One day the conspiracy theorists will be right

So Scotland the not so brave bottled it. Or, rather, they were robbed.

Social media are awash with filmed evidence of officials marking ballot papers and stuffing “yes” votes into “no” piles to achieve the result the British establishment had predetermined.

I was resigned to living just over the border from a latter-day Zimbabwe if the vote had gone the other way, but was surprised to find that I already was.

But then this sort of conspiracy theory mainly appeals to those who also believe that alien abductions are commonplace, the Moon landings never happened, and Diana was murdered by British intelligence on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh.

There are echoes of the somewhat unhinged mourning for Diana in the groans and whines audible across the border. Rather pleasingly for those of us who associate “The 45” with the doomed, romantic Jacobite rebellion of 1745 that came to a bloody end at Culloden, this is the name adopted by those whose dream of independence simply refuses to die.

Presumably because it trips off the tongue rather more easily than: “The 44.7% who lost by a whopping 10% margin even though their leader got to choose the date, the question and the people who were allowed to vote.”

Just some of the organisations The 45 intend to boycott. Good luck with that.

Today’s question is: what now? And the answer looks like shaping up to be: let’s give the Scots pretty much everything they wanted in terms of control over their own affairs, while preserving their unfair advantage in public spending and allowing their MPs to continue to sit in Westminster and vote on purely English and Welsh matters. You don’t have to be a Tory or UKIP partisan to spot that this is grossly unfair.

But how to resolve it? I know, let’s balkanise England into EU-approved regions and elected mayoralties, even though the people reject these ideas out of hand when they are put to them. Then we can say we are on a level playing field, with devolution for all.

Or if you don’t fancy that, why not create a new English parliament somewhere like Sheffield, so we can say we are addressing the north-south divide as well as restoring the balance between England and Scotland?

I’ll tell you why not. Because the last thing almost any of us want is yet more politicians operating more layers of government.

I live in conservative rural Northumberland and Conservative rural Cheshire. Both communities have far more in common with each other – and arguably with similarly rural Dorset, Angus, Montgomeryshire or Antrim – than north Northumberland has in common with post-industrial Gateshead or Teesside.

Which is why the demand for more regional devolution will never command universal support. Added to which, I strongly suspect that those who argue for more local decision taking will also be at the forefront of those utterly outraged by the inevitable result of more “postcode lotteries” in the quality of public services in each locality.

England is not so big a country that it needs to be split into bite-sized chunks, nor does it need a new Parliament. Those with a vested interest in protecting the sway of the Celtic fringe over the English just need to accept that it isn’t fair, and let it go.

Meanwhile the Scotch [sic] referendum has been an object lesson to all of us who have hankered for a vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

It so happens that most of the “scare stories” derided by Alex Salmond were true. Why would any company doing 90% of its business outside Scotland run the risk of keeping its base there when it could find itself in a different currency zone and subject to different rules, regulations and tax rates? Most of the scare stories about the risks of leaving the EU – particularly the “three million jobs at stake” – won’t be true, but I have little doubt that they will prove at least as effective.

So if that promised referendum ever takes place, which I doubt, we will almost certainly be cajoled by the combined forces of the political establishment into voting to stay. The conspiracy theorists will say we were robbed. Next time, for once, they might even be right.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Scots wha hae

Tomorrow our nearest neighbours may decide to press the non-nuclear button and vote to become an independent country.

In which event, I suppose it behoves me to find a polite way of saying “good riddance”. But sadly I can’t.

I think that anyone minded to take this great leap in the dark under the leadership of a manipulative banker – and a Scots banker at that – needs their heads examining.

But then the Scots imagine that they are hard done by; adore the sound of the bagpipes; believe that haggis, deep-fried Mars Bars and Buckfast tonic wine constitute haute cuisine; and fail to grasp that both kilts and tartan trews look utterly ridiculous. So there is ample evidence that they needed their heads examining anyway.

I have lived a double life for the last five years, but with one factor in common: both the places in which I base myself are close to the English border.

In Northumberland I can actually see the border from my windows but rarely venture across it, because I have been made to feel so unwelcome whenever I have done so of late. I don’t think it’s anything personal, but a country that makes much its undisputed natural beauty as a tourist attraction might perhaps try a little harder not to make English visitors feel so spectacularly unwanted.

