My kingdom for a hearse

What sort of country have we become?

Some of us were moved to ask this question by the public hysteria following the death of Princess Diana. Surely nothing could be further removed from Britain’s traditional stiff upper lip than the huge roadside crowds weeping and wailing, hurling flowers with such vigour that they risked causing a further serious accident by obscuring her hearse driver’s view.

The urge to grieve in public seems to have increased as belief in the after-life has diminished. Nearly every fatal road crash now generates a roadside shrine of fading flowers, cuddly toys, candles, crash helmets and football shirts, and woe betide anyone who suggests tidying them away.

It’s not just recent fatalities that move us, either. Witness the huge upsurge in public engagement with Remembrance events, including the observation of a two-minute silence on Armistice Day. An event that passed largely unremarked as I was growing up in the 1960s, when substantial numbers of First World War veterans were still alive.

However, our love affair with the dead and remembrance has surely reached its apogee in the bizarre performance surrounding the re-interment of the supposed remains of King Richard III.

Part theme park carnival, part religious ceremony, the overall effect can surely only be considered ludicrous, and the level of media coverage it has attained beyond absurd.

All it has lacked so far is Tony Blair choking back tears as he pronounces: “He was the people’s tyrant”.

But was he? On Sunday evening I was amused by a reported comment from the historian David Starkey likening Richard III to Gordon Brown. Both manoeuvred for years to seize a crown, but had little idea what to do with it when they got it, and failed to hold it long.

No sooner had I repeated this mild jest on Twitter than I received an angry rebuke not from a Labour loyalist but a pro-Plantagenet, accusing me of falling victim to “Shakespearean propaganda”.

Sure, Shakespeare appears to have exaggerated Richard’s curvature of the spine into a hunchback, and if the case of the princes in the Tower came before a Scottish court the verdict might well be “not proven”. But he had the motive and was not the rightful heir to the throne.

It seems odd that Leicester should be burying a potential child murderer with such grandeur and honour not long after the tomb of the child molester Jimmy Savile was destroyed, and while a campaign rumbles on to dig up and cremate his remains.

Perhaps in 500 years time his crimes will also be dismissed as hearsay, in the admittedly unlikely event that anyone remembers him at all.

The university and ecclesiastical authorities in Leicester have waged an absolutely brilliant PR campaign not just to rehabilitate King Richard the Last, but to secure the creation of a major new tourist attraction through his burial there.

In defiance, let us not forget, of his closest living relatives, who felt he should be interred in York Minster, as he himself wished.

I have a liking for tombs and have paid my respects to many of England’s former monarchs and their consorts, and I can’t say I’ve ever been knocked over in the rush. I shall be truly baffled if the new sideshow in Leicester now powers to the top of the TripAdvisor rankings.

Meanwhile the parallel with Gordon Brown, while entertaining, seems to miss an even better opportunity to draw comparisons with his successor as the leader of the Labour Party. Because while Mr Brown undoubtedly waged a long and bitter battle to seize the crown he believed was rightfully his, he did not actually defeat his own brother to obtain it.

As we endure the already mind-numbingly tedious General Election campaign, we can at least be grateful that we now change governments through the ballot box, not on the battlefield.

However much we may yearn for distraction, let us also try to focus on the living, whose existence may yet be improved by how we vote. Richard III has been dead for 530 years at the last count, and his condition is highly unlikely to change. Even if history has treated him unfairly, which I rather doubt, so what?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Please, sir: can I have some vision and passion?

Few things gave me greater pleasure in 2014 than the resignation of Alex Salmond after his referendum defeat.

I was not so naïve as to suppose I had heard the last of him, but at least I hoped for a decent interlude of remission from the dread disease.

Instead he is back in the headlines and all over Conservative billboards as the great bogeyman of the forthcoming General Election: the one-issue obsessive who may well determine which of the leading contenders enters Downing Street.

And, of course, he will do so at a high price. This will mean either another independence referendum that he will surely be odds-on to win, if the SNP has indeed eliminated Labour as a political force in Scotland; or a “devo max” settlement that it will be hard to discern from independence by the naked eye.

As political stratagems go, there can surely be few that have failed more spectacularly than Labour’s brilliant idea of creating a devolved Scottish parliament with a voting system rigged to prevent the SNP ever attaining a majority, thus granting themselves a cosy fiefdom they could rule forever.

But then the fundamental problem seems to be that contemporary politics is all about stratagems. Trying to outmanoeuvre the other side with the promise of a tactical tax cut here, a raid on someone else’s savings there, or yet another scare story about the NHS.

And always seeking to crow that someone who has wandered off-message by saying what they genuinely think about any issue has committed an unforgiveable “gaffe”.

From "two Jags" Prescott to "two kitchens" Miliband, apparently the key election issue of 2015

It’s a contemptible game. Small wonder, then, that the British public has come to treat politicians with such contempt. Condemning them to a Western Front-style stand-off in which both sides pound away with small hope of gaining more than a yard or two of ground, let alone clinching an outright victory.

I no more understand the Scots’ sense of grievance that propels the independence movement than I can comprehend what drives the militants of Islamic State. Both seem to me to be based on a misreading of history.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the piscine double act of Sturgeon and Salmond can tap into a genuine passion for a cause, however wrong-headed it may be. So do other smaller parties like UKIP and the Greens, even though on closer examination many of their policies prove to range from the ill-thought-through to the howling mad.

