How Many Ways To Kill A Cat?

In the 1950’s when motoring became possible for all buying new cars in the face of current credit restrictions was very difficult. Consequently many bought cars that were old. Often an ancient heap was the only choice a student of the period might be able to afford.

Mine, a 1934 Austin 7, had a worn clutch, shiny tyre treads, brakes that might or might not work, unreliable steering and gears that were not synchromesh. This meant as well as all the other operations you had to “double declutch” on every gear change.

The lights also were prone to fail so I kept a couple of cycle lamps and wire to fix them to the front whenever needed. The MOT tests introduced in the 1960’s brought this age of the freedom of the road to an end with a clamour of complaint.

There were a number of similar vehicles in the area, some better, some worse but in our innocence we called them “accidents waiting to happen”. For many we did not have to wait long. I sold mine when reliable transport was needed and I “invested” in a Vespa 125 Scooter. It was much more restricted but at least functional.

Looking around our public services, systems of government, legislation and all the procedures and guidelines, I see again a great many accidents waiting to happen and it seems that most of them are happening at once. For the tax system see the 10 November item The Anatomy of a Service Delivery Disaster on:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/

Whatever you may think about The Coalition or the policies or personalities of those at the head and their performance it is difficult not to believe that they are on a loser. Given the nature of the political class we are afflicted with it is possible that their personal interests and ambitions will ensure that we are all the losers

There are too many major problems and unpleasant consequences in train for them, or anyone, to cope with. The row over university fees, costs, provision and future is a classic of its kind. The mess is so bad that possibly it can never be fixed.

It has been coming a long while largely because key decisions that should have been made in the last fifty years never were. There are too many to list here, make your own, but if on the back of an envelope make it an A3 one.

The reality has been that when an academic hullaballoo starts over financing or expansion governments have thrown money in the direction of the loudest noises.

I have argued before that it is possible to have situations where “There is no right decision” only a choice between inconvenient or unpleasant alternatives. It would be possible to go into a long and intricate debate about the history of the present crisis in higher education and all the injustices of how one generation has benefited at the cost of another.

It will not be any use and in fact would simply obscure what the problems of the immediate present are never mind those of the several possible futures that we might or perhaps not enjoy. The latter seems the more likely.

One crucial blunder has been to allow a university system to develop whose institutions, with few exceptions, depend on immediate revenue funding from the state, sponsors with their own agendas and student fees.

As the liabilities both for the institutions and the potential students now seem to greatly exceed revenue or realisable assets we have the serious potential for a “crash” situation.

During the financial troubles at the turn of the 1830’s in 1831 Benjamin Fitt of the Priory Farm, Selborne, Hampshire (see Gilbert White “The Natural History of Selborne") issued a summons against the President and Fellows of Magdalen College of Oxford to have them gaoled at Winchester over issues concerning leases and rents. The year before his family connections and their friends had burned down their local workhouse.

Schrodinger of The Cat question of quantum indeterminacy was a Fellow at Magdalen for a time.

So in 2010 does Captain Swing ride again or is it just another academic car crash?

C4 "Dispatches" Sweatshops, Serfdom And Snorting

The C4 “Dispatches” last night, Monday 8th, dealing with sweatshops and serf labour in Leicester took the lid of a very nasty business that has been running for some time.

We had all the usual spin from the bosses and financiers about their deep ignorance of where the profits were coming from and how and all the paperwork they had saying that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

In my purely personal opinion I do not believe them, I do not believe their Press and Public Relations advisers, I do not believe their lawyers and above all I do not believe either their associated directors and all the executives and managers they employ.

Moreover, in my purely personal opinion, I do believe that the Leicester M.P’s were aware of what was going on where and why. I do believe that the local leading politicians and their connections were aware of the situation.

I do believe that too many of these people were gaining too much personally from the way these businesses were conducted.

To add another touch to the issue of belief and disbelief, I believe that throughout the fashion industry and the associated celebrity culture the great majority of those involved are well aware of how the money was being made and the conditions.

