Number 1 Ranked Political blog! *

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* Its not a very authoritative as a lot of high ranking bloggers have left it, but just felt like bragging!

(I had to capture the image just in case I slip down the list again.)

Education Education Education!

Remember Tony Blair saying that?

Crawley Labour party have a website. They have a special place for the Ifield section of their website here. (Please note the spelling) However today it looks like this!



Makes me feel so much better about my own typo's! makes you wonder how for the first time in the history of Crawley Council it changed hands from Labour to Conservative.

Hat tip this poster on politicalbetting.com

Polonium 210 Splash it on all over!

Any one remember the Brut 33 advert with Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan? The tag line was splash in on all over. Well that seems to be what has happened with Polonium 210.

I have to say that I am a bit mystified by the news that traces Polonium 210 has been found on three British Airways aeroplanes as well as a couple of other sites in London. You can read the BBC's report here.

The reason I am mystified is that the stuff is rare and I presume expensive, yet it appears to have been transported around and left all over the place. You do have to wonder how much the killers started off with.

That said the trail seems to lead back to Moscow. I suspect that if you ran a Geiger counter over the airport you would pick up a trail that led right back to KGB headquarters. That I have to say would make me very suspicious as it would start looking like a fit up. Umm...

I have just changed to a 3 column template

I did that mainly because I wanted to move things like topic labels up and add some other things to the side bar without having it disappear so far down the page where no one would read it.

Does it look OK? Please feel free to leave comments.

Victim statements- what if they were hated?

Having listened to current affairs for a while and listened to last nights channel 4 news in the light of this pointless and barbaric murder (as reported on the BBC here) the fiancee of the victim had read out a victim statement on her behalf.

Fair enough. It seems it may have played some part in sentencing.

The question is though, what happens when someone is killed who no one cares about, nobody loves, or indeed who may be universally derided and hated within in their community?

Does it make killing them alright? Or at least better than killing someone who people like?

We need to be ware that we do not rank people in what could be a horrific way even though it is for the best of reasons.

Update 23:50 30th November 2006

I just wanted to make it clear that I was not talking about Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin laden as a potential person for whom no one would read a witness statement, but Eleanor Rigby or the like. You know, that man or woman who lives on their own, has odd ideas doesn't like kids and does not have any.

Voter apathy and modern politics

Party member ship has collapsed since the 1950's when 1 in every 11 people were members of a political party to 1 in 88 now. (An interesting statistic I picked up from Sir Hayden Phillips report on party funding)

You have to ask why people have become so disconnected from politics?

Well, there are a number of reasons including the fact that life is a lot more comfortable for most people than it used to be. However one reason I can see for this is the way modern politics is conducted.

Take for example this article on the BBC's website from 1992 about John Major campaigning on his soap box in the general election.

A group of left wing activists turned up to heckle with load speakers. How profoundly ugly, childish and anti democratic is that? Similar also went on in the 2005 General Election with both Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy having their personal band of hecklers sent in by Labour to make sure they could not campaign.

In the 1992 campaign Jack Cunningham was asked when Neil Kinnock was going to get on his soapbox. He said:

"We have graduated from soapbox politics."

Well, it does not appear to be engaging people any more. This sort of behaviour is simply wrong. It puts people off politics and stifles debate. It is time for politicians to get back on their soap boxes and with a bit of luck the fascist tendency in the Labour party will not try to stifle debate.

Hat tip for the BBC article to Mike Smithson of Politicalbetting.com.

Party Funding II

I wrote about party funding on the 14th of July, here.

Labour set up a commission to look into the issue headed by Sir Hayden Phillips, whose website, www.partyfundingreview.gov .uk can be found here.

The review has published it's interim report which is available here.

On page 12 Sir Hayden Phillips says this:

"Finding a consensus on a new way forward for party funding will not be easy. The reform of party funding is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve the wider benefit of improving the quality of democracy. From the reaction the Review has received so far, I believe that the achievement of a good measure of cross-party agreement would be welcomed by the public. For that reason alone the process of the Review must be openly explained and not perceived as a private agreement only in the interests of the established political parties. Achieving agreement will require not just facilitation but an act of political will, including a readiness to accept that no one party will necessarily be able to achieve all of its objectives."

Which is interesting given this report in the Guardian, by Patrick Wintour their political editor. According to his information Labour are looking to bring forward legislation early next year to deal with the party funding issue regardless of the position of the other parties. This of course has many dangers associated with it not the least of which will be a battle Royal in the Lords.

