Who can be trusted to tell the truth?

You would not think it now, but I was a very trusting child. I believed my parents when they told me you could always trust a British bobby.

Evening, all. A classic octogenarian British PC.

I even believed my first headmaster when he told us, at the time of the 1961 census, that its secrecy was so complete that one could put down one’s occupation as “burglar” without any fear of retribution.

Scroll on to 2014 and it seems that you can report as many thefts as you like without anyone lifting a finger, though the European Union presumably marks them down as further evidence of burgeoning economic activity, justifying another whacking increase in its membership fees.

After all, it has just slapped in a £1.7 billion demand that seems to be largely based on previous under-recording of such vibrantly healthy UK economic sectors as tobacco smuggling, prostitution and drugs. By which I guess they mean the sort favoured by that “crystal Methodist” banker rather than my own statins and low dose aspirins.

Maybe this is the sort of British success story George Osborne has in mind when he bangs on about his “Northern powerhouse”, led by a directly elected mayor. You remember, the sort that the people of Manchester (and many other places) rejected in a referendum only two years ago but are now apparently going to have anyway, whether they like it or not.

Among his or her many other useful functions this new mayor will take over the role of the police and crime commissioner that a handful of people bothered to vote into office a few months later.

It all seems eerily reminiscent of voting ten years ago against both a North East assembly and a unitary authority for the whole of Northumberland. One of which has already been imposed upon us while the other is clearly trundling down the tracks once again, thinly concealed by more waffle about “city regions”.

Really, what is the point of voting for anything at all when no notice is taken of the outcome?

How would it go down if I adopted the sort of approach to the Government that it takes with me? Maybe sending my tax demand back with an offer to pay a token amount because it’s all I can afford (which has the virtue of being true).

Oh, and I’m terribly sorry, HM Revenue & Customs, but you won’t be able to check my records yourselves because I’ve shredded them all to comply with the Data Protection Act, as the House of Commons has done with all those dodgy expenses claims.

... apart from the ones we shredded

Regardless of election results, politicians of all parties display a shared and cynical determination to plough on with policies they have never deigned to explain properly, whether those be elected mayors or the encouragement of mass immigration.

Small wonder that the result has been a collapse of trust in authority over the last half century, which means that most of us no longer look up to anyone or accept what they say at face value.

In some instances, this is entirely beneficial. For example, if you were crazily thinking of buying a ticket to outer space from a music industry entrepreneur with a proven track record of failure in the technologically less demanding task of running a reliable train service into London Euston.

In others, the results are more questionable. Virtually no one but the most gullible green fanatics believes that there is a case for massively increasing our reliance on wind and solar power. But then virtually no one readily accepts the case for massive increases in fracking or nuclear capacity, either. 

If the UN’s scientists are right, and we need to get used to the idea of doing without gas and oil completely by the end of this century, a lot of us are going to need to do some pretty radical rethinking about who we can trust quite soon.

Either that or prepare to spend rather a lot of time sitting in the cold and dark. On the plus side, though, we won’t be able to hear George Osborne banging on about powerhouses. And, if the scientists are right, it won’t be quite as chilly as it might have been.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Events, dear boy, events

Recent events confirm three lasting truths: the British are obsessed with the weather, politicians cannot be trusted, and you should think long and hard before giving an animal a name.

The disappearance of much of southern England beneath floodwater has generated a media frenzy calculated to move even the most stonehearted. What could possibly make the misery of those affected even worse?

Well, having ministers and quangocrats fighting like ferrets in a sack over just whose fault it is probably does not help much. And if my own home were underwater a personal visit from Dave “Doing Everything We Can” Cameron would be pretty much the last straw.

At this point I was going to insert a hackneyed but hopefully witty reference to politicians’ hopes forever being dashed by “Events, dear boy, events”. But I am deeply disappointed to report that my usual in-depth research has uncovered no evidence that Harold Macmillan ever actually said it.

Another much-loved anecdote spiked, then. Though when I was writing my opera book last year I read time and again that the story of Tosca leaping from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo and immediately bouncing back into view was completely apocryphal.

Until I happened to listen to a podcast of Desert Island Discs in which the legendary British soprano Dame Eva Turner described exactly that happening to her. So perhaps dear old Uncle Harold did say it after all.

