fortnight, and brought down upon your head dire showers of maledictions; with the result that gradually your shop grew empty of customers, and you fell to roaming the streets and exclaiming, 'The world is a very poor place indeed! A Russian cannot make a living for German competition.'

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls (1842)

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Blair - 20:20 hindsight?

 

(Source: Daily Mail)

1972: Tony Blair and his friend pose (and preen, as good-looking English guys could in those days) outside the Vineyard Congregationalist Church in Richmond, west London. They played rock music in the crypt, and even then he went 100% at whatever he took on:

‘Guys, guys.’ Tony called us together after one show. ‘We’re OK and everything but we could be so much better if we rehearsed!’

No '70s laid-back amateurishness for him, then.

John Rentoul's sympathetic biography of Tony Blair "whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning" (Independent newspaper) notes the future PM's avoidance of drugs, ability to persuade people to help, scrupulous honesty (leaving a note when the band's van scraped the paint off a Jaguar) and sincere, but unhokey, developing interest in religion.

And yet...



From "Tony Blair: Prime Minister" by John Rentoul

He didn't let lack of experience stop him. Here he is in his pre-Oxford gap year:

 

And here is the natural marketer, albeit with an amusingly obvious inducement:

- a forerunner of his penchant for "eye-catching initiatives" that aren't so great on closer analysis.

But the photograph haunts me. Two posers, but the one on the left is the one you look at. And the quality of that grin - not amusement, but somehow thrown at the spectator. What are that hand and hip doing? Is it the will to power, perhaps, combined with the desire for celebrity and adulation - Narcissus in early bloom?

Classical tragedy is based on a great man a with fatal flaw. Could we have foreseen where his egotism misled him into unjust (and it's said, illegal) war?

I have ordered Leo Abse's psychologising book on Blair - the original 1996 edition, to see whether Abse does more than simply vent his detestation of the new Labour leader and can predict the future problems, as well as his decade in the limelight of British politics.


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Knowing that every vote makes a difference, makes a difference

I've previously noted the unfairness of the UK electoral voting system in Scotland, which gives Labour an unearned majority there:

(Data: BBC)

But the system in the Scottish Parliament works far better. Each person gets two votes, one local and one party-list-based regional. In aggregate, here is what happened in 2011:

Data: Wikipedia

... bang on for Labour, slightly generous for the SNP. Not a bad hybrid, either: voting first for a local candidate, and then for a party, rather than combining the two and effectively voting for a Prime Minister (with all the personality-cult garbage that brings in its wake).

Even more interesting is the difference between how the two votes were cast:

 

Data: Wikipedia

In the regional contest, when it was no longer simply First Past The Post, and the vote was more likely to be taken into account even if one chose a minority candidate, the voting share for small parties leapt from 1% to 12%. Knowing that every vote makes a difference, makes a difference.

Electoral Calculus predicts that in next year's UK General Election, even under FPTP, UKIP may get over 14% of votes cast - and NO seats - so goodness knows what the voter behaviour would be under some form of proportional representation. Perhaps this month's European Parliament elections will give us a clue, and the differences between those results and GE 2015 could be worked up into some yardstick of democratic deficit.

Not, of course, that the EU Parliament decides anything, as Pat Condell points out in this splendid rant (htp: James Higham):



- which leads me to wonder why on Earth Alex Salmond would wish Scotland, if and when divorced from the rest of the UK, to remain in the European Union (or rather, join, legally speaking, not that the EU has much respect for law if it gets in the way of power).

I've already suggested that Scotland might do better to join forces with Norway and Iceland, maybe even Denmark (which, you'll recall, was expected to vote against the Lisbon Treaty and so the government cancelled the referendum and went ahead anyway). With North Sea fishing and oil, and firm Icelandic-style treatment of banksters, plus the energy and technical creativity of its people, a Kalmar-Union-plus might just work. Rather that than tie your jollyboat to a sinking megavessel like the EU.

One more question: should Scotland get independence, will the Scot Nats have outlived their usefulness? And has the shrewd Salmond already planned for that? Salmond the EU Commissioner? Salmond for EU President?


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Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty at home in Jackson, Mississippi (pic source)

From "Why I Live At The P.O.":

It wasn't five minutes before Uncle Rondo suddenly appeared in the hall in one of Stella-Rondo's flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias, like something Mr. Whitaker probably thought was gorgeous.

"Uncle Rondo!" I says. "I didn't know who that was! Where are you going?"

"Sister," he says, "get out of my way, I'm poisoned."

"If you're poisoned stay away from Papa-Daddy," I says. "Keep out of the hammock. Papa-Daddy will certainly beat you on the head if you come within forty miles of him. He thinks I deliberately said he ought to cut off his beard after he got me the P.O., and I've told him and told him and told him, and he acts like he just don't hear me. Papa-Daddy must of gone stone deaf.'

