Everything Has A Limit

Birdbox and Overlord

2023-08-31T07:32:17Z

Birdbox (Susanne Bier, Netflix, 2018)
Overlord (Julius Avery, 2018)

I very much enjoyed Birdbox, which is elevated above the standard disaster plot of mysterious contagion / followed by road trip i.e. quest, simply by quality direction and quality acting.
There are two main narratives. The first is the present day, with Malorie (Sandra Bullock) taking two four/five year olds on a river trip to a mysterious destination which she hopes wil offer sanctuary. The catch? They have to wear blindfolds all the time. To remove them means death.
The second (and main narrative) starts five years earlier, with a pregnant Malorie. Suddenly people the world over begin committing suicide. A mysterious (possibly alien) presence causes most people to immediately decide to die within seconds of them "seeing" it.
Malorie manages to find refuge in a house full of various eccentrics, including John Malkovich as a marvellous curmudgeon. The main aim is survival. For example, getting to the supermarket a half-mile away and back is not too easy when you have to do it without opening your eyes.
An additional spanner in the works is the discovery that some insane people do not kill themselves when they see whatever it is, but they do feel the urge to force other people to see "the wonder".
Gradually these two factors reduce the numbers. Malorie and one of the other members of the group both give birth at the same time.
The film is good because nearly all of the characters have depth, even those who get killed off early, and even the "baddies". Sandra Bullock in particular is brilliant as Malorie, a far-from-perfect mother with more than her fair share of personal problems, and yet one who wants to "do the right thing".
A strong performance too from Trevante Rhodes as Tom, o ne of the other survivors. Malkovich looks to be having a great time as a miserable old bastard, and Tom Hollander provides a neat mid-film cameo. Of course, we as viewers know that it will be a cameo, because his fee and schedule would have been swuch that he probably couldn't manage to be on set for more than a few days' shooting time.
And the kids are, of course, guaranteed heartstring-pullers.

Overlord, by contrast, was fairly terrible. Perhaps it was a success according to its own parameters (lots of rather unpleasant gore as people die in variously unpleasant ways), but in terms of characters, plot development, acting, whatever, it doesn't hack it.
Let's assume that you come to this film knowing *nothing* about it (this is basically impossible as the film's publicity tells you the "reveal" about a third of the way through).
It opens with a group of American paratroopers preparing to drop into France just ahead of D-Day, with a mission to take out a communications tower. The plane comes under fire from the ground, the parachute drop is rushed, the group get separated.
Eventually a few of them come together and manage to make oit to the town, where a young lady (Chloe, played by Mathilde Olivier) hides them in the attic.
Mysterious things are going on in the town. We catch our first glimpse of the results of this -- Chloe's aunt, who looks to have become some kind of monster, is hidden away in another room.
Enter Pilou Asbaek as stereotypical German baddie (the German troops are never any more than carboard cut-outs).
Gradually the truth emerges (you know, that truth we were already told about in the publicity) that the location of the communications tower is also a place where a scientific programme is underway. Cue the excuse for shots of lots of people who have been subject to those experiments.
The film heads towards a thoroughly ungripping conflagrational climax.
I mean, it's terrible. I fast-forwarded through a fair bit of it because it seemed obvious what was going to happen. The film is termed an "alternate history" World War II film. Well, my idea of "alternate history" is "what if Churchill had been killed in a bomb during the blitz?" Not "what if the Nazis developed a serum that turned people into monsters? Asbaek spends quite a bit of the film doing a Dr Phibes impersonation. Wyatt Russell as Corporal Ford also takes the serum so that we can have some kind of Captain America vs a Nazi super-hero baddie fight at the end. Jovan Adepo does his best as the lead role, but surely he could see that he was trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Mathilde Olivier (who also had a main role in 1899) does't seem stretched at all. Asbaek gives his all, but it's a bit of a comedown from the days of Borgen.
I mean, the film *must* have something, as its target demographic seemed to like it. But, as one critic observed, it's just a collage of standard plot devices, stitched together, which don't really make any sense as a coherent whole. Therefore all that you get are what (to me, at leas), seemed a sequence of disconnected set pieces constructed as either a visual gore-fest, a super-hero vs super-hero battle, or a World War II drama battle scene. We've seen all of these before, done better, in other films that made some dramatic sense.

Birdbox: 8/10
Overlord: 2/10

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A Spy Among Friends

2023-08-21T12:17:25Z

A Spy Among Friends” (Six x 60min episodes, 2023, Nick Murphy) is an adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name, covering the uncovering of Kim Philby. I had seen a docudrama a few years ago with the same title, which I thought was excellently done, but, annoyingly, I failed to record it to DVD. So I can’t go back to compare the “drama” bit that coincides – the conversation between Philby and Elliott in Beirut before Philby runs away to Moscow.

I felt this to be a top-class drama. Of the lead characters, Anna Maxwell-Martin is superb as the (fictional) Lily Thomas, questioning Nicolas Elliot (Damian Lewis, whom I think has never been better) about what was *really* talked about Beirut. Guy Pearce wasn’t quite as top-notch as Philby, but it was a ridiculously difficult part to play. In the upper tier of the supporting characters was Adrian Edmondson as Sir Roger Hollis – head of MI5. A wonderful performance, I thought. Stephen Kunken as James Angleton just didn’t come across for me. Once again, Angleton is something of an enigma. But this portrayal didn’t really convince me of anything.

The plot covers two main narratives – the aftermath of Philby’s defection, and the years of friendship between Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby that consisted mainly of Philby pulling the wool over the eyes of the British establishment.

In the first narrative we see Philby escaping to Moscow and then trying to come to terms with it. Pearce attempts to give Philby some depth and some ambiguity, an effort I feel is doomed to failure (a point to which I shall return). Elliott, in his developing interrelationship with Lily Thomas from MI5, also has depth. But whereas Philby’s complexity concealed hidden shallowness, the layers of Elliott, gradually revealed by Lewis like a magician at a magic show, are all too real.

There were criticisms in some quarters that the fictional Lily Thomas, a stroppy lass from Durham who has the nerve to be married to a doctor who not only works for the NHS, but who is also black, was put in as (a) a sop to the “woke” brigade and (b) served to make it look as if the whole of MI5 and MI6 was an old boys’ club from Cambridge and the Establishment in general.

Now, the ‘black husband who works for the NHS, well, yes, it did feel a bit of the time to be a rather artificial addition. But the non-establishment “tough” woman battling against a system which she thought had failed because no-one would suspect a “chap like Philby”, was, I think, spot-on.

It so happens that I am at the moment reading the book “Guy Burgess, The Spy Who Knew Everyone” by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hilbert, and what becomes clear from the reading of this book, the watching of the ITV documentary that accompanied the last episode (which, TBH, I didn’t think was very good) and everything else I have read about the period in question, convinced me of two important things.

The first was that the “old boys network” was in fact deeper and wider than “A Spy Among Friends” indicates. And it was this colossal incompetence among the British “ruling class” that led to the four, five or six “moles” within the British system surviving so long.

That, in itself, was a disgrace. To come back to my feelings about Pearce’s depiction of Philby. One should have zero sympathy for Philby, He was not ambiguous as a character in the slightest. He was addicted to deception (Philby’s “misdirection to the end” is cleverly indicated in the final episode) and didn’t give a shit that he sent thousands to their deaths, including the entire network of potential sympathizers who were in the part of Europe taken over by Russia, and the Albanian nationalists who tried to “invade” their homeland, only to come up against a mass of Soviet weaponry the minute they were on Albanian soil. Philby sent all of these people to their deaths without ever expressing (or feeling) an iota of regret.

Of the others, Burgess was an upper class drunk who survived as long as he did only by pulling strings among his other establishment friends. Donald Maclean, perhaps the only one of the four well-known “villains” for whom I have the slightest midgen of respect, rose through the Foreign Office at least partly because of his education. Indeed, the upper echelons of the Civil Service at the time (particularly the Foreign Office) was almost an extension of Eton or, at a pinch, Harrow and Winchester. And finally there is Blunt, known about since 1963 and yet allowed to carry on.

So, we have a collection of spies (John Cairncross had been caught in the early 1950s but, like the loathsome Blunt, had continued to lie, claiming that cooperation with the Soviets stopped at the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War) who were known about by the establishment, and yet not one of them faced either the British or Amerrican justice systems. They didn’t face American justice because the Americans didn’t get hold of them. And they didn’t face British justice because the people in charge either let them escape, or convinced the people in charge that a prosecution would not be in the public interest.

What in fact they meant was that a prosecution would not be in their interest, because a defence barrister for Burgess or Philby would have been able to expose the gross incompetence of the people running the show, and the fact that this incompetence was compounded by an inability to believe that “one of us” could be spying for the Soviets. Philby, Burgess and Maclean were, I am sure, allowed to get away. In the case of Philby, he was indirectly encouraged to get away. With Blunt and Cairncross, it was swept under the carpet for 16 years in the case of Blunt and nearly 40 years in the case of Cairncross.

And there were probably others. The links between Burgess, Blunt and a number of establishment figures really look as if they went beyond networking and protection because he was “one of our chaps”. “Coincidentally”, the same names crop up again and again in terms of belonging to the same clubs, sharing the same address, being recommended for jobs or (in Burgess’s case) giving reasons why this dissolute drunk should not be sacked.

After Blunt was exposed in a book that called him “Maurice”, and then by Private Eye, and finally by Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons, he continued to lie, claiming that he had stopped sending secrets to Russia in 1945. He was also (genuinely) surprised that the promise had hade been given in 1963 by his old mates in MI5 had been broken. He seriously thought that he would be able to live out his life in England in peace and as part of the Establishment until he died. Does that display stupidity or arrogance? More the latter, I think. The intrinsic belief that the alumni of the public school system and Oxford/Cambridge were really still in charge of things just never went away. You would have thought that he would have spotted that Margaret Thatcher was not cut from the same cloth as Alec Douglas-Home. (Blunt, by the way, claimed that Home had supported the suppression of the information that Blunt was a spy. In fact, Home was never told. The powers behind the throne (and the throne itself – the Queen *was* told) made sure that the prime minister was not.

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The Deer Hunter

2023-08-18T14:28:52Z

To celebrate Robert de Niro’s 80th birthday, the BBC broadcast Cimino’s The Deer Hunter last night (they also broadcast Cape Fear, but I didn’t watch that – partly because it didn’t start until midnight-thirty, and partly because I recall not particularly enjoying it when I first watched it).

Obviously I have The Deer Hunter on DVD, but I sat down to watch it anyway. I think that it was absolutely the perfect choice to show. Everyone has seen The Godfathers a million times. Therefore the rivals to show are either Once Upon A Time In America, or The Deer Hunter.

When we look at the canon of the 1970s, we tend to think of Coppola and Scorsese, but not Leone and Cimino. But I think that the four directors together created a connected concept – one of the forging of the United States, and how that was being lost.

Coppola did it with the Italians, as did Scorsese (who also made a couple of films on the Irish). Leone did it with the Jews, and Cimino did it with the Russians/Slavs – bothin Heaven’s Gate and in The Deer Hunter.

The latter has been written about thousands of times, and really I am only repeating what many have written before. The vital thing to understand is that the key parts of this film are not set in Vietnam – even though it is these parts that everyone remembers. The majority of the film is set in Clairton, Pennsylvania; in the rust belt. Six young men work in the steel mill. It is hard, blue-collar work. Three of them (De Niro, Walken and John Savage) are heading for Vietnam. Three others (George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren and John Cazale) will remain to work in the steel mill.