Literally for every snort a serf works for a week and still may not be paid. The effect has been to put very many into debt slavery, a condition that few of them are likely to escape.

It has to be said that this problem has been building up for some time. It is very likely it existed in a lesser form before 1997 and the pre-conditions were there for it to turn really bad. Since 1997 it has gone wholly out of control for the benefit of all the usual suspects.

There was one error in the programme I did identify. It was the community worker who used the word “slavery” to indicate his opinion. He said it was as bad as employment conditions were in Leicester 100 years ago. He was wrong. It is much worse and the nastiness is a great deal worse.

There is a grim irony. The particular sweatshop shown was located in the former Imperial Typewriter Works an award winning factory built in the 1930’s and regarded as a model its kind put up by a company that had a deserved high reputation for its treatment of and facilities for workers.

In November 1946 it was visited by the King-Emperor George VI who still was ruler of a vast empire then including the Sub Continent of India. See the Pathe clip, although the factory shown is another one.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=26816

My photograph above shows HM The King at an assembly bench at the Imperial Typewriters. You can see it was a well laid out, airy room. There were also canteen medical and recreational facilities. The wages compared well and there was a real pride in the firm. The London offices were on Kingsway at Imperial House.

The sports fields were a couple of miles away with several pitches, tennis and athletics facilities and decent changing rooms. Their Chess team ruled the roost in the County and beyond, largely because of Polish recruits. When a Grand Master came for a simultaneous match with the local chess elite the Imperial men were rarely beaten.

The modern sweatshop in the building had none of these things, the fire exits were blocked, no ventilation or facilities of any kind, it was in the basement and it was filthy by any standard.

Built originally purely for storage of engineering parts during the early 1940’s it was used as a key local air raid shelter because of the strength of the structure. When the C4 film started it gave me a nasty jolt, because I recognised it all too well having spent too many unhappy hours there.

There were lighter moments, such as the practice fire drill that owed more to Buster Keaton than to the intentions. As for the Pathe clip, if you watch it I was on Spinney Hill Park with “Tebbs” Lloyd-Johnson (Google him) who then lived overlooking the park as the King and Queen went through.

He was around more than 100 years ago along with many others I knew and later worked with. He had moved to a growing city which had a rich culture and opportunity. Many economic migrants arrived in the early 20th Century because it was a good place to work and live.

The Luftwaffe did not get the building and the company, it was the UK government and the economic planners that did followed by the asset strippers of the early 1970’s. It went very badly wrong and turned nasty in the 1960’s when the firm like so many other Leicester firms hit the skids.

Twenty odd years of having their profits and revenues creamed off and ambitions frustrated did for them. As a one time prosperous town, like most of the Midlands Leicester was treated as the cash cow for subsidies and development expenditure elsewhere and many firms, such as Wolsey suffered as well deprived of the ability to compete fairly or effectively.

Meanwhile down in London the celebrities that the sweatshops fund preen and parade and those who run an industry based on this sit in judgement on government, are lauded for their riches and incidentally remove most of their wealth to tax havens.

Welcome to British Freedom 2010 Style, the Land of Lost Content.

Pain On The Train

Amongst the many murky financial dealings of the last government the rail business is almost in a class of its own. As taxpayers we have been paying heavily for the privilege of having services provided by theoretically either commercial companies or substantially state owned agencies answerable to nobody except their financial advisers who have reaped rich dividends.

As passengers we have been living in a mysterious wonderland of guess the fare and find the service that has become increasingly complicated and also loaded against us. Get on the train without a ticket because the ticket office is not open and the machine won’t work and be hammered with penal fares.

Get off or on at a station that shortens your journey and also get hammered. Get on a train at the wrong time because that at the right time has been cancelled, guess what? Be on a train that is rerouted on a different line because a time target must be met or be dumped on an unmanned station late at night in the wilderness and find you own way home.