Should more money have been spent on sea defences and dredging rivers in the Somerset levels? Common sense says “yes”, but EU directives and budgetary constraints apparently combined to dictate the opposite. While the rights of birds and water voles naturally trumped those of mere human beings.

The resulting disaster provides ammunition for campaigners for the unlikeliest causes, such as reintroducing beavers to the UK. Hang on: don’t beavers block rivers and cause floods?

Yes, but the right sort of floods because they could slow down water that might otherwise gush downstream and inundate all those lovely houses for which some idiot council granted planning permission even though they are standing on a flood plain.

Is the wettest winter since Noah was in the shipbuilding business the result of climate change? Almost certainly.

Is said climate change caused by human activity? Quite possibly.

Will we solve it by covering the countryside with wind turbines? I very much doubt it, though maybe some of the schemes for tidal barrages that so upset campaigners for our feathered friends might serve a useful dual purpose in generating reliable power and keeping the sea at bay.

And maybe the billions we can apparently find to invest in turbine subsidies and high speed rail links, calculated to strengthen London’s grip on the nation’s economic windpipe, might be usefully redeployed to keep the electorate’s feet dry in their own homes.

Meanwhile over the weekend the Twitter-literate were temporarily distracted from the floods to bemoan the terrible fate of Marius the giraffe, shot and fed to the lions in Copenhagen zoo because he made too feeble a contribution to the gene pool.

Surely this line of thinking must have sent a particularly powerful shiver down the spines of those in charge of environmental policy and flood control?

When I was a boy some bright spark decreed that barred cages were out of date and built an elephant enclosure at London Zoo surrounded by a moat instead. One of the beasts promptly toppled into it while reaching for a bun.

The resulting tabloid headline “Death of a children’s friend” reduced me to tears until my Dad put me straight: “It’s only a ****** elephant, son.”

Yes, and it’s only a giraffe, too. But it had a name, like a dog or a horse, and this is always a massive obstacle if you are planning to turn something into food.

I would cheerfully eat the deliciously anonymous chickens raised by my late neighbours but could never bring myself to accept chops from the pigs to which I had been introduced by name.

So pro-beaver campaigners please note. If you want to keep them out of the Chris Smith blame slot when the next floods arise, ensure that they’ve all got cute names, ideally beginning with “B”.

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.

A fascist takes charge of Sunderland? Yes, it's April Fools' Day

I have always loathed April Fool jokes, but even I managed a smile at the obviously spoof story that Sunderland AFC had recruited a self-proclaimed fascist as their manager.

Luckily one from the right (or should that be far right?) side of the north-south European divide that ensures Hitler a permanent place in our collective memory as the supreme example of total evil; yet permits a rather more indulgent view of his Italian counterpart Mussolini as a vaguely comic incompetent, except in the matter of making the trains run on time.

Perhaps, if Signor Di Canio fails to save his new club from relegation, fans might refrain from hanging him upside down from a lamppost and allow him to apply his skills to running East Coast Trains instead?

But the Sunderland appointment, and resulting shock departure of David Miliband (whose resignations apparently come, like buses, in appropriately banana-like bunches after a long and tedious wait) was by no means the only hilarious moment of the last week.

There was the original Miliband departure for an organisation called International Rescue (stop now, my sides are aching), which can presumably only be capped next April by his brother going off to fly Fireball XL5.

Spot the difference: Miliband (D) and Brains from the real International Rescue

Then there was that obviously comical loon in North Korea declaring war on his neighbours and threatening the United States with nuclear annihilation, in the manner of a small boy with a pea-shooter squaring up to a Challenger tank.

My, how we shall chuckle about that in a few weeks as we crouch in the cupboard under the stairs with a meagre supply of tinned food, waiting for the fall-out “all clear” from sirens that were scrapped as part of the Government’s civil defence cuts of 1991.

It set me thinking of other great April Fool spoofs of the past, from Richard Dimbleby’s spaghetti trees on Panorama to the classic BSE scare – as a result of which, you may recall, we are currently supposed to be dying by the million from an incurable brain disease called new variant CJD.

Except that, in reality, the highest death toll exacted by BSE seems to have occurred in the 1990s, among beef farmers driven to suicide by stress.

Then we were all going to die of salmonella in killer eggs, listeria in killer cheese, the total collapse of civilisation as a result of the Millennium computer bug, dioxins, asbestos, lead in petrol and the deadly HN51 bird flu pandemic, in the unlikely event that we survived childhoods blighted by ritual Satanic abuse.

