The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

When it comes to explaining why heatwaves play such havoc with railway transport, it is agreed it is mostly down to continuously-welded steel rails not being able to expand and contract. I have just heard the leading academic expert on this, qua British railways, say

[Mick Harper]

They had a rundown of the thirty-two London boroughs the other day -- you know the sort of thing, ranking them from worst to first. I didn't want to sit through it all because they always start at the bottom and work upwards so it would have taken an hour or more to find out whether it was Lewisham/one, Kensington/two or Kensington/one, Lewisham/two. It's always a fine judgement.

But I take a ghoulish pleasure in finding out who's the present pits so I sat through five minutes on the iniquities of (32) Barking & Dagenham and (31) Croydon. Then came (30) Lewisham so I moved on to something with a bit of objectivity attached.

[Mick Harper]

At this perilous juncture in our island story, the nation's senior voice, Newsnight, is investigating the Prince and the Pizza once more. After reminding us of the charge--that a sailor had it off with a young woman he had met at a party--our Moral Guardian informed us they hadn't managed to uncover any new evidence, but somehow that was significant.

We turned to one another in our parlours, tapping the side of the nose with the first finger of the right hand. "There's no smoke without fire."

[Mick Harper]

CNN ran their equivalent, a Maine Democrat -- who might represent the swing vote in the Senate after November. The dude had won the nomination despite all manner of dubious activities coming to light.

'We're sticking with him because he's better than Trump,' being the general sentiment as he received endorsement after endorsement from Democrat heavyweights. Until this week, when a woman came forward with an accusation of rape from five years ago.

[Mick Harper]

I sympathise with Prince Harry. I remember having to make a last minute trip to London with the wife and kids and phoning mum to see if she could put us up for a coupla days. 'Sorry, pet, we've got a houseful at the moment, you should have rung.'
'Who's in my old room?' I asked.
'We haven't finished fumigating it,' she replied jokingly.
At least I think she was joking.

[Mick Harper]

Would you like a well-paid job in charge of several thousand dedicated employees and which gives you an unexcelled degree of personal power over several million of your fellow citizens? No, probably not. But you do know zillions who would give their eye-teeths just for a week behind that particular desk. Well, tell 'em they can get a five-year gig, no sweat.

That's because an average of three people apply for every vacant Chief Constable's job. If that's too much competition, a lot of them have only one applicant so they'll have a 50/50 shot at those. And don't worry about not being on the in-house grapevine, the position has to be widely advertised by law.

So how have we been reduced to such a parlous state when it comes to appointments that carry such moment? As you probably guessed by that 'one applicant', everyone knows who's going to get the job, and if not, it will be someone remarkably like the last one. And that's not like anyone you know. It's not like any senior policeman with a bit of gumption either.

It's not quite Buggin's Turn but it's certainly Grandmother's Footsteps. The lucky candidate is always a box-ticking, admin-type who's been on all the courses but hasn't done anything for real apart from making his immediate superior's life easier. Like Jack Frost's nemesis, Horn-Rimmed Harry, but without the charisma. /more

[Mick Harper]

It's true the police are not very important in an orderly place like Britain but even so it's worth not leaving them entirely to their own devices. I know you can level this accusation at all the other flabby bureaucracies that run the show -- the civil service, local authorities, the universities, the BBC, the NHS, blahdiblah -- but we've got to start somewhere.

For a start, why should it be a policeman? It used not to be. Chief Constables could be retired military men or local magnates. It might be a good idea if they were not allowed to be policemen. CEO's of conglomerates haven't normally worked their way up from the post room. That way. Chief Constables might be CEO's rather than figureheads, good at PR and keeping things the way they are.

People of that sort would at least be capable of withstanding the sort of pettifogging complaints about them doing something perfectly normal but which has broken some rule or other and forced their resignation. Or worse, taking responsibility for some enormity committed by individuals about twelve ranks beneath their own.

They would certainly do something about the whole operation being gradually turned into an arm of social services despite being institutionally racist, sexist, homophobic and the rest. We need an anti-policeman to police the police.