One of the best ones I saw was a train that finished up stranded in a power station siding because of some sort of mix up which left passengers several hours late in the early hours of the morning with all the respective parties denying liability.

The weird world of Network Rail is a subject much covered elsewhere with the boss of a government department (basically) able to retire young to a highland estate. The renewal of rolling stock has been an incredible giveaway to foreign firms. That many do not fit platforms here or there has not been a problem.

The companies were released from the obligations of Health and Safety over passenger accidents and the reporting and inspection of incidents relieved of the necessities of truth or on site examination.

Now tucked away in the back of the media we hear that HS1 the much trumpeted new High Speed service in the South East has been sold off fast to a Canadian outfit. The details are not clear but it seems that the UK end of the new high speed lines has been quickly dumped by the government.

On previous posts you learned that I am not entirely surprised that things did not go according to plan, but then I have only been travelling these seventy years or more around several countries and have actually done some railway work.

It is simple really. People pay money to travel by train and it is and always has been a significant cost to anyone on average or the ordinary run of wages.

On the new South Eastern HS1 service there are two main branches. The run from Ashford in Kent to London does save a good deal of time, but at a cost. The time taken from Dover and Ramsgate to Ashford was only a little quicker.

On the other line beginning at Faversham after Strood an HS1 journey to St. Pancras takes 34 minutes, exactly half the time of a stopping Charing Cross train.

However, if anyone works or wants to go to say the West End, Covent Garden area or close to London Bridge or Blackfriars then the half hour saved by HS1 is lost in going to any of those districts.

I know because I have done it. The times I did were because of weekend engineering works on the usual lines that were not convenient. Also as Underground stations go, Kings Cross St. Pancras is a good one to avoid.

What will happen now on HS1 is not known. What we do know is that South Eastern Railways lost a lot on the service and their takings are down also on other services.

The reductions and messing about with timetables to enable them to avoid any increase in staff numbers for the HS1 has increased car use and led to numbers of commuters moving house to other services. I doubt that if any of those reductions will be reinstated or any improvements made.

At present around the country a lot of the existing companies are looking hard at their accounts, potential liabilities and services. If there are reductions in the non ring fenced rail subsidies then it is likely that that fares are going to go up a lot more than inflation and trimming, reduction and some closure of services is likely.

What therefore is the governments Big Idea? Yes, indeedy, around £30 billion for an HS2 new line for the relatively short runs in England covered already by competing services. £30 bilion is of course the starting offer. A person who has actually read some rail history knows that almost invariably the start figure is laughably short of the final cost.

But we have a media fixated on Big Ideas. Together with big finance, big government, and big debt loadings what we get is big mistakes and even bigger bills for the taxpayer to pick up. What is hard for all these to cope with is the ability to look at the detail and get down to the detail.

This is no longer the way we work. It is not “sexy” or “big deal” or wow wow “Prestige” with the big “”P”. It is just hard work, co-ordination, real planning and a concern with real service.

Take London to Birmingham for example. In 1922 the fast morning train from Paddington to Snow Hill took two hours. The equivalent London and North Western train took two hours and eighteen minutes to New Street, the delay caused by the need to take off coaches for Northampton at Blisworth.

Today the New Street trains by Virgin are rather faster and the Chiltern Line trains from Marylebone to Snow Hill around the same as 1922 but stopping many more times. It would be possible to speed up either or both and to link them to the HS1 and Eurostar tracks at St. Pancras and all for a lot less than £30 billion.

If you wanted to go north also the routes are there on existing tracks. There are many possibilities and believe it or not there is the “Big Idea”. It is to have a system of electrified rail links on a standardised traction basis covering the whole UK. This will link not only all major urban areas but airports and seaports as well.

It is the big decision Labour flunked in its period of office from 1945, again in the 60’s and the 70’s. The Blown Labour government (Bl + own) handed the railways over to the financial sharks.

Can the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats finally wake up to what is needed, scrap the HS2 and get down to the detail and the basics?