Beer, fags, lentils ... and fruitcakes?

Where is the passion and vision in the campaigns of the two major parties? How are they going to save Britain from break-up, and ensure that we are properly defended, whether that be from Islamist terror or President Putin?

Can we please move on from foot-shuffling and pointing at the other child across the classroom (“Please, sir, it was him, sir!”) whenever the issue of cuts to defence spending is aired?

Yes, I know that campaigns trying to stir our patriotic impulses have not always proved a roaring success, notably William Hague’s “save the pound” crusade of 2001.

But these are dangerous times, and it surely behoves our would-be leaders to rise to the occasion with some real vision instead of playing party games, of which the bickering about televised debates is but the most egregious example.

To be fair, David Cameron and Gordon Brown both managed to express some powerfully pro-Union sentiments when the referendum campaign appeared to be running away from them. How much better it would have been if they had relied on that passion, rather than trying to buy off the other side with massive concessions. A ploy that never creates gratitude, and always feeds the appetite for more.

I don’t actually expect the tone and content of the election campaign to be elevated as I wish, but I do have one small consolation. According to Monday’s Times a “celebrity chef” called Valentine Warner (no, I’d never heard of him, either) is setting up a distillery in the Simonside Hills to produce Northumbrian whisky form genuinely local ingredients.

If he succeeds, he will replace at a stroke the one Scotch export on which I am reliant, and allow me to wave a bittersweet farewell to that land of midges, wind turbines, identity cards, grievance and bitterness.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Missing London, and why I intend to do more of it

“You must miss this,” my driver said as we sat in a huge traffic jam on the edge of the City of London on Monday.

To our left a bus inched past, leaving just about enough clearance to accommodate a sheet of graphene. To our right assorted Lycra-clad loons on bikes wove gaily in and out of the traffic, scattering pedestrians like confetti.

“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked, thinking fondly of the beauty and tranquillity of the corner of Northumberland where I had just spent the weekend.

I lived in London for nearly 30 years, and have never regretted handing back the keys of my rented flat in 2006. Though I do bitterly regret selling my small stake in the capital’s property market 20 years earlier.

I felt sure things must have peaked, having more than doubled my money on my fourth floor walk-up flat in Earl’s Court in less than five years. I pocketed a magnificent £73,000. Not so long ago I thoroughly depressed myself by checking a property website and finding that it last changed hands for not much short of a million.

Which is, by any standards, utter lunacy. If I were starting my career again, even in an overpaid trade like financial public relations, I could surely never aspire to buy my own home.

The Bank of England faces the uncomfortable challenge of setting interest rates that will dampen the undeniably overheating South East property market without visiting ruin on the rest of us.

It’s quite enough of a challenge maintaining a single currency in a country united by centuries of shared history, language and values, when its regional economies diverge so markedly.

How anyone ever imagined it was going to work satisfactorily across an entity as diverse as the European Union is completely staggering. But then, of course, they never did. The Euro was merely a lever to help achieve the grand objective of building a United States of Europe. Whether for the noble purpose of ensuring peace and prosperity or to allow a small elite to strut the world stage with added swagger I leave to you to judge.

A big fan of the Euro, you may recall, was one Tony Blair: a man still fond of global swaggering. We would be lumbered with the Euro now but for the sterling (in every sense) efforts of Gordon Brown, who deserves to have a statue erected in Kirkcaldy just for this. Even if he was perhaps motivated less by an appreciation of the Euro’s economic insanity than by a determination to deny Tony his desired place in history as the man who abolished the pound.

But, of course, Mr Blair has no need to worry about his place in history. That is assured thanks to Afghanistan and Iraq – and hasn’t that gone well?

Invading Iraq to eliminate non-existent weapons of mass destruction and clamp down on non-existent terrorists, we have managed to put great swathes of the country in the hands of real terrorists of particular savagery. The same brutes we support, oddly enough, when they are fighting the evil dictator Assad in Syria.

When the terror campaign spreads beyond the Middle East, as it surely will, I imagine that it will make rather more impact on life in London and our other great non-UKIP-voting, cosmopolitan cities than it will in the rural backwoods of the north.

Another great reason for all of us to count our blessings and ask just one question whenever we are asked to attend a business meeting in London: why?

If God had intended all our decision-making to be concentrated in one square mile, why would he have allowed us to invent videoconferencing and superfast broadband?

If the latter ever comes to my little hamlet, I’ll hardly ever need to leave the house again. And the cost of extending it would be a tiny fraction of the money we propose to lavish on HS2, to get people to their unnecessary meetings in London a fraction quicker.

Or, for that matter, on unnecessary wars that have achieved the exact opposite of what they were billed as being for, at a human cost that is almost unbearable to contemplate.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A chance to scale our cot sides in the polling booth

In my admittedly limited experience, children are born intensely conservative. They hate change.

Take my younger son. (Not literally, please.)

Now aged two, he has latterly taken to climbing out of his cot in the evenings. On a couple of occasions he has hurt himself in the process, so last week we gave him the happy news that we would be removing the cot’s sides to convert it into a bed.

Cue much pouting and floods of tears. Through his choking sobs, I made out the words: “My no want a bed. My want to sleep in a cot.”

A child with strong conservative views on just about everything

As with children, so with adult politics. Whenever we are offered a radical choice, we tend to fall back on the old principle of “better the devil you know”.

