Last night I watched a complete bomb of a film entitled ‘Geostorm’ which was about a global climate change control geoengineering system which was hacked or infiltrated to malfunction in order to give some megalomaniac world power. The film was complete blarney and really I should find better things to do with my time. But the film’s premise was sound. If some genius could devise a geoengineering solution for climate change and e.g. ’control the weather’ why might that not be weaponised? When I said the film’s premise was sound, that’s not quite correct. Whilst there are some serious voices suggesting climate geoengineering is technically possible, there is not, at present at least, the slightest possibility of a political consensus about how to achieve it—so it will remain science fiction.
 
Never mind. Here’s a run of the mill story from the past week:
 
‘ Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increased to a record high in 2023, even as  countries promise to lower their emissions, the World Meteorological Organization reported Monday.
​
The WMO, an agency of the United Nations, said in its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin that in 2004, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 377.1 parts per million (ppm), but in 2023, it was 420.0 ppm, an increase of 42.9 ppm, or 11.4%, in just 20 years. Large vegetation fires combined with high levels of human and industrial fossil fuel emission activities in 2023 may have contributed to increasing carbon dioxide emissions, it said. “Another year. Another record,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “We are clearly off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 °C and aiming for 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” (Washington Examiner, 28/10/24)

+Hard working people again. Strivers. They’re going to have to find a few more bob from next year if they travel to work by bus, as Starmer has announced the fare cap is to rise by 50% That could amount to an extra £10 a week, which in a  year will add up to between £300-£400. Is that not effectively a tax rise? Not to worry, Starmer has meanwhile told us that austerity will not return. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s budget to see how he’s figured that one out. I may have to overcome my aversion to daytime television to watch this latest version  of budgetary hoodwinking. As with everything with the science of economics, it’ll all boil down to hard facts and indisputable realities.
 
+The multiple stitch-ups in the Labour party candidate selection processes in the last parliamentary round established new standards of industrial sized political corruption. So I was relieved to find we are not alone in being victims of such shenanigans. An eye-opening account of similar activity comes from Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, where candidates are being chosen for next year’s Federal elections (in which it is predicted PM Trudeau’s Liberals will be trounced). On the face of it, the Liberal party’s candidate was sorted out in three days flat. For those of us who are interested in the actual workings of ‘democracy’ as opposed to its marketing, it’s well worth reading about at https://shrinkslessorsquare.ca

The government has launched its ‘Have your say on the NHS’ consultation. Before looking at how this is set up, I thought I would have a consultation with myself first—before I find out if the official consultation is merely a tick box exercise with multiple choice questions combined with a surfeit of prompts. Clearly my problem is jaundice. Perhaps this exercise will cure me of it.

So the first thing that comes to mind is that human bodies are irredeemably analogue and the idea that care can be safely handed over to digital systems is never going to be sufficient. I say ‘sufficient’ because I am not denying a role for digital solutions for routine, explicable problems, but my fear is that there will be a tendency towards chatbot style answering systems that merely delay real interactions with fully trained professionals. A mechanised response may be cheaper than putting in the resource to get e.g. the doctor/patient ratio to a better level, but accurate diagnosis I suspect never comes cheap. Such diagnosis should also be delivered in a timely fashion, which currently it is not, with an NHS waiting list over 7 million long (and that’s only the ones who actually get onto a waiting list). In this last regard the solution is to recruit more staff, such as radiographers, and that costs money. The government should say ‘we’ll do whatever it takes.’ Is Streeting up for that?
 
Tony Blair, of whom it was suggested he could barely operate an electronic calculator is one of the biggest pushers of artificial intelligence as the universal solution for challenges such as the ‘broken NHS’ (© W. Streeting). It was of course in his time in government that the Post Office Horizon scandal began its long road to disaster. Many other government computer modernisations have failed to deliver what they promised. But it is also true that investment in computer technology in the NHS has lagged behind, leading for example to malware crashes and the like. Oh, that’s another thing—perhaps one of the biggest risks– hackers, always on the lookout for the next ransom opportunity. One of the issues with new computer systems is the length of time they take to introduce and the likelihood that the specifications will keep on changing, not least because of new government priorities. I doubt that the private sector fares much better, although Amazon seems quite efficient. There’s an avenue of investigation, Wes! Ughh, my jaundice seems to be getting worse . . .
 