From Cheshire I cross into Wales on a daily basis, for the simple reason that my principal client is based there.

One notices the difference immediately, as the worn-out, potholed English road gives way to the immaculately tarmacked Welsh one.

Like the Scots, those who live in Wales have a variety of other expensive privileges showered upon them, from free prescriptions to cut-price university education. Yet oddly house prices are materially higher on the English side of the Welsh border.

This may be because the NHS in England is marginally less likely to kill you, or because the supermarket signage is not incomprehensible, or because many people don’t want their kids educated in a dead language that sounds uncannily like someone with bad catarrh clearing his throat.

In both the Welsh and Scotch (as we may now surely say once more, not having to bow to their absurd preference for “Scottish”) cases, there is abundant evidence of our Celtic fringe being heavily subsidised by the English taxpayer in the vain hope of keeping them on side and perhaps even a little bit grateful.

There is no sign of this strategy proving even a teensy bit successful, and I for one have had enough of it. I am absolutely outraged by the all-party offer to shower yet more benefits on the Scots if they vote “no”, without even consulting the rest of us.

I’d much prefer them to vote “yes” if the alternative is an even more biased constitutional and financial settlement at England’s expense.

I have never recorded my nationality in a hotel register as anything but “UK” (because it expends fewer calories than writing “British”) but I am sure I will easily adapt to identifying myself as English.

It will, of course, be a blow never again to have a Prime Minister of the calibre of Gordon Brown, or to see a Labour government more than once in a blue moon.

Don't panic! On second thoughts, do. And make that "Two Nations".

I won’t actually pour my large collection of Scotch single malts down the drain but I shall never buy another drop of the stuff. I fancy this may be very good news for shares in Northern Irish distillers.

When the hungry refugees start trying to trickle across the border in a few years’ time, I shall enjoy a chuckle at their expense as they are turned back by well-trained Northumbrian pikemen.

It might actually have been cheaper to keep Trident.

All this is assuming, of course, that we actually take any notice of the referendum result. Rather than pronouncing, in EU style, that the voters clearly haven’t understood the question and making them do it again until they produce the right answer.

Alternatively we could send in the military, arrest the ringleaders and charge them with treason. There is something about Alex Salmond’s perpetually smug expression that always makes me wonder how his head would look on a spike on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

We don't want to lose you, but ...

As next week’s World War I centenary approaches, a popular song of 1914 keeps playing in my head: “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.”

It played particularly insistently during last week’s cringeworthy Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, as all around the world tiny island nations observed the best that Scotland could offer, and surely concluded that it wasn’t quite ready for independence yet.

I had to avert my eyes at times, but am assured that the dancing giant Tunnock’s teacakes were not a ghastly hallucination. So presumably monstrous, gyrating deep-fried Mars bars and bottles of Buckfast tonic wine must have featured, too.

The only parts I saw that were not a national humiliation featured the Red Arrows, what is left of the historic Scottish regiments of the British Army, and Her Majesty The Queen.

In this, it all seemed oddly reminiscent of those independence ceremonies that used to pop up in the cinema newsreels nearly every week when I was a boy. These always featured Princess Margaret or some royal duke standing glumly to attention next to a beplumed outgoing governor, as a military band played and the Union Flag was hauled down for the last time.

Princess Margaret arrives to grant Jamaica its independence, 1962

The film then usually cut to jubilant native dancing (though I don’t remember it ever including the local equivalent of a teacake) as the colourful flag of some new nation was raised for the first time.

Cynics pointed out at the time that the incoming government might just prove to be slightly less efficient and more corrupt than the colonial administration it replaced. But self-government was held to trump good government every time.

Does it for Scotland now?

I must admit that, if I were a Scot, and faced with Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband all advising me to vote to stay in the Union, I might be sorely tempted to do the opposite.

A feeling I shall no doubt share when faced with a similarly united front on any “in or out” referendum on the EU.

For the rest of us, sharing an island with the Scots is a bit like sharing a house with a particularly graceless teenager. We try to do our best for them, but all we hear in return is moans of “It’s not fair” and “You’ve ruined my life”.

