peezedtee

Metro map of the day

2012-01-16T10:10:00.004Z

Latest rapid transit map from Singapore. The system has expanded hugely since I was last there only a few years ago. The thick lines are heavy metro, the thin lines are light rail (in the DLR sense, not street trams).

Footballer of the day

2012-01-07T14:33:00.004Z

Happy New Year to all, and happy 21st birthday this week to Eden Hazard (crazy name - crazy guy), a Belgian lad with nice legs who currently plays for Lille in France. He likes to wear his shorts quite snug-fitting, which makes a welcome change from so many footballers currently.

Heffalump of the day

2011-10-30T21:59:00.002Z

Rugby picture of the day

2011-10-29T10:02:00.001+01:00

How to make tea

2011-09-17T09:31:00.001+01:00

Hiking picture of the day

2011-09-16T14:15:00.002+01:00

Railway poster of the day

2011-09-06T09:48:00.004+01:00

The Bournemouth Belle was a Pullman train, introduced by the Southern Railway in 1931. Unusually, it ran on Sundays only at first, but became daily in 1936. Journey time from London to Bournemouth was 2 hours 9 minutes, running non-stop from Waterloo to Southampton. By 1939 it had been speeded up by three minutes. The brand lived on under British Railways until the south-west main line was electrified in 1967, as a result of which you can now do the journey, hourly throughout the day, in 1 hour 45 minutes, albeit with more stops and not in such luxury -- certainly no restaurant car these days: the most you can hope for is a sandwich trolley. No train now runs non-stop between London and Southampton.

Laid-back wombat of the day

2011-09-02T12:28:00.001+01:00

Police sirens in the night, and the collapse of civilisation

2011-08-14T13:34:00.004+01:00

Like most people, I have been shocked by the events of recent days in London and other cities. Shocked, and profoundly disturbed.

To look at the matter first from a selfish point of view, it has suddenly become apparent that one is not safe in one's home. There simply are not enough police for them to cover everywhere at once. The trouble has largely stopped in the last few nights, but that is only with extra police drafted in from elsewhere, all leave and rest days cancelled, 12-hour shifts, and police moved to this task from almost all other inquiries and responsibilities. Quite obviously, they cannot keep this up for very long. Once police dispositions revert to normal, the whole trouble could start again.

And while the looting of shops has taken centre stage in the TV coverage, it has been less widely reported that in some places ordinary houses and blocks of flats have been torched by gangs, apparently just for the hell of it. Some completely innocent people have lost their homes, as the police either stood idly by or were nowhere to be seen. This seems to me a good deal more serious and worrying than a few thousand people stealing shoes and telephones from chain stores, utterly disgraceful though that is: it is quite simply an outrage.

It has often been said that the first duty of any government is to protect the population. In this respect, the powers-that-be have plainly failed.

For the first time since moving back to London from abroad five years ago, the boyf and I have wondered if we did the wrong thing.

Looking at the wider social issues, there has been a torrent of analysis in the posh prints over the past week. The most persuasive articles are those pointing out that many of the likely underlying causes are not new, and that the matter is multifaceted and complex, defying simplistic solutions. Thus, the situation obviously cannot be attributed primarily to government spending cuts; but equally obviously they are not going to help, especially those aimed at youth clubs, playing fields, and other relatively cheap ways of keeping young people occupied.

Another thing that clearly doesn't help is large-scale youth unemployment, a continuing blight not only here but across most of Europe.

But these essentially "economic" and "political" arguments do not really do it for me. I am more interested in the "cultural" explanations, involving arguments about long-term moral decline, the collapse of respect for authority, the disintegration of the idea of society as something to which we all belong (pace Mrs Thatcher), and the eclipsing of notions of solidarity and fairness by those of greed, selfishness and materialism -- and an ever-coarsening popular culture, obsessed with "bling" and "celebrities", that endlessly encourages people to think that they should be judged by the objects they possess.

In short, civilisation is falling apart. This cannot fairly be blamed on the present government, or the previous one -- it is clearly a longer-term phenomenon than that -- so party-political point-scoring is pretty irrelevant at the present time. The media have a lot to answer for, in my view, for where else does the "popular culture" come from?

But politicians cannot escape all blame, and the same goes for many of the other "important people" in society, of whom greedy bankers and City fatcats are only the most obvious examples. Peter Oborne is very persuasive in The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom when he points out that

"the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up."

Oborne goes on to describe the Financial Times's glossy weekend magazine How To Spend It as "repellent", something I have always felt myself, but I never imagined I would see a commentator from the Right echo my thoughts. He goes on to lambast tax-avoiding millionaires like Richard Branson and Philip Green, as well as senior parliamentarians such as Francis Maude and Gerald Kaufman who made extravagant expenses claims and have escaped unscathed.

Of the Prime Minister, Oborne writes:

"The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that 'everybody deserves a second chance'. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters."

And finally:

"Let's bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life."

Britain, he concludes, "needs a moral reformation". I cannot but agree -- but where will it come from, and how will better values be instilled in the populace? I wish I could see a means to that end.

Sea otter of the day

2011-08-07T18:03:00.005+01:00

This sea otter is having its lunch. The sea otter is unusual in that it eats while lying on its back in the water.

Senior scouts of the day

2011-08-07T18:01:00.002+01:00

From Germany, probably.

Back to blogging

2011-08-02T13:47:00.004+01:00

I am emerging from three months' silence on this blog that was partly though not wholly the result of the No vote in the AV referendum, which sent me into a bit of a decline from which I am now recovering.

By voting day it was clear that we were going to lose, but the extent of the defeat was a shock. This is how I felt about the result:

I also felt:
(1) angry about the outrageous lies put about by the No campaign and its lackeys in most of the press,
(2) even more than ever inclined to think that referendums are a bad idea,
(3) doubtful as the value of any sort of political activity, which in my case always seems to turn out to have been a waste of time.

One small crumb of comfort was that my London borough was one of half a dozen places in the country where the Yes vote actually won. Most of the others were also in London, plus Oxford and Cambridge I think. This reinforces my belief that London is not in England. Someone or other made a half-serious suggestion that in those places, at least local elections should be conducted by AV.

Nick Clegg has a lot to answer for. Settling for an AV referendum as the price for Lib Dem participation in the coalition was a reckless gamble, and if I were a member of that party I think I should have wanted him to resign the leadership when the gamble so spectacularly failed. It is now clear that no proper thinking had been done beforehand about what terms the party should insist on if the opportunity arose. AV just happened to be on the table because it was previously bandied about, in a half-arsed way, as a possible compromise with Labour (not the Tories), and that was not because anyone in the LD party actually wanted AV but because one or two significant Labour figures, such as Alan Johnson, had earlier made favourable noises about it. Once the negotiations with Labour were clearly going nowhere for all sorts of other reasons, the idea ought to have been dropped.

The end result for party politics is that the LibDems appear to have self-destructed as an electoral force with nothing much to show for it. Many of the supposed "liberal" achievements of the coalition, though certainly welcome, were things the Tories were committed to doing anyway (no Heathrow expansion, no ID cards).

But more important to me than the fate of one party is that electoral reform is now off the agenda for the rest of my lifetime, so I am now condemned to spend the rest of my years in a profoundly undemocratic polity with no prospect of any significant improvement.

Train of the day

2011-04-30T14:24:00.004+01:00

Here is the original (1970s) rolling stock on the Brussels metro, now looking slightly dowdy. When I first lived there in the 1980s, it took me a while to get used to the phenomenal speed at which these trains accelerate away from the platform, compared with the London Underground. Incidentally the service is much better now than it was then. At the time, the interval between trains was only 20 minutes in the evening -- hopeless for a city metro -- and it was being threatened with being closed down in the evenings altogether, under the then right-wing Liberal national government. Things got a lot better with Belgium's new federal structure, when in the early 1990s the new Brussels regional asssembly took over responsibility for local transport in the capital. Devolved regional government is good for transport -- look at Scotland and Wales recently, and indeed London compared with the rest of England.

A very short film on what to do about the referendum

2011-04-23T13:16:00.004+01:00

Hello undecided voters! If you watch no other video clips about voting systems, please watch this one by TV's Dan Snow:

AV too complicated, innit?

2011-04-21T10:36:00.004+01:00

I like this, from UncleMikey at b3ta.com (click on the image to enlarge):

"No to AV" and its campaign to deceive the public with a torrent of downright lies

2011-04-20T18:05:00.006+01:00

I was just sitting minding my own business, watching International Youth Football from South America on Eurosport2, when a leaflet arrived, headed "Keep One Person, One Vote". That sounds reasonable, I thought -- but is anybody suggesting otherwise?

It turned out to be an astonishingly mendacious piece of propaganda from NO2AV. And there was the first falsehood right there on the front cover -- the suggestion that the Alternative Vote does *not* involve "one person, one vote".

Of course AV also means one person, one vote, and it has been pointed out a million times by now that under AV everybody has only one vote, which is counted again at each stage of the counting procedure, so all votes in each contest are counted the same number of times. Anyone who suggests otherwise either hasn't understood how the system works, or -- more likely in this case -- understands perfectly well how it works but is trying to deceive the public.

Most outrageous of all is that the leaflet solemnly regurgitates the barefaced lie that AV will require voting machines and hence extra public expense. How can they get away with this, when it has been formally clarified by the authorities that machines will not be used or needed? Isn't there anything in electoral law that forbids deliberately making assertions that are verifiably the opposite of the truth?

I was going to go on and point out all the other things that are wrong with this leaflet, at best deliberately misleading and at several points just plumb wrong. But somebody else has done the job for me, in graphic form, which you can see here.

One significant point not adequately covered is the scare story that AV will assist extremists such as the BNP. The fatuous Tory peer Baroness Warsi -- evidently not keen to have the issue clouded with mere facts -- has been pushing this line. It's not just wrong, it is the opposite of the truth. One of the main advantages, perhaps the only real advantage, of AV is that (provided people understand how to use it effectively) it *prevents* a poorly supported candidate "coming through the middle" and getting elected on a small percentage of the vote because opposition to him or her is split too many ways. That is how BNP candidates have occasionally got elected in local council elections under first-past-the-post.

The only way the BNP can get elected under AV is if either (a) their candidate gets 50% of first preferences, which isn't going to happen, or (b) the BNP gets quite a lot of first preferences and then also picks up most of the second preferences of all those candidates who have performed in the first count less well than the BNP. This also seems extraordinarily unlikely (because Greens and LibDems and Respect types are never going to put the BNP as their second choice, though I suppose a few UKIP supporters might).

So with AV we would be moving from a system under which the BNP can occasionally get elected by a fluke, to a system under which they have no real prospect of being elected at all. No doubt that is why the BNP is actively campaigning for the "No" side in this referendum -- a fact that seems to have passed TV's Baroness Warsi by.

The shameless gangsters at NO2AV have also put out a spectacularly misleading TV broadcast, clearly designed to confuse the viewer and provoke groundless fears. You can see a version of it, adapted to point out some of its faults, here.

I am not claiming here that AV is wonderful. Actually it is not a very good electoral system. There are much better ones, but they are not on offer in this referendum. The point to keep in mind for this 5 May vote is that, of the two choices before us, the present system, first-past-the-post, is plainly inferior to AV -- so deeply flawed in fact that almost anything, not excluding the tossing of a coin, might well produce a fairer result.

Two articles worth reading, among many on this subject: this by TV's Andrew Rawnsley, and this New Statesman editorial.

And see also this piece by Neil Harding on the agonies of tactical voting, which AV would make unnecessary.

Footballer of the day

2011-04-13T15:05:00.003+01:00

Here is TV's Ashley Cole training with the England squad a couple of weeks ago. While these shorts are not quite up to the standard of Argentina in the 1978 World Cup, they are a lot better than most football shorts seen these days.

What we want to know is this: If Ashley Cole can wear these, why not the rest of the England team? And if they can wear these very satisfactory shorts in training, why cannot the team's regular match strip be the same, instead of the dreadful, clownish, long and baggy things they currently wear?