Labour need to work on the basis of consensus on this one. It would be bad for democracy and indeed Labour if they don't.

What seems clear is that Labour are worried. They have £23 million in outstanding loans and it looks like they are going to have trouble paying them off. According to this report from the BBC it also appears that the Conservatives owe huge amounts as well, in fact £33.5 million. Mind you the Conservatives do not seem worried by this. Labour are also concerned that out side of the spending limit window the Conservatives are getting their campaigns in marginals going. This strikes me as a bit false as I am sure Labour were doing the same between 1992 and 1997.

It must be remembered that the reasons why people are being turned off politics is because they don't trust the parties. If you read Private Eye you will see why. Paying for some fringe event at the Labour party conference gets you on the platform, speaking with a minister and the appearance that you have just bought influence. If you add to this the Powder Ject issue you can see why people don't trust Labour.

All political parties need to re-engage with voters. This won't happen if every time some one ones to speak to the public a bunch of pratts from other parties turn up to heckle. That needs to stop.

Also state funding of political parties will go down like a lead balloon. It already happens, but the public don't know so don't care. If there is more state funding they may go bananas.

Hat tip to Jon on politicalbetting.com for the link to the Guardian story.

Polonium 210 A most peculiar poison

I was going to write an article deriding the idea that we should be worried about polonium 210, but having done some calculations I decided not to.

Polonium is a very odd thing to kill some one with. It is a bit poisonous but highly radioactive. People make the mistake of thinking that Uranium 235 is radioactive. It is a bit but not much. It is fissile which means that you can split its atoms with a slow moving neutron but is fairly harmless otherwise.

Polonium 210 on the other hand is highly radioactive. To give you an idea it radiates at 4,500 Curie per gram. A Curie is a unit or radioactivity. It is to radiation what the Fared is to capacitance and the Cubic Mile is to measuring milk. It is a phenomenally large measure of radioactivity.

Here are some other interesting facts.

The acceptable level of Polonium 210 in water is 0.2 Bq/L or 0.2 decays per second in 1 liter of water.

One Curie is 37 billion Becquerels.

Polonium 210 is rare. Very very rare. In fact estimated annual production is 100 grams. Not much. But then you don't need much to kill someone either.

A milligram ought to do it.

However it is a bit like killing someone with a hallmarked platinum bullet. Except that with the number of sites that this material turning up, its a bit like a machine gun burst of hallmarked platinum bullets. Bizarre. It also should not be that hard to track the source of the polonium either. So in effect the murder was signed. Who would do something like that?

I also found this article interesting.

Intercept evidence whats currently allowed

When this Government trots out proposals for new laws to deal with the threat of terrorism that vastly reduces our liberties and constitutional protection one of the things that both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats say is "Why not allow wire tap evidence to convict these people".

The answer is we could not possibly do that.

Well why not? There are only two common law jurisdictions that do not allow wire tap evidence in court. The UK and Hong Kong. Except that we do allow it in our courts if the wire tapping was carried out by someone else.

We also allow recordings of telephone conversations where one end is bugged. The Police also can and sometimes do insert a bug in a telephone, and get both ends of the conversation and this is still allowed.

In fact the only thing not allowed is intercepting a call remotely and using that as evidence. This is plainly nuts.

We do hear arguments about revealing methods but that can be covered by a public interest immunity certificate. So what is the argument?


Do we stick with Hong King on this one, and call the Dutch or Belgians every time we could do with a phone being tapped, or do we catch up with the rest of the civilised world?

Even the Director of Public Prosecutions wants wire tap evidence to be admissible.

For further information you can read about this weeks File on 4 here. Apparently you can't listen again until tomorrow.

The Union under threat

Well according to this article in the Telegraph its all over for the United Kingdom.

More than half of all respondents either side of the Scottish English border want rid of the Union.

As a Conservative and Unionist this breaks my heart. We have to ask how we got here and more importantly how we move forward.

It seems clear to me why we have lost the plot. The Conservative party was a massive force in Scotland before Margaret Thatcher, but after the poll tax was tried on them first that is no longer the case.

Labour have also been politically opportunistic in favouring devolution.

We are now in the most ridiculous of situations. Firstly the Scots feel rightly betrayed that in the Thatcher years policies were tried there first regardless of how Scotland's MP's voted, and now under Blair the English feel the same way, with Scottish MP's passing laws on England that their constituents will never have to endure.

