Timbersbrook Project

A few days ago police and council officials turned up at a privately owned nature reserve, demolished the sheds, and took the animals away. See the Congleton Chronicle for details, and a blog post here. Here is the Council's press release about it.

The problem was that the owner didn't have the necessary planning permission to use land that he owned as a nature reserve. Therefore the council eventually went and used "direct action" to uphold a planning decision, after a long legal fight.

This green belt development appears to be a collection of animals housed in temporary structures. It was open to the public and without admission charge, one of the few free family attractions in the area.

It certainly seems like very bad PR and very disproportionate for them to use such force to destroy something loved by lots of people. Some accommodation could surely have been made?

Writing for a wider audience

I realise I'm a crap writer (I'm good with sums not words), and also probably a hypocrite for saying what I'm about to say, but reading lots of blog posts about the riots from across the political spectrum has made me think that if someone is writing for a wider audience, rather than just nodding-dog readers, then there are a few rules of thumb:

1. Keep posts short and cogent. Pure Orwell: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."
2. Don't use emotive language, names, loaded terms, etc. Besides anything else, I'd start to worry about myself if I found using the term "Nu Liebour" gratifying.
   
3. Credit political opponents with intelligence and good motives. If I disagree with the gist of a blog post, I'm going to struggle to read the post when it's sprinkled with the insinuation that I'm stupid and want to eat poor people. I think that if you can conceive of your opponents in a good light, it enriches your understanding of that position, rather than just to think of them as bogeymen.
   

£3.75bn of cuts

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude described the savings, confirmed by an independent audit, as "staggering".

"To put £3.75bn into context, it's equivalent to the salaries of 200,000 junior nurses, or 150,000 secondary school teachers, it could pay for several Whitehall departments, and it's about the same as the revenue derived from one penny of the basic rate of income tax.

Right, so to put the increased IMF subscription into context, it's the annual salaries of 490,000 junior nurses, or 368,000 secondary school teachers. Or HS2 is 907,000 nurses' salaries or 680,000 teachers'. Our national debt would pay for 50.7 million junior nurses. The cost of servicing our debt will shortly be 3.9 million junior nurses.

Guido Fawkes

Is there any way I can get a RSS feed to his site, but with all the shit about the death penalty filtered out? While we're at it, can we get rid of the red sentences at the end of each paragraph (as if the posts aren't pithy enough, we need that for our tiny attention spans), the Saturday Seven Ups, and the tiresome constant talk about visitor numbers and past successes?

I don't even know where to start about his call for the death penalty for kid and cop killers. Some thoughts:

• The state shouldn't have the power of life and death over people. We don't want politicians posturing over this, and we don't want stays of execution to be political or matters of public opinion, which was a reason why it was abolished in the 1960s.
  
• Judges and juries are fallible, and statistics are very good at misleading people. It's foolish to pretend innocent people will never get executed.
  
• The death penalty is final and irreversible.
• Revenge isn't the same thing as justice.
• It probably doesn't act as a deterrent. Look at murder rates for US states that have it and those that don't. Pierrepoint observed that if it was a deterrent, he wouldn't have hanged a friend he saw at the pub every week who knew what his job was.
  
• It's moral vanity for some just like buying Fairtrade is for others.
• Murder is murder. It's stupid to pretend murder of a non-cop or non-child is less serious. Particularly with the police, it gets further and further from the idea of police being ordinary members of the public doing professionally what ordinary citizens should do anyway.
• Just because the public support something doesn't mean politicians should go ahead with something. It's also up to politicians and opinion-formers to take a lead on things and educate people about issues. Maybe if a majority of people support the death penalty, it's only an indication that it's been off the political agenda for a very long time with only the tabloids and people like Guido banging on about it. Opinion formers who have the status quo on their side don't go around arguing in favour of the status quo. Polls show people think it's worse for guilty people to be found innocent than for innocent people to be found guilty. This shows people need education on matters of justice.
  
• Without the death penalty, we are more able to pile weight on countries with the death penalty for minor things like smuggling drugs. If we have the death penalty, we are only able to criticise their choice of offences they execute for.
  

One thing this does is demonstrate that if Guido is a libertarian, he's a libertarian like the Tea Party are libertarians. They want a small state in financial terms, but it should still promote the moral code that suits them.

Campaign For HSR

I noticed on the BBC a news item about the IEA's new report on HS2. Naturally to balance the article, they include some opposing views:

The Campaign for High-Speed Rail said it was "hugely disappointed" and "shocked" by the views expressed in the report.

Professor David Begg, director of the campaign group, said the think tank had "completely failed to grasp the wider benefits of the high-speed rail project, which will create jobs, boost investment and spread the economic wealth of this country".

Now it's unfair to criticise people for totally failing to engage with a debate on the basis of how they've been quoted by the BBC, as the BBC like to keep their articles short and pithy. So I went straight to the horse's mouth.

On their website, the Campaign for HSR have a background briefing on the IEA's report. This is surely where you can find a rigourous fisking of the IEA's report? They're a respected thinktank, and the Campaign for HSR being a respectable group, would surely want to engage in the debate in a grown up manner? What? No?

This morning the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) released their assessment of the proposed high-speed rail project, co-authored by Dr Richard Wellings and Kyn Aizlewood.