Railway station of the day

2011-03-30T11:09:00.002+01:00

Time-lapse pictures of Elstree and Borehamwood station having its platforms extended to take 12-coach trains. This is part of the Thameslink upgrade programme.

Personalities against fairer voting

2011-03-29T22:23:00.008+01:00

According to a website called Labour No to AV, if you vote "No" in the forthcoming referendum you will be in company with the following exciting intellects, all vying with each other to be at the very cutting edge of contemporary political analysis:

Margaret Beckett!
TV's Hazel Blears!
David Blunkett!
Margaret Hodge!
TV's John Prescott!!
John Reid!
Dennis Skinner!

It is also interesting to note that of the small parties, the only one campaigning against AV is the British National Party.

Lies and smears about electoral reform

2011-02-24T11:51:00.003Z

A very good article by John Kampfner in yesterday's London Evening Standard, This referendum is about a lot more than vote reform:

Ultimately this referendum, on May 5, comes down to different visions of Britain. The "yes" campaign tends to be supported more by the young and optimistic. The "no" brigade is comprised mainly of Conservative Right-wingers who hate any form of change. These people opposed devolution for Scotland and Wales (now accepted as normal) and other forms of social change of past decades that have become part of the fabric of British life.

I hope he is right about that, because if so, the "Yes" side should win quite easily. Certainly the "No" campaign has got off to a lamentable start, with an irrelevant and mendacious focus on the supposed cost of changing the system. And they are also talking demonstrable nonsense about the system itself. Tom Newton-Dunn, who surely privately knows better but is presumably doing Rupert Murdoch's bidding, affects to believe in The Sun that AV is too complicated. Are they seriously suggesting that the British are too stupid to number candidates 1, 2, 3 in order of preference, as the Irish and the Australians have been quite capably doing for many decades? Is this really the best they can do?

As this campaign gets under way, I begin to feel that maybe it matters more than I thought it would. I mentioned the other day pro-STV friends who think AV almost an irrelevant diversion, so inferior is it to STV. While there was some force in that viewpoint in the abstract, now that the referendum is actually happening I suspect that it will be a disaster for progressive politics if the "Yes" side now loses.

Finally for today, may I commend a blog post by Neil Harding entitled 10 Facts About The Alternative Vote.

Changing the voting system

2011-02-22T19:40:00.005Z

TV's Andrew Rawnsley has written quite a good piece about the forthcoming referendum on the Alternative Vote. In his view, the current polls are more or less meaningless; either side could easily win; and support on both sides is so far soft.

I must say I am a bit depressed to find that even some of my LibDem friends, who (like me) have been agitating for electoral reform for decades, are lukewarm about this particular proposal and, while they will vote yes if they can be bothered to vote at all, they won't be positively campaigning for it. This is because they want STV, and think AV is so inferior to STV that it is scarcely any better than what we have at the moment.

I also want STV, but the hard fact of life is that we are not going to get it anytime soon. I am of the "anything is better than nothing" view. We all know that AV is not a proportional system. It can sometimes produce distorted results, just like first-past-the-post (FPTP). But breaking the stranglehold of FPTP is surely a good thing in itself, and introducing the principle of preferential voting likewise. Numbering candidates in order of preference is better than the all-or-nothing choice of the present system, and could be a step towards STV: all that would be required to move from AV to STV is to join existing constituences together into groups of, preferably, five. The voters by then would have got used to the idea of numbering the candidates 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Even if STV proves to be beyond our reach, AV is still better than what we have because it very largely removes any incentive to attempt to vote tactically, i.e. the voter can safely write down his or her true preferences without having try to guess what everybody else is doing.

As Roger Mortimore of IPSOS-Mori points out in an excellent new paper, A Guide to the Alternative Vote (PDF), it's not true that it it impossible to vote tactically under AV, but the effects are unpredictable and it is difficult to see how in practice a candidate or party could organise it. They might try, but the important thing is that for the ordinary elector there is no point in it.

Andrew Rawnsley meanwhile thinks that the more people hear about preferential voting the more they will like it, so he is optimistic that the campaign could produce a majority for change. Certainly David Cameron's speech on the subject last week was a disgraceful tissue of lies which the pro-AV camp ought to be able to demolish quite easily.

Bicycles (and trams) dominate in Utrecht

2011-02-17T17:34:00.001Z

Why can't it be more like that here?

No evidence supports NHS reforms

2011-02-05T08:53:00.004Z

The other day in The coalition so far: good or bad? I expressed, among other things, some doubts about the government's proposed NHS reforms.

It's worse than I thought. The excellent Ben Goldacre of "Bad Science" fame (best known for his brave and relentless skewering of the claptrap that is "homeopathy") now writes in Andrew Lansley and his imaginary evidence that there have been 15 major reorganisations of the NHS in 30 years. An upheaval every two years! What an absurdly wasteful and inefficient way of carrying on. Yet, according to Goldacre, no real attempt was made to measure the effectiveness of any of these "reforms". And so there is no evidence to support what the government now wants to do.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley keeps talking about "evidence" to back his proposals. Goldacre shows that there is no such evidence. In reality, nobody knows whether they will improve things or make them worse.

Cute Korean boy band of the day

2011-02-03T08:42:00.002Z

The coalition so far: good or bad?

2011-01-28T10:00:00.004Z

A recent blog post by Neil Harding lists what are, in his view, The ten worst (and five best) things the coalition have done...so far.

He is particularly upset about the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the cutting of numerous budgets, all moves that will, by and large, hurt the poor more than the rich. The increase in VAT also attracts his opprobrium. I am inclined to agree with most of this. How can the government possibly claim that VAT is progressive? Why not raise the money instead by increasing income tax on the rich? Why can we not be more like Scandinavia, whose economies incidentally are consistently more successful than Britain's?

Neil is also highly sceptical about the proposed NHS reforms, and I fear he may be right. It is unclear how it will improve services, and seems more likely to waste public money than save any. An article in this week's British Medical Journal bluntly describes the whole scheme as "mad". All past evidence is that major restructuring of large organisations hardly ever delivers the advantages claimed, and seriously damages efficiency while the upheaval is under way.

On the plus side, Neil Harding approves of Ken Clarke's "Prison doesn't work" stance, and I very much agree. Some of us have been trying to make this argument for more than 30 years, but know-nothing tabloid kneejerk populist yelling always seems to win the day over the calm appraisal of facts in the area of law-'n'-order. We wait to see whether it will really be any different this time.

Defence cuts, and raising the income tax threshold, are positive moves as far as they go; but, as Neil points out, the defence budget could be slashed far more than this without any discernible disbenefits to the country as a whole. Some jobs would be lost. But the present level of defence expenditure -- on pointless macho toys like aircraft carriers and Trident missiles -- is a remarkably expensive way of sustaining a few hundred thousand jobs.

On big item missing from his "good things" list, I think, is transport. Rather remarkably, the coalition has stuck so far to its determination not to expand airport capacity in the south-east, in the face of a great deal of doomist bleating from the vested interests concerned. Also, Philip Hammond as Transport Secretary is proving a good deal less of a "petrolhead" than most of us feared. Not only are Crossrail and Thameslink going ahead, and a certain (albeit too limited) amount of railway electrification also; but the man has actually been going around saying that railways are an essential part of the economy's infrastructure, and have to be invested in whether they make a "profit" or not. This is about as different from the usual Thatcherite dogma as you could reasonably get, and deserves more credit than it has so far received, especially in the present economic circumstances.

Take That video of the day

2011-01-06T11:33:00.000Z

Trams of the day

2010-12-17T20:23:00.003Z

Or streetcars, as they call them in America. This is silent film of them in Washington DC in the early 1950s. These have long gone, but there is now a plan for a new tram system there.

What the hell is going on?

2010-12-14T19:06:00.001Z

Let us be clear: Julian Assange is an arrogant, self-important twat. But even arrogant twats have the right not to be extradited on trumped-up charges. Does anyone seriously believe in the accusations of rape? And what on earth is Sweden playing at? It is almost the last country one expects to see doing the USA's dirty work for it.

I don't of course buy the argument that the Wikileaks operation is morally justified on freedom of information grounds. Not all information can or should be in the public domain. Certainly we ought to be told in general terms what governments are doing in our names, but it is remarkably naive to think that that means every piece of paper can be published.

But there does seem to be an element of "shoot the messenger" in the reaction of our various dear leaders, a sort of mixture of outrage and panic. The clearly guilty party is the US government employee who leaked the stuff in the first place, rather more than Wikileaks for broadcasting it.

Bicycling news

2010-11-06T17:48:00.002Z

The latest issue of the Campaign for Better Transport's London Group Newsletter (PDF) includes a review of the new London bike hire scheme. We are supposed to call it the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, but I don't see why we should give an evil grasping bank any credit for contributing less than one-fifth of the cost. Most people seem to be calling them Boris bikes, but I won't do that either, because B. Johnson has merely brought to fruition a scheme that was already being developed when Ken Livingstone was Mayor.

The reviewer welcomes the principle of the scheme, but is a bit sniffy about the bikes themselves, which he finds heavy and slow. As it happens, I got round to joining the scheme myself a couple of weeks ago, and have now used it a handful of times. I find the bikes just fine, and easier to use than I expected; not terribly fast, sure, but they are not meant for racing, after all.

I do already have a bicycle, but the great beauty of this scheme is that you can take a bike from one docking station and leave it at another, so that you don't have to bother about finding something suitable to which to lock your bike and then still worrying that it might be stolen none the less. The density of the docking stations is quite remarkable: on average they are said to be only about 100 metres apart. The only big problem is that so far they are only to be found in roughly Tube zone 1, so it's entirely an Inner London thing for the moment.

The scheme seems to be a huge instant success. I see loads of people using the bikes, and it's not that unusual to find a docking station with no bikes available at all, so clearly more need to be provided already.

TfL's other great cycling innovation of this year has had more mixed reviews: it is the first two Cycle Superhighways. These are commuting routes into central London from, so far, the east (Barking) and the south (Wimbledon). From what I have seen of the southern route, there are rather few stretches where the cycle path is separate from the road. Mostly the "superhighway" amounts to putting a lot of bright blue paint on existing streets. Amsterdam or Copenhagen this is not. But, as the CBT newsletter points out, it should at least help raise awareness of cyclists on the part of motorists, and it certainly makes the route more visible to the cyclist himself.

Uniform of the day

2010-11-02T16:27:00.003Z

A French senior scout.

London transport spending

2010-10-25T15:22:00.005+01:00

London Reconnections reproduces a Transport for London statement about the funding settlement.

Four points caught my eye:

(a) It implies that some sort of Piccadilly Line upgrade is still going ahead, despite the cancellation several months ago of the order for its new rolling stock. Maybe we are to get new signalling but with old trains.

(b) The East London Line extension to Clapham Junction is going ahead "and will be delivered by the end of 2012", though presumably still without the new station at Surrey Canal Road. It will be good to have more frequent trains from Denmark Hill, though I am not sure how far the new journey opportunities will compensate for the forthcoming reduction in Victoria-bound trains (and their removal altogether from Clapham High Street and Wandsworth Road).

(c) The congestion charge is increasing to £10. This is a step in the right direction, but I think it ought to be at least £15. Most car journeys in central London are unnecessary and should be penalised accordingly.

(d) Parking on the TfL road network will be charged for. And so I should think. Why on earth that's not already the case is a mystery.

Probably the worst news is the confirmation that fares, already quite high, will rise by a lot more than inflation. On buses, especially, this will hit the poorer citizens disproportionately and is therefore regressive. Ken Livingstone always did his best to keep bus fares as low as possible within whatever financial settlement was available, even when there was no alternative to putting tube fares up.

The cuts

2010-10-21T18:55:00.007+01:00

A predictable response to yesterday's Spending Review comes from, among many others, TV's Polly Toynbee and TV's Johann Hari. This is not to say that they are wrong, just that we already know what lefties are bound to say about it.