Life's A Blast

There has been another volcano up recently, Merapi in Indonesia. The authorities there suggest it could be continuing for some time. What has been mentioned but little reported is the sundry other rumblings at around 120 volcanoes in the vicinity.

Despite all the major advances in chemistry and technology volcano watching is still a very difficult business. These added twitches may mean something little or big or nothing at all. We know that eruptions can cause unexpected major problems, as happened earlier this year with a minor Icelandic one, but we have not had one that is a real belter for a little time.

There are a number of theories about the end of the Neanderthals, a humanoid species parallel to our own which died out some tens of thousands of years ago. A case has been put forward for one major cause to be a series of large eruptions in the Caucasus around 40,000 years ago which changed the ecosystem of the north on which they depended.

It was some 75,000 years ago that a very big blast from Toba almost wiped out humanity, it is alleged. It reduced us to a few thousand people who developed habits of acquisitiveness and violence that ensured not just our survival but our conquest of other species and occasional collapses of societies and populations.

Santorini in the Eastern Mediterranean did for a number of civilisations around that part of the world around 3,500 years ago and triggering new forms of political organisation and method. The new techniques of deep sea investigation have found another potential big one deep down not far away.

In the Roman period we had Vesuvius, a modest one really. Again it seems that under the water nearby there is a potential bad one. After the Roman Empire retreated from Europe there was some kind of climatic severe disruption in the 6th Century with consequential disasters for humanity. There are various theories on this one, but one suggestion is a major Krakatoa event.

Also, the ending of the Medieval Warm Period in Europe with a number of disastrous effects has been suggested as the consequence of climatic disruption occurring after a series of eruptions in South America. More recently we have not long been made aware of the effects of the rupture in the Laki fissure in Iceland in the 1780’s.

This was followed by other eruptions around the world with a major one at Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. One way or another these led to major depopulation of the upland areas of the Atlantic Isles. The one that has been extensively featured in film etc. is the 1880’s Krakatoa blast that reminded us of our vulnerability.

At the moment there is glacial melt occurring in Iceland. This is being put down to a minor volcano which pops off without much effect every five to ten years. The worry is that it might be due to an after effect of the earlier eruption of this year. Experts think that one can lead to a bigger one not long later along the way. Perhaps, but if that triggers Laki again it is time to find out where you put the old gas masks.

There are other possibilities. The doomsday merchants point to lively activity up in the Aleutians, maybe associated with Kamchatka. This could be hefty. Also the mega chamber at Vanuatu is rumbling quietly away, but then it always does. Inevitably the Americans have to go bigger and better with the rising ground levels in Yellowstone giving the prospect of North America being covered by an ash cloud.

Back in 1939 one of my uncles found himself on HMS “Scott” sailing to Grenada after Kick ‘Em Jenny, an undersea one kicked in to everyone’s surprise. There was little known about these at the time. Since then many have been discovered, including some very big ones. Really deep down there are vents continually on the boil. They matter because they could affect sea warming and therefore climate.

Prediction in this field is a dangerous game. You can make yourself very unpopular and very foolish at the same time. But just don’t bet against a big one soon.

That Squeak Is Getting Louder

One of the mantras trotted out by those who dislike any of the changes in progress in the UK is that if something might affect the “lifestyle” options we have then it is impossible to contemplate.

They seem blissfully unaware that we have had a five to ten year hiatus at least in addressing many very difficult and complex matters and in working out policies and making decisions to try to deal with what might happen either sooner or later.

Any of these is likely to impact to a greater or even greater degree on the lifestyle we have been conditioned into thinking is necessary and is there for the taking for all time. There is one major issue where it is possible that some change is imminent and it is very difficult to work just what, when and how.

It is the question of oil supplies and in particular whether “Peak Oil” is now or a very soon issue and what the implications are. On the Oil Drum site this week there was a post where an expert has tried to reduce the matter to its essence in terms of simple logic. It is set out below.

If oil supplies cannot increase at the same rate as population increase and the inherent demands for basic and other consumer products then something has to give. The suppliers may turn up the taps in the short term to profit but this will mean a bigger crash later.