I had quite forgotten what a sensational episode is the the wedding between Steven and Angela. Cimino kind of repeats this in Heaven’s Gate, but not to such a great effect. What lifts the episode to greatness is, quite simply, the joy of watching De Niro, Streep, Walken and Cazale at the top of their game.

The fact that this is Cazale’s last film performance, with his partner Meryl Streep soon to care for him as he died from lung cancer, aged 43, gives it added poignancy.

The following day four of the six go deer hunting, and they return, somewhat the worse for wear, to a bar. Dzundza sits at the piano and plays a tinkly tune, just before there is a sudden jump cut to Vietnam a few months later. It is quite clearly, to my mind, the centrepoint of the film. It is a lament to a lost America and to an America that Cimino, Coppola, Scorsese and Leone could see was being lost. All four directors spent the 1970s trying, in their individual ways, to record that process in film. The result was some of the finest films to have been created in the history of the art. From The Godfather through to Apocalypse Now (Heaven’s Gate, Gangs Of New York and Once Upon A Time In America would come fractionally later) we have films that will be remembered for a long long time. Later iterations (Goodfellas, Casino) sit more, I think, with The Sopranos and The Wire. They are magnificent films, but they are not a part of this relatively short period that saw films in which the directors could see that what they were filming was about something that was not quite yet completely lost.

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Incentive to take no action

2023-08-14T10:57:02Z

The tragedy in the town of Lahaina on Maui, Hawaii, is still unfolding. But one constant comment from the people who wer ein the town when the fire hit was that there was no official warning.

That does not mean that there was negligence. Sometimes natural catastrophes evolve in a fashion that means the developing disaster only becomes "obvious" with hindsight.

On Maui, the second largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, there are 80 outdoor sirens. These are tested monthly and are intended to warn residents of tsunamis and other natural disasters. Although there was a power failure overnight and the flames did not "suddenly" engulf the town until mid-afternoon, the sirens did not go off. For the moment, we don't know why not.

The stories of the people who survived follow a similar theme. Although it was clear that *something* was happening, it wasn't clear precisely what and it certainly wasn't obvious that fleeing the town would have been the right thing to do. That, indeed, could have been a matter of heading into danger rather than heading away from it. Then, when the conflagration arrived, it was with quite staggering speed and incredible heat.

Why the air temperature should have risen so dramatically, so quickly, I am not sure. But, as I realized when I heard the comment of a survivor whose family had been trying to drive away saying "when we saw the car next to us just burst into flames, we knew we had to head for the ocean", I realized that it was quite clearly an inferno rather than an ordinary fire.

Put grimly, this is not something that you see often -- certainly not in the wildfires that regularly hit southern California these days. When it comes to identifying bodies it will be on a par with Hamburg during World War II. Teeth or DNA.

There is, however, another factor that might be at play here. I would estimate that about 95% of people are not the kind who are capable of making on-the-spot decisions -- not unless, as eventually happened in this case, a failure to do so will result in certain death.

People generally like to do two things. The first is to think about it, and the second is to consult other people to see what they think. The tendency of the vast majority of people to avoid personal responsibility (even in their own minds) is strong. Anyone who has tried to organize a group of six people into a restaurant trip will understand this. All too often a half-hour is spent with all six of those people trying to avoid being responsible for the final choice. After all, it might be a bad restaurant. If it is, they want to make sure that someone else can be held to be to blame.

Sadly, this strong desire to avoid decision-making for which one might be held to account in case it goes wrong has permeated into organizational culture. The larger an organization, the more layers that there are, the harder it is to get a decision made quickly and, if it does go wrong, to discover where the buck stops. It is hard to get a decision made quickly because, generally speaking, the risk-to-reward ratio in any organization militates against signing something off. If it goes right, no-one says anything. if it goes wrong, the person who does the signing-off gets the bollocking. There are a large number of people in organizations who are actually proud of their ability to pass any potential responsibility on to someone else's desk.

Now that the tendency to make decisions slowly, on reflection, and preferably with someone else likely to take the blame if it goes wrong, are not only intrinsic to the nature of large organizations, but also secretly in sympathy with 95% of the people who work in that organization, it becomes easier to see that, when a disaster (like, say Grenfell) unfolds, with multiple failures on multiple layers, the one constant appears to be one of people choosing not to act rather than to act. Common sense would have shown that fire access to Grenfell Tower was nearly always blocked by parked vehicles, but not one of the thousands of people who would have seen this would have done anything about it. Why? Because there was no reward for so doing. Similarly, the whole sequence of events which seems to have led to dangerous cladding being put up on the outsides of hundreds of blocks of flats looks to me to have been the result of everyone involved shifting the responsibility to someone else's desk.

We live in a society of risk avoidance. This, indeed, is praised. "Caution", "precaution" "safety", and so on are hooray words. But no-one seems to spot that, when "caution" is deployed on an individual level ("if this goes wrong I am going to make sure that my arse is covered") it can lead to far greater danger on a societal level. Indeed, I would posit that society's entire approach to "safety" is flawed. But I know that nothing can be done about it, because I have been in too many groups of six early on a Saturday evening when five of the people are saying "I'll go with the majority". They think that this makes them look "easy-going". In fact, it makes them look like "blame duckers".

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The Speech Chain. How we speak, how we hear, how we understand

2023-08-13T17:33:40Z

I've become increasingly interested in linguistics in recent years, even though I'm poor at languages. Although my initial directions of approach were in the areas of knowledge representation and accents/dialects, linguistics can become quite a rabbit hole.

So I now have books on sociolinguistics, syntax, semantic theory, historical linguistics (which is the history of linguistic study, not the history of languages), the history of languages, phonetics, and language variation.

My latest book on the matter, however, was something of a departure. It's the "classic" book by Denes & Pinson on "The Speech Chain".

This is more science than normal linguistics, covering (mainly) the biology of speech, of hearing, and the physics of sound. It was, therefore, way outside my comfort zone, and in places beyond my abilities. But it was well worth reading.

My main takeaway from the book was that the human ability to convert sound waves into meaning is just staggering. I mean, when you think about it, it's ridiculous how the ear and the brain, working in tandem, can distinguish musical sounds, voices, meaning in those voices, the sound of a motorbike outside from a person in the room making a sound like a motorbike, and so on, and on, and on.

By comparison, the production of sound, while still incredibly complex, is simplicity itself. I mean, I can see how the brain could learn how to control the muscles and air output to make sounds of language. There's a lot of mechanics involved, but, then again, most musc;le control has a lot of mechanics involved.

I think that The Speech Chain was first written in in the 1960s and was massively updated in 1993. It could do with an update again. While the book does well in predicting the implications of the "digital age" in terms of text to speech and speech to text, machine comprehension of speech and machine speech of meaning (which I would guess no longer has to go through the sequence of meaning to text to speech) the way in which things have developed digitally would make up as much of the book as the bit on analogue communication.

I went for a hunt online for "synthetic speech" and I might have guessed that Google's offering would appear first in Chrome. The Denes and Pinson book does well in explaining the complexities of speech (and a read of this chapter would give you a strong hint of why voices such as satnav will fool no-one into thinking that it is a real person talking). The variables are enormous in terms of pitch, intonation, stress, and context. Now, all of these *can* be processed into an algorithm, and that's what Google has done. While I don't think anyone (yet) would be fooled into thinking that they were speaking to a real human when in fact they were speaking to a machine, I can't see it being far off where this could be achieved in at least a significant percentage of cases.

The Denes and Pinson book also refers (obliquely) to a couple of things which disconcert me when other people speak. the first is a common bugbear -- the rising inflection at the end of a sentence when a statement is being made, rather than only when a question is being asked. Denes and Pinson, I am pleased to say, state quite categorically that the end of a statement sentence should be indicated by a lowering of tone and volume on the final unstressed syllable. Unfortunately, it doesn't address the habit of some people not to obey this rule, or (therefore) try to explain why it happens. I think that it's fairly obvious why, but that's not part of this article.

However, did you know that not all questions end on a rising inflection? Try it. If you say "Are you coming?" then you get a rising inflection. But if you ask something like "Are we jumping that wall?" the emphasis will probably be on the "that" rather than on the "wall". Indeed, I suspect that the majority of questions uttered in speech don't have a rising inflection either. This could be why using a rising inflection to end a statement sounds even more "off".

The second bugbear of mine also relates to the end of sentences. Denes & Pinsen say that, on average, people need to pause every 2.5 seconds to take in air, in order to be able to carry on speaking (since making a noise requires the expulsion of air). This, they write, happens at the end of sentences, and within sentences if those sentences are longer than average.

But there are some people who seem to break this rule deliberately. Three categories of person have cropped up in my experience.

1) Politicians who think they are orators. Michael Foot was the worst in recent times. His pauses were quite deliberately inserted only in the middle of sentences. This was because he was thinking of his next sentence while only half-way through the current one. This meant that the gap "required" by a full stop (or, as the Americans in this case call it more accurately, a "period") was non-existent.

2) Lawyers (frequently general counsel) speaking at conferences. I don't know if this is a habit that they have learned in court. But it seems a remarkably common flaw. And I call it a flaw deliberately, because it makes things very difficult for journalists who are taking notes. Not a few times I have given up taking notes on a speaker with a legal background, because the pauses at the "wrong" points in the speech (in the middle of sentences) had made it impossible for me to gauge the precise meaning of what was being said.

3) Interviewees on the Today programme. These are the worst of the worst, but I guess that they are only playing the game. If you are running out of time and you have a lot more that you want to say (a common occurrence), by never pausing at the end of a sentence, you make it far harder for the interviewer to bring the interview to and end. As a listener, it drives me mad, because you can feel the interviewer desperately wanting to bring the whole rant to an end, but unwilling to break the unwritten rule of interrupting another speaker in the middle of a sentence.

Fortunately the interviewers have got wise to this game now and tend to just interrupt at the start of a sentence with "thank you very much I am afraid we will have to leave it there".

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"Reform Or Die" Streeting tells NHS

2022-12-17T08:13:03Z

Considering the fact that six months ago I agreed with hardly a word Streeting said, it might appear somewhat baffling that his political position appears to have shifted dramatically. But the explanation is not that complex. Streeting has been tasked with saying what Starmer would like to say, but which for political reasons he cannot.

The current Streeting/Starmer position on the NHS is, I think, part of an attempt to reposition the Labour Party away from the perception that it consists of an alliance of special interest groups rather than (key phrase coming up here) "the ordinary working person in the street".

The changes to the NHS that Streeting has posited are important in that Labour has finally accepted that the organization is not staffed solely by saints and that it is not perhaps the perfect system.

In fact he went further, he said that the NHS was in an "existential" crisis.

Now, obviously I've been saying stuff like this for a long time, so confirmation bias will mean that I am happy to hear someone in the Labour Party saying it. For a start it makes me more likely to vote for them.

But the more interesting parts for me were two other points that Streeting raised. He said that there was a perception that the Labour Party represented the interests of NHS workers rather than the interests of people who used the NHS. That for me was a key point and represented a fundamental attempt to shift the power base of activist Labour away from those who are effectively public sector employees (among others, academics, teachers, NHS staff, lower-grade civil servants, social workers, and the part of the charity sector dependent on public funding, and a mélange of what we might politely term "the metropolitan elite") and back towards the raft of voters who moved en masse to Boris Johnson at the last election.