But now comes the not-at-all-left-wing Institute for Fiscal Studies, confirming that the changes announced are essentially regressive, and that the Chancellor was not being completely honest when he said that the broadest shoulders will bear the biggest burden. It is true that the richest 2% are hardest hit in absolute terms, and so I should bloody well think, but poor families are the biggest losers as a proportion of their income.

This is just what one would expect from a normal Tory government, but this is a coalition government in which the Lib Dems (who say they believe in progressive taxation) are supposed to be a moderating influence. That is the only justification for their being there. I think the LDs are going to struggle to retain much credibility for the foreseeable future. Perhaps they will claim that, if they weren't in the government, it would have been even worse.

Of course, few people actually voted for any of this. But we do not live in a democracy. It is the unelected bond markets who decide what actually happens. It seems that, if we do not have these cuts -- if, for instance, we solve the problem by instead imposing a big one-off levy on the very rich (as advocated, entirely fruitlessly I fear, by the Glasgow University Media Group) -- the bond markets will attack the pound and interest rates will shoot up and then we shall all be even further up the creek than we are already. It is all very undemocratic and very unfair.

Why aircraft carriers?

2010-10-19T20:09:00.003+01:00

We read today that the Ark Royal is to be scrapped, but two new aircraft carriers will still be commissioned.

What I want to know is this: Why does Britain need any aircraft carriers at all? I have looked into this, and I find that most countries do not have any aircraft carriers. What most countries have are enough soldiers to defend their territory and enough aircraft to defend their airspace. Only nine countries in the whole world have aircraft carriers. As one would expect, by far the largest fleet of these phenomenally expensive vessels belongs to the USA.

The Prime Minister is quoted today as saying: "Britain has punched above its weight in the world and we should have no less ambition for our country in the decades to come". But why should Britain punch above its weight? What's the point? This idea seems to be a silly post-imperial hangover. Why can't we just be like Scandinavia or Holland?

Electrification: Malaysia shows the way

2010-09-25T08:35:00.007+01:00

While the powers-that-be in this country dither over railway electrification, at least one part of our former empire is just getting on with it. Electric services have just begun on a substantial stretch of Malaysia's main north-south line. This is the first stage of a plan to electrify the whole route from Singapore in the south to the Thai border in the north. It's a British-built metre-gauge line. Here is one of the new EMUs bought for the purpose:

Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh is about 200 km and the journey time is reduced from well over three hours to just 2 hours. The article doesn't say anything about acquiring electric locos, so presumably the existing (fun but rather slow) half a dozen through trains a day between Singapore and the far north will continue to be diesel-hauled over the newly electrified section between Seremban and Ipoh.

This is, I think, the first long-distance electrification in the entire region. Up till now the only electric trains in Malaysia have been a small suburban network around Kuala Lumpur, two metro lines within KL itself (both of which are about to be extended), and Siemens' excellent standalone airport link line.

Trains of the day

2010-09-14T09:49:00.003+01:00

Various suburban EMUs in Melbourne, Australia.

To the British eye, what jumps out is that these trains all seem to be operated by Connex. Remember them? I wonder what Melbourne has done to deserve this.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that Connex lost the contract in 2009 to Hong Kong's MTR. Ha ha ha!

Uniform of the day

2010-09-04T11:50:00.004+01:00

Czech scouts, with dog.

Back from holiday

2010-09-03T12:13:00.007+01:00

We were in Aberdeen and the Grampians -- "a strange choice of holiday destination", as it was put to me beforehand.

It's true one expects Aberdeen to be always grey and wet, but we were lucky -- it was so for only one day. The rest of the time we had warm sunshine. It is actually quite a pleasing city. We hired a car and explored castles in the surrounding countryside, which is delightful. The National Trust for Scotland may be in trouble over its accounts, but the people showing us some of its castles did an impressive job.

The journey from London to Aberdeen and back was courtesy of Messrs East Coast, whose ageing but nicely refurbished HST 125 performed faultlessly. To my surprise, the train was pretty much full between London and Dundee in both directions.

On the way back, a young woman getting on at Dundee and going to York found a seat marked "reserved from Newcastle". "Which comes first, Newcastle or York?" she asked another young woman in the next seat. "I have no idea", was the reply. These were both British (in fact I think English) people, clearly intelligent and middle-class. I never cease to be amazed at some people's ignorance of elementary general knowledge. Do schools teach anything at all nowadays?

Which reminds me, I had been moderately impressed with David Cameron so far -- not all his policies, obviously, but his evident general competence -- until he said on TV in America that Britain had been the USA's junior partner in the Battle of Britain. As any fule kno, the USA wasn't even in the war for another 18 months at that point.

The summer of 1940, when Britain's very survival was hanging by a thread and when it stood alone against tyranny, was always supposed to be a, if not the, defining moment of this country's modern identity. And here we have our prime minister, for heaven's sake, educated at Eton and Oxford, who apparently understands nothing about it at all. It would almost be funny, if it weren't so desperately sad.

Lockerbie: He probably didn't do it!

2010-08-20T21:57:00.004+01:00

Lockerbie is back in the news, I see. I wish the meejah would stop talking about "The Lockerbie Bomber" when so many observers doubt whether he had anything to do with it. Maybe the message is begining to get through: TIME magazine (you can't get much more mainstream than that) has an article today that actually includes a section headed: "Could Al-Megrahi have been innocent?" Well, yes, as some people have been saying for many years. If the US Senators who say they want to find out the truth really do find it out, they may not like what they find. But we may be sure that the UK and US and all other involved authorities will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.

Whither electrification?

2010-06-30T21:23:00.006+01:00

Just over a year ago in Railway electrification and the Tories, I wrote that a reason for hoping the general election would be postponed as long as possible was so that the then Transport Secretary, TV's Lord Adonis, would be able to let some of the rail electrification contracts quickly enough that by the time the Tories took over it would be too late to stop them.

Well, the election was indeed postponed as long as possible, but it is not yet clear that the new government is going to pick up the electrification baton. The clock has been set back to zero, it seems, and Andrew Adonis might as well not have bothered. It is the greatest of pities that such a pro-rail (and knowledgeable about rail) S of S came along so late in the day. I was very alarmed to read in Rail News recently, in Growing gloom over electrification prospects, that "the chances of electrification of the Great Western Main Line and several key routes in the north west in the foreseeable future appear to have dwindled to almost zero."

This was based on an oral answer in the House of Lords, where the government spokesman (one Lord Attlee, grandson of Clement), more or less said there was no money to pay for it.

Now the new issue of Modern Railways arrives and the plot thickens further. No mention of electrification not going ahead at all, but in a surprisingly small and non-prominent news item it has Tony Miles quoting Iain Coucher, the outrageously arrogant and greedy CEO of Network Rail, who I see is now departing early (no great loss there, I think), as saying that the Midland electrification should go ahead first, not the Great Western. This would be a cheaper option, and makes more sense in various technical and rolling-stock respects.

If this really is what's happening, I'm quite happy with it, indeed I said in the first place that my own preference would have been for the Midland to go first. For one thing, it serves a slightly greater population overall. For another, the line is already electrified as far as Bedford, whereas the GWR is electrified only as far as Airport Junction. Thirdly, one feels the poor old Midland deserves a bit of a break after all these years; it always seems to have been last in the queue for investment. I think maybe you could also argue that electrification would benefit the Great Western somewhat less since it was laid out for speed in the first place, whereas the Midland is more like the WCML in its profusion of curves and gradients, disadvantages which electric traction can mitigate in part. It's also probably potentially more significant for freight, especially if some of the idiotically short-sighted 1960s reductions from 4 tracks to 2 can be reversed.

Anyway, maybe this idea was just Coucher thinking aloud, and clearly now he is not going to be involved in it, so we await the outcome of the various "value for money" and other reviews that are now under way. It will be extremely disappointing if major railway investment is put on ice for the foreseeable future. During a recession is precisely the time when projects of this kind should be going full speed ahead, as on the Southern and on Merseyside in the 1930s. It creates jobs, and costs less than when asset values are higher, and means you are in a good position to exploit growth when the economy revives.

And what of TV's Philip Hammond, the new Transport Secretary? He certainly is not Lord Adonis, sadly. Railway Eye has already decided he is a "petrolhead". TV's Christian Wolmar is equally unimpressed. He did not get off to a good start by saying he was going to end "Labour's war on the motorist", a piece of brainless tabloid nonsense - motoring costs are actually 14% down in real terms over Labour's period in office, while rail fares have been rising sharply in real terms for ages. Hammond did go out of his way to say he was not a fan of Top Gear, so at least he is aware of the danger of appearing too car-obsessed. He didn't sound completely hopeless in a too-brief interview today on Radio 4's You and Yours, though the questions put to him were not exactly probing and his answers were not followed up. Crossrail is going ahead, but he is going to try hard to make it cost less: that was about as much as we heard from him on railways. I hope Wolmar is wrong on this. I don't think Hammond is another Ernest Marples, at least. No doubt it will be the Treasury beancounters who finally determine what happens, as usual.

Train of the day

2010-06-08T07:44:00.003+01:00

The Singapore metro (called the MRT) is probably the most efficient public transport system I have ever used. A couple of weeks ago somebody sprayed graffiti on one of its trains, seen in this clip. This is unheard of in squeaky-clean, conformist, authoritarian Singapore, and has caused national outrage. You just do not do things like that in Singapore! Bizarrely, the culprit turns out to be a Swiss expat and he is now in deep doodoo.

Poetry corner

2010-06-05T22:24:00.003+01:00

So. Farewell then
Matthew Parris and David Aaronovitch
and Peter Riddell
and TV's Danny the Fink.
I shall not be reading
your columns anymore
unless I happen to find a copy of The Times
discarded on a train.
Because the Times website is going behind
a paywall
and I am certainly not paying two quid a week
to Rupert Murdoch.

P.Z. Thribb (61½)

Trains of the day

2010-05-25T08:36:00.005+01:00

Rare footage of the Liverpool Overhead Railway (closed 1957). Eerie and sad.

For more on this now vanished line, including a route diagram, see this post at Scott's "Merseytart" blog.

The appropriately 1950s music used to be the signature tune of "Children's Favourites" on the Light Programme every Saturday morning.

Do we care who leads the Labour Party?

2010-05-22T07:10:00.004+01:00

Lord Heseltine said on telly the other day that it didn't matter who led the Labour Party, though his preference would be for Ed Balls (easiest for the Tories to beat).

This reminded me of my own feelings after the Tories' defeat by New Labour in 1997. There was a lot of media fuss about their leadership, and my reaction, and that of everyone I spoke to, was: "Who gives a toss?" The Conservative Party seemed hugely irrelevant. It felt possible at the time, and for long afterwards, to hope that it was in terminal decline, and that, if we just ignored it for long enough, it might simply disappear.

Do we actually still need a Labour Party? If we ever get proportional representation, a quite different party structure could be envisaged, in which the more liberal-minded social democrats in the Labour Party were absorbed into the LibDems, and the radical left merged with the Green Party. This would leave the illiberal authoritarians of the Blunkett/Reid cast, who need a new Authoritarian Party, in which quite a few Tories would also be more at home. The more libertarian-minded Europhobes on the Tory right ought to be in UKIP.

One of the most difficult problems with the Labour Party is its trade union link. I cannot see what trade unionism has to do with social democracy. Much trade unionism seems to be about maintaining differentials, which is pretty much the precise opposite of equality. BA cabin crew, for instance, understandably want to keep their relatively well-paid jobs, but that is of no concern to the rest of us. I don't really see why I should care if BA goes bust. How does the promotion of sectional self-interest assist the cause of a fairer society?

The unions do make a certain amount of noise about poverty, but that applies only to certain notoriously ill-paid trades like cleaning and catering, where jobs are often precarious and unionisation is weak anyway. I presume that most of the real poor are not working at all.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that, for Labour politicians, the main purpose of the trade union link is simply to provide funding for the party. Quite why the trade unions still think this worth their while, when Labour governments nowadays are so deaf to their demands, is one of the great mysteries of our time. It is difficult to feel convinced that the phrase "The Labour movement" still contains any rational meaning. It is a hollowed-out vehicle that has been running on empty for a long time.