[Mick Harper]

Oh no! The council house is back. Andy Burnham's all for them apparently. Channel 4 News took a loquacious Labour housing acolyte on a tour of a vast south London development. All these will be given to the council, she said proudly, pointing at one block. These will be affordable for first-time buyers, she said pointing at another block. And the rest will be for commercial sale so it won't have cost a penny of public money.

I couldn't see the difference personally. But I could see millions of pounds going up in smoke. Let me roll the picture on ten years:

1. Some of the council flats will have been sold for an enormous profit by the people lucky enough to be awarded one and who have lived there for the two years required to avail themselves of the 'right to buy'.
2. Some of them will be illegally rented out to City folk for a vast profit by the people lucky enough to be awarded one.
3. Some of them will be occupied by 'problem families'. Not many but enough to put a permanent blight on the whole estate.
4. The first-time buyers will have pocketed the difference between an affordable and a non-affordable flat and moved on.
5. Everyone else will be owner-occupiers like most of the rest of the country only, this being London, they are already paper millionaires.

Welcome to the big city, Andy, there's a reason no-one's built a council house for the last twenty years. /more

[Mick Harper]

The main reason why local authorities don't build council houses any more is that when they can't afford to collect the bins sufficiently often to avoid rat infestations (a statutory duty), they are hardly likely to spend enormous sums of money on the non-statutory task of building purpose-built dwellings, requiring vast amounts of maintenance, that lead to reams of bad publicity and which they will have to sell for a loss after a few years because of 'right-to-buy'. And all for people they don't want living in their area in the first place.

That's why the small amounts of public housing that is being built is done via national grants to housing charities. They are in business to do all these things -- and do it reasonably well -- and aren't subject to right-to-buy so can at least keep their housing stock intact for the long haul.

Was it always this way? No. I was myself brought up in a council house -- to my very great advantage -- but there were a number of differences between the Britain of that era and now, viz

* The national building stock required emergency measures thanks to the Luftwaffe. (My own was built on a bomb site.)
* The country was homogenous. There were no migrant families in need of housing.
* Single mothers had their babies adopted (more or less by diktat) rather than given council houses to bring them up in.
* Nutters were put in asylums not given council houses to fend for themselves because of 'Care in the Community'.
* There was no 'homeless class'. You either lived with mum and dad or in a hostel.
* Council houses rents were comparable to commercial ones. A slight discount but not the fraction they are now because of so-called 'Fair Rent' policies.

I'm not saying I should have been brought up in a council house. My mother was a teacher and my father (mostly) gainfully employed. We were not exactly the kind of people in dire need of public housing largesse. But on the other hand it was not a gigantic waste of public money that we were.

[Mick Harper]

One is always impressed by American vandals. It was they, you will remember, who introduced calligraphy to the vandalising of trains. At a time, please note, when our own homegrown youth were happy just slashing seats and urinating with abandon.

A correspondent presently resident in Washington, a Mr Trump, brings intelligence of a new generation of American vandals -- ones who take their cue from science rather than the arts. They were, he tells me, responsible for the algal blooms on the famous Reflecting Pool.

As an ex-professional algologist myself, I can assure you that is no small thing. Culturing algae in a domestic refrigerator, for example, requires constant monitoring and adjustment. But keeping a large body of water at the requisite temperature for a full bloom to develop speaks of team work, training and sheer American can-do.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

1. You probably know what an e-bike is. It's a bike with a small motor that helps you up hills. There are very few regulations needed to, as it were, keep them on the straight and narrow. They are an absolute boon to urban life generally (with some snags because the technology is so new).

2. You probably don't know what an e-motorbike is. It's a motorbike that's trying to pass itself off as an e-bike so its rider can live an unregulated life on the road (and, all too often, the pavement). They are an absolute menace to urban life generally, not least in giving e-bikes a thoroughly bad name.

It's up to (a) legislators (b) the police and (c) internet commerce providers to ensure that (1) are encouraged and (2) are controlled and/or discouraged and/or outlawed.

So here's an anecdote to see how everyone's getting on...