Le Tour De Frantic

It's the same with bus's, you wait ninety nine years then two come along together.  Another win in the Tour de France for a Brit' and the delight of hearing our national anthem blaring across Paris and because of the occasion whoever was watching having to listen.  That this was to be a celebratory one hundredth event just added to the fun.  The fact that "our" Brit' was born in Nairobi was little mentioned.

The French managed only one stage win but Riblon won the prize for being the most combative rider, that is the one who made a fair number of the stages more interesting to the media and the public than they might have been.  Otherwise it was thin pickings for the French who are having to accept that the Tour is now an international event with a lot of foreign money "invested".  They are reaping the benefits of globalisation and their event is now a world marketing exercise.

So it is almost natural that the Sky team featured prominently amongst the contenders generally although their effort became concentrated on the Yellow Jersey of the leader and winner. The coming of digitised satellite TV with all the technical advances have made it very different in many ways from the past.

One of the less attractive features is that along the route at key points and especially on crucial mountain stages all the nutters, mad exhibitionists and escaped loonies of Europe are gathered together for the crowd scenes.  Perhaps quiet arrangements could be made for the 2014 Tour to start rounding them up for deportation to one of France's more unpleasant penal settlements.

They could be put to useful work growing biofuels.  Along with them, I wonder about all those motorised caravans very evident along the route with some ordinary ones.  One question is the size of the total investments in these beasts of the road that is made by people following the Tour.  There must be many who are spending their children's inheritance living semi-rough to follow a bunch of bikers around.

The put down answer to this is that helps to promote economic growth.  It may not be long before the government decides to put one third of us on bikes and make the other two thirds run around following them.  But this leads to another little mentioned matter.  It was in the time of John Major the Muddler that more sports funding was put into cycling.  Whilst the Sky name as sponsors was all over the place no mention was given to the State or Major.

Nor was there any mention of all those in the past gave freely of their time and resources to keeping cycling going as a sport without much recognition or help, even when the occasional medal or win happened.  It was always not just a lesser sport, but worse a plebian one without any relieving celebrity interest. The BBC were always very sniffy about reporting it.  If only Lennon and McCartney had ridden tandem now and again.

The picture above if of the two greats of French cycling of fifty or so years ago, Jacques Anquetil on the left and Raymond Poulidor (with cap) on the right.  Jacques had robust ideas on drugs, such as what the hell and it's up to the rider if he needs a boost.  This was an age when pep pills were in common use.  After his time was the age of the Baby Boomer when anything went, especially down the throat.

After this it gradually became realised that this stuff had a number of problems.  One was that international competition was not just between the participants but between the backup squads of biochemists and experts in chemical synthetics.  You were not just what you ate, but drank, sipped, had injected or implanted.  As testing and analysis was way behind discovery and delivery for many years there was a hopeless quest for control and preventing it.

Now it seems to be catch up time with the virtues of stringent regulation, monitoring, careful analysis and control of all medications as a feature of administering these events.  It is odd to see the politicians being strongly in favour of all this for sports events and competition whilst denying its efficacy or use elsewhere either in the economy or in government.

The Tour now ends with one of those whizz bang flashy productions that all seem so similar despite the vast effort and expense put in to making them an individual entertainment.  Perhaps it may not be long before the techie who devises the best feature is named the winner of the Tour.

It is all very different from even the recent past.  One can understand why so many in France would like it to be even more French.  The organisation is now not just coupled to world media but the Tour becoming less French in many ways.  We are promised a start in Yorkshire.  Perhaps another year the finish might start to go international, say removed to Pontefract Racecourse.

Allez les bleues.

And Is There Honey Still For Tea?

Five years ago on 6 March 2008, Magnus Linklater in The Times wrote on The Coming Food Crisis.  Below is what he had to say.

So what progress have we made?  In the meantime we have started to lose all the bees we need for pollination.

Quote:

The early signals are there, but the world seems to be sleepwalking towards disaster

To explain the exact connection between a newly opened hamburger joint in Beijing, Sir Richard Branson's biofuelled planes and the strip of wild flowers running round my farmer friend's field in Cambridgeshire would take more than the 970 words allotted to me here but, believe me, they will be on the front page of this and every other newspaper before long, because they spell the beginnings of a full-blown food crisis.

You can see the early signals already - the doubling of wheat prices, the mounting cost of bread, the steepest increases at the supermarkets for 14 years, demonstrations on the streets by pig farmers threatened with bankruptcy, “tortilla riots” in Mexico, the drying up of aid to the Third World.

