Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

Pride of our alley?

Let Malcolm start with two confessions:

1. Yesterday’s Sunday papers got short shrift, mainly because of that long liquid lunch at Ye Olde Cherry Tree, a decent meal well lubricated with St Austell’s Proper Job.
2. He is distinctly ambivalent about the Bercows. Obviously, since John Bercow as Speaker gets up the noses of so many Tories, he cannot be entirely a bad thing. He seems to do the business; but doesn’t cut it along with the recent great Speakers of recent memory: say, Bernard Weatherill (recently the star of James Graham’s This House at the Cottesloe) and Betty Boothroyd (a great hoofer, never out-shone by anyone). As for wife Sally, well, she does seem a trifle OTT.

And it is of Sally Bercow of whom we now speak.

The story so far:

Back in the darkening days of last autumn a frisson ran through the British political establishment. Some well-rehearsed ‘revelations’ from decades gone by, about paedophile rings in high places, bubbled to the surface of the settlement pit. One particular name involved was McAlpine. Unfortunately two McAlpine cousins, “Jimmie” and Lord Alastair, were confused by the media, including the BBC (who later paid McAlpine £185,000 for the mistake).

In the course of which Sally Bercow tweeted:

Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*

The noble Lord McAlpine (believed to be down to his last ten million) then set about cleaning up. He issued writs for libel against all and sundry, collecting large sums of moolah in the process:  the Guardian columnist George Monbiot coughed; and comedian Alan Davies is supposed to be down for £200,000. McAlpine then generously desisted from cleaning out the bank-accounts of lesser beings, making a special, public and explicit exception of Sally Bercow’s seven words and ornamental punctuation.

Sally, blessed her little convoluted heart, stood up to the bullying. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reminded us how things went from there:

The libel case is centred on whether Bercow’s tweet was defamatory. A key issue will be the level of innuendo implied by the use of asterisks in her comment. Such punctuation represents the mimicking of a physical action by the user.

Hold on!  There is a precedent for this, which — at first, even second sight — seems to contradict the old maxim de minimis non curat lex. When English law wants to, it could — as with Roger Casement, hang a man on a comma.

Back to the Sunday Times:

At a High Court hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for McAlpine, 70, will ask for permission for the case to be split into two parts: one to determine the meaning of the tweet, and a second, if required, to award damages. The peer is seeking up to £50,000.

If the case goes against her, Bercow fears a two-part trial will drag proceedings on for months, with legal costs likely to overtake damages. This is why she is thought to want a full trial to be heard in one go.

Bercow has instructed solicitors at Carter-Ruck on a no-win, no-fee basis and is believed to have taken out insurance to cover costs of up to £100,000 should she lose.

She will be represented in court by William McCormick, QC, a defamation and privacy expert whose previous clients have included Sir Elton John.

McAlpine’s barrister is Sir Edward Garnier, a Tory MP and former solicitor-general.

Andrew Reid, of the RPMI firm of solicitors, who is also representing the peer, said, “It is very disappointing that Mrs Bercow still wants her day in court. But there is a huge public interest in this. The sooner the meaning of what she said is settled, the greater the benefit to the public at large.”

Focus, if you will, on that last quoted paragraph.

What does it mean?

• One plain insinuation is that plutocrats, who can afford the bill for the thrill of the chase, might mulct lesser creatures through just a threat of action. But the lesser being is not supposed to use the proper legal remedy of “a day in court”. Of course, with verbose senior barristers involved, the chances of this being settled in a “day” are precisely zilch. Scattering writs like confetti was patented by such low-lifes as Robert Maxwell, to the great profit of his tame lawyers, who have refined the operation ever since.
• Second, McAlpine’s lawyers would clearly prefer not to have all that embarrassing “huge public interest”. Not in front of the serviles …
• Partisan politics, and a bully’s need to humiliate, seems a major contributory factor.
• As for “benefit to the public at large”, any sensitive and sensible mind boggles. We have here another of the myriad attempts by those with power to throttle and constrain each and every twitch, tweet and twaddle of the social media. Underlings’ sympathy for La Bercow derives from the good British principle of nil carborundum.
• The moral superiority of Lord McAlpine fades when we recall he was on the take, albeit on behalf of Thatcher’s Tory Party, from the likes of Asil Nadir. His love-of-country amounts to being a non-dom. His family firm, the construction giant McAlpine, made vast sums from Tory policies, and also operated the notorious black-list: since McAlpine started his career with the firm as a clock-watcher and pay-clerk on the South Bank site, his distance from victimizations cannot have been too great.