"He picked a fine day to do it then," says Uncle Rondo, and before you could say "Jack Robinson" flew out in the yard.

What he'd really done, he'd drunk another bottle of that prescription. He does it every single Fourth of July as sure as shooting, and it's horribly expensive.

_________________________

- Part of Eudora Welty's collection "A Curtain Of Green" (1941)
 
What brings this to mind is Brain Pickings' republication of her unsolicited (and unsuccessful) letter of application to New Yorker magazine at the age of 23:


March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930–31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A.(’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours,

Eudora Welty
_______________________

Truly she was "a good gift".


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Who owns your money?

From The Guardian

"No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue."

- Lord Clyde (Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue, 1929)

This is not tax evasion, but tax avoidance, and Barlow has earned his corn honestly and, as far as I know, without cheating or hurting anyone. It's not his fault that, like Henry VIII, our governments in recent years have been completely useless at managing their finances.

What Lord Clyde would have thought of the Inland Revenue getting clearance to shovel money directly out of your bank account on the merest (even pretended) suspicion that you might owe them something, I can't say.

But as Martin Armstrong observes, that fires the starting-pistol for the race to get your money away from any jurisdiction that thinks it can make free with your property. Governments should not give themselves carefully-fuzzy powers to do what they will: "carte blanche" was the instrument of Dumas' wicked Cardinal Richelieu.

Nor is this the revolutionary French National Assembly, where the mob brings down whomever it wants on a whim. Whipping up public indignation is a very dangerous and two-edged sword.

And remember that the American Revolution was about "no taxation without representation" - the tea dumped into Boston Harbour was a Trojan horse attempt to get the colonists to concede the principle by purchasing a product that had been taxed at source.

You could argue - and I do - that our current electoral system is so dysfunctional as to be just such a form of non-representation.*

These appear to be desperate times.
____________________

*No, that doesn't mean don't pay your taxes. But the sense of disenfranchisement feeds potentially dangerous resentment. Power carelessly exercised creates its own opposition.

The system's increasingly urgent search for extra money to keep going, the increasing difficulty ordinary people find in making a living and saving money, plus the erosion of civil liberties and general over-bossiness, are making some people stressed and reactionary. The EU debate (for example) involves such issues. Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millennium" shows that when societies are under great stress, they are vulnerable to manias. I think we see some of this on the Net.


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Safe seats, inequity, democratic crisis

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html

Data from the 2010 General Election - not a good one for Labour - shows that the 50 safest Parliamentary seats in the UK (% of winner over second highest candidate) are all Labour.

Of these 50, the runner-up in 27 constituencies was not Conservative or Liberal, but UKIP.

UKIP are predicted to get 14.44% of votes cast in 2015, compared with 9.1% for the Liberals; and 0 seats, compared with the Liberals' predicted 19.

Tony Benn warned that when turnout dropped below 50%, we would be in trouble. In 2010, four constituencies did this, and a fifth just managed to reach 50%.

We are overdue another Reform Act.

Data from Electoral Calculus: http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html


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Wheat Belly

A few years ago, we walked the Cumbria Way with a group of friends. We covered eighty five miles over six days and on returning home I found I'd gained six pounds in weight. How do you walk eighty five miles and gain six pounds? Well maybe one way is to begin each day with a breakfast like this. This was Keswick as I recall.

The extra pounds soon disappeared once we'd returned home because although I like my food, I dislike overeating, the bloated feeling that comes afterwards.

I was reminded of this by a No Tricks Zone post The Greatest Nutritional And Pharmaceutical Swindle Of All Time…High Grain, Low Fat Diets Are Killing Us By The Millions.

There are two videos in the post, the first being an interview with Dr William Davis, author of the book Wheat Belly. From the Amazon book description:-

Every day, over 200 million Americans consume food products made of wheat. As a result, over 100 million of them experience some form of adverse health effect, ranging from minor rashes and high blood sugar to the unattractive stomach bulges that preventive cardiologist William Davis calls "wheat bellies." According to Davis, that excess fat has nothing to do with gluttony, sloth, or too much butter: It's due to the whole grain wraps we eat for lunch. After witnessing over 2,000 patients regain their health after giving up wheat, Davis reached the disturbing conclusion that wheat is the single largest contributor to the nationwide obesity epidemic - and its elimination is key to dramatic weight loss and optimal health. 

There isn't a huge amount of wheat in that Keswick breakfast, but I followed it by toast and marmalade, so lots of wheat and sugar. Is wheat so damaging, or is it all those cheap calories it delivers?

After all, if we move to any reasonably balanced diet which calorie for calorie is more expensive, wouldn't we tend to reduce our calorie intake? Would that generate similar health benefits?

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