Meanwhile the SNP stir it up, with their LA cheer leader and by far the worst James Bond in my view their ever Scottish and no way any kind of actor Sean Connery blathers on. (If you want to see a real Scottish Actor see David Tenant. if you are a Dr Who fan you would never ever know he was Scottish until you heard him being interviewed. That man can act, Sean can't)

I have to say I don't know what to do, but I just would not start from here.

Polonium and political controversy are no strangers

Polonium is a rare earth element. It does not grow on trees. It is in fact very very rare.

From the news reports I understand that traces Polonium 210 (an isotope of polonium) have been found in the now infamous case of Alexander Litvinenko.

You can read the BBC's article here. It will be covered by all papers in the morning.

There are of course some questions which arise. Is Polonium dangerous? Well I suspect it is a bit toxic, quite a lot of rare earth metals are. It is however as rare as rocking horse excrement, if not rarer. Hens teeth would be much easier to get hold of.

You can get it in a number of different ways, all of which involve nuclear power and the technical ability to separate polonium from what ever else it comes with.

Polonium 210 is an alpha emitter. That is to say that when it decays it sends out an alpha particle, which contains 2 protons and 2 neutrons.

There are two other sorts of radiation, beta, an electron, and gamma, a very high energy X Ray.

What makes alpha radiation so safe and deadly at the same time is this: Think of something being hit by an alpha particle as being hit by a 10 ton shell. It is going to do damage. What makes it so safe is that being so large and heavy alpha particles don't go very far. Typically only a few inches in air. In fact you could quite safely keep an alpha emitter on the top shelf and never get any radiation. Schools typically have alpha emitters but kept in lead.

Where it becomes very very dangerous is when it gets inside the body. There is nowhere for the alpha particle to go but some where it is bound to cause damage. It does this normally because it is basically a Helium atom without electrons. As it passes any atom it may steal an electron. This leaves an ion that was not there before, a free radical. These things can and do cause all sorts of problems including cancer. In order to do any of this damage though it does have to be inside of the body.

There will be huge amounts of speculation about who killed Alexander Litvinenko, but the biggest question in my mind is what prat would sign the murder in ten foot high letters of flame by using a chemical so rare that only 100 grams of it are produced a year?

Polonium is of course no stranger to political controversy. The Curries named it after Poland at a time when Poland was occupied in order to highlight its plight.

You can read the already updated to take account of this controversy article on Polonium on Wikipedia here.

Labour in another sleaze row!

With all the trouble labour are getting themselves into over sleaze, it is a wonder how they find time to do anything else.

The reported position in MSM is that Labour are trying to deduct at source amounts out of their ever decreasing number of councilors allowances for being a councilor. You can read the Daily Fascist Mail here or the BBC here.

The standards board are looking into it.

Allowances are paid to councilors because they spend sometimes considerable amounts of time doing work for their electorate. They don't get paid a huge amount.

Asking them to pay some over seems fair enough, however demanding it isn't.

The real issue though is getting a council to spend its time effectively collecting money for a political party. You are not supposed to use council resources for party work, and that clearly is party work. This is where Labour are in my view in trouble. Of course some Labour weasels have come out of the woodwork to defend the position but I can't see it washing.

The Tosser Test

The Conservative party have just launched this website. Personally I find the language a bit unnecessary. According to Iain Dale Norman Tebbit said:

"I suppose this is a mark of the permissive society which has been lauded by the Labour Party over many years. There is no foul language nor physical or moral degradation which is not now embraced by the current orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the orthodoxy has reached the Conservative Party."

With which I agree.

However he then went on with:

"It is not a word I would even use about Polly Toynbee."

I disagree with Lord Tebbit on this. I would.

However the website and campaign seems to be getting a lot of media attention which is good. It is after all not aimed at me. It has to be said lots of Labour and Liberal people are just attacking the site without looking at what it is trying to achieve. No surprise there.

The aim of the site is to help people deal with personal debt and to avoid it if possible. Its a good thing I say. It would also be nice if there was less irresponsible lending as well as borrowing.

The NHS's best year ever! II

I wrote this article on the NHS's best year ever here. It detailed the story of a local boy of 8, and his 20 hour ordeal to get treatment for a broken arm including being ferried by ambulance between hospitals and being kept in a cubicle next to a suicidal man.