One last thought …

This Sunday Times piece was illustrated by yet another from a photo-shoot of Lord McAlpine cruising (make of that word what you will) around Venice.

The chequered suit and a gaudy tie, guaranteed to bar any on-course bookie from frightening the horses, tells us all we need to know. This present image, arms propped on true-blue umbrella, Rialto Bridge and moon-faced cheesy half-grin to the fore, mushy-peas Grand Canal beyond, is the latest, and even least appealing of the sequence.  Even Sally Bercow, in her more flirtatious and ill-advised moments didn’t sink that low.

Daily Cess

For going on quarter-of-a-century the great Arthur Christiansen steered Beaverbrook’s Daily Express to  a commanding position in the English middle-market: sales of 2 million in 1936, three million in 1944, and four million in 1949. In those days, the Express had a finger on the pulse of social group C2,  and a boot on the throat of Tory ministers. Much as Malcolm loathed the ‘Empire First’ thundering, he had to admire the magnificent machine that was the Beaver’s  paper for the purpose of making propaganda. When Robert Allen wrote his 1983 memoir of the Express, he was able to entitle it — with good reason — Voice of Britain.

No need to boast

On 27 January 1953 Christiansen circulated his editorial staff with a typical instruction:

Ban the word “exclusive” in the Express. Our aim is to make everything exclusive. Therefore we have no need to boast.

He wanted the news (never “stories”) to be told straight, in context, and in plain straightforward English: he would have scorned word-play and punning headlines. Above all he demanded accuracy and fact-checking:

We fell into a bad error yesterday and had to carry a Page One correction on a story. While I seek to encourage members of staff to establish their own contacts in every field of endeavour, I must insist that they use the services of our specialists in checking their information.

When comes such another?

The Black Lubyanka — that magnificent Art Deco block (as above) — is now the base of another merchant bank. The last news operation in those parts was Reuters, which debunked to Canary Wharf around eight years ago. As early as 1967 Michael Frayn foresaw saw the end coming:

Fleet Street now is just the dull, busy thoroughfare that connects the City to the West End.

The Daily Express, four owners and eighteen editors later, is a poor, pathetic rag. It sells a smidgeon more than half-a-million copies daily, and is little more than an advertising sheet for Richard Desmond’s other interests (Channel 5, the dubious “Health Lottery”, and links to his other unsavoury businesses).

Gross misrepresentation

So let us celebrate today’s front-page screamer:

Or, if you prefer it in text:

DAVID Cameron last night promised to deliver a tax cut for millions of British families by 2015.

The Tory pledge to introduce an income tax allowance for married couples will be in place by the next election, senior Government sources confirmed.

It will mean an extra £150 a year for households across the country and will provide some welcome cheer amid the economic gloom.

Got that? None of the other UK news-outlets had quite that line:

The government will not introduce a tax break for married couples in next month’s Budget, it emerges…
However legislation is expected to be introduced before 2015 to allow couples to transfer part of their personal tax allowance to their partner. [BBC News]

No concessions for Tory right in PM’s push for gay marriage.
Tax breaks for married couple ruled out in March budget. [The Guardian]

Mr Cameron dashed Tory hopes of a tax break for married couples in next month’s Budget.
A senior Government source said the Prime Minister had delayed the manifesto promise yet again after talks with George Osborne. [Daily Mail]

The Conservative 2010 manifesto and the Coalition Agreement said ministers would introduce a tax allowance for those who wed, but the Government said yesterday that the policy would not feature in next month’s Budget. [Daily Telegraph]

Cameron will not offer marriage tax breaks to placate anti-gay marriage Tories, says Government source
Pledge was made in Tory manifesto and coalition agreement [The Independent]

From Liberia, where he was co-chairingtalks on global poverty, [Cameron] made clear that … [h]e would defy ministers and MPs pressing for tax breaks for married couple to be included in next month’s Budget, instead of waiting until later in the Parliament to introduce them. [The Times, £]

And even:

David Cameron has slapped down traditionalists in the cabinet opposed to proposed gay marriage laws by saying he would not introduce tax breaks for married couples in the March budget [ConHome]

Or, to explicate the obvious:

• nothing in this Parliament;
• a ‘pledge’ in the Tory 2015 manifesto, which is a direct lift from the unredeemed one of 2010;
• and even then only a tax-allowance concession worth precisely nothing to most of those couples who are both working.