Still, as things stand we do have a Labour leadership contest, which those of us who are no longer in the party can watch from outside for its curiosity value. The best news is that Hattie Half-Bake isn't standing. It is bad enough that we have to put up with her as acting leader for the next few months. As for TV's Diane Abbott, I can't quite imagine her as Prime Minister but at least she will surely liven things up a bit. I was sorry that Jon Cruddas decided not to stand.

TV's Ed Balls would be a disaster. (His wife is at least as clever, and might have been marginally less obnoxious, though she shares his infuriating penchant for never answering the question being asked.)

The rest seem much of a muchness, so far. Perhaps the debate will illuminate their differences. None of them seems to me much like leadership material. The only person who comes across on the telly as a reasonable and competent human being is TV's Alan Johnson -- but he isn't standing, either.

Skiing picture of the day

2010-05-22T06:08:00.001+01:00

LibDem U-turn on nuclear power?

2010-05-13T21:05:00.002+01:00

The coalition government's policy on new nuclear power stations is being reported as a U-turn for the LibDems.

In fact, though, I saw Vince Cable on the telly before the election already saying that, for his part, opposition to nuclear power was not ideological but economic. Nuclear power is fantastically expensive if you include all the building and decommissioning costs. His main concern was that it should not be subsidised by the taxpayer (as it always has been up to now). And that proviso remains, it seems, in the new government's approach. If they stick with that, the likelihood is that no nuclear power stations will get built in any case, so this "U-turn" looks a bit like a distinction without a difference.

I must admit I have long been a bit of a wobbler on this issue, and was never absolutely sure that the LibDems (still less the Greens) had got it right. If we look out to the medium and long term, the looming world energy crisis might mean we are going to need all the (carbon-free) energy sources we can get -- the James Lovelock view.

Where I know I differ fundamentally from most of the pro-nuclear lobby is that nuclear must not be seen as a substitute for renewables. On this view, it is an either/or question, hence the appearance of people paid by the nuclear industry, such as Sir Bernard Ingham, in the ranks of the anti-windfarm fanatics. The danger is that if the spotlight is shifted from renewables to nuclear, it provides an excuse for not bothering to pursue wind, wave and solar energy. (Which reminds me, how is the Severn Barrage study coming along?)

One point I have never seen mentioned relates to the (probably slight) danger of a Chernobyl-style nuclear accident releasing a vast radioactive cloud into the atmosphere. And it is this: What is the point of the UK not pursuing nuclear energy on those grounds, unless our nearest neighbours are going to do the same? France and Belgium already get most of their electricity from nuclear, and are completely signed up to developing it further. Radioactive clouds do not respect national boundaries. Furthermore, Germany and Sweden are, I believe, already rowing back on earlier Green-inspired commitments to phase out nuclear power.

I don't much like it, and maybe we won't need it, but I don't see any point in expending political capital on empty gestures.

Let's look on the bright side

2010-05-12T16:24:00.005+01:00

Naturally I am gobsmacked by the past 48 hours, like everyone else. But whatever else about all this, there are some good things:

(1) The Heathrow third runway is definitely off. LibDems and Tories both said they were against it before the election, and the new govt confirms it now on its very first day. They couldn't possibly go back on this. This alone is a great cause for celebration.

(2) Fixed-term parliaments is a huge step forward. This isn't just a recent LibDem demand. Radicals have been campaigning for this for centuries. No longer will be incumbent PM be able to rig the election date to suit his or her short-term party advantage.

(3) As has been widely noted, the Alternative Vote is not designed to be a proportional system (it can't be, because it retains the single-member constituency). But it is a preferential system, so the elector does get a bit more power. Above all, voters need no longer try to second-guess how everybody else in a particular constituency might be voting. Under such a system, we can at least stop worrying about tactical voting (provided the system is properly explained to people). Also, once people have got used to numbering candidates in order of preference, it lends itself to easy conversion to STV at a later stage -- you just have to combine groups of constituencies together.

Tories, PR and short memories

2010-05-11T15:03:00.003+01:00

People have short memories. Everyone is correctly pointing out that most Tories currently harbour a visceral hatred of the idea of changing the voting system, and a great attachment to first-past-the-post.

They are also implying that "it was ever thus". This is not so. The last time there was a big groundswell of support for proportional representation, in the 1970s, most of that support (other than from the Liberals, of course) was coming from the Conservatives, including some quite leading ones who had been in Ted Heath's government of 1970 to 1974. There was also a phenomenon jokingly known as "Moggism-Levinism", after then Times editor William Rees-Mogg and his star columnist Bernard Levin, both of whom banged on endlessly in the mid-1970s about the need for PR "in the national interest" -- this of course when the Times was still a respectable, non-Murdoch paper.

Indeed, I remember many on the left in those days describing PR as a sinister right-wing plot whose real purpose, in their view, was to keep Labour out of power. I was an elected member of the Council of the Electoral Reform Society for much of that decade, and although we did have some maverick Labour Party members on board, a greater number of Tories were in evidence. In truth, it was an issue that cut right across party lines. It was only when Mrs Thatcher's extremist far-right clique hijacked the Tory party that this changed.

It is funny to see party tribalists on both Tory and Labour sides now rushing to the defence of first-past-the-post. Their arguments generally purport to be altruistic but in fact they are usually calculating party advantage. The Tories who oppose PR claim that only FPTP preserves what they claim is the essential constituency link, but probably their real reason is that Tories always represent only a minority of voters (this was true even at the time of the Thatcher "landslide" in 1979) and, under PR, the country's natural anti-Tory majority would always find expression in terms of seats, as it has mostly not done under the present system.

Peter Kellner in Rise of small parties shackles the big beasts pointed out on Sunday that the political landscape has gradually changed over the years and it is now quite likely that even if the system remains unchanged we are going to end up with hung parliaments in future:

Last week’s inconclusive outcome may be the first of many, even if first-past-the-post survives.

The reason is that the Labour and Conservative parties no longer dominate politics as they once did. In 1951, only nine MPs did not take the Labour or Tory whip; in 1970 the number was 12. By 1979 the number had climbed to 27, but the 70-seat Conservative lead over Labour delivered Margaret Thatcher a 43-seat overall majority.

Last week even a 70-seat lead would have been insufficient. As well as the 57-seat contingent of Liberal Democrats, 28 MPs will represent eight smaller parties. To secure an overall majority of just two, the Tories would have needed 86 more MPs than Labour.

(...) One of Cameron’s problems is that his looks like such an English party. There will be 298 Tory and 235 non-Tory MPs in England; but the rest of the UK returned just nine Tories compared with 108 non-Tory MPs.

To which the Tories could counter: those lopsided figures are exaggerated by first-past-the-post. They secured the support of one Scot in six. A proportional system could have added another nine MPs to accompany the solitary figure of David Mundell.

There is an even bigger reason for Conservatives to dislike first-past-the-post. Had Thursday’s voting figures been reversed, with Labour winning 36% of the vote and the Tories taking 29%, Labour would have enjoyed an overall majority of nearly 70. Even after the latest boundary changes, which in effect gave the Tories 12 extra seats, Britain’s political geography remains tilted against the party.

Yet the Tories are fiercely attached to the system that causes them such anguish.(...)

This being so, perhaps more Tories might start changing their minds about this. Michael Portillo, as so often, is already ahead of the curve. He said on telly the other day that he was beginning to see the advantages of a more proportional system.

Election: Good news, bad news

2010-05-09T18:13:00.003+01:00

Good news:

(1) How marvellous that the ghastly humbug Esther Rantzen only managed to come fourth!

(2) Total lack of progress by the BNP and UKIP.

(3) I am delighted by Caroline Lucas's success in Brighton for the Green Party.

(4) Gutter press propaganda in favour of the Conservatives and its smears against Labour do not seem to have had much effect. It is remarkable that the Tories failed to do any better than 36% of the vote in such favourable circumstances for them. The newspapers seem to be losing some of their influence.

(5) Good riddance to Jacqui Smith, who was a thundering disgrace.

Bad news:

(1) The defeat of Evan Harris in Oxford is a grave blow. From the rationalist/secularist point of view, he was one of the best MPs in the House.

(2) Above all, it's a tragedy that the Lib Dem score was not enough to give them the clout to secure a proportional voting system. We may not get another chance. I hope I am wrong.

Tennis picture of the day

2010-05-02T22:24:00.003+01:00

Westminster School, 1984. This has appeared in the papers this week because second from left is Nick Clegg, but my purpose in reproducing it is to illustrate further the great superiority of tennis shorts in that era compared with today, as I noted (with illustrations) back in July 2008.

What a stupid woman

2010-05-01T08:24:00.005+01:00

Janet Street-Porter on this week's Question Time said she was turned off by the prime ministerial debates on TV. Because all three candidates were men, she said, she found it all irrelevant and couldn't relate to it. "Hello", she added, "more than half the electorate are women!"

What a stupid attitude! It was noticeable that her remarks gained no sympathy at all from the studio audience of both sexes, who just looked bemused.

It causes me to wonder once again why it is that so many (not all) women in public life so often come across as just irredeemably silly. One thinks also of Anne Widdecombe, Melanie Phillips, Caroline Flint, Margaret Hodge, Tessa Jowell, Germaine Greer, Hazel Blears, Jan Moir and several others.

Of course, there are also quite a few sensible women. And there are some silly men (John Redwood, Peter Hitchens, Sir Stuart Bell, George Galloway, Christopher Booker), but proportionately a lot fewer. I'm not talking merely about people whose opinions I disagree with -- that would be a very much longer list -- but about those who lack common sense and say things that are simply idiotic.

Worth having a look at

2010-04-28T09:28:00.006+01:00

(1) Anthony Wells has a stab at explaining What happens in a hung Parliament. Note that the Queen doesn't have to grant a dissolution and a second election if she is advised that somebody else (who need not be a party leader) might be able to form a government.

(2) Who will lead the opposition? by Martin Kettle raises a so far neglected question. Suppose the LibDems come second in votes but third in seats, Nick Clegg has a moral claim on the post of official leader of the opposition. Kettle explains why this is important and how it could turn nasty.

(3) Stephen Tall explains Why gay voters are deserting the Tories for the LibDems. It's become rather clear that real commitment to gay equality in the Conservative Party is largely confined to the small modernising clique around Cameron, and a lot of their backwoodsmen turn out to be (as also on several other issues) not on message. Quelle surprise! Incidentally, now that Alan Duncan has been sacked from the front bench, as far as I know we have only Nick Herbert to hold the fort as a guarantee against future Tory backsliding on gay questions.

(4) Neil Harding points out that coalitions are not necessarily indecisive. "The 12 best countries for controlling the deficit and maintaining decent public services are all run by coalitions", he says.

(5) My old Campaign for the North chum Austin Mitchell MP explains why all this talk of "efficiency savings" is just hot air. He also writes, and I am inclined to agree: "Sadly no party is saying the one thing people want to hear. Bring the troops back from Afghanistan. What's the point of a war we can't win?" Actually I think the BNP and the Greens are saying that: strange bedfellows.

(6) In British political landscape could change for ever, Neil Clark reminds us that the existing parties are themselves rather artificial coalitions, only held together by the first-past-the-post voting system. Under a proportional system, the whole party structure could change over time, giving everyone clearer choices. He's right if we have a list system but I don't think the argument works so well if we have STV in multi-member constituencies, since that system gives voters the power to choose themselves between different strands of the same party.

(7) Dave Cole argues against David Cameron's suggestion of recall elections for bad MPs. This seems to be one of those "good ideas" that becomes less and less good the more you look into it.

(8) David Aaronovitch in Radicals or conservatives? How can we tell? speaks for many of us when he expresses utter confusion about where today's Conservative Party really stands. "The Conservatives are excellent on defence and internationalism, but useless and deceptive on Europe. They say good words about the poor, but suggest that their policy emphasis will be on reducing taxes for the middle classes and — amazingly — the very wealthy. Their key word is change, but much of time they seem to promise the past as much as the future. It's a promise that cannot be kept."