And this is only the start of it. In the words of Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the University of Leeds: “We are sleep-walking into a crisis.” At the very least he predicts the end of the era of cheap food, which will of itself amount to a big shift in our eating habits. But if the process of rising costs and diminishing supplies of grain accelerates, as it may well do, we could witness actual shortages of basic foodstuffs. One report last month said that the world is only ten weeks away from running out of wheat supplies after stocks fell to their lowest level for 50 years.

The causes are many and various, but at their heart is a change in global consumer habits that has crept up on us almost without our noticing. In China and the Far East, growing wealth has been accompanied by a taste for Western diets, including, principally, beef, which is now being imported in increasing quantities.

There was a time when the idea of an American-style hamburger would have turned the stomach of the average Chinese; not any more. McDonald's is rolling out a chain of drive-through fast-food outlets in China's 30,000 petrol stations, and opening restaurants across that vast country to cater for a new appetite for Western meat.

The world market for beef, and the resulting need for cattle feed has coincided with a decline in the production of grain, as the maize farmers of America switch from producing their standard crops to growing biofuels as an alternative source of energy.

 Worried by the instability of oil and gas-supplying states throughout the world - from Russia to the Middle East - the US Government has encouraged farmers to turn their fields over to producing ethanol. Production of this alternative fuel is predicted to rise by 30 per cent by 2010. As one farmer put it: “Once I grew food for a bullock, now I grow fuel for a Buick.”

Enter Sir Richard, heralding a new era of carbon-free aviation travel by sending one of his passenger jets across the North Sea, its tanks brimming with biofuels. His feat is, of course, widely applauded, with giants of the global-warming era such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore congratulating him on a pledge to spend $3 billion on developing his alternative Virgin fuels. So, just at a time when we should be considering how best to increase our production of grain, we in Britain are switching off one main source of it.

Here then, one might imagine, would be an opportunity for Britain, with its long tradition of highly efficient farming, to begin filling the gap. As Professor Lang, in a lecture this week at City University, London, pointed out, Britain has turned round its farming industry to become one of the most productive in the world. Too productive, perhaps. By the 1970s Britain and Europe, aided by massive subsidies, were contributing to grain, beef and butter mountains that had become a source of international scandal.

The Common Agricultural Policy began switching its grant system away from production towards more environmentally friendly schemes. Farmers were encouraged to grow verges round their fields, where wild life could flourish. Hedges, ripped out to increase the size of fields, were carefully replanted. Ponds, small copses, water verges and species-rich grassland were actively encouraged.

It did wonders for biodiversity, and made a great deal of money for some. My East Anglian farmer friend reported happily on the marked improvement the new grants had made to his bottom line.

He is less happy now. With wheat at £180 a ton, he would dearly like to rip out the thickets and meadows where birds and bees so happily congregate, and go back to doing what he is best at - producing grain. But he is locked into a ten-year scheme and, for the time being at any rate, he is unable to make the switch.

Elsewhere, there are some signs of flexibility: in Scotland a new scheme is being introduced, aimed at encouraging farmers to co-operate, and become more competitive and more market-orientated. But overall there is little sign that policy-makers have grasped the enormity of what has happened. The UK is now barely 60 per cent self-sufficient in food.

It is clear that the Government has yet to react to the dimensions of the looming world food crisis. It needs to begin a debate with the EU on the whole direction of Europe's agricultural strategy and rethink it from scratch, devising a strategy for sustainable production, then begin to educate the public about the realities ahead. It will mean a change in culture that is a million miles from the Tesco-driven consumerism we have grown lazily used to over the past 20 years.

Professor Lang suggests we may need to go back to the ground-breaking reports of the 1940s, which led to a wholesale shift in Britain's approach to food production. If that means a revolutionary change in the national diet, then so be it. Maybe that would be no bad thing.

Unquote.

Recently, food prices have been increasing rather more than inflation.

Oh Ye Of Little Faith

According to sources in the web, the denominations of faith we have had in the past are now being replaced.  These may seem to be satirical but there may be more truth in them than many a holy book.

The first comes from a link in Nicholas Shaxson's "Treasure Islands" blog and relates to finance.  For many of us it is not too difficult to see the present world of money, the economics of money and the mantras on its management as being more like faith than reason especially when the penance becomes due.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765617333/The-new-church-of-finance.html?pg=all

The second relates to the National Health Service and its rapid fall from grace.  This is about the general scope of the NHS.  There is one aspect rarely touched on and that is the malign influence of recent employment law and the associated effect of compensation lawyers out for a killing, in this case almost literally.