The temptation to show them the door is almost irresistible, and yet … would it really be sane to reintroduce national boundaries and currency exchanges just beyond Carlisle and Berwick?

Are the differences between the English and the Scots not overwhelmed by the things we have in common, in our shared history and culture?

It’s not as if we speak different languages, however difficult some accents may be to penetrate, and however hard they may try to pretend otherwise by whacking up Gaelic signage that almost no one understands.

The oil will run out, the naval shipbuilding will move south, and while they seem unlikely to bankrupt themselves with another mad colonial enterprise (as they did in Panama to occasion the Union of 1707), another gigantic bank crash seems pretty much as sure as day following night.

How will that play out without the English Exchequer to bale them out? Or will they come running back to the Bank of Mum and Dad like many a teenager who has left home for good, then found the reality a bit too hard?

Let them make their choice, but on the understanding that there is no easy way back - and no more bribes for deciding to stay, either. The privileges heaped on the Scots, compared with the voters of the North East, are already wholly excessive.

If our neighbours want to be governed by a school of fish (Salmond, Sturgeon) with gigantic chips on their shoulders, I suppose we must let them, but on the whole I hope they decide otherwise. They are family after all.

Even if, like most families, we spend all year dreading those times we cannot avoid spending together.

I just need to amend the words of the song playing in my head to “We’d quite like to lose you, but we think you ought to stay.”

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.

Is 'I hate politicians' the right way to vote?

People really hate politicians, don’t they? Not just the Tories, always major hate figures in my neck of the woods, but politicians in general.

The Conservatives for heartlessness, Labour for past economic incompetence, the LibDems for broken promises and all for hypocrisy and bloated expenses.

Yet amidst all this Nigel Farage somehow manages to shrug off a veritable tsumani of gaffes and extremist outbursts from his candidates that would have done for any mainstream party leader long ago.

Because people don’t see him as a serious politician, but an affable bloke with whom they would enjoy a chinwag in the pub. And, if they are at all right wing in their inclinations, agree that he talks an awful lot of common sense.

Particularly about those issues that every other party deems too politically incorrect to discuss; notably immigration, on which many traditional Labour voters harbour convictions every bit as “right wing” as their Tory counterparts.

I have considerable sympathy with Mr Farage’s view of the EU and I’d certainly rather spend an hour or two in a boozer with him than with Messrs Cameron, Miliband or Clegg.

But how many other UKIP MEPs or candidates have you ever heard of? Probably just that bloke who jumped before he was pushed for jokingly calling party activists “sluts”, though I’ll wager you can’t remember his name.

The other one's called Godfrey Bloom, in case you are wondering

How many UKIP policies can you list, for that matter? I’ve just taken a look at their website, and am not massively wiser.

I was surprised when a fellow lifelong Tory told me the other day that he will be voting UKIP in the European elections specifically as a protest against the Conservatives’ espousal of gay marriage.

No doubt there will be a similar range of motivations behind those who will grant UKIP a historic victory on 22 May, if the current polls are to be believed. But underlying it all will surely be simple loathing of professional politicians, allied with the certain knowledge that Mr Farage will not be moving into Downing Street as Prime Minister.

Meanwhile the smooth and quintessential professional currently occupying that role faces his own potential day of reckoning in September, when Scotland goes to the polls in the referendum that he granted on the assumption that the result would be a resounding “no”.

Survival of the Union still looks the way to bet, but only just. Because such is the hatred of mainstream British politicians that their every intervention pointing out the folly of voting for independence just seems to push a few more waverers into the “yes” camp.

In this respect, Alex Salmond may be characterised as McFarage Lite (or, more accurately, Heavy).

There must be considerable doubt as to whether Mr Cameron could survive as Prime Minister if the United Kingdom broke up on his watch.

And then what? There is only one potential Tory leader who can match the Teflon qualities of Nigel Farage. Another man equally at home on a TV game show and apparently able to shrug off all manner of revelations about his personal life. People don’t even seem to hold the fact that Boris Johnson went to Eton against him, because he is a laugh.