The election: Let's not get too carried away

2010-04-27T10:41:00.004+01:00

I think some people are getting a bit ahead of themselves with all this talk of who might coalesce with whom and under what leader. Anything could happen, but it seems clear the most likely outcome at present is still that the Tories don't get an overall majority but do come first in seats and first in votes.

It remains entirely possible, and is I think quite likely, that David Cameron could form a minority government and brazen it out for many months if not years. The opposition parties may be in no position to mount a challenge for a long time -- especially since Labour after its defeat could well implode in recriminations and backstabbing. Also, nobody will want another election any time soon because the parties are all broke.

Naturally, I hope this is not what happens, but we need to keep our feet on the ground. People are forgetting that, historically, minority governments are not especially weird or unimaginable. We had one for nearly all the period 1974 to 1979.

Just saying.

Why progressives should vote LibDem even if they hate the LibDems

2010-04-25T15:27:00.003+01:00

Amid the great swirl of endless speculation currently going on about the general election, it's clear that nobody really has a clue what is going to happen. Has there ever been an election when everything is so much up in the air so near to polling day?

Naturally, the extraordinary LibDem surge and the possibility of a major constitutional upset is very exciting. But as Steve Richards notes yesterday in Talk of revolution is still premature, we should try not to get too carried away because "it is still quite possible that the mould will not be broken".

Mind you, both Steve Richards and I have already been proved completely wrong on one point: last July he wrote The last thing we need is a televised election debate and at the time I found his arguments persuasive. He now says "Originally, I was worried they would be dull, too constrained by rules, and would put viewers off politics. I am thrilled that I was wrong. They have energised the election."

Polly Toynbee yesterday issued her customary instruction to hold our noses and vote tactically to try to keep the Tories out, in Your heart might say Clegg. But vote with your head.

This stance -- opposing the Tories, more than positively embracing any one of their opponents -- has also been my pretty constant political position for the last 50 years. She says, "I have never much minded what the best anti-Tory party is called, I just want the left of centre to win. I will always back whichever group combines being furthest left with winnability."

But her view that Labour, while not ideal, is left-wing enough to be going on with, is no longer one I fully share. It seems to me to rely far too much on a simplistic single-dimensional left-right spectrum as a way of viewing politics. It leaves out of account the fact that, on quite a lot of issues (Heathrow third runway, habeas corpus, the database society, individual freedom in various contexts), Labour is actually WORSE than the Tories, or anyway worse than what the Tory leadership currently claims to believe. The Labour government has been for some years been alarmingly illiberal and authoritarian, as well as alarmingly un-green. Ms Toynbee is probably still at heart a top-down nanny-state Fabian social democrat, and although she does happen to take the correct view on most of these individual issues (she has been excellent on Heathrow and on secularism, for instance), when push comes to shove, these things clearly matter less to her than they do to me.

Anyway, I now live in one of those odd inner-city Lib/Lab marginals in which the Tories are nowhere, so all this no longer applies to me. For what it's worth, I am voting for the sitting LibDem MP (Simon Hughes), not that there is anything especially wrong with his Labour opponent here, as far as I know.

Now, I actually don't especially care who is the next Prime Minister or what are the manifesto commitments of the parties. Whoever becomes the government will probably break their promises anyway; they usually do. It is all hugely irrelevant compared with my overarching desire, which is to get a change in the utterly bonkers voting system. To this end, I think people should vote for the LibDems in any constituency where they have any reasonable chance of winning, however little enthusiasm they might feel for LibDem policies or however much they do not warm to Nick Clegg, or wish Vince Cable was their leader, or would really prefer to vote Green, etc. etc.

I for example wish the LibDems were being a lot more radical on Trident and Afghanistan, but, as I say, none of this is to the point. Achieving proportional representation is the ONLY thing that matters this time. Once we've got it, we can argue all we like about parties and policies.

Ms Toynbee also wants electoral reform, but for her it is only one of two equally important aims, the other of which is to keep the Tories out. Her assumption is that if the Tories get into government, even if it is a minority government, there is no chance of PR. This may be true, but I'm not sure.

Michael Portillo made an interesting little outburst on Andrew Neil's This Week on Thursday: Diane Abbott was saying "The Tories will never offer the LibDems PR", and Portillo jumped in to say "Oh yes they will!", adding that Tory high command will be so desperate for power that they could well outbid Labour on conceding a referendum if it is the price they have to pay. (This whole 10-minute section of the programme, a most interesting discussion also involving Andrew Rawnsley and Charles Kennedy, is well worth watching and you have a few days left in which to view it here.)

"Other senior colleagues of Mr Cameron privately concede that offering a referendum on electoral reform to the Lib Dems could be a price worth paying to ensure he becomes prime minister", adds George Parker in yesterday's FT.

I am perfectly happy to see a Cameron government for a while if it is a way of getting voting reform. A Tory government will do damage, but it will be temporary; whereas changing the voting system permanently alters everything.

Meanwhile, Matthew Parris yesterday claimed that Nick Clegg cannot stand Gordon Brown and will do nothing to prop up Labour (something Clegg himself more or less confirmed this morning in his very impressive interview on the Andrew Marr show). Parris concedes that Cameron would be "intensely reluctant" to concede electoral reform, but sets out a scenario in which Clegg might be able to insist on it, especially since "first-past-the-post might be looking pretty discredited by May 7".

Of course, this is all terribly speculative, and in reality, almost anything could yet happen. My main hope is that the LibDems (and, if necessary, smaller parties which also want PR) are fully rehearsed for getting the most out of any eventuality and will not allow themselves to be bought off with, I dunno, a cabinet post for Vince Cable, or a mere Speaker's Conference on PR (we have been there before), or some other titbit which does not embrace voting reform or at least a referendum thereon.

Pointless helicopters

2010-04-06T13:33:00.003+01:00

Am I alone in getting irritated by the broadcasters' use of helicopters? The Prime Minister goes to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for a dissolution, and his motorcade through central London is covered live on TV via a helicopter. I suppose at least you could say that is a way of visualising a constitutional ritual. But then he sets off to St Pancras to get on a train, and we have to watch that journey from a helicopter as well. It is of no conceivable interest, except perhaps to notice in passing how many one-way streets the PM is allowed to go the wrong way down. It is wasteful of BBC licence-payers' money, exceedingly un-green in fuel terms, and damned noisy to boot, if you happen to be in the streets concerned.

The Shadow Home Secretary and the Shadow Attorney-General

2010-04-05T08:40:00.004+01:00

Chris Grayling. (I only fairly recently realised he is not the same person as A.C. Grayling.) He seems a bit accident-prone -- only a few months ago he put his foot in it about some announcement or other.

The fuss about gay couples at Bed and breakfasts (see e.g. Peter Tatchell here) seems a little bit manufactured to me, and I write as a former gay rights campaigner myself. He made an unwise passing remark in private, which doesn't mean that in office he would try to change the law back to allow the kind of discrimination being talked about.

In practice, who would actually want to stay at a B&B run by a proprietor who was hostile? I detect a certain lack of commonsense floating around in all this.

By and large, Grayling is a clever and mostly reasonable fellow. When he was shadow transport secretary he seemed unusually well-informed.

This storm in a teacup has been given a lot of publicity, while something that to me is more important is being ignored, if we are going to start analysing the suitability or otherwise of Cameron's would-be ministers. I speak of Edward Garnier. No, me neither, but he is the Shadow Attorney-General. According to the latest Private Eye, he is also a libel lawyer and he has come to the defence of his chum, the disgraceful Mr Justice Eady, the judge who keeps upholding scandalous "libel tourism" claims, and who I am delighted to see has been overturned by the Court of Appeal in the Simon Singh case. This is a case that was crucial for freedom of speech in Britain.

The Eye also reports that Garnier was hand in glove with Carter-Ruck over the even more scandalous Trafigura affair, in which Carter-Ruck, unbelievably, were trying in all seriousness to put an injunction on the reporting of Parliament.

Edward Garnier is reported to have vigorously defended the status quo as regards the libel law, and he added that he has earned his living and paid his mortgage thanks to it, as if that were some kind of justification.

Are we to have an Attorney-General who believes that freedom of speech should be compromised by monstrously unreasonable libel actions? This seems to be a matter of much greater significance than bigoted bed-and-breakfast proprietors, yet none of the mainstream press has reported a word about it yet.

The three main parties' transport policies

2010-03-25T12:41:00.003Z

Transport Extra has produced useful quick summaries of the three main parties' transport policies as we go into the general election:

Where the Tories stand on key transport issues

Where Labour stand on key transport issues

Where the Liberal Democrats stand on key transport issues

I am not very surprised to discover that my views coincide most with those of the Liberal Democrats, as on so many issues.

Of course, what none of this tells us is whether any transport projects will survive the budget cuts that everybody says are coming.

Train of the day

2010-03-22T08:48:00.001Z

It's the right kind of snow as the Hakutaka Express battles through the Japanese winter at Echigo-Yuzawa station.

Fashion parade of the day

2010-03-15T11:17:00.001Z

Why doesn't British TV have programmes like this?

Manhattan: Broadway traffic ban becomes permanent

2010-03-13T09:23:00.005Z

Good news from Manhattan, where sections of busy Broadway have been experimentally car-free for nearly a year. According to this article in Business Week, the ban has been so successful that New York's Mayor Bloomberg is making it permanent. Pedestrian injuries are down by 35%. Taxi journey times are improved by 7%. The car-free zones are to become public plazas where outdoor events will be held.

Let us hope that, on his next visit to London, Mayor Bloomberg will have words with his pal Boris Johnson about this success. Quite aside from the ongoing kerfuffle over what to do about the nightmare that is Oxford Street, our own theatreland could also do with some radical thinking of this kind. Christian Wolmar has recently blogged about being stopped by an idiotic jobsworth of a policeman for walking in the road in Soho where the pavement is too narrow and there were no cars coming. Mentalities are going to have to change.

Trams of the day

2010-03-10T18:24:00.002Z

Double-decker trams in Hong Kong. For more, see Hong Kong's marvellous transit system.

Train of the day

2010-02-24T11:36:00.004Z

The Class 507/508 is a train I associate with Merseyrail over many years of visiting Wirral. But, oddly, SouthEastern has one or two of them as well, though probably not for much longer. Currently they are operating on the Tunbridge Wells via Croydon service, and here is a pair of 508s at East Croydon.

Football picture of the day

2010-02-23T14:01:00.002Z

Whither the euro?

2010-02-16T11:13:00.004Z

I always said Greece (and Italy) should never have been allowed to join the euro in the first place.

When the euro started up I was living in Belgium and I thought it was a jolly good idea, not least on purely practical grounds. The Belgian/Luxembourg franc was an irritating nonsense: it had been successfully tied to the Deutschmark for ages, so there was no point in having a separate currency with all its inconvenience whenever one crossed the border to France, Germany or the Netherlands.

If I remember rightly, the original idea was that the members of the euro would be the Benelux countries, France, Germany, Austria, and Denmark, all countries with strong economies tightly linked to Germany's, and whose currencies were fairly closely aligned on the mark. (Denmark later decided it didn't want to belong, largely I suspect for emotional or symbolic reasons. I never thought there was the slightest prospect of Britain joining in, so whether it would have qualified or not is a question that need not be addressed.)

Great stress was laid on "economic convergence" as a criterion that had to be met before a currency could join. The Germans were especially keen on this if their people were to be persuaded that losing their strong, stable currency was a good idea.

I was really taken aback when it was later proposed that the lire and the drachma should be admitted. This involved turning a blind eye to what everybody in Brussels surely knew, that Italy and Greece were, and had always been, corrupt basket cases. It seemed that a sensible and prudent economic project was being replaced by a rash and purely political one. I don't understand why Germany agreed to this.