Hence the fate of the North East Assembly and Alternative Vote referendums. Or, looking further afield, the votes on independence for Quebec or the creation of an Australian republic.

I suspect that this augurs badly for those campaigning for a “yes” vote in the Scottish independence referendum, but it also creates a real mountain to climb for those arguing for our withdrawal from the EU, in the unlikely event that we are ever allowed to vote on that.

Particularly as the classic Big Lie about three million jobs going straight down the gurgler on our exit will be repeated relentlessly throughout any campaign.

This argument has featured to some extent in the current enthralling European election campaign, but for me the real impact of the “party of in” came in the letter I received last week from my elder son’s school.

This announced that, from September, his school lunches will be free of charge. And instructed me in a rather hectoring manner to write back immediately if I did not want him to have them, explaining my reasons why.

As it happens, I am perfectly content for him to eat a school dinner, which is why I have been cheerfully paying for the privilege for the last year.

Once I could have met this cost from the child allowance the Government kindly gave us when our sons were born. Gordon Brown even threw in a £250 cheque to kick-start our elder boy’s Child Trust Fund.

Our benefactor, possibly giving an early example of the "Farage wave"

Then George Osborne decreed that, because I earn more than some arbitrary limit, this child allowance would be taken away again. Though no one ever actually wrote explaining how I could stop receiving it.

So the money still flows into a joint bank account, my wife spends it on the children, and it gets clawed back from me when I submit my tax return at the end of the year. A classic time- and money-wasting bureaucratic merry-go-round.

I am not complaining about being asked to make my contribution to cutting the deficit, but the logic of now giving me another benefit I do not need completely eludes me. In fact, it makes me fear for the sanity of those currently running the country.

Free school meals are Nick Clegg’s big idea and presumably designed to make me feel warmer towards his party. If so, it is a wheeze that has backfired spectacularly.

It has strengthened my desire not to see another coalition after the next General Election, and particularly not to allow the Liberal Democrats to become our permanent party of government, swinging like a weathervane between left and right.

Stolen, with thanks, from the Daily Referendum blog

I have already taken the opportunity to express my view in tomorrow’s European elections. Voting early because, about four general elections ago, I requested a postal vote that somehow became a permanent fixture.

I resisted the temptation to show my disgust with the loons currently in power by voting for a party dominated by even bigger ones.

That UKIP carnival in full swing

I do not seek to influence your own vote in any way, but I do urge you to cast one, no matter how much contempt you may feel for politicians in general and the European Parliament in particular.

The people who say: “Don’t vote, it only encourages them” are quite wrong. Because voting is the only peaceful way we have of exerting influence on those who seek power over us, and eventually climbing over our own cot sides to sanity and freedom.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Goodbye, cruel world

They say that all good things must come to an end, though happily the British monarchy is testing this theory to its limits.

However, I feel sure we can all agree that there comes a time when we should bid farewell to the seriously mediocre.

So it is with this Tuesday column, which concludes today after a run of 387 over 7¾ years. A distinct advance on the nine months that Journal editor Brian Aitken predicted would be the longest I could possibly keep it going when I started.

At least I had a good innings, as they like to say in the day rooms at twilight homes.

I realise that my departure will come as a hammer blow to my beloved aunt and the handful of mainly elderly enthusiasts who buy The Journal every Tuesday simply to keep up with my ramblings.

On the other hand, it may lead to a modest spike in sales of Aldi budget champagne to fans of wind turbines and Gordon Brown (if he has any left).

While the world at large will naturally receive the news with the massive indifference I deserve.

I knew I was on to a good thing personally after my second column, published fortuitously on Valentine’s Day 2006, won me a hot date with an attractive PR woman plus a letter of sympathy from someone in sheltered accommodation in Rothbury.

In those days I was a solitary curmudgeon, winding down in the depths of the countryside after some years of toil in the City of London, and was able to prove my “green” credentials by having no children. This more than offset the fact that I burned lots of coal, ate huge numbers of animals and drove a Range Rover.

Then several remarkable things happened. A column I had written for the business pages called “The Chief Executive’s Handbook” went modestly viral enough to bring me to the attention of a youngish female accountant at Iceland Foods’ head office in Flintshire.

The fact that I knew her chief executive prompted me to ask him whether the e-mail she sent me had come from a fictitious troublemaker or a genuine eccentric, and he confirmed that she was the latter.

This touched off a correspondence that was supercharged by the fact that I had started writing a blog – a development that had prompted several derisive messages from Journal readers ridiculing me for wasting my time in such a futile manner.

Yet it played no small part in the chain of events that ultimately led to our marriage in February 2009 and the subsequent birth of two healthy sons.

All of which goes to show that you should always expect the totally unexpected, and never accept conventional wisdom about what constitutes a productive use of your time.

Of course, it has its downsides. I turn 60 in June next year and had been looking forward to paying off my mortgage, putting my feet up and doing a bit of pottering around on my senior citizen’s railcard.

Now I am scrabbling for more work and hoping that my sadly defective heart may keep going for another 20 years or so, to see my boys through university.

Luckily my wife’s employers have sprung to my aid, as viewers of the recent reality TV series on Iceland will have noticed, by granting me the use of a refrigerated broom cupboard as an office, and allowing me to pretend that I am in charge of their PR.

However, it is not pressures of work or the lure of short-lived TV stardom that have led me to call a day on this column. It is simply a change in production scheduling which creates a deadline I cannot meet.