On the other had if supplies are conserved and we try to eke them out in a way more related to key needs then the worse could be deferred for some time. As much of modern food supplies depend on petro-chemicals for large scale agricultural production including fertilisers, processing, distribution and packaging this matters.

What is flummoxing many experts is what will happen to oil prices. It is not clear and depends on overall consumer demand in many areas that are difficult to estimate. There are some pretty ideas that this or that will overcome the issue but the chances are that they will not be cheap or convenient or enough.

The author suggests that the essential problem is politicians and the way they both make decision and handle issues. As Washington DC in the USA is a key place in all this recent history of decision making there is far from encouraging. In the UK we do not like making decisions. In the EU it is almost impossible to make any rational decision.

Quote:

Dr. James Schlesinger: "The Peak Oil Debate is Over" at ASPO-USA Conference
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 1, 2010
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: aspo-usa, aspo-usa conference, james schlesinger [list all tags]

Dr. James Schlesinger gave one of the keynote talks at the recent ASPO-USA Conference. Dr. Schlesinger comes with a wealth of experience: He was the first Secretary of Energy, from 1977 - 1979.

Prior to that, he had been Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, US Secretary of Defense, and Director of Central Intelligence.

Thank your very much. Between us, I cannot emulate the erudition that was displayed at the last session.

But I am delighted to be here nonetheless, and I hope you share that. May I start with a bromide.

A resource which is finite is not inexhaustible. If you think that over, it should not be a revelation. That was a bromide; some people think a keynote should never rise above a bromide.

Some five years ago in Italy, I concluded a talk by saying that like the inhabitants of Pompeii, who ignored the neighboring volcano Vesuvius until it detonated, the world ignores peak oil at its peril.

Two years ago, in addressing ASPO, in Cork, Ireland, I argued that the "Peakists" had won the intellectual argument, except for some minor details about precise timing, but that, by and large, everyone recognized that there were limits on our capacity to increase the production of crude oil, as we have, steadily, since World War II.

That Peakists were no longer a beleaguered minority, that they had won, and that consequently, they should be gracious in victory.

There is an old Spiritual that is relevant here, the walls of those who doubted the peak, seemed to be impregnable. Nonetheless, you marched around the walls seven times, and then blew the trumpets, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

But acceptance by knowledgeable people is not enough.

The political order should respond. Nonetheless, our willingness, let alone our ability to do anything serious about the impending inability to increase oil output is still a long way off.

The political order responds to what the public believes today, not to what it may come to believe tomorrow. It is also resistant to any action that inflicts pain, or sacrifice, or those who vote.

The payoff in politics comes from reassurance, perhaps precluded by a rhetorical challenge. Still, the challenge is clear, in both logic, and in the evidence.

Let me start briefly with the logic:

First, if something cannot be sustained, eventually it will not be sustained. Ultimately, it will shrink.

Secondly, you cannot produce oil unless you first discover it, a contribution by Colin Campbell.

Third, a resource that is finite cannot continually have its production increased.

What is the evidence? First, we remain heavily dependent on supergiant and giant oil fields discovered in the 50s and 60s of the last century. (I might add, of the last millennium.)

Only rarely in recent decades have discoveries equaled production. Mostly, it has been one barrel discovered, for every three barrels produced.

Second, old super giants like Bergan in Kuwait and in Mexico have gone into decline earlier than had been anticipated, and going into decline have been Alaska, and the North Sea, Western Siberia, and the like.

Third, while it is not yet twilight in the desert, as you may have read, still, we are well into the afternoon, even in Saudi Arabia. Even the Ghawar oil field is increasingly hard to sustain.

Fourth, in 2004, we experienced our first demand-driven price spike, as opposed to the previous price spikes, driven by supply interruptions. We still operate at about the level of production capacity of 2004.

Next, given projected decline curves, running from 4% to 6%, and the projected increase in demand during the next quarter century, we shall require the new capacity equivalents of five Saudi Arabia’s.