Boris: cleaning up?

Even if you rate Labour’s chances of victory in the General Election scheduled for May 2015, their prospects of staying in government cannot look good if their 40-odd Scottish MPs are booted out of Westminster. Particularly if, by then, the Tories are led by charismatic career politician successfully masquerading as a buffoon.

I keep reading that this is the age of tactical voting. Tactical voting for UKIP on 22 May will tell the major parties that we hate them all, but won’t get us one inch closer to exiting the EU. Scots voting for independence in September may do for Mr Cameron in the short term, but will ultimately be far more of a disaster for Labour.

These are certainly very exciting times for anyone with an interest in British politics. The sad thing is that many of us only seem interested in giving all the main parties a kicking. Perhaps we should all pause to reflect on the likely consequences before we do so?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Scotland: England's Ukraine?

I am doubly fortunate to be married to someone who loves Art Deco above all other styles, and to be the son of parents who married in 1936.

So the wedding presents with which they furnished their first home, and then passed on to me, are cherished as things of beauty; rather than resented, as they might so easily be, as someone else’s cast-off tat.

Mrs Hann’s excellent period taste also enabled me to score some easy points by taking her to a restaurant famed for its Art Deco ambience to celebrate our own fifth wedding anniversary last Friday. 

The sense of living in the 1930s was equally powerfully reinforced by the supporting cast of mainly elderly fellow diners and by the day’s rolling news.

An elected dictator holds a famously lavish Olympic games designed to impress the world, then invades a neighbouring country “to protect his own nationals”, while other states collectively tut and wrings their hands ineffectively.

Sounds awfully familiar, does it not? It just needed people digging trenches in the London parks as rudimentary air raid shelters to complete the effect.

The most telling difference seems to be that Hitler was seeking to re-draw a map of Europe created by the victorious allies in 1919, while many of Mr Putin’s little local difficulties have been caused by Russia herself, most notably by Khruschev’s quixotic decision to hand Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. 

What can he have been thinking of?

It’s almost as though Churchill, after a one late-night whisky too many, had signed a decree to hand Hampshire or Devon to Scotland.

At the time the Unions of the USSR and the UK looked equally imperishable, so why not?

Anyone who thinks that such a crazy scheme would have been stymied by vociferous local opposition in Britain might like to consider how meekly we all rolled over in the face of the ghastly Heath-Walker local government reforms of 1973, which obliterated several historic counties and arbitrarily redrew the boundaries of many others, including Northumberland and Durham.

It does seem extraordinary that any major power would cheerfully hand over territory containing one of one its principal naval bases (Sebastopol, home of the Russian Black Sea fleet) to an entity that might have the temerity to secede one day, and even dream of joining a completely different power bloc.

But then with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it probably wasn’t the smartest move to base Britain’s nuclear deterrent at Faslane in Scotland, either.

The UK declared 20 years ago that it had “no selfish strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland, whose shipyards, airfields and anchorages had come in so handy during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.

Presumably the men in Whitehall who know best feel equally relaxed about allowing the Scots to vote on their independence in a few months’ time, despite the fact that our naval shipbuilding as well as Trident are based up there as part of our long-standing benevolence in the matter of public sector job creation for the Jocks.

Mr Salmond says he wants to keep the Queen, the pound and Scotland’s membership of NATO and the EU, but we already know he doesn’t really mean some of what he says, and has no hope of getting his way in other areas.

We keep thinking that the world has moved on and we have learned from the past. Armies mobilising, tanks rolling across frontiers, people being rounded up and murdered because of their ethnicity or their religion: that was the dark side of the 1930s and its lovely Art Deco. It doesn’t happen now. Yet sadly it does and it will because human nature does not change. And, depressingly, almost certainly never will.

It was widely believed in 1914 that nearly a million “Russian soldiers with snow on their boots” had landed in Scotland and were being transported through England to join the fight on the Western Front in France.

I would dearly like someone to tell us just what strategic plans have been drawn up for the defence of England when the spurned and bullied Prime Minister of an independent Scotland turns for fraternal aid to his new best friends in Moscow.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The referendum question

As every serious Westminster politician, European panjandrum and British business leader lines up to tell the Scots they would be mad to vote for independence, certain parallels spring to mind.