It is sad that The Journal will no longer host the country’s premier agony aunt and most obscure misery uncle on the same day, but it was great while it lasted. Thank you so much for your readership and support.

Luckily for me I’ve landed a new job, starting next week. I’m going to be writing a Wednesday column for The Journal. But don’t despair, wind energy cheerleaders. Brian confidently predicts that it will last an absolute maximum of nine months.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Party conference season: an ideal time to accept reality

So far the annual party conference season seems to have been dominated by issues of energy.

Whether those be Labour’s promise of a short-term gas and electricity price freeze, or the Tories’ efforts to energise the long-term unemployed back into work.

A cynic might observe that a key driver of the high energy prices charged to consumers has been the generous subsidies introduced for basically uneconomic forms of electricity generation like wind turbines and solar farms.

All founded on a policy of “carbon taxation” that was powerfully reinforced on the watch of a certain Labour Energy Secretary called Ed Miliband.

But it would be unfair to make this a party political point. Because everyone outside the always entertaining UKIP circus seems to take huge delight in pointing out what a brilliant job Britain has done in reducing its carbon emissions; while conveniently forgetting to mention that we have only achieved this by exporting most of our manufacturing industry to China.

Which may, in turn, have some bearing on the numbers of long-term unemployed.

In the overall scheme of things, taking credit for this makes about as much sense as a man boasting that he has eliminated his overdraft, while omitting to mention he has put it in his wife’s name instead. 

Reading the acres of coverage of last week’s UN report about the 95% certainty of manmade climate change, I found myself reminded of a friend who kept going back to her doctor with a debilitating chronic ailment.

Fed up with the lack of action to cure her, she finally asked in no uncertain terms why medical science was letting her down so badly. At which the doctor outlined in great detail the courses of treatment potentially available to her.

“But those sound even worse than my disease!” she protested.

“Exactly,” her GP calmly replied.

We can all observe that the climate is changing, as it always has, and we may accept that human activity is a factor. But where is the evidence that requires us to spray money like an unmanned fire hose in a futile attempt to cure the problem?

Every farmer and landowner in the country with an eye for a financial killing, and no appreciation of beautiful landscapes, is being powerfully incentivised to whack up ugly great wind turbines on their property, though these will make a minimal contribution to our overall energy needs.

The new view from St Cuthbert's Lindisfarne, courtesy of Tony Meikle

Last year my local council installed cavity wall insulation, completely free of charge, in the house I rent in Cheshire. Even though, if it actually worked (of which I have seen no evidence to date) it would clearly have paid me to do this at my own expense.

In the long run I and everyone else will be paying for these “green energy” developments and “energy saving” initiatives through higher bills, whether from our power companies or in local or national taxes.
There is never any such thing as a free lunch. No, not even for those primary school children Nick Clegg is so keen to feed. Why on earth does he want to supply free meals to the offspring of middle class parents like me who are perfectly capable of paying for them? Particularly when the coalition only recently (and reasonably) abolished my child allowance.

But then one might equally well ask why Ed Balls is now promising to reintroduce the 10p rate of income tax his mentor Gordon Brown abolished in 2008.

We appear to be going around in ever decreasing circles of political unoriginality, culminating in the ultimate dumb idea of reverting to the sort of price controls that failed so spectacularly in the 1970s.

Even reactionaries like me, whose ultimate goal in life is to put the clock back, would never choose to stop it there.

Every party should stop striving for the next news soundbite and pause to reflect on what really matters, whether for their cherished “hardworking families” or lazy so-and-sos like me.

They might well conclude on energy costs and climate change, as my friend did on her illness, that it is best to stop looking for non-existent miracle cures and simply accept reality, then adapt to it as best we can.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Hello, hello, hello. What's all this, then?

My whole life flashed before me when the two men in black unexpectedly appeared on my doorstep on Saturday morning.

Or at any rate it did once I had grasped that they were policemen. This took me a while: first because they were implausibly young, secondly because they were wearing combat fatigues rather than crisp white shirts, and finally because they were simply the last people I was expecting.

How a policeman looks in my mind's eye

I had not spoken to a policeman for around 20 years, when my last Border terrier but two made a poorly judged lunge at the letters our temporary postman was ill-advisedly waving at him.

This time I was pretty sure that my dogs had not harassed anyone, so the part of my life that chiefly flashed by was the 1980s, as I tried to work out which of the secretaries I dallied with at the time might finally have dobbed me in for sexual harassment.

I started croakily making the speech I had been taught by a legalistic friend at university: “It’s a fair cop, guv. You got me bang to rights. It’s bird for me this time. Society is to blame.”

(The theory, as I recall, is that the arresting constable will solemnly read this out from his notebook when the case reaches court, whereupon it – and hopefully the rest of his evidence – will be dismissed as an obvious fabrication.)

Luckily they interrupted my speech by advising me that they had not come to arrest me, but to follow up “the incident” of last Tuesday.

What incident?

Oh yes, when the lady who tends our garden called to drop off some plants, and decided that she “did not like the look” of the men up a ladder on our roof. Men with a property maintenance company’s marked van, who were carrying out some long-awaited repairs to stop water pouring into my younger son’s bedroom whenever it rains.

Mending the roof when the sun shines, in fact. If only Gordon Brown could have got the hang of that, how different all our lives might have been.

