Public Enquiries

We seem to love Enquiries in this country; looking back, I can't think of a time when one wasn't in progress. We love exploring the past and pinning blame on people for past events, even if those concerned are long dead. The current furore about Jimmy Savile is perhaps typical. Whilst I have very great sympathy for all the victims of his abuse, exactly what is the point of the police enquiries? We are told that they have something like 250 lines of enquiry and have identified some 50 or so victims. Following up all those lines of enquiry is going to cost substantial sums of money, many millions no doubt, and unless there is any prospect of other co-conspirators being charged with aiding and abetting, just what is the point? But the police enquiries aren't the end of the matter, the NHS is setting up an enquiry (or three) as is the BBC, which will involve the expenditure of more public money. The end result will no doubt be statements from all the organisations concerned that "Lessons will be learnt".  However, in this particular case, I don't think any new lessons will be learnt, not because I believe that it could happen again, but because attitudes have changed significantly over the past twenty or so years and it would be far more difficult someone to start to do what Savile is alleged to have done without attracting wider attention.
Of course, we mustn't confuse this enquiry with the "Saville Enquiry", into Bloody Sunday, which dragged on for years at horrendous cost and never really produced anything that satisfied the public at large, the majority of people that I know, generally seem to take the view that soldiers under pressure, being fired at, will quite reasonably fire back and, as far as they are concerned, that is the end of the matter. Surely more would have been achieved by paying the victims' dependants a generous ex-gratia sum of money than paying all those lawyers to talk for years.
The first enquiry that I can recall reading about was the Lynsky Tribunal, which was about allegations of corruption in the government and civil service. Nothing Changes!  Since then, there seem to have been at least one or more public enquiries every year, ranging from the Ground Nut Scheme to the Hutton and Iraq enquiries.  But the thing about all these enquiries is that by the time they take place, most people had already made up their minds about what had happened and that this is unlikely to change regardless of the enquiry outcome. I'm still happy to believe that Dr Kelly was murdered, regardless of what Hutton said!
We need some new way of investigating these matters, some short and sharp way which carries out the investigation at a sensible cost and comes to a conclusion in months rather than years, preferably without the involvement of so many (expensive) legal experts.
In the meanwhile, I am calling for a full public enquiry into the murder of the Princes in the Tower as I believe that Richard III has been unfairly accused of involvement in their deaths.

Cyber attacks

I was very interested in the comments on cyber attacks made by Leon Panetta, the US Defence Secretary and reported in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. It would seem that foreign hackers had the potential to take down the country’s power grid, financial networks and transport system.

In truth, I hadn't realised how much industry and our utilities relied upon the internet for the control of their systems. My first reaction was "Why on earth are they connected to the internet", as when I worked on computer systems for Air Traffic Control, it was absolutely forbidden for any operational system to be connected to the internet and the computers at various sites were connected by what at that time were described as "private circuits", although they were provided by BT.

I am out of touch with the current situation, but I would imagine that these days a so-called private circuit is now simply multiplexed onto one of the high speed broadband carriers, and the only private bits will be the connections at each end! Equally, where a circuit was only used rarely, say for the switching of remote equipment, the temptation to have a simple phone line and control the equipment via the internet in order to save cost would be overwhelming.

In the past few months we have seen the problems that can be caused by computer failure. Firstly there was the bank computer which prevented people from accessing their accounts or making payments, we are told this was the failure of a software update. Then yesterday we had the failure of the O2 mobile phone network, again apparently due to computer problems.

Being generous, I take the explanations at face value, but it does demonstrate in a very small way the damage that could be done by an enemy in a concerted attach on our computer systems.

I think that we should be very worried.

Political Speeches

I am not impressed by modern political speeches.

The media tell us that Cameron made a fine speech, that Obama is a great orator and so forth. But surely anyone, who doesn’t mind standing up in front of a crowd and speaking, could make a fine speech if they had some of the best speech writers in their countries at their disposal, along with expert coaches and studios where they can practice and view the results on a TV screen.

Anyway, who listens to these speeches other than the party faithful and the media? Snippets are shown on the TV news bulletins, but does any ordinary person actually listen to them? Surely no one is persuaded to vote for a party on the basis of set speeches at a party conference.

What we need to test our politicians are genuine debates or question and answer sessions, something that we are unlikely to get in this country.

 Meanwhile, our politicians should remember that “Actions speak louder than words”, and so far I’ve seen very little action from Cameron and Co. Plenty of fine words, yes, but no real action.

Party Conferences

I have been wondering about why the political parties have their conferences other than to get publicity for the leaders’ speeches, and surprisingly for a pensioner on the right of the political spectrum, I have reached the conclusion that as far as conferences are concerned, the Trade Unions are far more democratic.