Starmer has realized that, as a coalition, this only worked for Labour when there was a residual "old Labour" vote – working-class white people whose parents had always voted Labour (and who had probably been in a union) but who no longer felt that those in charge of Labour represented them in any way. The Islington Corbynites attracted many of the young left (often at university), yes, but this was not enough to put together a winning coalition.

Streeting went further in stating, almost explicitly, that this was a new Labour (or, perhaps, a new "New Labour") when he called the "left-wing" critics of his proposals "the true Conservatives". That is another argument that I have been making for several years – that Labour activism today is basically conservatism. It harks back to 1945 to 1951 as a mythical golden age, and it wants to return to a time of class division and strong unionism. It consists of people mainly looking back rather than looking forward. And it is, I posit, a group of people who fail to realize that the "wealth" of the ordinary working person in those days was mainly based on poverty in what was then called the third world. Much of the UK's wealth that was built up from the 16th century onwards has been based more on the taking of raw goods from other countries and then turning it into something else, which we then sold back to them.
Controversial line from me, there's nothing wrong with that, just as there was nothing wrong with those countries eventually getting pissed off with the deal and doing the "conversion" themselves (this, after all, was exactly what England did around the late 15th century when it stopped exporting its wool to Flanders and letting Flanders make all the profit from turning that raw product into a consumer good, and started producing stuff from the raw material itself).

But there is no going back to what was really a non-existent golden age. Once again, things are not black and white. Globally since the 1970s there has been a stagnation in the wealth of "the ordinary working person", while entrepreneurs and rentiers have got better off. As will often be stated, everyone (well, not actually everyone, but that's the basis of another article) benefits in absolute terms from these entrepreneurs creating higher overall GDP, it's just that the *share* allocated to the employee that falls. As such (this argument goes) the ordinary working person should be grateful. Meanwhile the opposite argument is that a small elite hoovers up the majority of the gains, leaving "scraps" of improvement for the ordinary working person.

But, back to Streeting and the NHS. He said when speaking at a seminar of the Policy Exchange think tank, that the NHS was not "delivering a standard of care that patients should be satisfied with".

Hard to disagree with that. The important point here is though, that he did not provide the standard Corbyn and NHS solution – that more money would solve it. As I have observed, not only has the NHS received more and more money over the years since 1947, but it has also received a higher proportion of GDP. And this has been at the expense of a more holistic strategy to the health of the nation. While cutting-edge advances have been made (from which I, personally, have benefited), the balance between non-medical care and medical intervention has shifted towards medical intervention. Put simply, the structure of the NHS is not built to deal with those who need looking after and who have no-one to look after them, but who are not acutely or even chronically unwell.

Labour, said Streeting, would " give the NHS the investment and staff it needs, but that has to result in better standards for patients".

Streeting said in a speech only 15 minutes long but which I think will be seen as a pivotal shift in how Labour hopes to put together a "new" Labour-backing coalition that the NHS's problems were about far more than pay levels for nurses.

Streeting said it was clear that NHS staff were "working as hard as they can" (a point I would not concur with. Some do, but some don't). But he also said that we cannot continue pouring money into a 20th-century model of care that delivers late diagnosis and more expensive treatment".

Let's face it. This is Starmer-speak, and it's something that I have been waiting to hear for a long time.

Streeting said that he endorsed a report by Policy Exchange, which lays out a roadmap for how Labour could achieve its target of training 15,000 medical students a year, if it wins the next general election.

Streeting said Labour's plan would involve:

Training 5,000 new community health workers a year

Using spare capacity in the private sector to bring down NHS waiting lists

Fair pay, terms, and conditions to stop the exodus of care workers (note that this indicates an intention to blur the lines between the NHS and social care – something that NHS are likely to resist vigorously because, well, they are conservative).

This will all be poison to the old Labour represented by the likes of Diane Abbott, Long-Bailey, etc. Academics too will hate it. This is a full-frontal attack on special interest groups who have wielded huge influence within Labour for the past 12 years. One of the big differences between Blair and Brown was that Brown was at heart a more conservative "old Labour" politician. His coalition was more Wilsonian. But he missed the fact that he was getting out of touch with the general population. His constituency was dying off. The new dichotomy was, as it were, between radicalism and conservatism, with radicalism (seen in UKIP, the Brexit wing of the Conservative Party) becoming more significant, and conservatism (things "as they were" losing touch).

Streeting said that it was" plain to see for anyone who uses the NHS that it is failing patients on a daily basis," Mr Streeting said. "So yes, we are going to reform it and make the NHS fit for the future. Ironically, it is those voices from the left who oppose reform, who prove themselves to be the true conservatives."

As the BBC's Iain Watson observed:

"All this was designed to make people who don't usually vote Labour sit up and listen. But there is little doubt that some who usually back his party won't entirely like what they are hearing."

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Thoughts On A General Election: Week 1

2019-11-10T13:58:41Z

It's all very surreal. In the weeks, nay, months, leading up to the Conservatives finally conning Labour into going for an election, the situation a week previously often seemed like ancient history. And yet now, with an election only a few weeks away, we seem to have entered a sort of stasis. Sure, there have been changes in a micro level, but nothing epoch-forming. Elections, it appears, still run down well-worn tracks according to well-tried rules; unlike the rest of British politics, where a Prime Minister who has lost more votes than he has won in parliament can run straight-facedly on a platform of "getting things done".

I should say that I don't lack sympathy for the Labour position in accepting a General Election. It was plain that the country was moving behind the idea of one and was getting frustrated at a parliament that had proved itself adept at stopping things but rather poor at getting stuff done. It was a bit of a Lose-Lose.

There was probably a hope amongst the faithful (and this is one of the dangers of living in an echo chamber) that the election would be "about" stuff other than Brexit. Well, good luck on that one. But there is a second point. This is not "sensible" May with "sensible" Hammond. It's "I'll promise anything" Johnson, backed up by "deficit spending is the way forward" Javid. In this sense, the lines about "14m in poverty" or "the NHS is under threat, we must defend it", find their force reduced when the other side is "we are going to spend lots of money".

But, for all that, for all the resignations and decisions not to run, or decisions to run as an Independent, or decisions to consider perhaps running as an independent, for all the pacts, nothing has really moved on dramatically since the day before the election was called. 

Well, that isn't *quite* true. My spreadsheet might continue to have the SNP set for 50 seats, but the Conservatives have been creeping up and the Labour Party has been creeping down. The LibDems had an early spurt on Betfair, but have since fallen back. On my spreadsheet, it's been a steady decline, from a predicted 48 seats to, now, a very modest 39.

Now, that might change. The LibDem position in terms of seat numbers varies quite considerably, even if their own vote stays on 18%, according to the distribution of the vote between the Conservatives and Labour. Its "decline" in week one has not been due to a falling off in its own support, but in the increase in Conservative support and fall in labour support.

Put bluntly, the seats it fails to win because of an increase in Tory popularity is not compensated for by a fall in Labour popularity (the benefits in the latter case fall to the Conservatives and the Brexit Party). In that sense, seats such as Old Bermondsey And Southwark (where the LibDems are fighting the Labour Party) are thin on the ground.

Now, one very interesting result from the recent polls has been a nationwide pick-up in the Green Party vote. It probably won't win them an extra seat this time round, but it will give them a platform (and one which the LibDems need to be looking at closely). If I might call it the "Blue Planet" effect, we could be looking at a 7% vote nationwide for the Green Party. And this isn't an organic brussels sprout for Christmas vote. It's not restricted to yer Brighton Greenies Extinction Rebellion types. This is a much wider demographic. Is it down to Greta Thurnberg? Is it down to David Attenborough? Or is it just that a tipping point has been reached and you are no longer consider a vegan nutcase if you start talikng about carbon footprints and global emissions and the world slowly getting warmer? 

It's easy to roll out the old lines about what's wrong with the Greens. Don't bother, they've been heard many times and there is much truth in many of them. But that doesn't matter. If even 5%  of "ordinary" people are moving over to that line of thought, its clear that rehashing those old lines of argument have not worked in the past and, therefore, won't work in the future. better to bring the Green-movement onside and to isolate the loonies than to tar them all with the same brush.

I still see TBP as having a significant chance in five seats: Both the Barnsleys,  Burnley, Hartlepool and Rotherham. 

I currently have the LibDems taking 18 seats from the Conservatives, and six from Labour.

The SNP's gains are fairly evenly distributed - eight from Cons and six from Lab (but none from LibDem).

My spreadsheet does not at the moment give Plaid Cymru more than the four seats they hold -- but my methodology is not set up for Wales, and my gut instinct is that they might get up to five. That will require some seat-by-seat analysis (for which, TBH, I don't really have the time or inclination at the moment).

On running poll of Con 37, Lab 26, LibDem 17, TBP 11, SNP 4, Green 4

I get 337 Con, 195 Lab, 3 TBP, 39 LibDem, 50 SNP, 4 PC, 1 Green, 1 Speaker.

Bets this week, hedged out my bets on TBP total vote to guarantee a small win no matter what. 

Bets on SNP to win Dumfries (@2.75)  East Lothian (@1.91) East Renfrewshire (@2.0) and Gordon (@1.91)

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Thoughts on a General Election, week 0

2019-10-31T11:31:29Z

One of the little secrets I had up my sleeve for the forthcoming election was my discovery when compiling my spreadsheet (still some tweaks required to allow for retiring MPs) that, far from The Brexit Party being a threat to the Conservatives, it was Labour that had most to fear.

That secret now appears to be out of the bag. The Brexit Party clearly ran the numbers through a spreadsheet not dissimilar to mine, and came to the same conclusion.

Basically, although TBP might have cost the Conservatives some seats, its only chance of *winning* seats was off Labour.

Should it decided to stand in onlty 20 seats, these are the ones I think it might choose:

Barnsley East

Barnsley Central*

Bolton South East*

Burnley*

Dagenham and Rainham

Doncaster North

Hartlepool*

Hemsworth

Heywood and Middleton

Kingston Upon Hull East

Leigh

Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford

Penistone and Stockbridge

Rother Valley*

Rotherham*

Sheffield South East

South Shields

Washington and Sunderland West

West Bromwich West

The seats I have marked with an asterisk strike me as their seven best chances.

All of the seats are Labour seats. I see no hope whatsoever of any Conservative seat going to the Brexit Party, with the *possible* exception of Thurrock, an old UKIP hunting ground. But I suspect that 2017 might have been peak UKIP there, one of the few seats in which it was not utterly humiliated in 2017.

The markets seem to be predicting that there will be no breakthrough and that TBP will go away empty handed. I'm agnostic on this at the moment. I think it could be very campaign dependent.

Only four bets by me so far, all modest. Lab to win fewer than 225.5, LibDems to win more than 36.5, SNP to win fewer than 51.5 (I can't see them getting more than 50).

All those bets are at slight odds on.

Also, one single seat bet (most markets there not yet available) Conservatives to win Ashfield.

One fundamental mistake that the BBC makes every election is to focus on seats that were very tight marginals last time. usually, of course, if there is any swing at all, those seats are of little interest, as the marginal last time tends not to be a marginal this time.

This year there is an interesting exception -- Kensington. A majority of 20 for Labour last time. Both Lab and LibDem are remainers, but the Lab candidate has the hurdle of her party being ambivalent at a national level (see threat of Brexit Party, above). I suspect that this will cost them more seats in New Urban public sector/metropolitan elite/young Labour London than it will in the Old (and elderly) Labour Leave ex industrial heartlands.

Now, Kensington is interesting because it is massivley Remain (68.8%). The Conservative candidate is reportedly in favour of the Deal, but not on the hard line of the party when it comes to leaving.