In the NHS it is almost impossible to get rid of a wrong 'un fast.  Then when they kill or maim people, even without the help of the The Liverpool Pathway because of the legal implications the reaction is one of denial, cover up and lies. 

One friend of mine in special measures in hospital encountered a nurse who decided to clear the ward so she could have an easy night.  That she could almost certainly have killed him was of no concern.  Quite how many she has killed we shall never know.

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/requiem-for-national-health-church.html

Perhaps in reality they are all Muggletonians (see Wikipedia).

The Return Of The Habsburgs

This one is a retread of one of 20 November 2009, about Europe.  It is very hot, there have been things to do and time is short.  At least the MOT test is in the bag and in this district I can claim to be one of a minority, being both taxed and insured, with a proper DVLA license and a car fit for the road.  It is about Europe and how things change, or rather do not change much.  To begin.......

Well, after all that, we are now agreed that basically, taking everything into consideration, and looking at all the options the Habsburgs were right.  It is now admitted by our leaders in Europe, not all of them elected, that after about six hundred years, all those wars of ideologies, wealth and empire seeking, dynastic disputes, and sundry fighting between other groups with particular agendas were a waste of time, men and money.

If only those misguided people our forebears trusted with power in the past had just let the Habsburgs, their Emperors, Princes, Dukes and the rest get on with running the show, religion, trade, and everything we could all have lived happily ever after.  Perhaps Herman van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton do not much resemble King Philip II of Spain, and Queen Mary Tudor of England who married at Winchester in July 1554 (above), but they are the best Europe can do for the time being.  Tony and Cherie would have been a little too Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

I will skip the slightly complicated history of the Habsburgs, it is all there on the web and Wikipedia serves for starters.  Nor do I suggest that the various descendants of Habsburg’s line scattered about the world should be elevated to high positions in Europe.  They seem to be a sociable lot, but their heritage has meant exclusion from politics.  They could almost claim to be an ethnic group who have suffered social and political isolation and could apply for the relevant grants and privileges from Brussels.

The Habsburgs, Holy Roman Emperors and all that, not only ruled much of Europe and beyond, but in the parts they did not have direct rule, exercised a profound influence over what went on.  Moreover, many went in for micro management to an astonishing degree, complaining that they were slaves to their peoples. 

We can also ignore their foibles and eccentricities, difficulties in personal relationships, and the consequences of genetic inbreeding.  They are minor compared to those of many of the current European and UK leaders, and as for the UK we can substitute “political” for “genetic”.  The effects of that are infinitely more serious and damaging to the business of ruling than the odd twitching of the DNA.

The Europe of the Habsburgs was a sprawling regime with its many parts rarely functioning in connection with the others.  It was a massive tax and wealth gathering entity which spent vast sums on prestige projects, personal palaces, and in enforcing the doctrines of which they and only they determined and defined.  

It was multi layered to a bewildering and complicated degree.  Most of the time of its functionaries was spend in working out who they were and what they were supposed to be doing.  If they found that out, then someone higher up would confound it, and it will all start again.

Public decrees would be made, laws and regulations issued, but how they came to be or why would be shrouded in deep secrecy, and only the powerful or the proximate would be party to any of it.  This meant that as you went down through the levels of administration, matters became slower and slower, and more uncertain.  Nobody quite knew what decisions might be made and when, unless, of course, they paid good money to find out and obtain the right result.

There was a proliferation of senior, high paying, posts to satisfy the many clients of the state, and as many of the highest gathered so many of them to themselves, then there was extensive delegation to much cheaper and junior officials whose only hope of survival was to extract as much income and as quickly as possible.   

The Empire had a monopoly of policing and military matters that were closely combined and under the instruction of the doctrinal and legal administrative classes, so that rebellion was prevented, and any reformers or opposition would be classed as rebellion or heresy and dealt with accordingly.

At the highest levels it was necessary to have connections and background that were absolutely correct.  Without the sixteen quarterings of the right families you could neither be admitted to nor held worthy of rule.  Then it was ancestral because that was held to the test of rightness or wrongness.  Today there are other tests of political correctness that amount to the same thing.  The are boxes that contain the right configurations of display, beliefs, and membership.