So I have a bit of an "I told you so" feeling about recent events. But the current British schadenfreude is misplaced, as Will Hutton points out in Don't laugh at Europe's woes. The travails facing Greece are also ours. Hutton is highly critical of our Supreme Leader for giving the impression that the euro's problems are nothing to do with us. He adds:

We also have no interest in Greece triggering a wave of exits from the euro and the 1930s-style competitive devaluations that will follow. Those dreaming of the free-market utopia of floating exchange rates should be careful for what they wish. By now you might hope there might be just a grain of suspicion about the manias and panics of free financial markets. Hope in vain.

If the struggle for economic reform in Europe is lost, Hutton says, we all go down. The reform programme, if it is to have a chance of success, must have at its heart the concept of "fairness - both within Greece and between Germany and the rest of Europe". Let us hope the powers-that-be will heed this wise commentator.

The Drain in Network S.E. livery

2010-02-11T13:12:00.004Z

One tends to forget about the Waterloo and City line. Even though it's just a stone's throw from where I sit, I think I've only used it about twice in 60 years.

I suppose it's rarely of any use to people who actually live in London, its target market consisting entirely of commuters into Waterloo main line.

This video clip reminds us that it used to be run by BR and was not part of the London Underground, and for a brief period its trains bore Network SouthEast colours, something I had quite forgotten.

Super jingle

2010-02-05T22:04:00.005Z

I came upon the following US toothpaste ad from the 1960s.

What a fabbo music track! I really love that style, which reminds me a bit of PAMS radio station jingles of that era. What a pity today's commercials don't have the same schwung.

Boris lambasted by transport consultants

2010-01-27T12:23:00.004Z

This from TransportXtra:

In an unusual step for a transport consultant, Colin Buchanan has spelt out its transport vision for the capital in response to the Mayor's draft transport strategy.

The consultant is critical of some of the mayor's priorities, such as the plan to scrap the western extension of the central London congestion charge, replace bendy buses and commission a new bus design for the capital. “In the present financial circumstances the mayor needs all the sources of revenue possible and not to incur expenditure which provides no improvement in transport services, for example the replacement Routemaster,” said Colin Buchanan chairman Andreas Markides.

I agree with both those points, as I have written before. The abolition of the western extension to the charging zone is merely pandering to the selfishness of Kensington petrolheads who no doubt vote Tory, and runs altogether counter to any conception of a sensible transport policy. The replacement of bendy buses is just an absurd hobby-horse of Boris Johnson's, on which I have written several times, most recently last February. Dave Cole also devoted a good deal of attention to this issue, notably here.

The TransportXtra article continues:

The consultant suggests that bus travel could be made more attractive by allowing Oystercard holders to make unlimited boardings of buses within 90 minutes of the first boarding without an additional charge.

Something of the kind was one of the relatively few interesting ideas put forward by Brian Paddick as LibDem candidate for Mayor. I was always impressed with the system in Brussels when we lived there: you pay a flat rate ticket for one hour's use of the whole city transport network, however many times you change buses or trams or metros in that period. It does seem arbitrary and inequitable that people whose journey happens to necessitate a change of bus should pay twice as much as those whose journey happens to be all on one route.

UPDATE: This from Boris Watch: New Bus For London – Costs Shoot Up, from which it appears that this wholly unnecessary project is going to cost us Council Tax payers over £11 million, and that only includes the first five vehicles.

Football picture of the day

2010-01-25T11:34:00.001Z

Useless Thameslink, part 94

2010-01-13T09:39:00.003Z

Another light coating of snow, another near-total collapse of the Thameslink suburban service:

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Messrs First Crapital so-called Connect are simply not trying.

Living on rations

2010-01-07T11:28:00.002Z

My friends Jamie and Chris are trying to live on World War 2 rations for a month as an experiment. So far they are still alive. No doubt it helps that Jamie is an excellent cook. Follow their progress throughout January at On The Ration.

Worst lyp-synch in history?

2009-12-31T13:56:00.003Z

Perry Como on US television in 1954. He looks to be drunk. I suppose they got away with it because the picture is so fuzzy anyway. Or maybe that's just a function of ancient videotape.

Nice latin orchestra though. I wonder who it is.

Tramway unfairness

2009-12-18T16:30:00.002Z

Tramways & Urban Transit reports that Nottingham is to have no fewer than nine new tram routes.

In Manchester, Birmingham and other cities, too, new tram schemes seem to be going ahead.

Meanwhile, here in London the number of new tram routes we are getting remains firmly stuck at zero, since B. Johnson brutally cancelled the cross-river tram project, on which so much preparatory work had already been done, and which was strongly supported by all the boroughs affected.

What have we done to deserve this?

Circle/teacup line problems continue

2009-12-17T13:46:00.007Z

I noted yesterday that all seemed not to be well with the new configuration of the Circle line, which, we were told, was to bring a five-minutely service on the Hammersmith branch for the first time ever (adding the new Circle service to the existing Hammersmith & City one). Now the Evening Standard has published New improved Circle line is 'rubbish', say delayed passengers. Admittedly this is only week 1, and teething troubles were to be expected. One also takes with a pinch of salt anything the Evening Standard prints about transport, and notes that this article is written by some hack who clearly hasn't taken the trouble to understand the new pattern. She writes:

Circle line trains now start in Hammersmith, run along the Hammersmith & City line to Edgware Road then do a clockwise lap of the Circle line and head back to Hammersmith. They then do the journey anti-clockwise.

which makes it sound as if Hammersmith itself is part of a new, larger circle, which is entirely wrong.

Nevertheless, it was always going to be the case that the Circle itself would only run every 10 minutes under the new regime, giving 6 trains per hour (tph), a slight reduction on the previous (highly theoretical) 7 tph. Transport for London glossed over this in its publicity for the change, so it arguably deserves opprobium now.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering people on the Hammersmith branch still don't appear to be getting their promised train every 5 minutes:

UPDATE: The Londonist has this: Circle Line Not So "New" or "Improved" (A Passenger's Lament)

Outrageous discrimination against shorts

2009-12-17T13:38:00.002Z

Depressing nonsense going on in Alabama:

Dale school board votes down shorts in dress code

It is perfectly absurd for teenage boys not to be allowed to wear shorts if they wish.

Teacup Line problems

2009-12-16T16:04:00.005Z

Could it be that all is not going well with the new teacup line? You will recall that the new Circle/Hammersmith arrangements were supposed to produce a train every five minutes on the Hammersmith branch. Yesterday's Evening Standard had a letter from somebody complaining that they had to wait 25 minutes at Edgward Road for an eastbound train on Monday. And here is the departure board for westbound trains at that station a couple of minutes ago, as the evening peak gets under way:

Sloppy language

2009-12-13T14:43:00.000Z

I wish people would stop saying "in terms of" when they just mean "as regards" or "concerning".

And I wish people would stop using the word "incredibly" as a mere intensifier. David Cameron is now doing it in almost every other sentence.

Train of the day

2009-12-02T13:03:00.005Z

This is the ICN, the Swiss tilting train. The boyf and I recently took a short break in Locarno, where we once went quite often but this was the first time for about 15 years. A delightful lakeside resort in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. We took an ICN from Basel to Bellinzola and it was 40 minutes quicker than the last time we did the journey.

My blog has been discovered

2009-11-20T23:03:00.004Z

Something called politics.co.uk -- claiming to be "the UK's leading dedicated political news website", which is a new one on me; aren't there more than enough political news websites already? -- has, I have just discovered, done a review of my blog.

The anonymous reviewer says "There are a great many problems with this blog", (huh? such as what?), "but the writing is entertaining". Well thank you for that. Apparently "Some of the writing borders on offensive" (huh?) and "the site is ugly to look at" (huh? It is just a standard blogspot layout.)

Despite these terrible errors of which I was hitherto unaware, "Peezedtee is saved from oblivion by fiery prose and trenchant opinion. This makes the blog an enjoyable enough diversion, rather than an abject failure." Thank you. Thank you so much.

Xenophobia not just wrong but also impractical

2009-11-20T22:30:00.002Z

To the hospital out-patients today for a small thing. I am seen by a Caribbean receptionist, an East European female nurse, an African male nurse, and an Indian doctor.

How on earth does the BNP suppose the National Health Service would function if its crazed ideas were applied?

Rail companies have their heads in the sand

2009-11-19T18:43:00.006Z

The London Evening Standard frequently carries letters to the editor griping about transport issues in the London area. Often these letters are silly and unreasonable -- as also were, in reality, many of the complaints once made about British Rail. But not always. Here is one from earlier this week:

The complaint in this case seems entirely reasonable, and yet South West Trains is generally regarded in the industry as one of the better operators. There appears to be a huge gap between the reality as perceived by most passengers and the fantasy world inhabited by the TOCs, who in the trade press always seem to be congratulating themselves on how well they think they are doing.

Until lately, among the specialist press, only Barry Doe in RAIL and Alan Williams in Modern Railways have expressed, from the passenger's point of view, a suitable degree of irritation with the train companies' many failings. It is good to see that in recent weeks the editor of RAIL, Nigel Harris, has started pointing out that we cannot go on like this. He doesn't agree with the above letter-writer's view about renationalisation, but he is calling loudly for root-and-branch reform of, in particular, the absurd and inequitable fares structure.

Myself, I think Harris is wrong to perpetuate the myth that nationalisation is obviously a bad idea. Not all state-owned organisations are inefficient. BR got a lot of things right, within the constraints under which it had to operate. Paradoxically, there was less direct government control then than there is now: BR in many ways had an arms-length relationship with government, rather like the BBC. But it is probably true that in terms of practical politics, renationalisation is a non-starter. If it was going to happen, it needed to happen when Labour came to power in 1997 on precisely that promise, on which they immediately reneged.

But there is a lot that could be done to improve things. One excellent suggestion, from Roger Ford of Modern Railways, is to reconstitute a single InterCity, albeit as a private-sector franchise. It was a great brand and mostly quite a good product. But that won't help Sarah of Shepperton, of course.

London Underground's new Teacup Line

2009-11-18T10:38:00.007Z

Transport for London has a new leaflet out explaining the forthcoming changes to the Circle Line (from 13 December). They are still going to call it the Circle Line, though it will be in the shape of a teacup, not a circle.

I hadn't previously quite understood that the Hammersmith and City line will still exist as a separate entity. When TfL says there will now be a train every 5 minutes between Paddington and Hammersmith, I take it to mean a Teacup train every 10 minutes and a H & C train every 10 minutes. This is certainly a remarkable increase in overall frequency on that section, which used to be notoriously unreliable and sporadic, at least it was in the early 1980s when I was living in Shepherds Bush.

Chaos can, I think, be expected on 13 December at Edgware Road. The leaflet makes a lot of the fact that, although some passengers will have to change trains there who up to now have had a through service, it will be an easy cross-platform interchange. In fact, this is not always the case. If you are going from, say, Great Portland Street to High Street Kensington (a direct journey by Circle train at present), your Teacup or H & C train will arrive at platform 4. The next High Street train might be across the platform at platform 3 (for Wimbledon) but it might equally be over the footbridge at platform 2 (an anti-clockwise Teacup train).

This is a good example of the iron rule that every transport improvement silver lining has a cloud for certain users.

Football picture of the day

2009-10-25T05:09:00.004Z

This is Argentina beating Holland in the 1978 World Cup final. How smart the Argentina strip was in those days, especially compared to the awful shapeless bagginess of most football kit in the present day.

Fifty years ago, we never had it so good. Possibly.

2009-10-12T23:10:00.005+01:00

It is just 50 years since Harold Macmillan's Tories were re-elected in the "You never had it so good" election. For my part, in October 1959 I was at school in Yorkshire and, for reasons I have long since forgotten, I found myself the Liberal candidate in my school's mock election. It was my first-ever political involvement and almost the only time I have ever won any kind of contest.