That grumbling is the noise of disconsolate Tory MPs.

Listen carefully and you’ll catch Arthur Christiansen, rumbling in his Holland-on-Sea eternal rest.

A small puff

Ooops! here we go for a slight boost in Malcolm’s derisory stat-porn (© either Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes — who cares, anyway?).

For why?

There’s a BBC page on 20 of your songs that changed the world, of which perhaps half-a-dozen get the Malcolmian seal of approval.

Furthermore, Nena’s one-hit wonder, 99 Luftballons is in the list. Quite properly:

Europop doesn’t come much better. Not that there’s huge competition in that category.

Nearer home:

Malcolm worked that one into a rumination on a DARPA experiment and a trip to the Sloany Pony in Parsons Green. Quite which aspect there keeps pulling in the gongoozlers he doesn’t know: it remains, however, one of the 1678 (officially) posts on Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service that still drags ‘em in.

Here’s another, older but perhaps better:

A week ago the Pert Young Piece dragged the Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the man himself to Berlin’s Warschauer Strasse S-Bahn station. From there down to Mühlenstrasse, to walk the mile long East End Gallery — the well-graffitied remaining stretch of the Wall. Damn cold; but not to be missed.

The Wall has been expunged for most of it length — though a keen eye tells the lingering architectural and other differences between the old East and West. On tatty, crappy Warschauer Strasse there can be no doubt.

Which brings us to another song that should have changed the world. Alas, back in 1962 (when Wayne Shaklin gave it to his wife Toni Fisher) we’d be waiting over half-a-century for the abomination to be ripped down:

Don’t KBW

KBW? That used to be the wall-daubing of local racists — “Keep Britain White”.

The generality of the UK public would not agree these last couple of weeks. Still, it did provide one of those spectacular NASA images:

Let’s check the places to be: Muswell Hill, Brighton, the Isle of Wight(which, phonetically, isn’t), Thurso …

Form line of attack!

Trying to come to terms with a bit of Czech, Malcolm hit on this:

Moje kamarádka se, naproti tomu, byla dobrým teroristou, protože byla dobrá v plnění rozkazů.
My friend, on the other hand, she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders.

Somehow that incongruity fitted the extraordinary ‘performance’ of Euro-minister David Lidlington, under scrutiny by Andrew Neil, on the BBC1 Sunday Politics. It was only when John Rentoul put up the transcript the whole disaster became evident.

So allow Malcolm to switch his metaphors in mid-stream, and revert to something nearer home: the wooden heads walls of Old England.

Action stations!

It began quite amiably (Cap’n Neil is at his best when the cannonade is loaded but the battery not yet run out):

Andrew Neil: David Lidington, the Tories led the yes to Europe campaign in the 1975 European Referendum. A Tory Prime Minister signed our accession to Europe, the Single European Act and Maastricht. Did David Cameron’s speech represent a break with the past?

David Lidington MP: No. What David Cameron’s speech was about was the recognition of the fact that change — and dramatic change — is already taking place in Europe and Europe’s going to change further. The speech was not just about the situation of the UK vis a vis the rest of Europe, it’s about how the whole of Europe needs to respond to the challenges of global competitiveness, democratic accountability and getting the relationship right between the eurozone and the others.

Wow! At first hearing, that almost convinces. It’s not as if the main crisis is UKIP rolling up the soft-Tory vote (and more by disaffection on gay-marriage, grammar-schools and such like), which is scaring the excrement out of the marginal Tory MPs. Well, is it?

Engage the enemy more closely!

Anyway, that was merely Neil’s bow-chaser finding his range. Once the target was close enough, the broadside:

AN: Now less than two years ago junior Tories in the government, including your own parliamentary secretary had to resign because they voted for a referendum. What changed?
DL: What that debate and that vote was about, in October 2011, was over whether there should be a referendum when the future of Europe was very far from clear. What the prime minister is talking about is having a referendum in the UK to settle matters to get the consent of the British people at the end of a process of European negotiation and reform. It’s two completely different questions.
AN: Well is it really? I mean in 2011 your – let’s just look at what you said. You said, ‘When I go round the constituency at political and non-political events, this is the last thing on their minds a referendum.’ You said, ‘they’re more concerned about jobs.’ I ask you again, what’s changed?
DL: It’s still the case that whether you look anecdotally in my constituency or whether you look at the opinion polls that Europe ranks below issues like jobs and the economy in people’s minds, but what has change –
AN: I understand that, but these people were fired because they wanted a referendum and you’re now giving them a referendum.