Even the International Energy Agency, which previously had been sanguine, now suggests that we can no longer increase production of conventional oil in the course of this decade. Note that it is conventional oil. That is all that Hubbert talked about.

Somewhat disingenuously, the debate has been turned on him, by talking about fuel liquids in general, throwing in tar sands, heavy oil, coal liquids, oil shale, and so on.

But clearly, large conventional oil production is increasingly no longer part of the future, unless there is a technological breakthrough, which Mr. Gilbert talked about just a few minutes ago, raising the ultimate recovery rate from existing fields, which at this moment we cannot expect.

Of course, there are uncertainties, which make timing predictions with regard to the peak risky: Iraq, which has been held back for a variety of reasons, may come along as one of those five new needed Saudi Arabia’s.

Offshore Brazil and offshore oil elsewhere are promising. Shale gas, which is apparently coming in abundance, but is not of course oil, may somewhat alleviate the pressures on liquid fuels.

But in general, we must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source, in expanding the world's economy for more than half a century.

Can the political order face up to the challenge? There is no reason for optimism.

We are likely to see pseudo solutions, misleading alternatives, and sheer sloganeering: energy independence, getting off foreign oil, and the like. All of that sheer sloganeering we have seen to this point.

The political order, which abhors political risk, tends to rely on the Biblical prescription, "Sufficient unto the day, is the evil thereof."

Thank you very much.

Unquote.

So time and growth, like the oil, may be running out. And in Westminster all we have is the political kiddies shouting at each other about lifestyle choices.

Say It Without Flowers

On Thursday 23 May 2009 I posted on “Les Fleurs Du Mal” about flowers. Some of my comments may have seemed exaggerated. Today, however, it was good to see the subject being picked up again in http://newgatenews.blogspot.com/

Also, today in http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/ was an item concerned with the tax implications in this “globalised” trade. There will be the claims that the trade creates jobs but just how many and who really benefits?

Also, where is our “development” money going? Is it into the incomes and homes of the local population or into the accounts of the multinationals?

Quote:

Taxjustice dot blogspot dot com - Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Kenya loses from flower firm tax tricks

From Kenya's Daily Nation:

Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) says it is investigating some multinationals for abusive transfer mispricing. Among them, according to Mr John Njiraini, the KRA commissioner of domestic taxes in charge of the large taxpayers, are the country's three largest flower companies."We have seen cases of multinationals reporting losses in Kenyan subsidiaries while their parent firms are making huge profits. We are investigating whether they have abused their transfer pricing policies," Mr Njiraini, said.

The article, quoting TJN's Africa network, adds that there is a great problem with enforcing transfer pricing arrangements, and with the arrangements themselves:

Mr Njiraini says to be able to crack the abusive transfer pricing syndicate, Kenya requires experienced lawyers in the area as well as tax experts, who are not currently available. Some of the tax-avoidance methods are rampant because there is no legislation against them.

Recently, the OECD's Jeffrey Owens noted that an astonishingly low 0.1 percent of foreign development assistance is allocated to supporting revenue and customs in developing countries, even though tax revenues are a multiple of the value of foreign assistance: ten times as much, in Africa's case.

It is small wonder that African and other governments have such a hard time confronting the complexities of transfer pricing (and other) abuses by global multinationals.Regarding transfer pricing, the OECD's arm's length principle, which is used as the international standard, is all but unworkable -- although the ensuing complexity does create billions in profits for accountancy firms.

As Michael Durst, Michael Durst, a former director of the U.S. Internal Revenue Services's Advanced Transfer Pricing Program, notes:

"Experience to date is sufficient to demonstrate that the current system is based on faulty assumptions regarding the way multinational business is conducted, so that the system, no matter how hard one seeks to reform it, simply is not capable of functioning acceptably."

Time for some fresh thinking on transfer pricing, in the interests of the citizens of developing and developed countries.

Unquote.