Nobody really knew where the money went, and accounting was simply an exercise in writing fiction.  Who was supposed to getting the money was one thing.  Who really benefited was quite another, sometimes completely random in effect, and at others going to people who had abused every office they held. 

There were some political jurisdictions which held out against the Habsburg system, but in the 21^st Century by the more effective methods of modern communications and means of propaganda they have been suborned and defeated. 

For almost a century Europe has been free of the last of the Habsburg heritage.  But it has been too difficult to shake them off.  They may not be back in person, but their political tradition has triumphed.  Their system is back, bigger and better than ever and we are all now subject.

At least we will not have dynastic wars.

Now in 2013, there is the potential in Syria and if as some suggest, Italy, only recently a nation state, does implode financially, it might be go back to start.

Pouring Oil On Trouble

The link below appeared recently in Naked Capitalism on 2nd July.  It suggests that all the cheery information we have been getting on all that fuel for the future may not be as soundly based as many would like to think.  As ever there are some technical problems which the optimists feel are not major issues.

It is a longish piece but worth reading if you are interested in these matters.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/gaius-publius-a-primer-whats-in-a-tar-sands-pipeline.html

The proposition is that to move these tar sands requires them to be turned into a chemical slurry, heated to a high level and then pumped long distances under high pressure.

If this type of movement is proposed for the UK it will be only days before either the government or Boris Johnson come up with the idea to put such pipelines along the HST2 to beef up the economic case for the project.

Perhaps the main storage areas, if the stuff makes it through the pipelines, might be included in the proposed new hub airport to be used as aviation fuel for updated versions of the Airbus and the Dreamliner.

It should all go with a bang.

The Summer of '76

We are being threatened with a continuing heat wave comparable to the summer of 1976.  This is something we could do without.  It was bad enough then, it could be even worse now.  The Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, how we laughed at such a thing then, was hastily given extra duties as Minister for Drought and warned us that water rationing would soon be with us as well as other unpleasant arrangements.

We now have a Department of Culture, Media and Sport mingled with Equalities, supported by 44 agencies and public bodies.  If a drought could occur now then the probable expansion of the government along those lines should soon mop up any current unemployment among the chattering classes.

As soon as Howell took up office the first rain drops appeared.  My worry is that if Cameron makes either Maria Miller or Hugh Robertson, two of the current DCMS and Equalities team responsible for drought we shall all expire of thirst while they wait for the deliberations of all the focus groups, consultative bodies and the rest before deciding that we need more water.

In 1976 James Callaghan took over as Prime Minister earlier in the year.  Faced with economic problems he became unpopular in trying to tell us that we could not have the double digit income rises and continuing expansion of expenditure, debt and the rest that we had become used to under Heath and Wilson because inflation with all its evils was destroying the basic economy.

There were extensive riots in South Africa and the question of Apartheid was a key political issue at home.  But here there were race riots notably in Notting Hill, then a decrepit inner London low income suburb.  Now the violence is largely toffs throwing bread rolls at each other at table in their multi-million pound homes in a gentrified district as they debate how to take advantage of Quantatitive Easing in the property market.

This issue affected the Montreal Olympics where many African countries withdrew because the IOC refused to exclude New Zealand because their All Blacks rugby team had toured South Africa despite the embargo desired.  A major feature of The Games was the medals tally by the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany.  For years afterwards our leading sports and media Left wingers and others took this to be why East Germany should become the template for the UK of the future.

It was also the year that Carter became President, to pave the way for the Reagan reaction four years later.  Little realised at the time were the rumblings of theory in economics departments and financial circles in the USA that would lead to the surge of de-regulation and open season finance that would change all our lives.

In China the Leader, Mao Tse Tung, as the West spelled it at the time, went to the Great Central Committee in the sky and became a Prophet rather than a politician.  Chou En Lai, his Deputy had died in January.  This had the effect of making his hard line adherents in the West and elsewhere even harder. Their extremes made it much easier for those on the Right to label any on the Left as Maoist and therefore beyond reason.

In many ways it was a year of turning points which would need a thesis or major work to set out in full, rather than a brief item knocked out by an idle blogger.  One for the UK was that in September, after the rains returned the economy went down the drain.  The IMF were called in and Austerity, Cuts and Controls introduced impacting on the very people who disliked them most.