The reason for the problem is that Accident and Emergency services are being downgraded at the local hospital, The Princess Royal. You may be interested to know that this hospital is fairly new, replacing the old Cuckfield hospital.

However it gets worse.

There is a proposed consultation on the amalgamation of maternity obstetrics and neo natal services in Eastbourne and Hastings on to one site. According to this article on the BBC's site, the consultation seems not to be on the amalgamation but where the amalgamated services will be. (Labour marginal or Conservative safeish with Liberal Democratic challenger)

Residents see that as a sham. I agree.

It does get worse still. Hospitals in Kent and West Sussex are being told to delay treatment of "routine" conditions. You can read the BBC's article on it here.

What ever the rights and wrongs of these things, there is a perception that something has gone horribly wrong.

Firstly you need to be aware of the geography of Sussex. It is a big place with large distances (in terms of time) between hospitals.

Secondly you have to wonder this. Why are hospitals losing services? All these hospitals have had these services for a long time. We are now spending huge amounts of money on the NHS so how come services are closing?

The truth is that the largest gains in throughput in the NHS were between 1990 and 1999, before the huge increase in cash came in. So where is the money going?

Relative Poverty and the fallacy of redistribution

Much waffle has been spoken today about this document revealed to the world by Guido Fawks (Big hat tip to Guido again). The document is not a policy document but a discussion document by Greg Clark MP and Peter Franklin. Guido has it here.

It seems to me much of the the vacuous chattering classes assume we have signed up for some sort of massive tax based redistribution of wealth. We haven't.

It seems the document looks at measuring poverty in relative terms defined as those living in households with 60% of contemporary median household income.

Fine, but there is an issue. Firstly what about young single people living on their own? How much of a problem would it be if their income was less than 60% of the median household income?

The second issue is that many families now have dual incomes, out of which they pay for child care. Families with much lower overall income who have a stay at home adult look poorer, but do not have the expense of paying for childcare either. People make choices. Some want a high pressure high pay job, others don't. Some have good luck others don't. Some work hard through school and then a career and others don't. The people who don't are not bad or indolent, they may just choose to enjoy life a little more and have less ulcers or what ever. Some people do difficult high pressure jobs that don't pay very well because either they enjoy that job or they feel called to do it. It would be daft to consider any of that a problem that should concern the state.

That said we do have a hard core underclass who are either unemployed or are not in full time well paid work. This group is much harder to help.

Some seem condemned by postcode in that because of where they live, people make assumptions about them which then limit their ability to get a job, and education or socialise with some other people.

Some people have poor literacy and/or numeracy severely limiting job prospects, whilst others may have mental health issues or drug addictions.

The question is would redistribution help, and what do we mean by redistribution any way.

If we mean that we try to remove people on low incomes from the tax system altogether then the Conservative party has been in favour of that for years.

If however we mean taking tax revenue and giving it to people on low incomes then we need to look at all the implications of that. People who do poorly paid work do so because they either can't or won't get better paid work, for a variety of reasons, however employers who engage people on low incomes do so because they can. If the state then tops up those earnings, then we are all subsidising an employer who is not paying a reasonable wage for the work he is asking people to do for him. In a free market you would hope as employment rises that employers would be competing for staff.

Alas a lot of unskilled, and indeed semi and fully skilled work gets filled by immigrants who will accept lower wages because they have their household in another country where living costs are less. This makes it impossible for low wage earners to have their wages driven up by scarcity of supply.

In short I take the view that if you pay people to be poor, then as there is money in it, people will be poor.

If we want to genuinely tackle poverty we have to deal with a number of issues.

• As Greg Clark's report rightly says people are becoming entangled in our welfare states safety net. We need to find better ways to assist the transition out of it.
• Many people end up with a poor education because no one thinks they can or should do better.
  
• We need an immigration policy to suit the whole country not just the economy. By that I mean we need to beware of the effect on wages of large numbers of unskilled immigrants.

In short the situation is complex. Just throwing money at it is not the answer.

Incidentally Iain Dale links to this piece on Conservative Home by Greg Clark whilst Borris Johnson has written this for the Telegraph.

I forgot to mention Greg Clark's piece on Conservative home points out that whilst those just within the 60% of median household income has fallen, those in the bottom 40% of median household income has risen.

Give addicts heroin?