When you pay your pounds for those apparently fresh supermarket flowers, stop for a moment to think about the markups down the line, the distribution costs, the running costs of installations where they are grown and then wonder how much the employees might earn.

Also, there is the interesting problem of how much water is used and how little clean water is left for the locals.

Ginger Rodents And Loose Tongues

Amongst the peoples of China in that country and around the world there is a twelve year cycle in which each year is designated by a special character. The Year of The Tiger, The Year of The Horse etc. It is believed that persons born in a year will have the particular characteristics attributed to it. One such year is The Year of The Rat.

Consequently Ms Harman in her throwaway remark to the Scottish Labour Party has not only managed to attempt to insult a red haired Scottish Lib Dem MP, Danny Alexander, but around eight to nine percent of people of Chinese origin and beliefs.

It becomes worse if you consider the peoples of the territories now on the borders of Afghanistan, Iran and to the north. At one time long ago, before the climatic ecozones moved, the Old Silk Road ran through the Kingdom of Khotan, now desert. They were governed by The Rat Kings and their peoples have had a long respect for that tradition.

So add in to those persons affronted a number of the mountain tribes of Afghanistan as well as all those in the East and elsewhere demand a respect for all other living creatures as well as man. There are rather a lot of them.

But to return to the United Kingdom and indeed Scotland there is a more recent Rat tradition. In January 1940 in Egypt the 7th Armoured Division of the British Army was formed and took as its divisional tac sign a common local life form, the Jerboa, a small rat with a serious bite and the capability of surviving in the harshest conditions.

The bite did matter, this was still before antibiotics became available and it could be lethal if it went septic. The Division went through the Desert Campaign, then into Italy, then withdrawn to be amongst the first to land in Normandy in June 1944. In July 1945 it represented the British Army in the Berlin Victory Parade.

Eventually, after a brief hiatus in the late 1940’s it disbanded in Northern Germany in 1958 but the tac sign was retained by the 7th Armoured Brigade throughout the following years. In Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade the 7th (Desert Rat) Armoured Brigade has provided troops for active service.

There were a lot of Scottish regiments and soldiers in the various corps elements at one time or another in the Division and later Brigade. Few of them I suspect will forget the time when they wore the Jerboa (Rat) insignia.

Whether their memories are happy or less than happy is another matter. There was one who took over ten years to complete his two years of service because of long periods of therapy in the nearest military prison. Many in their time would count the days and hours to “demob”.

The Rats above are the 1st Battalion The Cameronians, The Scottish Rifles in the mid 1950’s in training in Northern Germany. At the same time, 1st Battalion The Cameron Highlanders were just down the road. Because they were all very sensitive chaps it was not a good idea to either confuse them, or more important insult them.

Although these men and others of their time will now be over 70, they will have their children, grandchildren and in some cases great grandchildren, mostly ordinary people in ordinary jobs. These are the people in both Scotland and elsewhere who the Labour Party has betrayed and antagonised.

As for Mr. Alexander, I note that on 16th September last he was involved with Forces Veterans encouraging them to seek the assistance that was in place for them. Perhaps he might have come across a few Rats from the past. He has red hair.

So do a lot of my family in the maternal line. I understand that is due to the genes in that the determination of hair colour requires the switching on or off (I forget which) of a couple of genes in the process of early development. In short it could be regarded as ethnic.

Many of us are painfully aware of the visceral hatred many of the left wing London Mediocracy have for ordinary working class people in Britain, notably those in the Labour party who have depended so much on foreign money in their quest for power and property. But in all their laws about equality and the rest it cuts both ways.

Ms. Harman’s careless remarks betray a deep seated ethnic prejudice against persons of early tribal origins in the Atlantic Isles. Perhaps someone should complain to the Parliamentary Standards Committee who might suggest diversity training and therapy for her.

I understand that the number of Gaelic speakers is in decline. Ms. Harman might be compelled to attend courses in that language to encourage an interest in cultures and peoples who, it seems, are alien to her.