Margaret Thatcher had become Leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 and was slowly but surely building up her position as Leader of The Opposition.  It seemed unlikely that a woman who had very defined views on the Right was ever likely to command a majority at a General Election.  How far her success in 1979 was owed to her own efforts and how far to the splintering of the Labour Party into various factions is a debate for another place.

That was a year when after three very busy ones, I was able to take some overdue leave and had a longer holiday.  While most other people were roasting my youngsters were being taught how to build an igloo in between making snowmen and snow ball fights.  The camping gear had been put into the car and we had headed for the Alps, fresh air, cool  nights and above all as much water as we wanted.

As I thumb through the reference book of that year there were many things I remember.  What did bring joy to most of the nation and the happy home was Southampton beating Manchester United 1-0 in the Cup Final.

Faslane Flodden Flannel And Fiddling Votes

The Ministry of Defence, whether by accident or design, has let slip a think piece on what to do about Faslane, the key base for our Trident missile nuclear strike force.  It is in Scotland, up the Firth of Clyde and turn left not long before Glasgow.  If Scotland becomes independent it could be left with the Scots as a peace offering but they may not want it.  The picture above is of The Isle of Arran in The Firth, home to many of my forebears.

One reason is cost, the more significant one is that a lot of Scots feel that not only is nuclear war wrong but engaging with it could be more of a liability than an asset for them.  Canny chaps, they realise that any nuclear facility is not just a strike force to hit others but in fact a prime target for the others if it all becomes two or more sided.

If the others are not over fastidious in their selection of targets and have spare capacity in their own nuclear capability as well as computers capable of multi targeting then it may not be just Faslane that gets hit.  Glasgow might as well.  This may suit some in Edinburgh and other places but the possibility exists that their coordinates also may be in the targeting systems.

There is a real risk therefore that all that kit might have to be moved south.  The question is where?  If Wales is ruled out because they might not like it at all then that leaves England.  The trouble here is that there are not many places around the English coast where the waters are both deep enough and with choices of passage to allow relatively secure movement as and when necessary.

The Ministry of Defence, perhaps after a hard day on the hospitality at a procurement session are said to have suggested that the little bit of Scotland on the low road to Loch Lomond could remain as UK territory, a mini Gibraltar, only without the sun and fun.  This could almost be guaranteed to be a cause of dissent and endless trouble.  One way of avoiding this is thought to be offering the Scots a chunk of England as a swap. 

There are dafter ideas but I am struggling to think of one.  They could have Hull, or Westminster or what is left of Dunwich, once home to a prominent family of Scott's but it is not likely that this will be popular, at least in Scotland.

Perhaps it could be included as an extra question, with a few others in the Referendum to come in 1314.  The logic for this date is apparently because 700 years ago, the King of Scots, with sundry lords of largely Norman, Norse and other descent won a battle against the King of England with other Norman lords, both using companies of foreign jobbing mercenaries along with a few servile locals required as field fodder.

This anniversary it is hoped will procure a number of marginal votes to help the SNP win, regardless of anything that has happened in the centuries since.  The Referendum might and indeed with advantage have been held a sooner.  But there was a slight snag with the autumn of 2013.  The 9th September is the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden when King James IV of Scots got it badly wrong and died in a major defeat with heavy casualties for the Scots, see Wikipedia.

As it happens there seem to be more of families of my ancestors there on the Scots side who also died for their King and Country.  For some reason there is very little in the media about this coming date and its significance.  There will be a few interested who will take part in events to mark the date, but I suspect they will not be widely reported.

There are all the signs that the various Referendum campaigns will be a series of cheap stunts, wild claims, fake figures and on the SNP side "Brigadoon" like fantasies and a reversion to the early 14th Century notion of the Scots as a wandering tribe who finally made it to a promised land. 

What is becoming clear is that all the complicated and difficult issues are being almost entirely ignored.  Like it or not the Faslane question is just one element in the highly complex area of defence, border controls and security.

More worrying for the Scots there are indications that while the Westminster government is clearly corrupt, incompetent, bungling and misguided and in hock to bent bankers, the madder end of the green factions and oil oligarchs the only lot worse than them in Europe could turn out to be those who take power in Edinburgh.

 

Which takes us back to why the Union happened in 1707 despite the probable wishes of the majorities north and south of the Border and the result of the Battle of Flodden.  Earlier in 1314 at Bannockburn among the defeated southern Norman and mercenary force were a number of early Albanian Stradioti light horse.  Where did they get to afterwards? 

Did they scatter into The Borders to become later Borderers?