Another thing. For non-city dwellers access to some forms of treatment is becoming more remote—for Scarborough residents a trip to York may be required for even minor surgery. For emergency cases that’s a trip of at least an hour by road with blue lights flashing. Scarborough has a hospital, but it’s been argued that it doesn’t have the demand to justify having standing teams of consultants  to deal with many forms of need. So large centres which can attract a critical mass of patient (customer?) is the preferred answer. It is said in this way consultants will be better able to manage and improve their skills. Bigger is very much better. But is this the only way to run a service? I suspect it is as much about managing costs as anything to do with ‘excellence.’ Once again a resources issue. Or perhaps we should rely less on charity to pay for air ambulances and have them on the government’s books as part of the official ambulance service. More air ambulances, Wes!
 
One wonders how genuine this consultation is when only a few days before it was launched the government was talking up injecting fat people with weight reducing drugs so as to get them back to work. I’m looking forward to how consultation respondees fare on the subject of drug company interactions with the NHS. It is a sensitive subject in the light of how some dementia patients will be denied very expensive drugs that could slow down their disease’s spread. The big question is to what extent drug companies profit from public investment? Drug companies’ huge profits often start with publicly funded programmes. Will Streeting challenge this institutional imbalance? Drug companies took a lot of credit for delivering the Covid vaccines. Without publicly funded research I think we’d still be waiting.
 
Talking of Scarborough, a town of 60,000 to 70,000 people, try finding an NHS dentist. It’s an old problem. When a new dentist opened about a dozen or so years ago a queue formed around the block. It was so long it made the national news. I registered there eventually. The retirement-aged dentist was very good, but he had limited English. It’s said that he flew home to Germany every weekend. The surgery has since closed. My original GP surgery also closed down. This wasn’t due to a lack of suitably qualified ill people, but a lack of staff. When exactly did austerity start? So now the answer has to be let’s have more dentists! Will that be the answer the government wants? Or will AI magic up a brilliant new distributional model based on supply and demand statistics using stochastic measurement predictability algorithms that demonstrate how on any day (within a flexible period) an appointment may be found within a spatial tolerability range? Utter garbage I know, but the cynic in me suggests it  can be the case that a bigger ache can get rid of a smaller one.
 
Well, I’m quite getting into this consultation. Here’s a positive suggestion. Given how many people feel compelled to look for solutions outside of the NHS given the waiting times, what we need is a NHS provided service assessing the benefits and/or risks of all the products which claim to cure your problem in the meantime. As waiting lists grow longer, so market opportunities arise for snake oil merchants. I may have been a victim of this myself. So this new NHS service would act like the Consumer’s Association. It would be free to damn the charlatan products without fear or favour. It would be more reliable (hopefully) than Trustpilot.
 
Perhaps that’s enough for now. Thank you Wes for letting me get this off my chest. I feel better already! (Now I will look at the actual consultation and prepare to take my medicine like a man.)
 
P.S. Wes: Yes, more money! Get on with it!

​+The trouble with phrases like ‘hard working families’ is that their over-use by politicians wears them out (just like hard working families) so very often a variation must appear, like Nick Clegg’s abysmal ‘alarm clock Britain.’ Now it seems this week’s budget is going to be all about ‘strivers’ (struggle, strain are suitable synonyms), everyone is going to strive for growth, except of course those who have largely played out their economic usefulness and thus can be treated as a drain on the strivers. Can everyone be a striver? How would their rewards materialise? I guess one answer would be to put e.g. every manual labour job on piece rates. How many potholes did you fill today? How many bins did you empty? And particularly apposite in today’s economy, how many parcels did you deliver? And of course all this before you can claim your cruddy state pension at age 67 (or later). What will be the reward for all your striving, in Rachel Reeves’ macroeconomic world? More growth in the economy which accumulates more wealth for the already rich? One hopes there may be serious attention given to Britain’s increasing wealth gap in Wednesday’s budget. Certainly the rightwing press are in a tailspin over the slightest suggestion that the merest ounce might sliced off their burgeoning fat—to what extent will Reeves resist their selfish alarums? Anyway, one small benefit we may take from Wednesday’s budget is that all the seemingly endless and tedious speculation will be over and we will all be able to turn over and dream of striving.