Suppose the UK (or what is left of it by then) were finally offered a referendum on its continued membership of the European Union in 2017.

Further suppose that Nigel Farage were our Prime Minister and enthusiastically leading the pro-independence campaign. (An unlikely scenario, I will admit. But then Labour engineered the devolution settlement in Scotland precisely to ensure that they retained power for good and the SNP stood no chance of ever forming a majority administration.)

Surely what we are witnessing now is a most instructive rehearsal of what would happen then. Multinational companies would howl that leaving the EU would be a terrible idea, and that it would cause them to reconsider their investments in the UK.

We would be warned that thousands of jobs would be lost, and we would all be far worse off.

Useful idiots would reel off lists of the marvellous investment projects funded by the EU, failing to mention that Brussels was merely returning to us a proportion of the money we had paid them in the first place.

Dire warnings of the impossibility of continuing to trade with Europe would be trailed out. And we’d be warned that we would have to obey all the pettifogging European rules and regulations anyway, so why not stay a member of the club and pretend that we have some influence over how they are framed?
All of which sounds to me suspiciously similar to the sort of pressure currently being applied to Scotland over the pound, EU membership and its future prosperity in general.

Of course, if Mr Salmond really wants to share another country’s head of state and currency, and stay in the EU, it is quite hard to fathom what his so-called “independence” is actually about.

At root, surely, it is an emotional rather than a rational response to the facts. In reality Scotland is too small to stand alone in any meaningful sense, and would surely be better off leaning on its nearest neighbour, with which it shares a language and so much history, than trying to cosy up to anyone else.

But then by the same logic Scots should always support England when they are not taking part in an international sporting contest themselves, and when has that ever happened?

I love Scotland. I spent all my childhood holidays in beautiful St Abbs. Their whisky is superb, and you can’t complain about the shortbread.

On the other hand, I hate Scotland. I have never been made to feel so unwelcome anywhere on the planet as I was the last time I made the mistake of taking a break there 20 years ago.

More importantly, I am sick to the back teeth of the two caber-sized chips so many of them seem to carry about on each of their shoulders, and their totally misplaced conviction that they have been getting a raw deal out of the United Kingdom for the last 306 years.

In fact, the Union was devised to save Scotland from the results of its own financial imprudence and it came in pretty handy again for them in 2008, when the British taxpayer picked up the bill for failing Scottish banks.

Plus there have been years of Scottish over-representation in British politics and the media … and don’t even get me started on Gordon Brown.

So if I had a say in this year’s referendum I might be strongly tempted to vote “yes” to get rid of the whingeing bunch of them, and look forward to enjoying some quiet amusement as they got their economic come-uppance for putting Braveheart emotion before common sense.

At the end of the day, though, although I am English I love Britain.

Which is why I’d like the Scots to stay in the UK and the UK to develop a much looser relationship with the EU.

We only have to observe the Scots, though, to see that great strength of character and steadiness of purpose will be required to achieve the latter outcome.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Nothing is inevitable but death - certainly not wind farms

I am sure my late mother was blissfully unaware that she was quoting Jane Austen when she regularly observed that “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

Substitute “passions” for “pleasures” and the gulf in understanding yawns wider still.

I am a strong opponent of “ever closer union” in Europe and look forward to the promised “in out” referendum, if it ever happens, but polls consistently suggest that the great mass of my fellow citizens do not care all that much either way (though they should).

On the Horsegate food contamination scandal, media vox pops certainly found some consumers who were beside themselves with rage at the thought of unwittingly munching Dobbin in their burgers or lasagne, but many more received the news with a resigned shrug.

Another horse joke, courtesy of the Huffington Post

Among other recent burning issues, I have not written about gay marriage because I really could not care less one way or the other. Nor do I regard it as a “scandal” that people who are lucky enough to own a house should have to sell it to fund their care home bills, so long as their partner is not rendered homeless in the process.