The simplest questions (“What has changed?”) are the most difficult — and Lidlington has to fluff this one, effectively three times.

England expects that every man will do his duty

Then Neil goes for the hard-pounding on the terms of the negotiation:

AN: Well let me see if I can help you. This is what the last Conservative manifesto said. ‘A Conservative government will negotiate on three specific guarantees. On the Charter of Fundamental Rights, on criminal justice and on social and employment legislation.’ You wanted these to come back to Westminster. Let’s say you add in protection for the City of London from new regulations from Brussels. Is that the bare minimum?
DL: You’ll have to wait and see for our manifesto exactly what is going to be in there.

This is clever stuff. Lidlington offers a tacit but unqualified “yes”. Anything less than that 2010 commitment and the Balubas go AWOL, and joining the UKIP marauders. Let’s be honest, even with those impossibles achieved, the true eurosceptic will still be off with the mutineers.

Malcolmian aside:

Balubas came to have a particular meaning in Irish politics, particularly so when Seán Lemass, having finally succeeded Éamon de Valera, was seeking to bring his party into the second half of the Twentieth Century

In November 196o, an Irish platoon in the Congo crisis were surrounded by the Baluba tribe. In that Czech expression, there’s the notion that terrorism needs close obedience to orders. In the Congo there was endless bloody terrorism, and the only orders in effect were those constraining the poor blooded infantry.

Nine of the eleven soldiers of that platoon were killed. Their bodies repatriated. O’Connell Street was packed for the courtege on its way out to Glasnevin. Yes, Malcolm was there.

Hence, the ‘Balubas’ became a term for the wild culchies who came up from the bog lands to torment the Fianna Fáil leadership.

And if you don’t recognise a “culchie” is, ask any Dubliner.

Finally, Neil holes Lidlington below the water-line:

AN: Let me show you another thing the Prime Minister said. He wants the EU to think again about its aspirations to ever-closer union. Now, this is what the Treaty of Rome in ’57 said. It’s the founding document. ‘Determined to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.’ Now, it beggars belief, doesn’t it, that the rest of Europe is going to overturn that founding principle?

Prepare to pick up survivors!

The whole Cameron case, as defended by Lidlington founders on that:

• Macmillan accepted the ‘ever-closer union’ concept at the first application for membership.
• Heath was something of an enthusiast.
• Wilson worked around it.
• As did Thatcher. Indeed, she was hot for economic union, particularly if it gave the UK’s quaternary sector access to the European market in finance, management, insurance and derivatives.
• Major carried on regardless: it wasn’t an important issue.
• Blair was, as always, insouciant.

Suddenly, after half a century, it becomes the make-or-break issue.

And we know that Cameron, the Tory financiers and backers in the City cannot accept a break.

Nice one, Mister Ed!

The weekly corrida de toros (always a lot of bull, but today a bit of horse) of Dave and Ed was a nice one today. Only the true die-hard thought Cameron did the business. Even the ranks of ConHome could scarce forbear to fleer:

[Miliband] probably won the exchanges on points, despite Cameron having the better of the arguments.  The Prime Minister all but used the “R” word, alluding to consulting the public and gaining the “full-hearted consent of the British people”.  His insistence that a Conservative Government would want to take powers back from Brussels, and that a Labour Government would give more away, was right.  But my sense is that to the lay voter hinting that you want a referendum in future while arguing that you don’t want one now looks muddled.

That’s Paul Goodman who, despite Malcolm’s partisan sniping is good — and getting better:

Downing Street must be anxious about women’s votes.  From the Tory backbenches, John Glen raised the gain which the Government’s proposed pension reforms will bring to some women, and Mary Macleod plugged childcare: I may be wrong, but both questions had the smell of the Whips’ Office about them. Laura Sandys asked about the great horsemeat scandal.  Cue the Rebekah Brooks jokes.

Edible equines

That’s another chewy matter, currently being digested across the media, including Slugger O’Toole, where Pete Baker has opened his Boucherie Chevaline. Not surprisingly, it’s a bizarre goulash of serious concern and dismal punning:

• One of the few, very, very, few, successful native industries Ireland could boast of was its meat industry, specifically beef. Following the Irish economic collapse it was about the only economic success story Ireland could point to. This will absolutely devastate it.
• I was just checking my burgers in the fridge there……Aaaannnnd they’re off!!!