I suppose I chose to be a Liberal because my parents were. They were News Chronicle readers; the title folded the following year, whereupon they switched to the Guardian. I don't remember having anything you could really call a clear political stance at the time, except that I didn't like the Tories because I felt, more intuitively than intellectually, that they represented the wealthy, and looked down their noses at the less well-off. I remember having a vague feeling that they were snobby and that the world was all rather unfair, so it must have been their fault, since they had been in power for ever, as it seemed at the time. I suppose I must have unconsciously picked up these rather crude views from my parents.

I cannot have been very familiar with the campaign or the party leaders, because we didn't have a TV at the time so I would not have seen any of them in action. Gaitskell made no impression at all. Grimond, I think, came across as a very attractive character, though I may be saying that with hindsight.

It is rather paradoxical that I took against Macmillan's Conservatives so strongly in 1959, because in much later years I became secretly quite fond of him, or anyway of his no doubt somewhat artificially constructed persona -- Edwardian, languid and patrician, a one-nation type in stark contrast to Thatcher and her grasping, selfish, shrill, narrow, suburban estate agents and similar vulgar arrivistes.

In fact 20 years later I actually travelled some distance to hear Macmillan speak at a European election meeting. (The only Conservative election meeting I have ever attended, by the way.) He was well into his eighties, but he turned in an absolutely sparkling performance; astute and witty, and conjuring up an inspiring vision of the European future with Britain playing a key role. Sadly that was not to be.

Why did I win the mock election in 1959? It is a mystery. I doubt if there was any particularly strong support for Liberal ideology. I can only think that I must have run a livelier campaign. I do remember putting yellow fliers up (all laboriously hand-written) on lamp-posts and telegraph poles everywhere, and my mother insisting I go round and take them all down after it was over. I have no memory of any hustings meeting, though we must surely have been required by the headmaster to say something or other. I also can't remember who were my Tory and Labour opponents, or the size of my "majority".

This past weekend, BBC Parliament has been showing absolutely fascinating archive stuff from that election, including Richard Dimbleby presenting the results show from Lime Grove, with David Butler going on about percentage swing, and Bob Mackenzie at the swingometer; and several hustings programmes, involving the likes of Ian Mikardo, Barbara Castle, Jo Grimond and Julian Amery, and a really rather impressive Liberal called Baker that I have never heard of and who must I think have left politics shortly afterwards.

The PPBs were hilariously stilted, and absolutely everybody talked with an unimaginably plummy accent, even Mikardo; but much of the actual political debate seemed amazingly similar to now. The same arguments about fairness and tax; the same arguments about the role of the state vs. the role of the market; the same arguments about ill-considered foreign military adventures (then Suez, now Iraq). Truly there is almost nothing new under the sun.

Lockerbie

2009-08-23T22:37:00.004+01:00

God, what an idiotic fuss about this Libyan fellow. The reason he should be set free is BECAUSE HE IS INNOCENT and neither he nor any other Libyan had anything to do with the bombing. For heaven's sake, haven't people read Paul Foot or Private Eye over many years on this case? Tam Dalyell is right and it is depressing that hardly anyone else is saying so. This whole business is a major international scandal.

Ken says: Renationalise the railways!

2009-07-02T20:46:00.004+01:00

This just in, on the Grauniad blog this afternoon: Ken Livingstone explains why the privatisation of the railways has been a catastrophe, and how the East Coast Main Line fiasco provides the opportunity to start renationalising the whole network, and why that would be a good thing.

Every word is spot on. No need to add anything. Just read the piece.

UPDATE: And see also this from the Campaign for Public Ownership.

Let Ronald Biggs die in jail

2009-07-02T09:46:00.001+01:00

I have never held Jack Straw in very high regard, but I'm with him on this one.

The way that the popular culture tends to venerate hardcore professional criminals has always sickened me. If society had its moral compass right, such people would be more vilified even than paedophiles, rapists and passion killers. Many of the latter, it can always be argued, are sick. There is something wrong with them: they are psychopaths, or their brains don't work properly; they are mentally ill, whether temporarily or permanently.

No such defence is available to the professional criminal, who is perfectly sane, knows exactly what he is doing, and is motivated by sheer greed.

I remember that, at the time of the Great Train Robbery, at least part of the gutter press evinced a sort of grudging admiration for its perpetrators. It was as if stealing vast sums of money was somehow an activity in which anyone might like to engage, if only they thought they could "get away with it". This mood changed only slightly when it was pointed out that, in this particular operation, the train driver had been physically attacked and injured.

We have seen the same kind of nauseating attitude in the case of several other such ruthless scum. I have seen grovelling, laudatory interviews in the media with such people as "Mad Frankie" Fraser, as if "going straight" for a period of time, and writing a book about it, somehow wiped out the bad things they had done in the past. Even the monstrously evil Kray twins, in the east end of London at least, continued to be worshipped by some.

In the case of Ronald Biggs, we have long been invited to admire the fact that he managed to escape from jail and live a life of luxury in South America, as though it were all just a harmless game. Good old Ronnie, he succeeded in hoodwinking the authorities, what fun. Well, he hasn't yet served his time. And how much has he repaid of what he stole?

The reason why such people should be locked away is a different reason from why we lock up murderers, rapists and perverts. These latter need to be locked up to protect society from any further such activities on their part. In the case of the professional criminal, the main reason for locking them up, in my view, is to send a message that being a gangster and stealing other people's money is not a morally acceptable profession and that society will punish it severely.

My proposal is that professional gangsters should never be let out of jail until they have paid back everything they stole. They should certainly remain locked up until they have said where the loot is stashed and allowed the authorities to recoup it. It makes me sick to hear of criminals who are let out after a few years and who can then access the hidden money.

I feel, too, that films and TV have a lot to answer for. It may all just be fiction, but there is a fantastic amount of it every evening and the relentless message it sends out is that crime is a normal activity, that the battle between criminals and the police and justice system is a sort of morally neutral cat-and-mouse game. It is no wonder that so many people seem to have a laid-back attitude towards stealing. We need to get back to the realisation that stealing, and greed, are morally evil.

Scrap Trident and save a lot of taxpayers' money

2009-06-17T12:46:00.003+01:00

I have all along been one of those who believes that renewing the Trident missile system would be completely without purpose and a huge waste of public money.

For the UK to go on having its own supposedly "independent" nuclear weapon is just idiotic macho posturing. This would have been so even were it not going to cost us £20 billion or more. It's a particularly expensive example of hollow gesture politics.

Everybody knows perfectly well that the thing would never be used independently of the US, and would be useless in the face of the kind of threat nowadays potentially facing us.

It is excellent news that the Liberal Democrats have come round to my view on this, with Nick Clegg now announcing a clear policy of opposition to Trident, replacing their previous fudged approach.

As previously on the Iraq war, the LibDems are adopting a progressive, commonsense line in sharp contrast to the two backward-looking conservative parties, Lab and Con.

I was already in very little doubt that I was going to vote LibDem when the general election comes round, and now I am in even less doubt. I'm sure I am not alone in this.

The uphill struggle for sensible debate on reform

2009-06-11T23:23:00.003+01:00

It is a measure of the desperately low level of debate on constitutional issues that this from yesterday's BBC Daily Politics is the nearest thing on TV I have seen for a long time that comes even faintly near to a sensible discussion on electoral systems.

Notice how Brillo Pad takes it as read that the whole subject is sleep-inducingly boring, and the implication that any debate, even the very idea of a debate, on the relative merits of different voting systems is hilariously abstruse and something only for nerdy anoraks.

Interestingly, only the man from the SNP -- where they already have some experience of these things -- seems to know what he is talking about.

Later in the day, a studio guest on the BBC News channel brought the issue up, and the anchor rushed to change the subject, saying oh dear, let's not go there, ha ha ha. This dumbed-down attitude towards an important political question is a major dereliction of duty by the BBC, in my view.

Good riddance!

2009-06-09T13:48:00.002+01:00

Good riddance to:

(1) Jacqui Smith, who was quite happy to abandon all sorts of ancient liberties and move us towards even more of a totalitarian police state. And quite happy also to send Iranian homosexual men back to Iran where they are likely to be publicly hanged.

(2) Caroline Flint, who has made herself completely ridiculous. That this gormless slut (described by Alan Watkins at the weekend as "a person of the utmost insignificance") could ever have been thought a suitable person to be in government can be explained only by a desperate attempt to include more women, just for the sake of it, however useless and stupid they might be.

(3) John Hutton, a man who apparently believes in all seriousness that we should be building more coal-fired power stations.

(4) Geoff Hoon, a timeserving lackey who appeared to have no particular beliefs but was prepared to do anything he was asked to do in furtherance of his career, now mercifully brought to an end.

(5) Hazel Blears. It is pleasing to learn that her constituents in Salford, noting her attempts to evade paying a large amount of tax, have seen her prattling on about her working-class roots for the self-serving humbug that it is.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK, from Tony Benn: "When people are losing their jobs or worrying about whether they can pay their mortgage, the last thing in the world they want to know about is whether or not James Purnell is in the Cabinet".

Railway electrification and the Tories

2009-06-04T11:17:00.005+01:00

Like (it seems) practically everyone else in the country, I wish Gordon Brown would go. It now looks as if that might happen next week, if some commentators are to be believed.

But there is a problem. If somebody (say, Alan Johnson) replaces Brown as PM, there will soon have to be a general election. Or so runs the conventional wisdom at the moment. There is no constitutional necessity for this; but in practice, we are told, the public would not tolerate another PM without a "popular mandate". On this view, the new regime would have to commit itself immediately to holding an election no later than the autumn (in fact, as soon as the parliamentary reforms to be proposed by Sir C. Kelly can be completed).

(UPDATE: That conventional wisdom has now been challenged by Steve Richards and Matthew Parris, both of whom think that if the new leader quickly set a definite date for an election, that date could be some time off.)

And if there is a general election, Labour will lose and the Tories will come into power. One of those who would then be out of power is the Railway Minister, Andrew Adonis.

Lord Adonis is probably the only minister left in the present regime who is doing any good at all. He wants to get on with electrifying the main lines out of St Pancras and Paddington. This is long overdue. It is an urgent and essential project if we are to have any claim to a sustainable transport system.

But the plans aren't going to be ready until the autumn. The incoming Tory government might abandon the plan on the usual short-sighted "public expenditure cuts" grounds. Whereas if the election were held off till next spring, the project could be under way, some of the major contracts already let, and it would be more difficult for the new regime to cancel it.

The best solution would be if Adonis could carry on under the Conservatives. He can stay in the House of Lords and does not have to worry about being re-elected. Peers can cross the floor more easily than MPs. He is, arguably, more of a technocrat than a politician. His allegiance to the Labour Party per se does not appear to be particularly visceral: he was previously a member of the LibDems, and having changed party once, he could do so again. But sadly he has categorically ruled this out. It is all very unfortunate.

Our only hope, it seems, is that the Tories turn out to be as green as David Cameron claims. This seems highly unlikely.

Fraudulent Lib Dem election literature

2009-05-27T23:30:00.002+01:00

There has been a bit of a fuss about a BNP leaflet turning out to be fraudulent in various respects -- hardly, I should have thought, a very surprising state of affairs. See for instance this by Danny Finkelstein.

But how honest is the election literature of the respectable mainstream parties?

Through our door comes a remarkably dishonest leaflet from the Lib Dems. Its entire purpose is to persuade us to vote for their list in the Euro elections, headed by incumbent MEP Sarah Ludford, who, I hasten to add, is a Good Thing.

We will leave aside the fact that the leaflet contains more pictures of Simon Hughes and Vince Cable (both also Good Things, in my book; that's not the point) than of Ms Ludford. They are popular London MPs at Westminster, neither of whom has anything at all to do with the European Parliament. But all the parties do this sort of thing.

What is shocking is that the leaflet urges us to vote tactically for the Lib Dems, though this is a proportional election by party list for the whole of London, in which tactical voting is completely irrelevant.

Thus, the leaflet says "Only the Lib Dems can stop Labour here", and quotes the statistics for the last general election in this constituency, in which the Tories came a poor third. The implication is that a Tory vote is a wasted vote. The message is rubbed in with a picture of Winston Churchill, captioned "The Conservatives haven't won here since before World War II. Every Tory vote helps Labour win".