Whilst I was working, I belonged to one of the Civil Service Trade Unions, which has since merged with one of the larger unions. At the time, we felt that our Branch was being ignored by the union’s officials as we were not mainstream Civil Service but a Government Authority or Quango. As a result, we put forward a motion which was critical of the executive and I was appointed as one of the Branch delegates to the annual conference.

Somewhat to my surprise, our motion was put on the order paper, to be taken with a number of similar motions from other small branches, and I had my couple of minutes to propose it, as did the delegates from the other branches with their similar motions.

Yes, we lost the motion, but at least we had a few minutes to air our views and it did lead to some changes which were being implemented when I retired.

So with this in mind, I asked a member of the local Conservative Party whether the local constituency party could  put motions to their conference that were critical of the leadership, and the answer was a definite “No”.

So what is the point in belonging to the Conservative party if you can have no influence over its policies? It seems the only time they have a say is when they vote for a leader, although once he is elected, there is no mechanism for the party members to fire him. He appoints all the Ministers, and all they do at conference is to give speeches saying how good they are. There is no discussion of their policies, all that members can do to signify their disapproval is to refuse to applaud, as happened in the case of Justine Greening.

If we don’t even have democracy within our political parties, what hope is there for real democracy in this country?

I'm back - with some photos

I stopped blogging earlier in the year when I was very much "under the weather". Although all is now well, I was reluctant to start again as, not being an early riser, I found that by the time that I'd read the morning papers and other news, too many other bloggers had already beaten me to it with regards to current events.

But yesterday,  whilst out for my (doctor's orders) stroll, I came upon this sign which I managed to photograph with my newly acquired iPod Touch.

You will obviously ask "What is special about this sign?",  as there are, after all, many similar signs around just like it.


Just these two signs standing each side of the above

 

In the thirty or so years that I've lived in the area, the size of both schools has roughly doubled with extra classrooms being added. Now some of the land is to be used for building, apparently to fund additions to the schools.

So there is now less than half the amount of land available, per pupil, that the school founders considered necessary all those years ago.

So much for the Government's statement that they are to stop selling off school land and encouraging more sport as part of our Olympic legacy.

Two glasses of wine a night triples risk of mouth cancer

Other than the snow, the main headlines seem to be that "Two glasses of wine a night triples risk of mouth cancer" and that the government is about to launch a TV advertising campaign to press home the message.
Note how statistics are manipulated to show the percentage increase in  the risk, but rarely show the basic risk from which this figure has been calculated.
Clearly something went wrong at the Telegraph as the actually gave some real data in stating that
"Mouth cancer is diagnosed in more than 5,000 people a year, leading to about 1,800 deaths, while about 12 million people have high blood pressure, increasing their chances of strokes and heart attacks."
So the risk of getting mouth cancer, assuming a population of 60 million is about 1 in 12,000 and of dying from it is about 1 in 33,000, a risk that I'm quite happy to take.
When it comes to high blood pressure, it is a well known fact that one's blood pressure increases with age, and with the present ageing population, why should anyone be surprised that the figure is increasing?
Of course, the government and all the various anti-alcohol organisations never point out the good that a moderate intake of alcohol can do, something which has been highlighted in numerous reports over the years and which is carefully ignored by the  medical profession.
So we are to have more government taxpayers' money spent on advertising to tell us half-truths. Surely it is their duty to give us all the facts so that we might weigh the advantages and disadvantages for ourselves?
Why don't they just shut up and leave us alone?
Do they really believe that a worthwhile number of people will take any notice of these adverts?
At least most of us know about the long term results of drinking alcohol, which is more than can be said about many of the drugs that our medical profession could end up prescribing as alternatives.

Useless Windmills

Today is the coldest we've had so far in this part of the country, according to my trusty (mercury filled) max/min thermometer is was down about -5 Celsius last night and it's still below freezing at midday.
But when I went for a short walk,  it didn't feel nearly as cold as it was a week or so ago because there is absolutely no wind.  Never mind, the house is nice and snug as long as there is electricity to drive the central heating!
Of course when we rely on windmills for 20% of our electricity, there would probably have to be power cuts, as there is no way that any commercial organisation would have plant with 20% spare capacity available "just in case". Indeed, according to my contacts, there is virtually no spare capacity at the moment with aged equipment being pressed into use to keep the country supplied at a time of maximum demand. I'm told that what could be a relatively minor breakdown under normal circumstances could cause blackouts over large parts of the country if it occurred during this cold weather.
Just let's hope that we have an outbreak of sanity in the Department of Energy and Climate Change with the appointment of Ed Davey as  the new Energy Secretary and that steps are taken to ensure that we would have electricity under the worst possible scenario.