They tried to explain this to her, but she was not to be fooled. In her mind, their undoubted criminality was exposed by the fact that they were doing the work at 5.30pm, when everyone knows that all genuine tradesmen knock off by mid-afternoon and go down the pub.

A roof repairer and a burglar. Easy to confuse, I'll admit.

I had also been criminally irresponsible in leaving some of my upstairs windows open, though this did not seem altogether unreasonable to me given that (a) there was a Category 3 heatwave taking place at the time, (b) there were two Border terriers in the house in need of a spot of ventilation, and (c) they were the sort of small windows that only an anorexic contortionist could stand the faintest chance of climbing through.

To be fair to my gardener, she did ring me on my mobile before calling the police to arrest the malefactors, but I failed to answer it because I was desperately busy at the time.

I later got a message asking me to ring the police on their 101 non-emergency number to confirm that the roof repairers were indeed genuine, as they had already told the officers who had turned up to suss them out.

This my wife duly did on my behalf, making me all the more surprised to receive a follow-up visit in person.

We had an inconclusive chat about the wisdom of leaving small upstairs windows open even in the height of summer, then the PCs went on their way.

As they did, I wondered to myself how much more police time is wasted by no doubt well-intentioned Neighbourhood Watch curtain-twitchers, whose willingness to call in the law evidently matches some people’s inclination to dial 999 because they can’t find their TV remote control.

But I also felt profoundly grateful to live in a country where the overstretched police can still handle such encounters with patience and good humour.

And, above all, profoundly glad to live in a society in which “not liking the look” of someone going about their lawful business does not provide an excuse to shoot them dead, just to be on the safe side.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

HS2? No thanks, I'd prefer broadband, heat and lighting

When I was young I found it ridiculous that every newspaper story wove its subjects’ ages into the text: what bearing did that have on anything?

Now, at 59, I know that nothing has more influence on our attitudes to any bright idea than our assessment of whether we are likely to live long enough to witness the outcome. That is why I feel the pain of seeing giant wind turbines advance across the beautiful uplands of Northumberland so acutely; because I know there is no chance that I will still be around when they come down again, if they ever do.

Image courtesy of SOUL, the Barmoor Anti Wind Farm Group

It does not take a genius to see that nearly all the arguments advanced in favour of building these gigantic bird-swats are self-interested or simply wrong-headed.

Which makes them curiously like those put forward for construction of the HS2 high speed rail line. On which, like Kevan Jones MP, I experienced a moment of horrible discomfort last week when I suddenly found Lord Mandelson agreeing with me.

Still, it could be worse. I’ve Googled “Gordon Brown HS2” and found no evidence that the new Sage of Kirkcaldy has come out against it, so there must be a sporting chance that I am still right after all.

The theoretical cost of this project keeps going up. It was £42 billion at the last count, and that was apparently without one small but useful addition: some trains to run on it. Still, why worry about that? We all know that the important thing is to get the aircraft carriers built, not fuss about whether we can afford any planes to put on them.

A chimera, and apparently an unbudgeted one at that

The Business Department now seems to be admitting that its key assumption that time spent on trains is economically dead because no one does any work on them is, to use a technical term, cobblers.

While the chief defender of HS2 tracked down by Radio 4 at the weekend claimed that the extra speed of journeys was irrelevant: the project was really all about creating much needed additional capacity for a rail system bursting at the seams.

Except that, as a regular traveller on the West Coast Main Line, I often survey masses of empty seats, particularly at those peak times when all those without calf-length pockets have been priced off the railway altogether.

If we do need more capacity, why not reinstate some of those passing loops and diversionary routes cleverly axed by Dr Beeching in the 1960s?

The Number One Hate Figure of my childhood, surpassing even the bloke who taught swimming at my school

If we’ve suddenly found a huge amount of spare cash to invest in transport, how about creating a Transpennine rail service that is genuinely worthy of the name “Express”? Reopen the freight lines in South East Northumberland to passengers, extend the Metro, build some more urban tramways (first learning all the lessons from the debacle in Edinburgh), stop cutting back bus services, relieve the congestion on the Gateshead western by-pass, and, yes, dual the A1.

I write as one who adores trains and whose youthful blood was regularly brought to boiling point by letters to this paper from the Railway Conversion League, arguing that the answer was to rip up all the rails, lay concrete and run buses. Even a schoolboy could see that their case was total rubbish.

I am delighted to have lived long enough to see rail emerge triumphant and enjoy a renaissance that seemed as least as implausible, back in the 1960s, as a British man ever again winning Wimbledon.

But it really is time to get back to reality and stop politicians grandstanding with ludicrous promises of massive public expenditure that actually cost them nothing because they will be long gone from office when the bills start rolling in.

In the vanishingly unlikely event that we really have got a spare £50 billion to improve the national infrastructure, please let’s spend it on something genuinely useful. If we must invest in something high speed, make it broadband. And spend the change on some new power stations that will keep working when the wind isn’t blowing at just the right speed.

Otherwise we are likely be spending our winter evenings in the cold and dark not in some imaginary, distant future, but uncomfortably soon.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Those who fail to respect Lady Thatcher are the real nasty party

I could have written about Margaret Thatcher in this space last week, but I was too sad.

Saddened less at the passing of a sick, old woman than by the nauseating joy of the unreconstructed Left on her demise. One need not contemplate their antics for long to know who is, and always has been, the real “nasty party” in British politics.