The IEA’s report reflects an old-fashioned, free-market-obsessed ideology that wants to spend Britain’s transport infrastructure investment predominantly on roads in the South East.

These sorts of ideologues have no appreciation of the important external benefits that a modern high-speed national rail network would bring for jobs and regeneration.

It is not surprising that the IEA has come out against HS2, when you read about some of the authors’ other thoughts and background.

1. From their past work, the authors are clearly obsessed by roads – particularly in the South East – and would happily privatise the railways on which Britain’s families and local business people depend. See below.

2. The co-author, Kyn Aizlewood, does not disclose that his views are clearly effected by the close proximity of his house to the proposed rail route and that he is a member of an anti-HS2 action group. See below.

...

The IEA have completely failed to grasp the wider benefits of the high-speed rail project, which will create jobs, boost investment and spread the economic wealth of this country to places outside of the TPA heartlands of London and the South East.

I would expect better from an otherwise reputable think-tank than to parrot misinformation and repackage the discredited views of opponents to the project who are clearly motivated by a mixture of small-state ideology and ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ attitudes.

They should be ashamed of themselves for abusing their research credentials to produce such a thinly veiled propaganda piece.

(Emphasis mine). That's a straw man about the local nimby interest, and directing investment to road building (the IEA might support this, but only because it could be funded privately, whereas HS2 will not happen without a large dose of public money), then they try to play to people's fears, that they'd privatise railways despite families and business depending on them. Then there is the unpleasant whiff of the writer claiming the moral apolitical high ground, portraying opponents as politically driven, when actually one group of people overriding another group of people's wishes to build something paid for by everyone without option, is an inherently political thing to do.

The director of the Campaign for HSR, who sits on the board of FirstGroup, is no stranger to throwing mud at opposing views. A link from the BBC article has him calling critics of HSR 'well-off nimbys', that people living on the route were 'economically privileged' while poorer people further afield would benefit from the scheme. Well, no shit, any large infrastructure project is bound to have some rich losers and some poor winners. Now this line of argument is a clear, conscious committed strategy for this group, as evidenced by a recent advertising campaign in Manchester:


So who are the Campaign for HSR? Their about us page tells us that they are independent from HS2 Ltd and the government, but doesn't provide any details of their funding arrangements. Who has paid the invoices from Westbourne Communications, their professional opinion changers? Who paid to develop their swish web site? It doesn't say. They list their 'national council', whatever that is, and it raises eyebrows:

Mr Dennis Curran, Chairman, Barhale Construction plc
Mr Jerry Blackett, Chief Executive, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce
Mr Gareth Morgan, Deputy Chair, Birmingham Future
Mr Jonathan Enever, Director, Gleeds Cost Management Limited
Mr Alistair Dormer, Managing Director, Hitachi Europe Ltd
Mr Paul Chapman, Managing Director, HS1 Ltd
Mr Tim Garratt, Director, Innes England
Prof Peter Moizer, Dean, Leeds University Business School
Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, Chairman, Nomura
Professor David Begg, Chief Executive, Transport Times Ltd.
Mr Andrew Eyre, Executive Chairman, TSL Turton Ltd
Mr Philip Green, Chief Executive Officer, United Utilities
Mr Dalton Philips, Chief Executive, Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc
Mr Chris Fletcher, Deputy Chief Executive & Director of Policy, Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce
Ms Miranda Barker, Managing Director, Allan-Environmental Solutions
Mr Azmat Mohammed, CEO, ID Interactive

I think, given that list, they need to detail their funding. They may be independent of the government and HS2 limited, but who are they not independent from? I'm still not convinced that HS2 isn't about ambitious people building fiefdoms, companies profiting from money forcibly taken off people by the government, and politicians looking for vanity projects.

These people who have a vested interest in HS2 being built should not be given the time of day when they engage in ad hominem attacks on people who offer legitimate criticisms, even if their interest in HS2 has been fanned by it being on their doorstep, that in itself doesn't make their criticisms incorrect.

ACPO

Just seen an ACPO bod on the news, unusually not in police uniform. Have often wondered about this, I thought there were strict rules about wearing the uniform off duty?

The right to kill burglars

I'm a bit confused by this. While I can get gleefully behind the populist feel-good idea that some scumbag who burgles your home is fair game, I have a niggling feeling. Or rather several.

1. Isn't reasonable self defence already protected in law?
2. Define burglar. Would there have to be signs of forced entry? Is an unlocked door OK or does there have to be broken glass or something? Does the person have to be holding an item of your property at the time of the baseball bat hitting their head? Is there any threshold in value of said item?
   
3. What happens when someone gets killed by mistake?
4. How does this sit with the 80 or so reasons an empowered person can use to force entry against a homeowner's will? What reasonable measures must a homeowner take to check a 'burglar' isn't a perfectly legal gas engineer who has smelt gas at the property?
5. While I think that a bona fide burglar deserves everything that comes their way, let's just indulge the bleeding heart liberal bit first. They might have turned to crime to fund a drugs habit. These people need help before it gets to that point.
6. Once you've got druggies out of the equation, that probably does leave your despicable career criminal. But then, they probably shouldn't be able to commit the offence in the first place because they should still be in prison for their previous crime.
7. Then there's the timing. At the same time Ken Clarke wants to reduce the size of the prison population and the Tories are going on about Big Society.