There is no mention of the fact that this election is for a London-wide list, in which the Westminster constituencies play no part at all. Those of us who happen to be well-informed about these matters know perfectly well that neither a Tory nor a Labour vote would be wasted in this election. But many voters who pay less attention to these things will be confused by this deliberate attempt to mislead. So far from "every Tory vote helping Labour to win", every Tory vote in this particular election will help to elect a Tory MEP for London as a whole (of which, as it happens, there are three in the outgoing parliament to the LibDems' one).

In fact, the only certain wasted votes here will be those for independents that nobody has ever heard of and for tiny no-hope crackpot parties such as the soi-disant "English Democrats" or the SPGB.

I find it particularly disappointing when the Lib Dems turn out, as sadly they often do, to be ruthless and dishonest in their local campaigning. At a stroke they thereby lose any claim to the moral high ground that many of their worthy policy positions at national and international level might otherwise seem to justify.

As it happens, the most recent polls suggest that Lib Dem hopes of gaining a second London seat in Brussels are vulnerable to a possible Tory surge, especially as the total number of London MEPs is being reduced from 9 to 8. No doubt that is the real reason why they are desperate to hoodwink people into not voting Conservative who might otherwise have considered doing so.

Aaargh! God help us all

2009-05-22T14:07:00.004+01:00

If the repellent, ego-tripping humbug Esther Rantzen is the answer, remind me what the question was again?

As for the idea of Ann Widdecombe as Speaker - I gather she was one of those who voted to prevent the expenses claims from being published in the first place, and according to The Public Whip she has voted strongly against transparency in Parliament. Surely she must be a complete non-starter.

Alan Johnson, Polly Toynbee and political meltdown

2009-05-21T15:14:00.003+01:00

Almost a year ago, I wrote in 14 things Gordon Brown should do now that, if we had to have Gordon Brown in charge, he should at least make Alan Johnson "the main public voice of the government, since he is one of the few present members of the cabinet who seems like a human being and actually answers the questions put to him".

In a response to that post, Neil Harding said: better still, make Alan Johnson PM and be done with it. Neil later enlarged on the point with a post of his own plumping for either Johnson or John Denham, both of whom support proportional representation. At all events, it was certainly hard to see how either of them could do any worse than Brown.

Then last September, in Further thoughts on leadership, I noted that Polly Toynbee had finally admitted that she'd been wrong about Brown; she now realised he was an incompetent fraud (I paraphrase slightly). The question then arose, was it now too late to make a change in the leadership? I wrote: "For what it's worth, I say give it a go, preferably with Alan Johnson".

Nobody paid much attention, and Johnson himself went around saying he didn't want the job, anyway. Since then the whole financial system has suddenly collapsed; and the economy, supposedly Brown's one strong point, has gone down the toilet with astonishing speed.

And in the last couple of weeks, Westminster politics itself has gone into complete and surely unprecedented meltdown, in a tumultuous series of unforeseen events that I think has taken everybody's breath away.

Meanwhile, Polly Toynbee has really been putting the knife into Brown lately. On 11 May she wrote, in Gordon Brown must go – by June 5:

"It's all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep (....) Labour made the rich richer and poor poorer: growth for the few, not the many. (...) Gordon Brown has been tested and found in want of almost every attribute a leader needs."

She went on, countering the view that the main problem was that Brown was hopeless on the telly: "It wasn't the medium that did for him, but the message. There wasn't one".

This is remarkable language from somebody who spent so long during the previous regime telling us that, if only Blair would go, the situation would be incomparably transformed with Brown at the helm. But there is more. Returning to the fray only four days later, Ms Toynbee wrote in Only Alan Johnson can prevent catastrophe:

"There are few Brownites left, only MPs anxiously calculating if the upheavel of regicide might precipitate a worse disintegration or whether Alan Johnson might save a hundred extra seats and restore Labour's political verve. 'If the execution was swift, they would do much better with Alan Johnson,' says the Ipsos Mori pollster Ben Page."

I and others have often written that there is no point in just changing the Labour leader: there must also be, at the same time, a bonfire of wrong-headed, unpopular, right-wing New Labour policies, and a clear definition of an entirely new political approach based on fairness and commonsense. Here too, Polly Toynbee has come round to my way of thinking:

"It may be too late for mighty swerves in political direction before next year's election, but it's easy to sweep away the self-laid landmines in Labour's path. No ID cards, but free passports for all instead. Devise a better plan for the Post Office – Johnson knows it well – and abandon anything that's more trouble and cost than it's worth. Ed Miliband's good green policy deserves a high profile, only achieved by revisiting Brown's disastrous third runway decision. Postpone Trident and open a public debate on nuclear arms and Britain's future place in the EU and the world. On inequality, set up a social justice commission to map a long-term path to fairer shares in pay, wealth and tax. In 12 years Labour has never debated these fundamentals ...."

Many of us can easily agree with all of that. Labour still isn't going to win, which, as I wrote the other day in Labour is an utterly busted flush, may not be such a bad thing, even from the party's own point of view, since winning the next general election could be a poisoned chalice. But it can still make a real difference if the Tories win by only a smallish majority, rather than win by a landslide. What we are asking Alan Johnson to take on is a thankless but noble task: to lead the party to defeat and into opposition, where it might have some chance, however slim, of rediscovering its purpose and its soul.

Train of the day

2009-05-21T09:10:00.004+01:00

A Thalys high-speed train on its way from Paris to Brussels, a trip which now takes only 1 hour 20 minutes. I can remember when this journey took over 3 hours even on the Trans-Europe Express L'Etoile du Nord, which in any case only ran twice a day. Thalys runs half-hourly through much of the day, and has been so successful that Air France has given up bothering to fly between the two cities.

Eurovision: the best man won

2009-05-17T21:12:00.006+01:00

As soon as the boyf and I saw Alexander Rybak's picture in the Radio Times we knew we were supporting Norway. Phwoar! (The song is quite good, too.) I never thought he would actually win, least of all by such a landslide.

Of course I am delighted, but it is a little unnerving to have backed the runaway winner. I am much more accustomed to being in a tiny minority on these as on many other issues.

I'm pleased also that the UK did not do all that well. In fact it didn't deserve to do as well as it did, with a very dreary and vapid song by the wholly talent-free "Lord" Andrew Lloyd-Webber -- who, as my friend Jamie reminds me, promised to leave the country if Labour won the 1997 election, so why is he still here?

I thought it was a bit mean of Iain Dale, on Adam Boulton's show this morning, to seem to imply that there was something fishy or fraudulent about the fact that Alexander came originally from Belarus. His parents moved to Norway when he was four, so he has spent 83% of his life in Norway. Aparently that's not good enough for "Tory blogger" (as he is always announced) Dale.

Still, however dull and self-obsessed Dale sometimes seems, he has one good post today, about the ghastliness of the BNP.

As he points out, the BNP is now trying to look "respectable" on TV, all sharp suits and ties, but behind the facade they are still the same nasty, racist, dangerous thugs.

(But he's still wrong about the Norway Eurovision song.)

Please get out and vote

2009-05-16T08:08:00.004+01:00

Neil Harding makes a very pertinent point in For Once, Maybe We Should Listen To Tebbit.

Remarkably, the loathsome Norman Tebbit has said something useful, which is to urge people to go and vote in the (proportional representation) European elections and to point out that they can vote against both Lab and Con without "splitting the vote" as is the risk with any first-past-the-post contest.

Obviously, what Tebbit is really saying to his Europhobic/xenophobic supporters is that they should vote UKIP, though as a Tory peer he can't actually spell that out. From their point of view, UKIP is essentially a ginger group aimed at pushing the Tories even further towards narrow nationalism and leaving the EU. They can all vote UKIP this time round, without endangering the prospect of a Tory government next year, which we are clearly going to get anyway.

But, as Neil Harding notes, the rest of us can draw similar conclusions in other directions - in particular, people can vote Green in this election without "wasting their vote". That is what I plan to do.

Neil also reminds us that not bothering to vote in this election is tantamount to voting for the BNP. So please, everybody, get out and vote for somebody, even if it is UKIP. It is your moral duty!

Uniform of the day

2009-05-16T07:47:00.002+01:00

Some posh college in Australia, whose name I have omitted to note.

Sir Clement Freud

2009-05-01T14:42:00.003+01:00

I was sorry to read of the death of Sir Clement Freud. I met him a few times in the middle 1970s when he was a Liberal MP and I had the thankless task of trying to co-ordinate political lobbying for homosexual law reform on behalf of CHE.

Behind the dog food adverts and the silly panel games, he was a highly intelligent and serious man. Meeting the rich and famous can be daunting, but he was kindness itself, and seemed a very nice person. He warmly supported our cause, despite being 110% heterosexual himself. He told us that a gay constituent of his had committed suicide and this shocked him into action. He did what he could for us in the House in unpropitious circumstances, and we were grateful for his help.

You've NO messages

2009-04-30T20:58:00.003+01:00

How I love it when I dial 1571 and the bimbo at the other end says "WELCOME to BT Answer. You've NO messages." Thank goodness for that, I say.

Labour is an utterly busted flush

2009-04-19T23:30:00.005+01:00

The Independent on Sunday reports today that Alice Mahon, Labour MP for Halifax for 18 years until 2005, has left the party. She says Labour has broken many of its election manifesto commitments, and adds:

It is not a party I recognise. I have lost faith with it ..... I am very, very sad: the Labour Party has been my life. I have reached the conclusion that there is not any avenue left in the structure of the Labour Party for people like me. Any threat from anybody marginally from the left and... the party machine comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

This comes top of a little-noticed piece on the Guardian website (though for some odd reason not printed in the paper) by Bryan Gould (remember him?) titled I disown this government, in which he refers to "shameful episodes at home and abroad which cumulatively are a complete denial of what a Labour government (or any British government) should have been about".

There have been some achievements, Gould writes, but these have been "molehills, judged against the towering peaks scaled by New Labour in its rejection not only of Labour, but of any decent and civilised values". It is a piece well worth reading.

Of course, to the ruthless New Labour machine exemplified by thugs like Damian McBride, people such as Alice Mahon and Bryan Gould do not matter a toss.

For me, and I am sure many others, the latest appalling revelations merely underline what I was already thinking, which is that I don't want to have anything to do with this loathsome gang ever again. I have reached the point, for the first time in several decades of political involvement at one level or another, where I am not merely resigned to the prospect of the Tories taking over, but actually looking forward to it -- not because I want the Tories, of course, but because I now feel an overwhelming desire to be rid of New Labour whatever the cost.

Another election looms

2009-04-14T15:52:00.002+01:00

How time flies! One will soon have to start thinking about how to vote in the European elections.

I am not contemplating voting Labour. In fact, as things stand at the moment, I find it difficult to imagine ever voting Labour again in any election. What a gang of sleazy, incompetent, immoral, self-serving ratbags New Labour have turned out to be. It seems the only minister doing any good at all at present is an unelected one, the railway minister Lord Adonis.

So for the European Parliament it is either the Lib Dems or the Greens. Here in London there are MEPs of both parties and both seem quite good on the issues (mainly transport) that I have contacted them about, e.g. opposition to airport expansion. And it's nice to have an election in which, for once, a Green Party vote is not a wasted vote, because of the party list system used in the European elections.

On the other hand, the Greens sometimes seem a bit Eurosceptic. I wish I could get a bit more of a handle on what they would be positively in favour of, because I might agree with it, but their website is quite vague on the issue. But there is no doubt that the overall Green group in the EP has done some very good and useful things.

The Lib Dems are excellent on Europe and relatively clear, I think, about how they would like to improve the present increasingly dysfunctional structure (not that there there is any prospect of a wider consensus on that issue). On the other hand, the wider Liberal group in the Parliament is not an outfit that one particularly wants to boost. Some of its other member parties, like the Belgian PRL, are a long way over to the right.

So at the moment I think I am leaning towards the Greens. But we shall see.