Before Thatcher good socialists surely drank light ale, not champagne

Arguably too young to know any better

I was 24 when Mrs Thatcher came to power and frankly unsure that this new-fangled idea of putting a suburban housewife in control of the levers of Government would get us very far. I was pleasantly surprised.

I find it hard to believe that any sane person who grew up amidst the turmoil of never-ending strikes, or endured the utter uselessness of our Soviet-style State-owned utilities and manufacturing industries, could fail to welcome their end at the hands of the Iron Lady.

For me and many others, she turned despair at Britain’s apparently unstoppable decline into hope that we might yet enjoy growing prosperity and freedom, and play a useful role on the international stage.

The immense and, outside Argentina, overwhelmingly positive international coverage of her life over the last week underlines the huge respect that she enjoyed worldwide for helping to bring down the Soviet Union and free the nations of eastern Europe after nearly half a century of subjugation.

Reagan/Thatcher 1   Soviet Union 0 (after extra time)

Ah but, her critics say, even the good things she did went sour in the end: the council house sales of the 1980s begetting the credit crunch and housing crisis of today, victory in the Falklands laying the ground for subsequent, less successful interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Really? Surely a woman who left office in 1990 cannot be blamed for what went so horribly wrong under the leadership of her much less talented successors 10 or 20 years later?

If any criticism can be made, it might be that the sheer dominance of her personality and policies apparently deprived those who followed her of the power of independent thought, turning the stark choice of the 1983 general election between Thatcher and Michael Foot into the bland, middle-of-the-road capitalist consensus of Blairism and the Coalition.

I would welcome another Thatcher, whether from Left or Right, who would once again offer us a really meaningful choice at the ballot box.

As for the appropriateness of tomorrow’s funeral arrangements, let me offer a rare word of praise for Gordon Brown: because all the essential details of Lady Thatcher’s funeral were agreed with the Government four years ago when he was in power.

The notion that this is some sort of party political stunt devised by David Cameron is simply incorrect. 

When objective history comes to be written, I am sure that Lady Thatcher’s achievements will be ranked amongst the most important of any peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th century, fully justifying the honours that were bestowed upon her in life and, tomorrow, in death.

Yes, Attlee also transformed Britain and did not receive a State or ceremonial funeral. But, with respect, Labour’s crowning achievement of 1945-51, the NHS, has been so hugely successful that it has been copied precisely nowhere. While the key tenets of Thatcherism from monetary policy to privatisation have been adopted throughout the world.

At least the modest Earl made it to Westminster Abbey

The fact that Lady Thatcher was, in the BBC’s favourite word of the moment, “divisive”, is irrelevant. Few 19th century politicians were more divisive than Gladstone, who even split his own Liberal party over Irish Home Rule, yet he was rightly accorded a full State funeral on his demise in 1898. Disraeli turned one down.

Gladstone lying in state in Westminster Hall: a marked absence of a flag

Oddly enough the only politician I ever loathed enough to feel moved to crack open a bottle of champagne on his death was another Tory, Edward Heath. I was deeply upset by the total dishonesty with which he initially pretended that our membership of the Common Market involved “no essential loss of sovereignty”.

Even so, I was wrong to celebrate his passing, as those who are planning to demonstrate against Lady Thatcher tomorrow will be on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.

Death is the one certainty for us all, and every death diminishes us. The only proper response to it is sympathy and respect.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Few things give us more cause to rejoice than being left behind

We all surely knew that the non-campaign for elected mayors was running into serious trouble when its supporters started bleating about the dangers of Newcastle being “left behind”.

I have been left behind all my life, from the earliest egg and spoon races at my primary school, and it has never done me any harm. In fact, I rejoice in it.

How many of us wake up in the morning full of regret that we ignored all those powerful politicians and economic gurus who warned us that we would be “left behind” if we did not join the euro? But there the parallel ends.

A lemming: no doubt cursing its luck at being left behind

Elected mayors were a half-baked idea that no one seemed capable of explaining coherently, let alone selling to an electorate that clearly had other issues much closer to its heart.

I await with keen interest a protest march chanting: “What do we want? More highly paid elected politicians! When do we want them? Now!”

The euro, on the other hand, while economically illiterate, is a very well-thought-through cog in that great political project designed to deliver a single European state. And even as the voters of France and Greece reject the parties of austerity, the cheerleaders of the new Europe like Lord Mandelson declare that the only answer to the crisis is – yes, you guessed it – more European integration.

Lord Contra-Indicator of Hartlepool and Foy

As a small-c conservative, I naturally take heart from the great British public’s tendency to reject gratuitous change, whether in the form of a regional assembly, the alternative vote or elected mayors, whenever anyone consults us directly.

I am also conscious, however, that the real victor in last week’s local elections and referenda was the Apathy Party, which kept more than two thirds of potential voters away from the polling stations.

If we don’t like Messrs Cameron and Osborne now, we are surely going to hate them when all the belt-tightening measures they have announced but not enacted actually start to impact on our lives.

It seems implausible that we would turn so soon to the comedy double act of the Two Eds, who were right at the epicentre of the Gordon Brown Fan Club that got us into our current mess in the first place.

Miliband and Balls: Ssshhh, don't mention Gordon

Though memories are remarkably short, as one can judge from the chorus of boos on any discussion programme when Coalition ministers attempt to pin the blame on the huge deficit that Labour ran up.