While Scottish independence, though a lousy idea in principle, would have the great advantage of taking whingeing Salmonds, Sturgeons and other assorted fishes with chips on their shoulders out of our newspapers for good.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the one issue about which I do feel pretty passionate at the moment: the despoliation of the matchless Northumberland countryside by the crazy wind energy subsidy scam (this century’s answer to the last one’s plague of subsidised conifer plantations – though at least we will never run short of wooden pit props for our thriving deep mining industry).

Follions as it would really look (compare the picture accompanying the planning application)

Last week’s column on the planned Follions Folly attracted a small handful of passionate e-mails of support, one castigating me for failing to appreciate the beauty of wind turbines, and another pointing out that they are less ghastly than nuclear power plants.

Well, up to a point, Lady Copper, though at least nuclear can produce large amounts of electricity consistently if not particularly economically, rather than relatively small amounts when the wind blows at the right sort of speed.

And from the great mass of the public, I suspect, total indifference. Fuelled by the sense that covering much of the countryside with gigantic turbines is “inevitable”, like German victory in World War II or the triumph of communism, and “the future”. Which is interesting considering that they combine the mediaeval technology of the windmill with Faraday’s cutting edge invention of 1831, the dynamo.

In my experience nothing is inevitable apart from death (we all know now that taxes are pretty much optional if you are rich enough to pay for the best advice). So I shall keep banging the drum for the total madness of wrecking a peculiarly beautiful bit of countryside, designated as of High Landscape Value and right on the edge of the National Park, just to put a bit of extra cash in someone’s pocket for the next 25 years.

The last week has seen the creation of a website - http://www.fightfollionswindfarm.co.uk - and Facebook page, which both feature a rather more realistic photomontage of the development than the one accompanying the planning application, plus some interesting height comparisons with existing turbines and buildings. Do please take a look and “like” the Facebook page if you feel so minded.

A public meeting has also been arranged at Whittingham Village Hall at 7.30pm on Friday for everyone concerned about the issue. Curiously, the applicants’ agents have declined an invitation to come along and explain why the turbine would be such a good thing for us all. Suggesting either total confidence that they are going to get their way regardless of what the yokels think, or a contempt for the views of the local community that almost beggars belief. Perhaps, indeed, a bit of both.

In a county that has already more than done its bit to help meet renewable energy targets, there can only be one sane response to opportunistic proposals for large turbines in beautiful, sensitive and remote locations. Just say no. Please.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Intensive care: the right place for the euro, not the UK

There comes a point for many of us when life seems to consist of a series of hospital admissions: each leaving the patient looking and feeling weaker than the last, and sadly allowing little doubt about the final outcome.

That is very much the condition of the euro today. We may, if we wish, utter a sigh of relief at markets’ positive reaction to the Spanish bailout, but should be under no illusion that it constitutes any sort of cure.

In Germany, Frau Merkel keeps warning darkly that the survival of the single currency is “an issue of war or peace”, which should worry all of us who remember some basic history. She may well be right.

The conundrum is that eminent specialists take diametrically opposed views on whether drastic action to try and save the euro will make war less or more likely. Kill or cure? It’s not an issue one wants to settle with the toss of a coin, whether that be a euro or a pound.

I personally find it hard to fathom why our supposedly Eurosceptic Government is urging members of the Eurozone to forge ahead with creating a single state to save their currency, regardless of the wishes of their electorates, while at the same time contending that Britain will have nothing to do with any of it.

Apparently this went much better than the follow-up: "Look, Angela, it's an elephant!"

Particularly when, at the same time as encouraging the Continent to unite (probably against us, on all past form), it seems to be doing precious little to prevent Britain itself from breaking up.

Doomsters gleefully predict that the United Kingdom is another terminal case, and that the fine displays of Union flags turned out for the Queen’s Jubilee will never be seen again. Not because they are about to be replaced with the EU stars, but because the blue and white Scottish component will have to be removed following Mr Salmond’s independence referendum.

Given that the flag was created to symbolise the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603, rather than the union of governments in 1707, it is not immediately obvious why it should be doomed by a reversal of the latter, given that the SNP seems to have abandoned its plan to make Scotland a republic.

Along with its plans to join the euro and make Scotland part of that great “arc of prosperity” embracing Ireland and Iceland. Remember that?