I heard this first on Radio 4, apparently the Deputy Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, Howard Roberts says we should prescribe drug addicts heroin. The thinking is they would then no longer need to commit crime to fund their habit. You can read the BBC's article here.

I agree. However I would go a little further. I would prescribe heroin to anyone who could show they were an addict as soon as possible. This would also have the effect of cutting drug dealers income stream as well as reducing the need for crime.

Whilst drug addicts are going for their regular fix, you also have the opportunity to try and get them off heroin and rehabilitated which is also a good thing.

In short, we could reduce crime, make life harder for drug dealers, have regular contact with addicts so enabling us to rehabilitate some and make sure doses are clean and correct (saving on drug overdoses and other problems with badly cut heroin).

Looks like a win win situation to me.

What happens here is the future of the world's security in the 21st century

cool!

Any chance of some more kit?

Troops?

Armour?

Helicopters?

Anything?

I have just read this from the BBC on Tony Blair's visit to Afghanistan. We already know that he communicates with his commanders in the field by the press megaphone, we also know that the only way they think they can reply is also by the press megaphone. You can read my article on the subject here.

It is just a bit of a shame Tony has only just noticed.

Having said that I like this quote:

"So what do you do?" Tony Blair asked one of the snipers, lined up to represent the garrison for a 90-minute trip to Camp Bastion.

He looked down at his long-barrelled rifle, shrugged as if to say "what do you think?"

No, go on Tony, tell us what you think a sniper does with a snipers rifle?

And the 3,000th visitor was Ellee Seymour!

Just crossed over another milestone, 3,000 visitors since June 26th 2006, and not all of them me!

Ellee also comments as well. Feel free to coment your self.

You can visit Ellee's blog here.

Update 20:24

I forgot to mention that I also got No. 41 in Iain Dale's top 100 Conservative blogs!

John Reid is taking up an interesting position

Much has been made of the Attorney General, Tony's mate, Lord Goldsmiths comments on extending the detention without charge of terrorist suspects beyond 90 days. You can read the BBC's article here.

His position is clear. No, because he has seen no evidence to support an increase as yet. This is broadly the position of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats as well, though I expect those parties to be harder to convince.

However what has interested me is Dr. John "Comrade" Reid's position. You will remember him as Secretary of State for making Ghengis Khan look like a Liberal the Home Office. His words are different to Lord "Sorry I can't get you off this time Tony" Goldsmith, but mean the same.

He is reviewing the position but appears as yet not to have seen any evidence to convince him. In other words I can't see we need the extension. Meanwhile Gordon Brown has been saying he supports an extension to 90 days which Sir Ian Blair (who I wrote ought to be sacked) backed in a speech in Germany.

To be fair John Prescott seemed a bit dubious as well the other week. He indicated that parliament had decided, and if it was going to revisit the case then there would have to be evidence.

So what is the story and why is it interesting? It seems to me that Comrade Reid had been jogging off gently to the right, all the time keeping an eye over his shoulder at what Gordon "I want your pensions" Brown was doing. Gordon obviously seeing this gap open up on the right of Ghengis Khan started running desperately to catch up, and out Reid Reid. Except that as soon as Gordon started running it seems Reid stopped for breath, and now Gordon has sprinted past Reid on the right, Reid is sauntering back to more sensible ground, making Gordon look very very bad to the key electorate, that is those who will elect the next labour leader.

Fascinating game play by by John Reid. I think he has totally wrong footed Brown on this one, but both are playing politics with the war on terror which is unforgivable.

Iraq a disaster, Blair in denial

So we have this mess in Iraq, and our dear leader Tony Blair gets interviewed by David Frost on Al Jazeera's English service. You can read the Al Jazeera article here.

What struck me though was not Blair's alleged admission that the violence since the invasion has been a disaster, but what he said next. This was of corse to David Frost asking if Iraq has become a disaster.

I quote:

"It has, but you see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq?

"It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Sorry? What? It is not because of some accident in planning? It's all down to the bad guys who should have been what? Less bad? Is this man really such a pratt? The idea behind planning is to have a plan for a number of potential scenarios not just a single wishful thinking one. What was he expecting? Al Qaeda to just roll over and play dead?

There were massive mistakes in the planning which were foreseen by many people especially planners in the Pentagon and State Department. I have listed them in my article here. The fact that he can't see just how badly planned and resourced the mission was indicates that he is in a state of total denial. Clearly he has become a major liability. A was leader needs a brain that works.

You can read more on Iraq here.