We cannot register a protest vote with the usual third party, since Nice Nick is enjoying a threesome with those other posh kids, so where does that leave us? With Nigel Farage, Caroline Lucas, George Galloway and Nick Griffin, plus others who would make their policies look like positively mainstream.

In short, pretty much where the Greek people have ended up today. Time will tell whether the net result is to be the collapse of the euro project or the extinction of democracy in Greece and any other country where the electorate has the temerity to challenge the wisdom of the European elite.

My money, I regret to say, is on the latter. But, either way, we face a period of acute economic and political turbulence across the Channel that isn’t going to do any favours for prosperity or stability here.

I would relish a referendum that gave Britain the opportunity to start extricating itself from this European car crash. The result is far from easy to call: our innate conservatism and shortness of memory surely militate against apparently radical action to put the clock back and reclaim our independence.

But when you are perched on the edge of a cliff with a forest fire advancing behind you, there is no easy choice.

Who will give us the chance to vote on something that actually matters? If nothing else, it might help to push the Apathy Party back into the minority where it rightfully belongs.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Driven to screaming point by endless repetition

Which PR genius invented the theory that the way to get a message across is through endless repetition? Because I would personally like to bang their head against a brick wall until they veered off message and begged me to stop.

If I hear geeky Ed with the speech impediment, or menacing Ed with the sinister smile, say just once more that the Coalition is “out of touch”, I swear I shall scream. Probably because I have just injured myself putting my foot through a TV screen.

Doing the thing with the hands: out of touch. Geddit?

I first found myself on the receiving end of the repetition technique more than a decade ago, when trying to defend a client against a hostile takeover bid. The bidder had engaged the largest and most successful financial PR consultancy in London, whose one detectable contribution was to employ the word “woeful” in every single pronouncement it made about my client.

This rapidly became like Chinese water torture, and certainly inspired me to redouble my efforts on the other side. More importantly, it did not work. My client retained its independence.

Woeful? Far from it.

I love words, and enjoy as much variety in them as possible. One of the many delights of English is that is the richest language on the planet. I do not advocate using an obscure word where a plain one will do; I find it painful to read writers like Anthony Burgess who force me to reach for a dictionary almost every time I turn a page.

But it is a joy to be able to deploy the right word in the correct context to convey one’s meaning as accurately as possible. Endlessly repeating the same stock phrases is the antithesis of good communication and lively debate.

I still shudder at the memory of a colleague who made it his mission one year to see just how many corporate results announcements he could begin with the words “This has been a watershed year for your company.”

I much preferred the approach of the chairman who took a yearly bet with a City analyst to work one challenging word into his statement in the annual report. The conventional tribute to employees was once enlivened by a description of them as “Stakhanovite”, after the hero of Soviet labour who achieved legendary levels of productivity as a miner under Stalin’s second five-year plan.

The original Stakhanovite

On another occasion the strength of the business was attributed to its being “autochthonous”: indigenous, native, well rooted in its local soil.

Both useful words that have been part of my regular vocabulary ever since.

My appeal to the corporate and political worlds alike is to credit their audiences with a bit of intelligence, and try to stimulate us with a bit of originality and a modicum of wit.

Vince Cable has proved himself good at this, having most of the characteristics of a thunderstorm: dark, miserable and threatening most of the time, but enlivened by sudden flashes of brilliant light.

Vince Cable: his true vocation

Such as his legendary comparison of Gordon Brown to Mr Bean, or last week’s crack that “being lectured by Ed Balls on the economy is like being lectured on seamanship by the captain of the Costa Concordia.” Which is spot-on accurate, and wins bonus marks from me for being in thoroughly questionable taste.

Balls: what he and Brown did to Britain. Only in deeper water.

Come on, boys and girls of Westminster. Do you seriously think that if you keep endlessly repeating the same numbingly tedious phrases a light bulb is going to ping on above our words and we’re going to put down our suddenly massively more expensive cans of cider or lager and say, “Oh yeah, the Coalition is out of touch, aren’t they? Same old Tories. I must vote for that Ed.”

Surely we can achieve a higher level of debate than this? Because encouraging people to take an interest in politics definitely requires more than saying exactly the same thing over and over again until we all reach screaming point.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Remember that it will all be the same in a hundred years' time

As Europe teeters on the brink of an almost unimaginable economic catastrophe, one that may make the events of the 1930s seem like a perfect summer of cream teas and croquet on the vicarage lawn, my thoughts keep returning to a valuable saying of my mother’s: “It will all be the same in a hundred years’ time.”

Bearing this in mind, one of the many things I cannot get worked up about is pensions. Partly, I will admit, because my personal late breeding programme makes it highly unlikely that I will ever be able to retire. Though the other thing making retirement totally inconceivable is the dreadful performance of the investments that I was persuaded to make over the years in a pension fund.

I remember that this concept was sold to me with various projections based on differing growth rates. But I do not remember ever seeing these include the reality of no growth at all, or at any rate growth so low that it barely covers the fat fees of the towering geniuses managing my fund.

My pension fund: how it was meant to be

The image "My pension fund: how it turned out" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. But imagine the one above with the arrow pointing the other way and you will be pretty much there.