If my projection of the way this election will pan out over the next few weeks is even roughly correct, we are set for a big LibDem surge in London. That could turn Kensington from a two-way marginal into a three-way marginal. So much so that I won't be putting any of my money on any of the candidates.

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Europe: The Great Divide

2019-05-24T12:04:33Z

And so, on the day that one thing I had come to think impossible -- the resignation of Theresa May -- comes to pass, something wlese happened which I had previously thought unimaginable; I agreed with something that Juncker said.

"If you tell people for 40 or 45 years 'we are in it, but not really in it', we are part-time Europeans and we don’t like these full-time Europeans, then you should not be surprised if people follow simple slogans once they’re asked to vote in a referendum."

It is this that sums up the whole problem. The anti-Europeans never went away. They have been around, not since 1975, when Wilson fudged a referendum and somehow got away with it, but since the early 1960s, when the first moves within the Conservative Party were made for a closer economic association with mainland Europe. The battle then was between Empire (fast becoming ex-Empire) and Europe.

No need to head into a deep history talk here. What is important is how the political parties coped with this division that crossed the party political lines created in the early 20th century. What they did was fudge. What they did was exactly what Juncker has said they did. "We are in it, but we aren't really in it".

As many on the federalist side of Europe -- either the open federalists such as Verhofstadt or the quieter federalists (basically anyone from Belgium, quite a few people from Italy and Eastern Europe) – know, a half-hearted approach is unsustainable. Either Europe heads inexorably towards federalism, or it breaks up. As such, the euro, Schengen, and so on, can be seen as policies that either create federalism "creep" or, if they fail, create a European crisis, the answer to which is, yes, more federalism.

Britain both never saw this or, when it did see it, refused to admit it. And even if it did admit it to itself, it couldn't admit it to the electorate. because, as with the two major political perties since world War II, the country as well was divided across party lines. This was a greater problem for Labour than it was for the Conservatives because Labour is now more than ever a coalition of two distinct political groups. The older, Bob Mellish, Joe Gormley, kind of Labour, was instinctively anti-Europe. The voters, from British industry (now dead or dying) were unionized, but in the private sector. The newer, more metropolitan, more middle-class, more likely public sector or NGO or government-funded in one way or another (not far short of 50% of GDP, remember) Labour is more likely to be enthusiastically pro-Europe.

As such, you can't expect the problem to disappear with a new leader, or new prime minister, from any party. Firstly because parliament is what it has been for decades, divided along non-party lines. And secondly because the country (call it the UK, GB, or the countries of England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland) have similar levels of division seeping through the strata of all society.

On the plus side, we are not alone in Europe when it comes to this division for or against greater federalism -- it's just that in the UK the semi-detached situation that has existed for so long manifests itself in "in or out?" whereas in western Europe it's a more soft "fight greater federalism or support it". When push came to shove, I don't think even Le Pen or Salvini would want to walk away from an economic association. it's the political merging that they object to.

Does this mean I have sympathy for May? No, not really. Her desire for the top job meant that she was willing to deny reality -- let's face it, Boris could have had it last time, as could Gove. But I suspect that both saw that it was a chalice from which only a fool would drink.

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A Tale of Two Shakespeares

2018-02-18T20:42:24Z

Coincidentally I have watched two movies about William Shakespeare within a week.

I took Roland Emmerlich's "Anonymous" (2011) to be a playful and enjoyable piece of historical tosh -- theorizing as it did that the Earl of Oxford wrote all of Shakespeare's plays.

Rhys Ifans was splendid as Edward De Vere/Oxford. Rafe Spall played Shakespeare as a comedic oaf with elan and enthusiasm. Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave played the young and old Elizabeths. Richardson is of course

Redgrave's real-life daughter. Edward Hogg was magnificent as Robert Cecil.

And the CGI to create Elizabethan London was nothing less than brilliant.

Oh, and Mark Rylance was in it as well. And Derek Jacobi gives the prologue and afterword.

Why, I wondered, did it divide the critics?
It transpired that Emmerlich seemed to believe that all of this was true! So, far from it being a happy romp of historical nonsense, Emmerlich was on a mission.  The problem with this, of course, is that if you want to create a conspiracy here, you have to twist the facts beyond credibility. Indeed, going into the fact-twisting and blatant falsehoods in the film would be wearisome (not least getting the wrong "Richard" play at the time of the Southampton/Buckingham rebellion). Elizabeth seems to have bastard children all over England. Well, it's all rather mental.
6/10
Just as enjoyable was BBC Films' "Bill" (Richard Bracewell, 2015) from the crew that made Horrible Histories (which ceased production in 2012, leaving many of them at a loose end).
This too takes liberties with history, but it wears this on its sleeve. It covers the "lost" period of Shakespeare, and hypothesizes a plot involving Philip II of Spain seeking to blow up the queen at the end of a Shakespeare play.
It is genuinely funny. The cast take on five or six roles each and at times one is reminded of Monty Python and Life of Brian. There are knowing nods to history, and rampant moments of surrealism. Simon Farnaby as the Earl of Croydon ("where?" "Do you know Penge?") is superb. Farnaby has popped up in The Detectorists, but he is far better here. The Russian mortgage lenders are a cameo masterpiece. Highly recommended.
7.5/10

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peterbirks @ 2017-12-12T17:47:00

2017-12-12T17:50:31Z

It was interesting to see a Merryn Somerset-Webb tweet earlier today (sorry, I do not know the original source), plus her reaction and the reaction of most respondents (sample given).

The clip was of a proposal that mothers in the UK should receive shopping vouchers as an incentive to breast-feed their babies.

The response was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of disbelief mixed with anger.

All completely understandable. How many of you took on a surprised look and said "That's ridiculous!"

 
But let's have a think about it. First, there are really two issues at play here;

1) Should we be doing this?

2) Irrespective of that, does it work?

To answer the second part first, what's most fascinating about the strategy is that, in the developing world, it has been shown to work.

Immunization programmes in Udaipur had not been meeting with much success. This was the case even if the immunization course was free. The reason is one that people think about the present in a very different way that they think about the future (see Thaler and Sunstein, "Nudge", Penguin 2008). This "time inconsistency" meant thta, even though people in Udaipur knew that immunization would probably be of great benefit to them, only 6% of people went through the entire course because the probable great benefit was in the future and the definite minor inconvenience was in the present.

So, in Udaipur they offered 2lb of dal (worth about $1.83 in US purchasing power parity - i.e., not much even to poor people in Udaipur) each time an injection was taken for a child, and a set of stainless steel plates for completing the course.

This increased the completion rate to 38% (from 6%). Not enough to eradicate malaria, but enough to make a difference.

Which brings us on to the "should" part of the question. First one might say "ahh, that's all very well for the ignorant illiterates in the developing world, but it doesn't work for sophisticated people like us". As it happens, we aren't as sophisticated as we think. Indeed in the developed world we respond in similar ways in terms of time inconsistency. And our attitude to health is just as irrational. A small inconvenience now is often enough to overcome a known benefit at a later time. A bar of chocolate now is a lot easier than going to the gym, even though we know that the gym is better for us. But, hey, promise us a nice dessert *if* we go to the gym. Sign me up!

So, that's got rid of the "we are different" argument (at least I hope it has). 

What about the  argument of one of the responders, that one should use education rather than bribery?

Interestingly, this is precisely the argument put forward (by both the right and the left) against such programmes in the developing world. Whether or not it works is irrelevant, it is, say the morally outraged, just *wrong*. It's actually an article of faith. For the left, it is seen to degrade both the briber and the bribee, as if accepting that something as important as immunization can be won over by just a couple of pounds of dal. If it *does* work, then it shouldn't, and we should try to change that.

For the right, it's just seen as wasted subsidy. In the long run, it will create a dependency culture and people will expect to be paid for stuff that they should be doing out of enlightened self-interest. It might work now, but in the long term it will make things worse. Empirically (once again, see "Nudge") this does not appear to be true. Another experiment with nets to protect against mosquitos found that, after some people were "bribed" to use nets the first time, a couple of years later both they *and* their neighbours were more willing to pay for more nets.

Now, in our developed world, the benefits of breast-feeding on a child's health are fairly well-known and agreed. The mothers are not "ignorant" of this. But intention does not lead to action. Time inconsistency rears its ugly head. If these small bribes work, the future benefit to GDP is likely to be far greater than the cost. It is, indeed, precisely the kind of thing that the NHS should be doing, rather than spending nearly all of its money on patching things up that have gone wrong.

But, you'll never get over people's moral outrage at it, form both right and left, because, at heart, it hits at their visceral belief that you cannot put a "price" on health. And if someone proves to them that, quite plainly, you can, and it works, then they get all uppity and say "Well, in a civilized world, it SHOULDN'T". Silly people.

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Albums I've listened to this year

2017-11-26T18:17:16Z

2017 - a year of consumption

Back at the end of November 2016 I decided to keep a list of much of the material that I read, or watched (i.e., books, films and TV series), or music that I listened to for the first time. The general aim was to reach a "target of consumption". I've only got a finite number of years left (as have we all, apart from my two demi-god immortal readers) so I would like to have a rough idea of how many films and books I get through in an "average" year.

My targets turned out in places to be way-too optmistic and in others to be reasonably accurate.

Albums:
I wanted to listen to 200 new albums; I managed 49.

Films:
I wanted to see 100 "new" films; I managed 48.
I set myself 50 Lovefilm rentals, and managed 42, 10 of them in the final month before Lovefilm shut down.
I wanted to watch 100 "recorded" movies from TV, but managed only 40.

On the books front:
20 non-fiction, and I exceeded this with 24.5 (I'm half-way through Paul Johnson's "The Birth Of The Modern"). Four of these were "doorstoppers". So I've done well there.
A target of 40 novels was missed by 8. However, of the 32 I read, three or four were rather long. I could have done better.

TV:
Finally, where I watched far more than I thought I would (at the expense of recorded movies) was TV series. The quality of television drama has improved, and some TV series are closer to "long films". I imagined that I would watch 10 series, and I ended up watching 28.

For films I managed 130 in total, while for books I managed 57. There were maybe three or four more "re-reads" on Kindle (Trollope, mainly).

So, for December. I thought I would do a little of my "best of 2017".

Albums:

Often my favourite album is the last one I listened to. Many of the albums date back decades (I note that the "mean" year is 2004).
So my favourite "oldies but newies" were:

1. A New World Record: ELO

2. Lodger: David Bowie

3: Heroes, David Bowie

4: Five Bridges, The Nice.

Of course I had heard all of these before, but I had not "possessed" them or listened to them all the way through for more than 20 years.

Disappointments were:
All The Young Dudes (Mott The Hoople),
Several other David Bowies
The Nice's Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack
Two early Fleetwood Mac albums.
None of these got many playings.

The best "new" (or newish) albums. Very hard to decide.

1. Planetarium, Sufjan Stevens

2. Public Service Broadcasting Live at Brixton Academy

3. Benjamin Clementine, I Tell A Fly

4. The Far Field, Future Islands

5. Pablo, Kanye West

6. Alone In The Universe, Jeff Lynne's ELO

7. Puberty 2, Mitski

Disappointments were:
Revolution Radio, Green Day;
I like it when you sleep, The 1975;
99%, Kaytranada;
You Want It Darker, Leonard Cohen;
Home Counties, Saint Ettienne;
The Bride, Bat For Lashes;
Sleep Well Beast, The National;
Goths, The Mountain Goats;
A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead;
Skeleton Crew, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

Once again, none of them were awful, but they have't got many multiple plays.