For different reasons, Malcolm likes both of those … and had to participate, in part recollecting an earlier post here:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

Even so, the presence of real meat (beef, horse, or whatever) in burgers is the least of his worries. It’s not the meat that concerns him: like the 99.9% of known germs slaughtered by household cleaners … the problem lies with the other and unknown bits.

One small wrinkle: the Irish tests which revealed the horse DNA date from two months since. What’s been happening since? Why does it become public only now?

Back to the bear pit

Miliband’s smirk at PMQs must have registered all the way to Brighton: he was winning, and he knew it.

Inevitably the Tory (and other) commentators are getting antsy. Hence the demands for a definitive statement of the Labour position, usually expressed in the whinge: Miliband must commit NOW! To which must go the answer: No chance!

Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) tried, rather tortuously, to reel in his sprat:

From the moment in 2003 that Gordon Brown stopped Tony Blair joining the euro, Cameron’s speech was waiting to happen. The evolving euro would sooner or later need a tight political corset to enforce fiscal, budgetary and monetary union. Britain and other states would not join this, and would therefore need to negotiate their relationship with this euro-specific regime. Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, both party to Brown’s victory over Blair, know this well. There need be no disagreement.

No disagreement? Come, come: that’s not the nature of British adversarial politics.

James Forsyth, Speccie-lating away, would like to see a Tory ploy in the whole thing:

Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now shut the door to Labour offering a referendum, putting Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. They believe that once Cameron has actually delivered his speech, the atmosphere will change and Miliband will have to say what he would do.

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

On a succession of vital topics raised in the interview, Mr Miliband said he couldn’t answer because we are too far out from an election: we will have to wait for the manifesto.

One has to read the rest of that, in the context of the tormented Torygraph, fully to realise Brogan’s frustrated pain that Miliband is not to be hooked. The full beef is hoarsely delivered by David Hughes:

Labour is marching on the spot, going nowhere fast. While the party’s policy review is churning away, Miliband appears to think that he and his front bench can confine themselves to lobbing bricks at the Tories and leaving it at that.

Is that wise? At the last general election Labour won just 8.6 million votes – that’s just a smidgen more than Michael Foot got when facing Margaret Thatcher in 1983 in what is generally regarded as Labour’s most abject post-war electoral performance. That suggests there’s a big job of work to do rebuilding the party, thrashing out a credible post-Blairite position. Instead, Ed Miliband seems content to coast, apparently seduced by Labour’s opinion poll lead into believing the next election is in the bag.

Big mistake.

Which amounts to a genteel version of those pointless and repetitive demonstrators’ chants:

— Wha’ d’we want?
— A target to hit!
— When d’we wan’ it?
— Now!

A problem made in and by the Tory party to eviscerate itself

The bottom line has to be there is no European crisis. Thanks to a steady steer from Angela Merkel, the worst of the €-mess seems to be passed. Ireland is selling bonds again. The appalling Berlusconi is polling at 20-25% and won’t be coming back. Greece and Spain are bleeding; but still only walking wounded. François Hollande has opened his second front (albeit in Mali); and dragged Cameron part-way into the mire: nice one, Frankie!

Only Cameron’s Britain seems to have conniptions; and so — after six months of dither — we may be able to read Cameron’s lips. As Miliband summed it:

The biggest change that we need in Europe is a move from austerity to growth and jobs, but the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to say about that. This is the reality: the reason the Prime Minister is changing his mind has nothing to do with the national interest. It is because he has lost control of his party. He thinks that his problems on Europe will end on Friday, but they are only just beginning.

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

• not about Britain — though it may include a “shopping list” of unrealisable aims,
• not about a referendum — though Cameron will do his best to imply just that,
• not about Europe, for Cameron and his government have rendered themselves impotent side-liners.

No: it is essentially about:

• fabricating some semblance of Tory unity until the 2015 election (any hopes for the Euro elections of 2014 must already be written off);
• fending off UKIP and Tory back-benchers’ night-stalkers — if Tory policy on Europe came as a stick of seaside rock, the six letters through the stick would read F-A-R-A-G-E;
• The referendum, which Cameron flinched away from before, has now become the last hope: that (not 10% or whatever in the polls) is a measure of how successful UKIP has been.