Luckily all these grave threats were somehow averted, after the expenditure of many billions of pounds on tighter regulations and improved procedures. Supervised by armies of civil servants and consultants, who have all done a fantastic job of keeping straight faces and never letting on that it was all a huge joke at our expense.

Similarly, I marvel at the way applicants for wind turbines manage to stop themselves giggling as they spout their regulation guff about how they are doing society a favour and helping to save the planet by wrecking our glorious unspoilt landscapes in pursuit of a quick profit for themselves.

Sadly not a spoof

But sadly we cannot dismiss global warming as yet another April Fool joke, despite the evidence of the remaining snow outside my window as I write this, because the beauty of this particular mega-scare is that we will all be dead before anyone can pronounce authoritatively on whether it had any basis in reality.

This is the true genius of the climate change scaremongers, and one that should be taken on board by all would-be April Fool jokesmiths of the future.

There is no point coming with a threat that we can see through by 12 noon on April 1, or even a year or a decade later. Make it one that threatens to wipe out humanity in a century or more, so that the gullible can fret about their grandchildren and insist that we all turn our lives upside down trying to protect the interests of the unborn.

Surely this has to be a far better jape than pretending to organise a fascist rally at the Stadium of Light (or should that now be Night)?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Bring on the sabre-toothed tigers

It is amazing how swiftly things can move. One minute Obama is being hailed as the shining hope of all humanity. Then he makes a dubious crack about the Special Olympics and half the commentariat spot that he was a flawed Blair clone all along.

I hesitate to point out that I told you so.

Then there are Messrs Corden & Horne, the new Morecambe & Wise, basking in unadulterated critical acclaim until they released their new film about lesbian vampires. Overnight their double act is universally acknowledged to be rather less hilarious than Brown & Darling.

Compared with these and other cataclysmic changes of fortune in recent months, my own turnaround has been positively glacial: a figure of speech that may well need revisiting in the light of recent predictions about the swift disappearance of the ice caps. Like climate change, mine is by no means all bad news. I have finally found the perfect partner I long despaired of ever tracking down, while nasty skiing accidents will become a thing of the past when there is no more snow.

But there is a downside. For the planet, the death of perhaps seven billion people in circumstances that will make every previous war, famine, plague and natural disaster look like a vicarage tea party. And for me, a hideous reversal of the weight loss about which I was crowing a year ago as I coasted to an easy victory over Tom Gutteridge in the great columnar weight loss challenge.

Recalling how difficult it was to shed the 21lb I lost then, I am appalled that I have allowed 12lb of it to regroup around my waistline. With hindsight, I made two fatal mistakes. One was not to consign my old, “fat” clothes to the bin as soon as they became too loose for me, thinking that I would postpone the acquisition of a new wardrobe until I had lost the further 21lb that was my no doubt unrealistic target.

The other was to acquire the same enviable handicap as Tom: a beautiful woman who expects to share an evening meal with me. Bang went my days of enjoying the classic PR man or journalist’s large and boozy lunch, and compensating with just a piece of fruit and a nice glass of water in the evening. Incidentally, when I started working in the City 30 years ago, every banker I knew was happily sozzled by 2p.m. and spent the afternoon snoozing at his desk. Keep them sober, send them to the gym instead of the pub and they come up with sub-prime lending and the credit crunch. There must surely be a lesson there somewhere.

Apparently one of the hot fads of the moment is the Paleolithic or Caveman Diet. Cut out grains, beans, potatoes, dairy products and sugar, and focus on the meat and fruits our ancient forebears hunted and gathered. Ideally, in the Warrior variant, guzzle the lot in just one big evening meal a day, as Stone Age man did after killing his prey.

The proponents of the plan argue that primitive man enjoyed perfect health, overlooking the fact that he was considered a bit of a wonder if he made it past the age of 30.

Nevertheless, I think I shall give it a go. But to create the ideal conditions for success, we surely also require the splendid incentives for exercise enjoyed in the distant past. Which means introducing more and fiercer species of predator to the British Isles. Why stop at bringing back wolves? With the massive progress now being made in DNA recovery and cloning techniques, surely we could really put the North East on the map by setting sabre-toothed tigers and velociraptors loose in the Cheviots? It will be amazing how swiftly I can move with one of those behind me.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.