Honourable mentions for "neither old nor really new".
The Origin Of Love, Mika;
Random Access Memories, Daft Punk. Both wonderful.

Public Service Broadcasting and Benjamin Clementine dominate my modern music listening at the moment. But "Planetarium", every time I play it, leaves me aghast at how good Sufjan Stevens can be.

Next blog: Movies, old and new.

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A ship's tale

2017-08-21T13:42:35Z

Now, here's an interesting thing. While the world and his wife/husband/non-specified sexual or non-sexual partner are looking at the "accidents" that the US navy seems to be having, mainly because it appears that its seaman, far from being lions led by donkey, don't really understand that sailing a destroyer is not just a matter of pointing it forward and hoping everyone else gets out of the way, there is a far more interesting, and potentially worrying, ongoing incident in the Atlantic near Las Palmas.

1) A ship catches fire:

Back on August 13th the bulk carrier Cheshire went adrift after a fire broke out in one of its five cargo holds, The vessel as a whole is thought to be carrying some 40,000 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Keep that amount in mind. The IRA pioneered the use of fertilizer bombs but, as CBS News observed, the most spectacular bombings worldwide use this stuff. To turn it into an effective bomb for terrorist purposes you have to "grind it down" – a slow process. But a "big" fertilizer bomb would come in at about 3,000lb. That's about 1.5 tons, give or take a bootload. The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 used a truck loaded with 4,800lb, a couple of tons, of ammonium nitrate.

So, currently there's a fire on board a ship, possibly now in more than one hold, with 20,000 as much ammonium nitrate fertilizer as was used in the Oklahoma bombing of 1995. Let's suppose it's only 1% as effective because it hasn't been "prepared" (I reckon this is a highly optimistic assumption, by the way) it's still 200 times as big as the Oklahoma City bomb

2) The Spaniards fight back

Now, the Spanish authorities have put out a few releases stating that things are "under control", but that's about the most optimistic scenario. They can't put out the fire (it might even be getting hotter). Clearly, given the potential lethality of any exposure ("the largest non-nuclear explosion ever" was how one insider called it) to a blast, you either need to be very brave or very stupid to go anywhere near it. So, basically, we have no idea how much water is being poured on this vessel, and where from. Spain said that tugs were "cooling the vessel from a safe distance", but recent photographs are remarkably thin on the sea.

The AIS (which is how people like us can confirm where it is) has been off since August 15th. So, we *think* it is drifting away from land, but we don't really know for sure. What we do know is that this is a problem with no easy solution. As soon as the fire broke out Las Palmas port responded to a request for the vessel to be brought to land so that the fire could be put out with a curt "fuck off". Basically you can't let this ticking time bomb anywhere near land. And if it isn't near land, it's not easy to fight a fire on a large ship that's drifting and un approachable because of the heat and the danger.

3) What might happen

There is, believe it or not, a historical precedent for this – after a fashion.

The Texas City disaster was an industrial accident that occurred April 16, 1947, in the Port of Texas City. It was the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, and one of the largest non-nuclear explosions. Originating with a mid-morning fire on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp (docked in the port), her cargo of approximately 2,100 metric tons of ammonium nitrate detonated, with the initial blast and subsequent chain-reaction of further fires and explosions in other ships and nearby oil-storage facilities. It killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.

The fire attracted spectators along the shoreline, who believed they were at a safe distance. Eventually, the steam pressure inside the ship blew the hatches open, and yellow-orange smoke billowed out. This color is typical for nitrogen dioxide fumes. The unusual colour of the smoke attracted more spectators. Spectators also noted that the water around the docked ship was boiling from the heat, and the splashing water touching the hull was being vaporized into steam. The cargo hold and deck began to bulge as the pressure of the steam increased inside.

At 09:12 the ammonium nitrate reached an explosive threshold from the combination of heat and pressure. The vessel then detonated, causing great destruction and damage throughout the port. The explosion sent a 15-foot wave that was detectable nearly 100 miles off the Texas shoreline. The blast flattened nearly 1,000 buildings on land. The Grandcamp explosion destroyed the Monsanto Chemical Company plant and resulted in ignition of refineries and chemical tanks on the waterfront. Falling bales of burning twine from the ship's cargo added to the damage while the Grandcamp's anchor was hurled across the city. Two sightseeing airplanes flying nearby had their wings shorn off. 10 miles away, people in Galveston were forced to their knees. People felt the shock 250 miles away in Louisiana. The explosion blew almost 6,350 US tons (5,760mt) of the ship's steel into the air, some at supersonic speed. Witnesses compared the scene to the fairly recent images of the 1943 Air Raid on Bari and the much larger devastation at Nagasaki.

Legal actions continued for a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster

Should the Cheshire blow up at a distance of 150nm from land, we can hope that it will be a spectacular mushroom cloud and nothing more, but there's still 20 times as much on board as caused the Texas City disaster. It could cause a tsunami. So we just have to hope that it doesn't start drifting back towards shore and that it does't explode. 'Cos if it does I reckon it might be a big story indeed.

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Thoughts on an election, week seven

2017-06-07T21:28:47Z

The latest opinion polls have led to a strengthening in the pound. With two polls showing a double-digit lead again for the Conservatives, those who should know better are talking of a 100+ majority.

But let's look at the trends within particular polling methods.

ComRes's last three polls have been:

44:34

47:35

46:34

ICM's have been:

46:34

45:34

45:34

SurveyMonkey's have been:

42:38

44:38

44:36

Opinium's have been:

43:36

43:37

45:35

Meanwhile, YouGov's have been rather constant at 42:38

So, even over the past 10 days, all the pollsters seem to have the Conservative vote as fairly solid, and the Labour vote either flat or increasing slightly. The situation remains: which pollsters do we believe? Or, alternatively, how many 18 to 34 year olds will turn out tomorrow? 50% (2015) or 64% (referendum) or even more? 

With about 70% of this demographic favouring Labour and only 16% voting Conservative, a 15pp increase in turnout would make something like a 3pp difference in the result (which, coincidentally, roughly reflects the difference between the predictions of ICM and YouGov).

I'm going to nail my colours to the mast here and say that my personal feeling is that YouGov has got it right.

Now, Nate Silver wrote an interesting article earlier this week entitled "Are the polls skewed?"

Silver debunks the myth that the polls always underestimate the result because of "shy Tories". He doesn't deny that there are shy Tories; what he points out is that they are only one factor.

He also points out that, although the Conservatives have outperformed the polls 6 times out of the last 7 elections (but only 12 of the last 19), the pollsters might have overcompensated for this. Now, when you work out that the Conservatives have not really outperformed the polls since polls came into being, and that in the past 10 elections when the Conservatives were in front leading up to the election, they *underperformed* the polls in six of them, any assumption that the Conservatives will outperform the polls again is based on very dodgy foundations.

Silver also points out that the pollsters have come up with different reasons for poll misses at different elections. In 2010 they blamed a late swing away from the LibDems. In 1997, 2001 and 2005 they blamed their overestimation of the Labour victory on a low turnout.

As Silver rather pointedly asks "Could it really be a coincidence that all these different errors in all these different elections just so happened to underestimate Conservatives?"

The important point is, the pollsters have "learnt" from their mistakes in 2015, but they have not all learnt the same thing. It could be an overcompensation, it might be spot on.

Anyhoo, for good or evil, I'm going with the tendency to overcompensate and the fact that the Conservatives are ahead to conclude that most of the pollsters have overestimated the Conservative vote, perhaps by 2pp, and underestimated the Labour vote by the same amount. That puts us in the YouGov ballpark of 42:38.

What result does that give us?

Well, it gives my spreadsheet the following:

Cons 327

Lab 242

LibDems 12

SNP 46

PC 3

Green 1

Speaker 1

NI 18

... for an overall majority of a thumping 4.

I always find it funny when politicos "like" anything I post when it supports their party. This is nothing to do with the validity of the analysis -- they just like the result and don't really care how I came by it. if the same methodology had come up with a different result, they would like the methodology less. Go figure.

Now this comes with an important caveat. I'm inserting a big differential in the LibDem vote, not as I originally planned because of Remain vs Leave (that is still there, but muted) but in terms of seats which were LibDem in 2010 and can be won back again, or seats that were won by LibDems in 2015 anyway. If this does not transpire, LibDems could shrink to 6 seats and the Conservative majority would climb to 16.

Now, I am perfectly aware that when I get this wrong, there will be no shortage of people telling me why I got it wrong. That's what always happens in the FX markets and the stockmarkets. It makes one amazed that there aren't more millionaires out there. Everything is obvious after the event. But if you didn't make money on it, I'd have to ask why you waited until afterwards to say why it was obvious.

So I've gone even madder. here are some predictions. These are not the same as my bets. My bets are all about value and I don't think I have had a single bet at shorter than 4/7 (two bets, Lab to win Vauxhall and Lab to win Rhondda).

In Scotland Con to gain:

Perth

Aberdeen South

Angus

Berwickshire Roxburgh & Selkirk

Dumfries & Galloway 

Moray

Ochil and South Perthshire

West Aberdeenshire

Lab to gain from Con

Bedford

Bolton West

Bootle

Brighton Kemptown

Bury North 

Croydon Central

Derby North 

Morley and Outwood

Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport

Weaver Vale

Con gain from LibDem

Possibly Carshalton -- very close to call

Lab gain from LibDem

Possibly Sheffield Hallem -- very close to call

My own bets (when not mentioned above) and which I haven't written off as doomed (i.e., I still stand by them)

Cons to win Birmingham Northfield

Lab to win Halifax

Lab to win Wakefield

Lab over 218.5

Lab over 177.5

Con under 399.5

Con under 370.5

Con under 337.5

Turnout 60-65

Written off bets

Cons to win Tooting

Cons to win Ynys Mon

Cons to win Cardiff South

Cons to win Hove

LibDems to win Bradford East

LibDems to win Birmingham Yardley

LibDems to win Bermondsey (still holding out an irrational hope that Simon Hughes might buck the odds).

Final seat predictions again:

Cons 327

Lab 242

LibDems 12

SNP 46

PC 3

Green 1

Speaker 1

NI 18

Overall majority - 4

comments

Thoughts on a General Election: Week 6

2017-06-02T19:39:33Z

Thoughts on a General Election - Week Six:

Although we've had quite a lot happen in the last seven days, there hasn't been any particular change of trend, strategy or competence. 

Labour has eased McDonnell out of the limelight, presumably because they think the holes in Labour's numbers are now their weak point. Once again, a smart move on Labour's part. 

Corbyn has been eased into the picture with consummate skill. If you had predicted at the start of this campaign that in the final week he would be sitting in front of Peston, telling him that he would keep his allotment if he became PM, I doubt that many would have believed you. Semiologically, this is classy stuff. The underpinning point here is that no chap who owns an allotment *and plans to keep it even if he wins* could possibly be a threat to the British way of life. Genius.

Meanwhile the Conservatives have more problems than you can shake a stick at.

1) They have refocused away from "strong and stable in the national interest"  into claiming to be the best party to deliver a strong Brexit. Unfortunately the "firm on Brexit" line doesn't really work. The LibDem's abject failure to make "Remain" an electoral issue should have been the clue. The voter sees Brexit as something he or she wants the new government to get on with; arguing about who is going to do it better is not really a vote-winner. It's even less of a vote-winner when the only people we have seen on either side who look like they might be really good at it are in the Labour Party.

