Don't Hurry Love

I grew up in Africa where the mail system is somewhat different to the UK.  If I wanted to post a letter from one town to another, I would have expected it to take a week or two.

No, that wasn't a typo: I did say a week or two, even if the distance involved was perhaps 20 miles.  That's how mail worked and what seemed normal to me.  It was therefore a revelation when I came to the UK and found that most mail should be delivered overnight.  And that you could be confident that it would arrive.

However, recently I had to send some important papers to South Africa and so I thought I had better use a courier, both for security and speed.  I will not say which courier, but the clue is in the title.

The pickup was ordered on Tuesday for Wednesday collection. 

The picture above is taken from the web site and shows that in two days the parcel has got as far as Heathrow Airport.  According to Google Maps, this is a journey of under 30 miles.  Google Maps also has a cute feature that estimates how long it would take to walk that distance.  Here's what they say

Yes, that's right: If the courier had walked it would take less than seven hours.

At this rate, I calculate the parcel will be delivered in a bit over a year. 

Consequently I feel a little aggrieved at being charged £45 for "courier delivery".

It takes me back to my childhood, where post was a "hit and miss" matter and I have to say I have noo feelings of nostalgia for this kind of service.

Don't Hurry, Love.

UPDATE

The bloggers code of ethics compels me to add the following update to this fast-moving story (and parcel).

As shown above, the parcel has now arrived in Cape Town.  This journey of about 6,000 miles, was apparently done in 3 hours, or approximately at an average speed of 2,000 mph.  That's 50% faster than Concorde.  I can only think that the courier company, in response to my original blog, purchased an SR-71 Blackbird to peform the delivery.

I am impressed!

Referendum Myths and Irrelevancies

I am annoyed at the pathetic levels to which both campaigns have stooped and - in something of a rush - I've picked out some of the worst arguments from both sides.  Anyone want to add to these?

FPTP is Fairer / AV is Fairer

An argument can be made for both systems on the basis of fairness.  FPTP does select the single most popular candidate.  AV does select the candidate that has the broadest appeal. 

What neither campaign is saying is that a lot of the time, AV and FPTP will select the same candidate:

•  When one candidate gets 50% + 1 vote on the first round
• When the leading candidate on the first round manages to get to 50% + 1 vote after votes have been redistributed in subsequent rounds.

I don’t know and I haven’t done the analysis, but I expect that most MPs elected at the last election under FPTP would have been elected under AV.

AV is complicated

Oh, it so is.  Especially if you struggled to get past junior school.  However, for anyone who manages something as simple as working out what to serve at a dinner party (“Stephen doesn’t like curry and Amy is lactose intolerant so let’s serve chicken and vegetables”) it’s a breeze.

Really.

The No Campaigners are Bullies

Life is hard.  Get over it.

AV is Expensive

First off, the No2AV campaign count the cost of the referendum itself: that's outright misleading.  Second, they make some big assumptions about the costs of AV.

AV probably will be a bit more expensive to run than FPTP.  But in terms of government expenditure, the amount is tiny: a fraction of 1% of the education budget, for example; a miniscule fraction of a fraction of 1% of the overall government budget.

Hardly Anyone Uses AV

A challenging point for two reasons.

Firstly, if we are to look at which is the most popular system of government in the world today, we’d probably come up with repressive dictatorships.

Second, one of the few governments using AV is Australia and their economy is doing very well, thank you.  If that’s what AV delivers, I’ll have it now, please.

Under AV, MPs will have to work harder

Oh yes, this is a lovely one to play to the angry voters after last year’s scandal.  Unfortunately, it’s not true.  There would still be plenty of safe seats (although some of them would change hands).  More importantly, there would still be plenty of hard working MPs.  My own MP has one of the safest seats in the land and yet remains immensely hard-working and never complacent.

…

That’s said, how will I be voting?

I’m not 100% set one way or the other.  However, I am leaning towards AV: it seems to me that  a system designed to get the approval of the broadest number of voters has a lot to recommend it.

Boxing clever

Today I feature a guest post by a friend of mine, David Burke.
---

In Praise of Stand-Alone Post Boxes

There is a Western European nation that suffers long, damp, moderately cold winters. To reduce energy use, it builds new houses with double glazing, walls, roofs and floors with high insulation levels and requires high performance gas boilers. Grants are available to upgrade existing houses. In some cases external doors are insulated. 

This same nation, having done all it can to reduce the carbon footprint of the house, then permits a hole of about 50mm by 300mm to be cut in the external door. This hole is usually fitted with a metal draught flap (sometimes a poor performer) which, after occupation, is often held open, sometimes all day thus obviating much of the benefit of all that energy saving construction. 