I was financially sophisticated enough to see through the great endowment mortgage scan, even though I was called a fool for insisting on a dull old repayment mortgage when I could have this fantastic product that would not only pay off my debt at the end of its term, but leave me rich as Croesus, relaxing in a hot tub in the Caribbean with a minimum of three bikini-clad babes. It was like choosing a penny farthing when I could have had a top-of-the-range Rolls Royce.

I was even bright enough always to tick the “no thanks” box when persuasively offered Payment Protection Insurance, though this does not stop me receiving repeated automated phone calls from helplines eager to pursue my mis-selling claim.

But a pension I fell for, hook line and sinker. Tax relief on the money going in, and a tax-free environment in which my money would surely grow. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start Gordon Brown (peace be upon him for saving the nation from the euro) came along came along and concluded that we were all having it too good, so reduced those tax breaks. Then piles of onerous and expensive regulations were heaped upon funds to prevent another Robert Maxwell craftily using them to line his own pockets. And to cap it all, the stock market went to hell in a handcart.

Not to worry, though, because my pension fund managers kept coming up with brilliant new wheezes for putting money into bright, shiny new things that offered so much more potential than dull old shares. For all I know, they could have included packages of mortgages on trailer parks in Detroit, dressed up as Triple A bonds. Because I made the critical mistake of getting so bored with the whole thing that I broke my lifelong golden rule of never investing in things I did not understand (which basically restricted me to a portfolio of pubs, breweries, hotels, restaurants and bakers) and saying the grown-up equivalent of “Whatever”.

So now I find myself with untouchable pension savings that were originally supposed to fund a comfortable if not luxurious retirement just two years hence, and would now buy me an annuity best described as pitiful.

Do I feel sympathy with those public sector workers who are going on strike tomorrow because their contributions are going up and their prospective pensions coming down? Of course I do. But I also feel that, to coin a phrase, “we are all in this together” in the face of inconveniently rising life expectancy and lousy investment returns. And the one thing I don’t feel inclined to do, as I contemplate the ruin of my own hopes of retirement, is to pay a penny more in tax to support their hopes of putting their feet up at my expense.

Working until we all drop sadly seems the only answer. Just like it was a hundred years ago before people started living long enough to make the whole idea of a pension industry worth dreaming up in the first place.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Small satisfaction in being proved right as the storm clouds gather

I find it hard to believe that almost two decades have passed since the Conservative party was tearing itself apart over John Major’s determination to ratify the Maastricht treaty, despite Britain’s ignominious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

"Bastards!"

That, it seemed to me, should have been evidence enough of the utter folly of attempting to lock exchange rates between divergent economies. But the ideologues pressed on regardless with their creation of the euro as a means to advance the cause of a single government for Europe.

Turned out well, hasn’t it? Having been castigated as a backward-looking little Englander for opposing this half-witted project, I hope I may be forgiven a moment of quiet satisfaction as I read the recantations of many of the scheme’s cheerleaders; there was a particular corker in one of the Sunday papers from the former editor of the Financial Times.

But unfortunately we are where we are: in the most horrible mess, with deeply depressing implications for prosperity, democracy and even peace.

Images of Greek protesters and rioters have been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police.

All going terribly well

In the early 1990s I had regular arguments with a distinguished client who was one of the leading lights of the pro-euro campaign. When his economic arguments failed, as they always did, he fell back on the spectre of war. Binding Europe together with a single currency was the only way to preserve the peace that had lasted since 1945.

It always seemed to me to be taking an excessively negative view of the Germans to believe that the only way to stop the Panzers once more rolling into Poland or Alsace was to give Germany a pivotal role in the economic management of the whole Continent.

Far more likely, I argued, that the creation and inevitable collapse of a supranational authority with no popular mandate would ultimately cause conflict, rather than preventing it.

It gives me no pleasure at all to note that this is exactly how it looks today, as the elected governments of Greece and Italy are deposed in favour of administrations led by “technocrats”.

This may not sound too bad, particularly as an alternative to a buffoon like Berlusconi. But how would we have felt if Gordon Brown had exited Number 10 not following a General Election, but because he had simply been sacked by the Queen, acting as proxy for the European Commission, and replaced by Baroness Ashton or Mervyn King?

Surely it is worth bearing in mind that the global banking crisis was the creation of the technical experts in that field, and that what we desperately needed was not more technocrats but more lay people with a smattering of common sense saying loudly and repeatedly “Hang on, this is completely mad.”

Right now, the ways forward seem to be the collapse of the euro, causing widespread economic misery; Germany picking up the gigantic bill to keep the euro together, which its taxpayers will not wear; or China backing down on its unsporting refusal to drop a few trillions into the proffered European hat.

Whichever way it goes, the implications look bleak for the future of democracy, and the avoidance of civil unrest and international tension. Yes, those of us who argued against British membership of the euro have done the country a service by keeping us off the passenger list of the doomed liner, but our rather frail craft stands no chance of enjoying a smooth passage as the whirlpool of catastrophe on the Continent does its best to suck us down.

So we sceptics were bang right. Big deal. Move on. But do please bear this lesson in mind the next time someone tries to sell you an idea wrapped up in the phraseology of progressiveness and inevitability.

A rare image of a wind turbine actually doing something

I will take similar momentary satisfaction, a decade or two from now, when the eager proponents of wind power finally admit that they were completely wrong. But by then our finest landscapes will have been desecrated by useless turbines, and we will be sitting in the cold and dark. And there will be no quick, easy and painless solution to that avoidable mess, either.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.