I’ve been trying to figure out why a calm, level-headed commentator on Palestine/Israel affairs like Asa Winstanley of the website Electronic Intifada should have been the victim of a dawn raid by the police and having his electronic devices taken into custody, so to speak—whilst he wasn’t arrested. Well, it’s not hard to figure out why—it’s both an intimidatory and an intelligence gathering exercise. No doubt Asa will get his gear back, although if it was me I wouldn’t use it—it’ll be bugged if it wasn’t before. All this under the auspices of the 2006 Terrorism Act. I thought I would look up the debate on the then Terrorism Bill which took place in November, 2005. Thankfully I just happen to possess a hard copy of the Hansard volume covering said debate. On the 9th November 2005 the diminutive but ever smiley ultra-Blairite minister Hazel Blears led off addressing the issue of what would constitute encouragement of terrorism, which was to be outlawed in the bill. Said encouragement might take two forms—deliberate incitement with knowing intent, or ‘reckless’ comment which could encourage some twerp into a terrorist act. Deliberate, knowing incitement was not contentious. What was was the test of ‘recklessness.’ It seems that in this context the meaning is subjective. Blears was somewhat evasive, as if it would be perfectly obvious what was meant. Bob Marshall-Andrews, ever the lawyer wanted to amend the bill’s wording to include words to the effect that somebody’s statement would have to lead a ‘reasonable person’ to commit terrorist acts, as opposed to somebody already disposed to such an act. Predictably that didn’t go anywhere, the government’s looser interpretation went through. We therefore have a liberally generous degree of subjectivity in what the law prohibits in free speech. Hence the police can without challenge wade into somebody’s house at 5.40am and sequester property or person. I’m sure Hazel will have lost no sleep over this at all.
 
Having retrieved this rather heavy volume of Hansard from my library (which contains 20 years’ worth), I was pleased to see I made a speech on the 23rd November on climate change, and even moved a bill. So I was there.

Who will win the US election in two weeks’ time? Is it of any consequence? I suspect Harris may have a slight edge, but unless she secures a significant victory in the popular vote which is matched in the electoral college there will be a backlash from  the Trumpers on a far greater scale than 2020. Even if she wins big, there’s still likely to be a turbulent response, not least from an orange skinned old man fearful of missing out on his last chance. Even if this doesn’t spill out onto the streets it will certainly do so in the next Congress where virulent partisanship will make governing the US virtually impossible, and that’s even if the Democrats were to win control of both Houses (probably unlikely). This is after all the recent history of American politics. I stumbled across a book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (Thomas E, Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Basic Books, New York 2013). This is a very good primer on the relatively recent development of ultra-partisanship which has particularly overtaken the Republicans. Given its publication date, there is no mention of Trump in this book, but practically all the elements of what it means to be Trump were being lined up 20 or 30 years ago. Newt Gingrich can take a lot of the credit for this. Here’s something he said in 1984: ‘You have to give them [your opponents] confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.’ (p. 36) This is really about doing media, not politics in the old fashioned sense of making things work on The Hill. Gingrich sought to wreck the system (such as it was) in order to proclaim that the system was broken, and only the new insurgent force of reborn Republicans could set things right. The path to Trump has been a long time in the making and he is merely a kind of recipient shaman (and showman)channelling the ineluctable fears and hatreds of followers who have given themselves up to him. I would place him somewhere on the spectrum up to Jonestown. But he himself didn’t prepare the groundwork.
 
The trouble is, does my original question have an answer? Does the outcome of this election have any consequence? Well, maybe for women in the U.S. Maybe, on the margins for healthcare. Who knows, maybe for a more isolationist America, something which would be cheered by leftists the world over. The competition for votes in the US seems less concerned with policy than it is with personality. In Gingrich terms, it’s reduced to a shouting match. He should get the credit he deserves for turning things upside down.

+Sir Mealy Mouth (guess who?) was in Berlin last week, sorting out the world’s problems (or perhaps more accurately lip reading Joe Biden to see what he was allowed to say). He had ‘tough’ words for Israel. Suggesting it might be a good idea to hold off a bit in order to let in some humanitarian aid to Gaza, finishing with the usual flourish of working towards the ‘two state solution.’ This man has no shame—he can’t have if he’s glanced at a map of the West Bank in the last few years. He is obviously oblivious to the fact, well established by now, that Israel hasn’t the slightest intention of supporting the so-called two-state solution. Does Starmer think we’re all idiots? (Ed: Yes) Meanwhile all credit to Netanyahu for understanding the lack of conviction in his western ‘critics’ half-baked condemnations. Netanyahu may be blundering into a bigger mess than he can chew, but at least he carries with him a coterie of willing accomplices.
 