Let us pause to reflect on exactly how much of its hard-won independence Ireland enjoys today. It simply has its austerity medicine prescribed by Berlin rather than London.

The other fatal flaw in what is left of Mr Salmond’s great scheme is that he now proposes to retain the British (or English) pound as his currency. Just as, thanks to the brilliant demonstration provided by the euro, it is generally agreed that having a single currency without a single government is a non-starter. 

Why are we entertaining the prospect of this nonsense running on until the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn in 2014, when there are so many bigger issues in the wider world to worry about?

The Jubilee surely gave a welcome boost to British identity and, if we can avert our eyes from no doubt embarrassing events in Poland and Ukraine over the next three weeks, this should be back on course as the country rallies behind Team GB at the Olympics.

What sort of showing would an independent Team Scotland make there, in the absence of recognition for caber-tossing and bridie-eating as Olympic sports?

With the world around us getting more dangerous by the day, it is surely high time that our friends across the border recognised how well off they are under our current constitutional and financial arrangements, and abandoned their sentimental longing for something better.

We may not be able to stop the European dream expiring, but at least moving the United Kingdom out of the bed next to the door would be a brave-hearted step in the right direction.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Once again the big winner is apathy

It is always a delight to see any political idea favoured by Eddie Izzard being decisively punted into oblivion, so last week saw the Hann household rejoicing for the second Friday in succession.

No

And who could resist a little surge of local pride on discovering that the North East had led the field in saying no to AV, with a majority of 71.9%?

A mere handful of places said “yes”: Oxford, Cambridge, a few smug inner London boroughs and their Edinburgh and Glasgow counterparts. Tempting me to the conclusion that we need never go to the trouble and expense of a national referendum ever again. Just obtain the newspaper wholesalers’ data on where The Guardian sells most strongly, hold local polls there, then do precisely the opposite of whatever they vote for. We won’t go too far wrong.

Though perhaps we should have one last national referendum on Scottish independence first. And I do mean a national referendum. How can you dissolve a marriage without consulting both of the contracting parties? Allowing Scotland alone to vote on its future would be like letting the children decide on their party guest list and entertainment without consulting the adults who actually have to pay for it.

But I am ignoring the pachyderm in the living quarters, which is this. Although pundits assure us that turnout in the AV referendum exceeded expectations, apathy was once again the big winner on polling day. A thumping 58% of my compatriots still found something more important to do than pootling down to their local school or village hall, and marking an “X” on a bit of paper.

How could this lot fail to inspire?

All right, it’s not very intellectually challenging and it doesn’t promise the same sort of returns as filling in a lottery slip, but in the Middle East people are currently dying for the right to do just this. How can you possibly conclude that it is more important to be scratching yourself on the sofa in front of Loose Women or The Jeremy Kyle Show?

Politics matter. Which celebrity is shagging which lady of easy virtue who previously enjoyed relations with which Premiership footballer does not.

Another thing that matters is our ability to hold our heads up in the world by adhering to certain standards of decency and fair play. From the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War to the recent revelations about our treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya, the reputation of the British Empire is certainly not an unsullied one.

But have the Americans, who worked so hard to bring our Empire to a conclusion, led us onto the broad sunlit uplands of probity and transparency?

Their support of assorted murderous tyrannies around the world, and their use of “extraordinary rendition”, extra-territorial detention camps, the extraction of information by torture and – yes, their ham-fisted inability to get their story straight about the cold-blooded killing of their public enemy number one in Abbotabad last week – all lead me to the conclusion that the world was a rather better and safer place when those chaps from Whitehall were in charge of it.

It’s not that I have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, though his “command and control centre” looked to me rather more like a teenager’s bedroom that had been handed over to an OAP as part of a Channel 4 reality life swap show. But why would anyone conceive and execute the operation against him in a way that seems specifically designed to give conspiracy theorists a field day?

Latest version of events: the White House execution team hold their breath as the UK AV referendum results come in

The only thing that troubles me about my misgivings is that I have already found them shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and will no doubt soon find myself allied with the entire readership of The Guardian, including Eddie Izzard. So as you were, Mr President. Most reluctantly, Operation Geronimo gets my vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.