2) What can one say about May? Even today she was responding to a question with the homily "What we have made absolutely clear is...." presumably without realizing that beginning an answer with this is on a par with "you are feeling sleepy, you are feeling sleepy..." . There's been little strategy and, more importantly, woeful delivery. I don't like to try to read people's minds, but I strongly suspect that even the longest-living, lifelong-loyal Conservatives are going "Gawd, this is embarrassing". It's like those maths lecturers at svchool or college who were so hopeless at social skills that they would spend the entire lesson/lecture talking to the blackboard while writing up equations which the class copied down. You never heared a word he said because his chin was in his chest and he mumbled.

3) UKIP seems to have imploded to about 3%. Curiously, I do not think this will make much difference. It might save a few seats for Labour in that the Conservatives will be unable to slip through "on the rails".

4) LibDems utterly irrelevant. The attempt to mobilize the Remainers just did not work. Half of them had become "let's make the best of it" and two thirds of the 20% left seem to be supporting Labour.

Can Labour win (i.e., form the next government)? I don't think so. Nothing is impossible, but for them to form the next government I think they need three non-correlated events to coincide:

(a) a continuation of the trend of the past three weeks rather than a pause,

(b) for the YouGov assessment of the youth turnout to be right, and for the ICM assumption to be wrong,

(c) Labour doing what the Conservatives did in 2015 -- getting the votes where it matters.

Party workers don't like hard-headed analysis. Because of their emotional investment, they think in terms of "reception on the doorstep". The fact that the pollsters have less than a great track record (despite their protests to the contrary in recent months) serves only to reinforce their belief that "it's not what I'm sensing on the street" has strong statistical validity. It doesn't.

Can the Conservatives win a bigger majority?

It's beginning to look difficult. It keeps coming down to Labour successfully harnessing the youthful vote *in the right places*. It's no fucking use in safe Conservative seats or safe Labour ones. You could have every drinker and eater around Brixton market's Tapas Bars on a Friday evening swearing that they will vote and it won't matter a toss. What are the youngsters going to do in the marginals?

If Labour fail in this, then the Conservatives might, just might, squeak a slightly bigger majority. But their efficiency last time was very high. That is what sets the bar in 2017. The Conservatives don't just have to pick up the votes efficiently, they have to do it even more efficiently than they did last time. A big ask.

I've put numbers for the UK in, plus numbers for the latest polls specific to Scotland and Wales.

Latest prediction

Cons 331

Lab   239

LibDem 8

SNP 49

PC 3

Green 1

Speaker 1

NI 18

Cons Majority of 12.

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Thoughts on a General Election. Week Five

2017-05-26T21:57:01Z

Thoughts on a General Election: Week 5.

The fallout from the "let's raid Granny's home for everything bar £100k" policy generated one of the most abject u-turns in campaign history. Even David Butler termed it "unprecedented" and I reckon he's covered more UK General Elections than anyone else alive.

And it will be too late. As YouGov's poll showed, the so-called "dementia tax" is now stuck in the voters' minds. It's almost as if the Conservatives sat down to try to work out the worst kind of typically Corbyn proposal possible, and then chucked it in their own manifesto.

The impact on the opinion polls was immediate and significant. A "wobble" threatened to become a stroke. A lead of 19pp was down to 5pp in only three weeks. For the first time it was being seriously hypothesized that Labour could get the most seats.

Even Conservative supporters have been calling it "the worst Conservative campaign in living memory". It's probably up there (or, rather, down there) with Churchill's in 1945, which made similar errors and which treated the Labour opposition with a similar scare strategy.

And yet, at 43% to 38% we would still see a Conservative majority. But, probably fatally for Theresa May, it would be hardly any larger than the one achieved in 2015.

The bomb attack in Manchester should have worked in favour of the Conservatives, but Labour had every opportunity to exploit it. They only had to hammer home (a) the 20,000 cut to the police force and (b) that Corbyn had questioned it at the time.

But this seems to be an election of attempted suicides. Corbyn chose instead to focus on how the west must bear part of the blame -- sorry, *responsibility* -- because of its actions in the past. As with the care home cost debacle on the Conservative side, and once again apparently beyond the with of the Party leadership and most of its supporters, the truth of an analysis is irrelevant. What matters is how well it plays with wavering voters and how it will be treated by the other side.

May being abroad, mixing with world leaders, is also something that should work in favour of the Conservatives. Certainly Blair would have been milking it for all it was worth, looking as statesmanlike as possible and "above" the party political fray. The adjective "presidential" was not an insult when it came to Blair. it was how he worked and he was successful at it.

But May is beginning to look significantly second-rate. And her team looks second-rate. They don't seem to have their finger on the pulse of the nation; 

Corbyn's team is in places beyond fifth rate. But McDonnell has turned himself into a friendly reassuring uncle. I wouldn't be surprised if he brought out a pipe, because this is straight out of the Harold Wilson playbook of 1963. And there is some talent in the Labour Party (notably Keir Starmer and -- I am biased here, my own MP Heidi Alexander) . Of course, most of that talent resigned because they thought Corbyn was electoral suicide. What we have got instead is not electoral suicide per se, as what would be elected suicide, because the financial promises are (a) unsustainable (b) disingenuous and (c) gambling on most voters not understanding simple financial facts (such as, if you borrow money to buy an asset, it is still borrowed money; having the asset does not stop it being so).

I assume that there is talent tucked away in the Conservative Party, but I haven't seen much evidence of it in this campaign.

Current seat predictions as of latest poll:

Cons 334, Lab 236, LibDem 10, SNP 47, PC 3, Green 1, Speaker 1, NI 18. 

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On aging and the loss of language

2017-05-21T20:35:45Z

62-year old Anthony Horowitz has said that in recent times he has become "more guarded, more careful and more discreet". All of us old white guys are the same. I hesitate to open my mouth outside the house any more. Our world has become a miserable one of being frightened to talk in case we say the wrong thing, even though we mean no harm. The intolerant Stalinism of youth takes no prisoners.

Background:
Horowittz's (I think, reasonable) point was that Bond (as written by Fleming) was an upper-class Empire colonial. Elba, thought Horowitz, was not right for Bond as Fleming invented him. However, the phrase generated accusations of racism. Horowitz apologized to Elba and Elba was gracious rather than rude in accepting it.
Subsequently, Horowitz wanted to feature a black protagonist in a new novel. An editor in the US warned him off doing this, effectively saying that white people could not create black characters (we are here entering the world of cultural appropriation, and the feeling by people that those not in their own social history are incapable of writing "genuine" characters). As Horowitz observed, that presumably means all of his characters in future have to be 62-year old white Jews. The nature of fiction-writing itself has been annihilated by a US editor.
From my own point of view,the problem is slightly different. But I am not alone.
As people age, their linguistic "free recall" deteriorates. You forget names, you can't get the right word, even though you know you know it. What also happens is that names you learnt later in life disappear faster than names you learnt early in life. And words you learnt later in life also disappear -- get harder to remember.
A few months ago I found myself unable to remember the words "Down's Syndrome". I could remember the world "mongol", because that was the word used to describe someone with Down's Syndrome when I was a child. I first heard the term "Down's Syndrome" when I was about 16, because I remember having to ask what it was.
Anyhoo, I was now in the situation of trying to describe an actor in a TV series without being able to remember the "right" terminology. This was solely because the synapses in the brain, the connections, age just like the rest of your body. Free recall gets weaker. But the synapses, the connections formed when you were aged 0 to 16, they last longer.
Another time, I found myself thinking of the concept of "mixed race" and, once again, the phrase that came first to mind was "half-caste". because, once again, this was the phrase used in my youth. I can't remember when I first heard the term "mixed race", but I was probably at University, mixing with the middle classes *en masse* for the first time.
The "polite" term for people of colour was "coloured" "Negro" was okay and the "n' word was rude. There was the National Association of Coloured Peoples and Martin Luther King referred to "the Negro". "Black' as the de rigeur word came in in the late 1960s.
The word "spastic" was the norm (remember it was called "the Spastics Society" at the time. I did now know the words "cerebral palsy" or "spina bifida"). But the terms "spaz" and "mong" were insults. They were rude.
As recently as a decade ago the term, "third world" could be used without insult. Then it became "North" and "South". Today it's called (somewhat inaccurately) "emerging markets".
Other terms that did not exist before I was 18 include "African American", "Native American" (we just said "Red Indian").
Now, my point here is, I might find myself unable to recall the "correct" word or phrase, but I would still know that a new phrase had supplanted it. But someone in their 80s might refer to "coloureds" not because he or she is a racist (although of course they might be!) but because that is the word they used when they were younger. Learning new words gets harder and harder.
So what if that starts happening to me? I start using "unacceptable" words because those are the ones hard-wired into my aging brain. It's not my attitudes that are locked in the past, it's my linguistic capacity.
Youth seems unable to comprehend this, and, by god, if you should happen to use an old-fashioned word, you soon know it from that smug purse-lip smile that they deploy -- meaning "without saying "look how enlightened I am compared to that old fool".
So, far easier to avoid mixing with such people, so that you don't risk the silent mockery.

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Election thoughts: Week Four

2017-05-21T20:34:36Z

Election thoughts: week four.

Last week's trends have continued. The Conservative manifesto was, well, odd. It seemed as if its main aim was to piss off the core Conservative demographic.
The thing that will really hurt the Conservatives from their manifesto is not so much the triple lock (of which,more later) but the new policy on paying for care.
It matters not that the current system is unsustainable and that something needs to be done -- the statement that anyone with more than £100k in assets *including their home* will have to pay for their care, to be claimed back from the sale of the home on death, strikes at the heart of middle-income conservative philosophy. And I'm not sure what planet the Conservative leadership is on, but more than £100k is not a penalty on London and the South-east; TBH, people like me are shrugging our shoulders already and accepting £50k a year care-home costs either for our parents or for ourselves.
But in the conservative rural heartlands, where properties come in at around £200k to £300k, this will be an entirely new cost.
Now, let's be real here, it is not a *tax*. The removal of benefits is never a tax. But it is a *cost*. And it's a cost which will hit those more naturally disposed to vote Conservative.
And, no, I can't work out the thinking either.
As for the removal of the 'triple lock', this is, if anything, even more stupid, although it is unlikely to cost as many votes. Why is it stupid? Because it gets a lot of negative publicity for virtually no likely gain. The remaining "double-lock" is likely, for the next decade, to result in pensions increasing at exactly the same rate as they would have under the triple-lock. (See graph from Institute of Fiscal Studies below).

On the Labour side; well, it doesn't matter if the numbers don't add up, provided you present them with a sense of sincerity and gravitas, rather than swivel-eyed mania. And McDonnell is good at this. He sounds reasonable and sympathetic. It's not the substance of what you say, it's the way in which you say it.

On the LibDem side, well, it just gets worse. The phrase "it's the economy, stupid", goes back a long way when it comes to fighting and winning elections. But one would have thought that, this time at least, the LibDems would have benefited from being a "single-issue" party -- that of Remain.
But it's failed, and looks to be failing very badly. The soft Remainers who now want to get on with making the best of Brexit are splitting roughly according to the opinion polls (proportionately a few more Labour and LibDem, a few less Con and UKIP,but nothing radical). Meanwhile the hardline Remainers (some 22% of the electorate) seem to be splitting two-thirds to Labour and one-third to LibDem (with a very few going to the Conservatives and one dementia sufferer in Norfolk going to UKIP). This is just dreadful for the LibDems, and their only hope now for a decent showing is to focus on those few seats that they might regain after losing them in 2015.