+Congratulations to Prof. David Miller, formerly of Bristol University, who has won an Employment Tribunal case regarding his dismissal. The Tribunal found that his Anti-Zionist beliefs were genuine and could not be equated with anti-Semitism. This is a significant precedent for everyone who can see the difference between a political project (an ethnocentric nation state) and religious belief. I hope this case has ramifications for the current state sponsored clampdown on pro-Palestinian protest. The recent targeting of journalists who are working to expose Israeli crimes in Gaza and West Bank, and now Lebanon reveals the overreach of the establishment’s prejudices and the abuse of legislation in pursuit of an ignoble cause rather than justice. Which is probably my way of saying I should never have voted for the 2006 Terrorism Act, which arose in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings. The way the police seem to be using this act, part of which deals with the incitement or encouragement of terrorism is to enable fishing exercises against anyone who supports a cause. In the case of Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada his electronic devices were seized in an early morning raid but he was not arrested. You might think, if the police thought they had something concrete to go on they would have arrested him. The trouble with the legislation they are relying on is that it allows for a fair degree of interpretation. Is it incitement if you say ‘I understand why Palestinians feel compelled to use force against a brutal occupier?’ What’s the alternative—just to lie down and see your home destroyed and livelihood destroyed? Even if you believe force should be met by force, that doesn’t necessarily mean you support terrorism, which is what the 2006 Act purports to be about. It could mean for example that Palestine should have a state sanctioned standing army. Just like us. Of course, the Israeli government wouldn’t countenance that, which is probably why they end up with, e.g. Hamas instead.

+I don't normally do travelogue sort of stuff on this blog but if there's a law in physics it must be that all laws are to be broken. So I'm writing here from my luxurious hotel bedroom in Copenhagen as I take a short break in the capital city of hygge. The main purpose of my visit was to go to the oddly named modern art gallery Louisiana 20 or so miles north of Copenhagen to see the final week of a William Kentridge exhibition, 'Refusal of Time.' Unfortunately I misinformed myself of its closing date, which was last month, so was to be disappointed. How did that happen? The rest that was on show didn't make up for the loss and I won't dwell on it. I did have a very nice lunch though in their cafe which overlooks the Oresund, with Sweden bathed in mist on the other side. I don't think you would find a more European place than this - I imagine a quick ferry trip from Sweden to Helsinger a short way further up the coast will bring Swedes on day trips to Louisiana. A little bit of water doesn't set them apart.
 
+Copenhagen almost has the feel of Amsterdam, but is more civilized (i.e. less crowded). Most of the bars seem to be full of locals (at least when it comes to happy hour). I noticed the high level of cycling, and further noted that (on my unscientific count) cyclists without helmets outnumbered helmeted ones 8 to 2. Much of the reason for this must be that every street has cycle lanes. It's also the case that everyone obeys traffic signals. Pedestrians wait dutifully for the green signal even when there's no traffic. What are these people taught at school? But I suspect that Danes still enjoy a sense of entitlement that comes with their relative wealth, civilisation and unthreatening global status. If you don't threaten anybody you will not have to suffer more at the most, than some patronising respect. As long as you continue to contribute your design principles in furniture and light shades.
 
+I visited the national museum of art, which is well worth a visit. But in its modern section too much space is given over to Expressionism, galleries full of dull, muddy depression and hence few viewers. How did this art ever become 'appreciated?' It defeats me. I doubt even the late lamented Brian Sewell could muster up an answer. Some art movements should be consigned to the storerooms, to be quietly forgotten. Apart from lovers of the emperor's clothes, nobody would miss them. The worst thing I have found visiting the SMK (national gallery) is that after about 11am it is taken over by adolescent school trip gangs, who find more pleasure in shattering the acoustics than appreciating dull expressionist paintings. There's never a teacher in sight to force them to wonder why pictures generally painted in different shades of manure should be so appealing to curators. There we go. You can take a donkey to the water but you can't make it drink.
 
+I shouldn't be too churlish about Labour to not recognize that some good will come of Starmer's government. I was reminded of this by this quote from Matthew Parris's memoir Chance Witness:
 
‘I was discovering that the key advantage a public school education gave a boy was a manner and a self-belief which shielded him from being found out too quickly. You often had to know an expensively educated Englishman for months, sometimes years, before you discovered he was thick. Fee-paying education was a sort of course in confidence-trickery.' (Penguin, 2003 p.116. Parris's subtitle is 'An Outsider's Life in Politics.' Never an untruer word was spoken - he only felt that way.)
 