Bated breath?

Last Monday Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, gave a bald assessment of just how desperate Cameron’s position is:

… he has set out how we might get that referendum on Europe after the next election, but there is a series of ifs:

• If he wins the next election alone (in other words doesn’t have to get this past Nick Clegg)
• If he can persuade other European countries, particularly Germany that they need and want treaty change
• If Britain can then get what it wants in negotiations
• If he thinks he can then win a referendum

If all that happens, well then, yes, there will be a referendum which he thinks will approve a new better settlement for Europe.

But his difficulty in giving that big speech on Europe in about a week’s time is what if he’s wrong on any one of those ifs?

There’s as much chance of all that coming to pass as Mrs Brooks’s ex-policehorse, Raisa, doing a Lazarus out of the Tesco’s chiller.

Succession planning

There now follows a Malcolmian gripe.

The BBC website has this:

The number of young police officers in England and Wales has fallen by nearly 50% in two years.

There were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10 but only 4,758 in 2011-12, figures obtained by the BBC show.

In Cleveland, North Wales and Staffordshire the fall in the number of officers aged under 26 was more than 70% over the period.

Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment.

But this data, obtained in a Freedom of Information request by BBC Radio 4′s The World This Weekend, shows how much of that fall has been among younger officers.

That is disturbing for any number of reasons, including:

• the tighter budget constraints, which may or may not be a “good idea” when pressures in society are reaching new levels of tension;
• the growing imbalance in the police service, limiting recruitment and promotion;
• that it required yet another of those FoI requests to extract information from officialdom: if the Home Office have the figures — and clearly they did and do — they should be up front, available and in the public domain. How else can equal opportunities be assured?

Malcolm makes two reliable predictions:

• Sooner or later an intelligent sociologist (such creatures do exist) will unearth the information that the heralded drop in crime is only a drop in reported crime. If police stations are closed, if there are fewer boots on the ground, if contacting the police involves being bounced around from call-centre to clerical officer and — with luck — eventually to a real, live copper in the same county, then there will be fewer reported crimes. Surely it cannot be true that, on some nights, the whole county of Norfolk , all two thousand square miles, is “policed” by just four or five cars?
• In the not too distant future officialdom will suddenly wake up to a yawning age-gap in the personnel of the police service. This is not a trivial matter.

When Malcolm became a teacher in the mid-’60s, he entered a staff-room where the generational divide was all too obvious. There were the post-war entrants to the profession, highly experienced, excellent teachers, military-brusque, but many already reaching and anticipating retirement. Thanks to the poor pay for entrants (it was about the same as the lowest professional grades of the Post Office, and far less than the Hong Kong or Rhodesian police), recruitment under the 13 years of Tory rule (1951-1964) had been slow and unreliable. To that we may lay ome — by no means all — the washy-washiness of state education in the 1970s.

Somewhere in there the teaching profession became, for better or worse, the exclusive province of female teachers in primary schools, and an obvious and attractive social advance for ethnic groups in all levels  — and thereby unrepresentative of the wider society.

Further down that BBC report we find:

Olly Martins, the PCC for Bedfordshire, which saw a 58% fall, said the implications of this trend were very worrying.

“To secure policing by consent, and thereby be as effective as possible, forces need to look like the communities they serve.

“This is particularly true when it comes to the need to engage with younger people, who are disproportionately represented both as victims of crime and among its perpetrators.”

In the side bar, Martin Rosenbaum, “Freedom of information specialist”, repeats that:

It raises questions about how representative the police force is, especially given the issues about relations between the police and young people in some areas. And it also can’t help with the concerns about the level of physical fitness among the police.

Society will be paying for this extended recession — and by no means just in monetary terms, and far, far beyond the politics of policing — well into the next generation.

LED kindly light!

The BBC technology page properly celebrates the way LED lighting means ever brighter and more energy efficient bulbs.

When Malcolm brought home a standard lamp and a LED bulb to suit, he had a 6th January epiphany. The life-span of the bulb is stated as 25 years.

Which almost certainly exceeds Malcolm’s expectancy.

Should it therefore be specified as a legacy to one of his daughters, along with any other bequests of hemi-semi-antiques?

A ‘minor’ study in relativity

From the running strap-line, across the BBC News website:

LATEST:

Nine police officers were injured and 18 people were arrested during minor rioting in Belfast last night

Now, if it had been in Brixton, or Tottenham …