Now, what good news is there for the Conservatives? A little -- just as Labour can suffer a serious hit on their national popularity and still come out with 150 seats, so they can get a serious boost to their popularity without gaining a lot of seats. So, even with the most recent opinion polls (i.e., the ones in the newspapers tomorrow, Sunday) my prediction for the result still runs at a Con majority of about 60. See below.

Con 353: Lab 217, LibDem 10, SNP 46 PC 4, Green 1 Speaker 1 Northern Ireland 18.

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Election thoughts - week three

2017-05-14T12:33:48Z

What is becoming increasingly clear is that Labour is having the best of the General Election campaign, but that this is at the expense of UKIP and the LibDems. The Conservative vote is holding up. This could have two paradoxical effects:
1) It won't make a great deal of difference to Labour seats if they get 28% or 31%. The Conservative majority could vary from, say, 60 to 110, while Labour seats would shift from, say, 160 to 185.
2) But that 30% barrier is important in another way. because if Labour gets 31% this time, Corbyn supporters can say that he performed better than Ed Miliband did in 2015. Far from leading Labour to political destruction, Corbyn and his backers could argue, with some validity, that his view is more popular than was Miliband's.
There is a paradox here, because it could be argued with equal possible validity that the strength of the Labour vote is down to two possible explanations:
a) National: The Labour manifesto is having an effect; the Corbyn campaign is getting through
b) Local: People are voting for Labour candidates who are telling voters that "look, there's no chance of Corbyn forming the next government. But vote for me and I'll be one of the ones getting rid of him"
c) the true position almost certainly being a combination of the two.
That could lead to the farcical situation whereby a person who votes for an anti-Corbyn Labour MP achieves the aim of electing that person, only for that vote also to be taken on a "national' percentage scale as a support for Corbyn's Labour, making it far harder to unseat Corbyn. Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs want to win themselves, but want a national disaster that makes a Corbyn leadership untenable. And many Labour voters probably find themselves in the same boat.

Andy Ward this morning referred to Theresa May as "an empty shirt", and I don't think that's an inaccurate analysis. Home Secretaries are rarely "top tier" (the last before May to become PM was Callaghan, while the last one to become a good PM was Asquith, who was HS from 1892 to 1895) and, let's face it, her coming to the leadership was like something out of Lemony Snicket.

As such the Conservatives are adopting the best strategy -- keep everything tightly under control and reduce the number of even controlled media appearances as much as possible. Northern Ireland was a great place for her to campaign. A good excuse for high security and not a Conservative or Labour Party supporter in sight. I wouldn't be surprised if she popped up next in Gibraltar or the Shetlands. That this is infuriating Labour supporters is just more evidence that this is the right tactic.
As ever, Labour party supporters think that it's about winning the argument, whereas in fact it's about winning the election. Elections in the era of The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Eurovision and "Cash In The Attic" are not the same as elections when Nye Bevan could windbag to 50,000 people and no-one would notice the lack of substance in the (unrecorded) speech.

But Labour can't try to beat the Conservatives at this game. As such, they are probably right to focus on "issues" -- especially ones that appeal to people who don't understand the hard facts of economics. If the Conservatives are the mum and dad saying "it's tough out there, the world is full of enemies, but we must hang together and hunker down as a family", then Labour is saying that the street outside is a wonderful place and let's all go to the sweet shop every day -- that bloke who lives in the rich house on the hill can pay. If a kid points out that there are 500 streets out there and the rich bloke at the top of the hill is unlikely to want to pay for all of them -- and might indeed fuck off to a Caribbean island if we try to make him, well, we can always wheel out Diane Abbott to say that the total cost would only be 6/6d.

For the LibDems, well, a disaster at the moment. No traction. It looks like 80% of the population have shrugged their shoulders over Brexit and said "we might as well get on with it". The UKIP supporters are drifting to Labour or Conservative (even if they came from LibDem in the first place) and the UKIP voters that arrived from Labour appear to be drifting to the Conservatives -- a fundamental shift that probably would not have taken place had UKIP not existed. If the LibDems start shuffling along at 8% and UKIP drops back to 5% (greens on, say, 2%) then we will be close to one of the most binary elections since 1959.

That, however, ignores Scotland which, much as some of would like to, we cannot. The SNP single-party state looks slightly vulnerable to a resurgent and individualistic Scottish Conservative Party. Just as there is a Labour Party in England that is surreptitiously (sometimes not so surreptitiously) anti-Corbyn, it seems plain that the Conservatives in Scotland are campaigning on a distinctly Scottish front. And it is working. On the downside for the SNP there could be a drop to 43 seats or so. More likely, I think, is 49-50 seats, with LibDems taking one and Conservatives taking five or six.

Current prediction is Con 374, Labour 187, LibDem 16, SNP 49, PC 4, Green 1, Speaker 1, NI 18.

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Secondary election thoughts - Week two of campaign

2017-05-06T09:05:49Z

Week Two of the campaign.

A day's silence did Labour and the LibDems no favours -- the quieter the campaign, the better it is for the Conservatives.
Whether or not the Diane Abbott error on LBC will harm the Labour campaign remains to be seen. But I don't think I am going out on a limb when I say that it is unlikely to have converted many to Labour from Don't Know.
The local elections seem to me to have advanced our knowledge of the way this campaign is going in six ways:

Labour will hold up better in Wales than the opinion polls predict.
The Conservatives will do well in Scotland, now being seen as the default anti-SNP vote in many once-solid-Labour seats. May has also adopted a deliberate "one-nation" campaign that doesn't just include Wales and Scotland, but embraces them. The Thatcher Conservative Party was quite simply Middle England and Basildon Man. It was the equivalent of Nixon and Reagan's "Sunshine Belt" strategy and Trump's "Rust Belt" strategy.
May's campaign harks back to the Conservative campaigns in 1955 and, specifically, 1959. The main difference in Scotland of course is that the opposing side is now the SNP rather than Labour.
UKIP is imploding and the Conservatives are the main beneficiaries.
The LibDems haven't achieved a national "all remainers support us" breakthrough. But they don't need to, or even want to. UKIP in 2015 was quite specifically the only "Leave" party, but it did them no good. What the LibDems need to do is focus on heavily Remain seats that were LibDem up to 2015. That might, just might, get them into the 30s.
My current (very tentative, because we've had no opinion polls for a few days and I haven't seriously broken down the council voting) gives Cons an overall majority of 66, Labour on 192 seats, LibDems on 31 and SNP on 45.

Later:
I've been through all the council results in Wales, Scotland and England, and some odd regional differences have appeared.
My conclusion from the regional breakdown is that it doesn't look great for the LibDems in England, and it looks slightly less bad for Labour. Indeed it looked to me that in England the Conservatives would in the main be accumulating votes where they didn't need them.
However, there's a physical band in "middle England", geographically rather than demographically, running from Derbyshire in the East Midlands down through Warwickshire and Birmingham, and into Worcestershire, that seems to be reflecting a particular Lab-to-Con shift. This permeates out slightly to Staffs, bits of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I may adjust my spreadsheet to give Cons a "skew" in this geography, while giving Labour a relative benefit (still an absolute decline, but a relative benefit) elsewhere in England.
Scotland looks better for the LibDems and okayish for the Conservatives.
Wales is looking better than expected for Labour. Plaid Cymru doing better, but probably not enough to pick up any extra seats.
Of course, general elections are very different beasts, and LibDems, as I say above, might well outperform in the right constituencies on the day -- but in past elections this has usually manifested itself in a couple of gains and just as many, if not more, disappointments at targets missed.
Conclusion. I'd mark down LibDems a bit from 31, push Labour up a fraction to 195, Cons flat at 358. But I'll put the geographical loading into the spreadsheet ( a slow job, I fear) to see what difference that makes.

Labour Party campaign addition and a bit of editorializing:
Robert Peston quoted one Labour candidate as follows:
"When I knock on doors I tell people they can vote for me if they like me and not have any fear of Jeremy becoming prime minister - because there is absolutely no chance of that" .
Corbyn was in Manchester tonight to celebrate the victory of Andy Burnham, but of Burnham himself there was no sight.
I received my campaign letter from Heidi Alexander today. She is the Labour candidate for Lewisham East, a staunch Remainer last year and a strong anti-Corbynite. Of the current leader there is no mention in her campaign letter. None.
Peston claims that Labour candidates see Corbyn as "toxic" and that they are adopting an almost LibDem strategy -- fighting as individuals who will represent their constituents locally as individuals.
The Heidi Alexander letter is almost unique in that in the body of the letter she not only omits to mention Corbyn, but she omits to mention the Labour Party. She signs it "Labour Candidate for Lewisham East", and the footer has "Vote Labour".
I don't think I am wrong in saying that all of this is, to say the least, unusual.
Perhaps Peston is wrong; perhaps Heidi Alexander is making a mistake and there's a mass of people out there waiting to sweep Corbyn and socialism to power. But my feeling is that what there is really is a small homogeneous block of mainly white middle-class people, working in academia, teaching, for charities, local government or the NHS, who are mistaking their own wishes and dreams for a national feeling. That small group could be responsible for leading Labour to a horrible defeat.

Conclusion:
All that said, Labour doesn't look to me as if it will melt down as far as some are predicting, and this could be spun into a Corbyn 'victory' of sorts. But any Labour candidates who are looking to win seem to want him nowhere near them. So we have the farce of Corbyn himself being shuttled into campaigning in either unwinnable seats or unlosable ones.
Last time round Labour made the "Echo Chamber" mistake. They aren't repeating that, thank goodness. It's more a matter of an "it isn't fair" campaign, It isn't fair that people picked up on Diane Abbott's incompetence. It isn't fair that the electorate don't get to see how wonderful Jeremy Corbyn really is. It isn't fair that the campaign is focusing on issues different from those which Corbyn supporters consider "important".
This is possibly true (in part). It isn't fair. But to go on about it begins to sound rather like whinging.

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Some early election thoughts

2017-04-18T15:45:47Z

I've been throwing in some preliminary numbers for the election. If I eliminate Scotland, Wales and NI as different regions requiring a different technique, and just focus on the 533 English constituencies, the latest polls indicate as a baseline C +6%, Lab -7%, UKIP -4% and LD + 5%.
However, applying this in a blanket fashion to all 533 constituencies would obviously be a mistake.
What I planned to do was to take the voting in the 2016 referendum and to "map" it onto the 2017 election (not as easy as it sounds because the constituencies were not precisely the same). For every percentage point that the referendum vote moved away from 52%:48% in the direction of "leave", I would add 0.7% to UKIP and subtract 0.7% from LD. Now, for want of a lack of certainty, I did not plan to map any pro- or anti-Leave skew to Lab or Con's vote in the forthcoming election. That might well be wrong, but I don't think it will be massively so.
It's taken me a couple of hours to put together the "database". I'll update in future on how I see this affecting the predicted result. And, of course, I'm yet to start on Scotland or Wales, where it's such a tough call to design an algorithm that I will probably just analyze it seat by seat.
In case I haven't expressed this sufficiently clearly, let's take a hypothetical "Remain", "Labour Held" seat which in 2015 voted:
20,000 Lab
16,000 Con
12,000 LD
5,000 UKIP
It voted 53:47 for Remain.
So our base result would be:
18,600 Lab
16,960 Con
12,600 LD
4,800 UKIP.
However, there's a 5 percentage point difference in favor of Remain from the national result in 2016. Applying the skew to the base result, we get:
18,600 Lab
16,960 Con
13,041 LD
4,632 UKIP
In this particular case, there would be no change, either as a result of the base swing or as a result of the fact that the constituency was pro-Remain. I'll have to go through each of the 533 seats (well, I'll have to design a function to tell the spreadsheet to do it and to highlight the changes in various colours, then to add up the totals! another couple of hours' work) to see how it might affect the final result.