So I'm all in favour of slapping VAT on private education. Indeed, if the product is as dire as Parris describes, private education should automatically be ruled out for charitable status. Labour won't go that far sadly.
 
+Dipping again into Parris's memoir I came across something which could be out of today's playbook, but this dates back 40 years or so:
 
. . . ' our programme [Weekend World] was centred on the aggressive stance which Israel was taking on some now forgotten Middle Eastern issue. That country's behaviour was thought hard to defend. In one of the weekly brainstorming sessions our Weekend World team would conduct to decide what to do and how to do it. I suggested that most of the rest of the media would be taking a square-on look at this controversy, and it might be more interesting, so to speak to turn our camera back on the United Kingdom, and that in pursuit of the question 'Is Zionism squandering the reserve of goodwill and sympathy upon which, ever since the Holocaust, Jewish causes and Jewish people have been able to rely?' we should interview a range of gentiles and Jews in Britain. Everyone nodded interestedly. Nothing more was said of my suggestion.' (p352  Emphasis added)
 
Parris, as presenter of Weekend World nevertheless worked with a top-notch team as two paragraphs later he says 'Do not let me paint a picture of a young TV star, his amazing ideas stifled by organisational deadbeats. My production team (which Peter Mandelson had not long left) were of high quality, many (David Aaronovich among them) going on to fame in their own right . . .(p.353) Say no more, as we say in Yorkshire.
 
 
+Hurricane Milton bore down on Florida almost immediately on the tail of Hurricane Helen. It seems to me that the Good Lord has already decided Florida should be punished. Recent polls have found an ever-growing level of support for the Rev. D. Trump. The mayor of Tampa warned residents to evacuate or die. Sounds reminiscent of New Jersey's slogan, live free or die. Is there a connection? And will all the people told to evacuate take the opportunity to vote early in mail-in ballots?

+With high drama, thrills and spills the Tory Party leadership race is drawing to a nail biting climax. It’s barely possible to walk up the street or enter the market without hearing snatches of animated conversation about the merits of each candidate. On the other hand . . .  Well, it has been reported that James Cleverly is making the running coming up from behind having delivered a speech which had superior soundbites and more gumption than the current frontrunner, the oafish Robert Jenrick. I heard Cleverly the other day on the radio and he sounded like an overinflated ego about to burst. So I read his barnstorming speech in an attempt to discover why commentators think he’s maybe going to win. Like all party conference speeches these days, it is largely a collection of single lines designed to punch, punch, punch the message home. There are no developed lines of discourse or argument, except perhaps for the overall case that ‘I am the only possible saviour of our party, our country, the world (i.e. that part of it with which I agree).’ It’s the kind of no-nonsense self-belief that got Liz Truss where she is today.
​
+Starmer is back in Liverpool today to announce a £22 billion 'boost' for carbon capture and storage, the technology that has struggled for 25 years to prove itself (and still hasn’t in my view). This dosh must be an amazing Labour commitment the like of which we have never seen before. Except that last year Rishi Sunak announced a £20 billion investment in carbon capture and storage. Labour’s extra £2 billion is probably just a cooked-up add-on to make it sound like this is fresh money. There is absolutely no way anyone will ever know whether it was real or not.

More on the ‘wealth creators’ thanks to the Daily Telegraph (1/10/24). The private equity firm Clayton Dubiler and Rice (CD&R) who loaded Morrisons supermarket chain with £7 billion of debt is one of several ‘investors’ who have now loaded Belron, the company behind Autoglass with billions of debt—in order to reap billions in dividends. According to the Telegraph: ’To fund the payout, Belron is being loaded with nearly €9bn of new debt which has led rating agencies to cut its debt rating to “junk” status. Borrowing money to pay shareholders, known in financial circles as a “dividend recap”, is controversial  because it puts more financial stress on companies while enriching owners.’

Where I wonder does the money created by this debt end up? Jersey? The Cayman Islands? Surely this ‘wealth creation’ masquerade is something Labour might want to curtail? No, probably not. One of the people set to benefit is Gary Lubner whom the Telegraph reports will take away £125million. Lubner has donated over £5 million to the Labour Party since Starmer took over. There are no reports that any of this money was used to pay for Starmer’s shoes or underwear. Yet.

It is deeply ironic that in certain circles this sort of financial behaviour will be seen as perfectly respectable. People like Rachel Reeves will have nothing to say about it. But when it comes to public debt we’re treated to a patronising tale about ‘balancing the books’ and ‘fiscal rules.’