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Year of consuming media

2017-01-29T19:36:18Z

This year I decided to list all of the new albums (or old albums that I no longer or had never possessed in physical form) I have downloaded, all of the films and TV series I have watched, and all of the books I have read.

I set myself some ambitious targets: 200 albums, 250 movies, 10 TV series and 60 books, divided 40 fiction to 20 non-fiction.

I also allowed myself a December 1st start, so I really had 13 months rather than 12 (part of the reason was that I still had a strange hankering to go to Las Vegas this December coming, although this of course depends on my health, my mum's health, and the State of the Union in 10 months' time).

Anyway, I'm two months in, and I've been going OK. 17 albums, 28 movies, 16 books, of which seven were non-fiction. Mainly as a personal record, but also public, just in case anyone is interested, here it all is.

The 'new' albums were:

Skeleton Crew	Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds	2016
Random Access Memories	Daft Punk	2013
Album	Girls	2009
Heroes	David Bowie	1977
All The Young Dudes	Mott The Hoople	1972
New World Record	ELO	1976
Alone In The Universe	Jeff Lynne's ELO	2015
In The Now	Barry Gibb	2016
Mr Wonderful	Fleetwood Mac	1968
Fleetwood Mac	Fleetwood Mac	1968
Puberty 2	Mitski	2016
Bury Me At Makeout Creek	Mitski	2014
A Moon Shaped Pool	Radiohead	2016
My Woman	Angel Olsen	2016
Retired From Sad, New Career In Business	Mitski	2013
Lush	Mitski	2012
Lodger	David Bowie	1979
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)	David Bowie	1980

Of these, Mitski's third and fourth albums have probably got the most airplay (Jeff Lynne and ELO have run her close).

The films I''ve seen are:

Sully		2016
Hell or High Water		2016
Arrival	Denis Villeneuve	2016
Anthropoid	Sean Ellis	2016
Don't Think Twice	Mark Berbigilia	2016
Other People	Chris Kelly	2016
Arq	Tony Elliott	2016
Free State Of Jones	Gary Ross	2016
Nocturnal Animals	Tom Ford	2016
Denial	Mick Jackson	2016
La La Land	Damien Chazelle	2016
Resistance	Amil Gupta	2011
Safety Not Guaranteed	Colin Trevorrow	2009
Mustang	Turkey	2015
Anomalisa	Charlie Kaufman	2015
Embrace Of The Serpent		2015
Stray Cats		1971
Stalingrad	Joseph Vilsmaier	1992
V/H/S		2013
Lesson Of The Evil	Takashi Miike	2014
Surrogates	Jonathan Mostow	2009
Bad Lieutenant	Werner Hersog	2009
Macbeth	Justin Kurzel	2015
Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone	Chris Columbus	2000
Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets	Chris Columbus	2001
Bad Timing	Nic Roeg	1980
Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban	Adolfo Cuaren	2004
Warm Bodies	Jonathan Levine	2013

Nothing a 10 out of 10, although some of these films were very good indeed. Sticking in my head as "really would like to see again" are "Safety Not Guaranteed" and "Macbeth". "Arq" is an interesting piece of low-budget science fiction. Might give that another go.

Non-fiction was:

Title	Author	Year
The Pity Of War	Niall Ferguson	1998
Anti Fragile	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	2012
Black Box Thinking	Matthew Syed	2015
The White Nile	Alan Moorehead	1960
The Year Of Reading Dangerously	Andy Miller	2014
The Subterranean Railway	Christian Wolmar	2006
War Of The World	Niall Ferguson	2006

All of which were worth reading. Niall Ferguson is going up in my estimation. He can be deliberately contrary, but his research is sound and his writing is solid without being boring. "The Year Of Reading Dangerously" is the only "light" book, and was very enjoyable.

Fiction was:

The Luminaries	Eleanor Cattom	2013
Deptford Trilogy Book 2	Robertson Davies	1975
Timbuktu	Paul Auster
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana	Umberto Eco
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets	JK Rowling	1998
Deptford Trilogy Book 3	Robertson Davies	1977
The Quarry	Iain Banks	2013
Harry Potter And ThePrisoner of Azkaban	JK Rowling	1999
A Possible Life	Sebastian Faulks	2013

And I'll probably finish Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire tonight.

Of these "The Luminaries" is easily the strongest. The Eco was the hardest work. The Deptford Trilogy I found less engaging than some people seem to. Harry Potters' "Azkaban" is very well written.

The TV series are:

Breaking Bad Season 3	12 episodes
Westworld Series 1	10 episodes
The OA	8 episodes
Sherlock 4	3 episodes
Victoria 1	8 episodes
Fleabag 1	6 episodes

Westworld and The OA stand out, with the former probably sneaking it. Sherlock 4 was rather disappointing. Fleabag had its moments, but was far less "revolutionary" than the critics claimed.

I'll admit, it's only when you list the things that you've read/watched that you realize how much stuff you consume. Is it "wasted" time? I don't think so. Watching "Homes Under The Hammer" or "The Great British Bake Off" or "Rip Off Britain" or "Storage Hunters" is "wasted" time (albeit not unenjoyable).

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It's a new dawn, a new day, a new life, and I'm feeling shit.

2016-10-05T13:29:01Z

So May has clearly gone way beyond Miliband-lite in terms of economics and fiscal policy, way left of Blair and Miliband.

Have Corbyn and Ronald McDonnell succeeded in shifting the economic agenda towards interventionism in the same way that UKIP and the right of the Conservative Party have succeeded in shifting the social agenda towards protectionism?

Not really. I think that interventionism and protectionism (of which nationalism is merely an extreme example at the individual level) go hand in hand. The world is shifting away from the orthodox economic line of Reagan and Thatcher that "the markets know best" because, quite clearly, the markets have been shown to be wanting.

Since labour is a form of capital, free markets love free movement of labour. It reduces one capital expense. They hate interventionism because it stops the inevitable upward flow of wealth in an uncontrolled economy (as evidenced by the change in relative incomes between "ordinary" employees and the top 5% of earners since 1975).

The "let the markets do their job" advocates are really a busted flush because they assumed that making "ordinary" people better off in absolute terms (because of advances in technology) would make them happier. If they had looked at their own lives they would have realized that it wasn't the money that mattered so much as having more money than your rival.

We are entering an interventionist age (in Britain, marked by May's namecheck of Clement Attlee, support for workers on boards) and with interventionism will come protectionism. With protectionism will come nationalism and with nationalism will come restrictions on movement of labour. 

That is how the apparent paradox of May appearing to shift to the left and to the right simultaneously resolves itself. They are both part of the same shift; we just choose to give them different labels.

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Life's a pain

2016-07-17T21:54:21Z

Chronic pain is a strange thing. If I ever wondered why people went quiet during periods of sustained illness, well, I don't now. It's not a matter of wanting to be alone; it's just a matter of pain being so much to the forefront of your mind that you can't really be bothered with much else.

As many of you know, because I have no compunction sharing stuff like this (bugger this stiff upper lip, crap), I've been suffering shoulder pain for just over three months now. So I reckon that qualifies as "chronic". It's nothing compared with the pain that many people suffer. Some (such as Prince) effectively die as a result of chronic pain. However, it's irritating because diagnosis is proving elusive, and that means prognosis is difficult. Also the pain is of varying types (skeletal, muscular; throbbing, dull ache) and is occasionally acute, because my shoulder also suffers restricted movement, and if I make the mistake of going beyond that range, I'm in agony for a few minutes.

But that's by the by. I'm not dead and I don't think I am dying. What I have changed is my prorities. Basically I just pray for a reasonable night's sleep. Sometimes I wake up once (about 3am), and I need to roll around on the foam roller for about 15 minutes. For the rest of the time the sleeps is reasonable. That qualifies as a great night. The bad nights are disturbed sleep for about 90 minutes, have to get up, an hour of foam rollers etc etc, back to bed, awake again 90 minutes later. Eventually I get up in the morning feeling worse than when I went to bed the night before.

It doesn't make the nights much to look forward to. But (and I guess this is the point) it all goes to prove what we all secretly know anyway -- that happiness is relative. Those decent night's sleep when I wake up feeling refreshed and (for a while) almost pain-free, leave me almost ecstatic with joy. I'm the happiest man alive, I feel. And the bad times? Well, occasional feelings of despair, but they are only brief. I just tell myself that tomorrow might be better and that I am strong enough to get through this. It's a battle I am playing with pain, with "playing" being the operative word. I see no reason to let the bloody thing defeat me, even if it might make me less than 100%.

I've been referred to the muscular-skeletal department at Lewisham Hospital, and am awaiting an appointment. All the treatment that I have had thus far seems to have had random effects -- sometimes temporary relief (a few hours). I suspect any of the other changes have been independent of the osteopath and physiotherapist.

My hunch is that it's a combination of things in the GH and the AC shoulder joints -- arthritis, capsulitis, a torn rotator-cuff, whatever -- which is serving to make a diagnosis difficult because it isn't a single problem. Arthritis in the AC makes sense because of the weight training. Capsulitis in the GH is not that uncommon for people my age. This leads to inflammation, grinding, all the different kinds of pain, all of which can "come and go". I'm kind of hoping that an x-ray and a scan will at least help them define what the problem is. It's not so much a paucity of possible treatments as a plethora of them, with somethings working for some people and some things making it worse. Without an accurate diagnosis it really is punting in the dark.

Oh well, tonight is another night and tomorrow is another day.

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peterbirks @ 2016-07-03T18:00:00

2016-07-03T18:07:05Z

The Food Programme on R4 at lunchtime was an interesting "single issue" take on the referendum with, I thought, a balanced look at the pros and cons.

One thing that struck me was that English farmers clearly depend on cheap east European labour. While the "establishment" warned that prices would rise, the Brexiteer made (I thought) the valid point that it was only economic to grow stuff like turnips and wheat because of cheap labour. It would be better for us to import it (he said) and focus on "added value" or "high margin" products.

The irony of this of course (this referendum is full of ironies) is that the guy on the Remain side was effectively arguing the importance of self-sufficiency in food (the "little Englander" approach) while the Brexiteer was arguing the benefits of global trade, and that "self-sufficiency" in food was an attitude that belonged to the second World War.
Although most farmers (understandably) were keen to remain, the programme fairly interviewed minority groups such as Scottish fishermen, who were elated at the prospect of departing. It also looked at the case of New Zealand, where subsidies disappeared overnight a few decades ago, causing dislocation and a refocusing away from sheep towards beef. But the net result was (eventually) positive.
That is the second obvious irony of the referendum is that those most likely to gain from Brexit are the British young (but they can't see it) while those most likely to lose are the old (and they certainly can't see it).
Already we've seen Carney say that the BoE will likely pump money into the economy (more QE), and cut interest rates. Osborne has effectively scrapped austerity economics. And now Ros Altman (pensions minister) has said that companies will not be pressured too hard to plug pensions gaps in the near future.
These statements, relatively unsurprising (I'd predicted three of them, and the fourth hadn't occurred to me) were what made many of the predictions of independent experts -- much cited by Remainers -- ludicrous; the scenarios made no allowance for government or BoE intervention.

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