The Western European nation is, of course us and as you will have guessed I'm talking about the letter box. The letter box as we know it, is a bit of a villain really. Not only does it lose energy when the flap is held open all day with letters, but it requires the postman walk all way from the road to the house to make a delivery, it's often in an awkward position requiring the deliverer to perform minor gymnastics and once found it can have a nasty bite, scraping hands and fingers. And that is without taking account of the dog behind the door!  And, of course it provides a welcome starting point for the burglar. So why do we do this? Is the no other way of dealing with the household delivery of letters and papers?  

Well, I have no answer as to why we do it, except perhaps that we have always done it.  But there is a way to over come the problems presented by our little friend, the letter box. 

In Australia no front door has a hole cut in it. Or in New Zealand. I don't think that they do it in the USA either (to name but a few). Instead, they provide a letter box at the road side. Sometimes lockable, sometimes not.

The benefits include :-

1. Reduced energy loss
2. Reduced price for the door
3. Reduced carbon for postal delivery as times are reduced and they can often be be done by bicycle
4. Improved efficiency for Post Office as productivity will rise.
5. Improved security
6. Improved convenience as deliverers will have easy and simple access to the delivery point.
7. Reduction in the minor injuries that badly placed and awkwardly designed letter boxes cause.

Set against this are two things: the cost of providing an external box, although this will be partly  offset by the savings to the door, and our cultural wish to have our post delivered to our front door.

If you don't want to do a something then you will always be able to show it can't be done, however I think that the benefits to the nation, of providing kerb edge post boxes far outweighs any initial cost. And the culture? Well how long ago was it when the dustman went round to the back of your house to collect your dustbin? And what happens now?

Finally, the photos (from Australia) show post being delivered by a man on a Honda moped, as well as various post box designs one showing the savings for the post man of not having to walk the length of a huge drive to deliver a letter.      

So there are health and safety advantages, there are energy saving benefits, and there are convenience benefits. Even in these straitened times these seem good enough reasons to me to promote a change in the building regulations.  And, of course, the postal service benefits although I'm not sure that you can make a building regulation for that!

D. J Burke FRICS (Rtd) 

50p to set us free

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Just a year ago Mervyn King was expecting inflation to drop back to its 2% target. Instead it’s well north of 5%. Petrol prices are up. The economy is stagnant. While the press and BBC have daily stories about “cuts”, no one talks about the fact that, even with these cuts, government debt continues to pile up and will do so throughout this Parliament.

It’s time to make the one cut needed to kick start the economy. This isn’t the cut of red tape, although that is desperately needed.

It’s time to take 50p off the price of fuel.

Doubtless civil servants at the Treasury will explain this is unaffordable. The opposite is true.

Lower fuel prices will help everyone: the worker paying a lower bus fare, the business on the edge of bankruptcy facing lower costs, the price of practically anything bought on the high street.

By helping the economy, it will lower government payments to the unemployed; it will increase profitability and tax revenues; it will create employment and consequently generate income tax and NI payments; it will help squeezed councils cover the costs of bin collections; it will help rural workers afford travel to their jobs.

It will drive down inflation so that those in poverty are less hard-pressed; those in the middle class will be able to spend more (or pay off debts faster); those looking for bank loans will be better able to justify them.

It will make the UK a better place to do business and make existing UK businesses more competitive overseas.

It’s win-win-win-win-win.

Can the Treasury see it? Write to your MP and tell him to pass on the message:

“Take 50p off fuel and set our economy free”

Enough to set your teeth on edge

I have a new tooth brush and I am not happy.

First of all, it came in packaging that required garden shears to open.  I tried the big kitchen scissors but I knew they would be no blasted good and I was right.  I was ready at that point to throw the damn thing away (toothbrush, not scissors) but my dearly beloved wife said she would do it, as she always does when I get grumpy.  So she got the garden shears and eventually extracted the device from its packaging but even then the severed plastic ended up cutting her finger so there were great gouts of blood spurting everywhere.

Next I actually wanted a toothbrush that takes batteries.  There is a good reason for this.  Some years ago I went to California on business.  I was staying at the Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara.  On arriving in my room, the door had barely shut before I heard this really annoying buzzing.  I couldn't work out where it was coming from.  I turned off the air conditioning and it remained.  I listened by the fridge, but no sound.  With five nights planned, I knew it would drive me crazy so I turned around and went back to reception and demanded another room.

Actually, that's not true.  They had been extremely pleasant at check in, so I went back and politely requested another room and they could not have been more helpful.  Another room was forthcoming and before I left the desk they were on the phone to the maintenance man to investigate room number one.

Blow me down if the second room didn't have the same problem: a really annoying buzzing at just the perfect level to disturb a good night's sleep, or even annoy me when working in the room.  30 seconds later I was on my way back to reception.

Their smiles were a bit more fixed this time and at the back of their eyes you could see the thought forming "Do we have a nutter here?"  However, their politeness never wavered and they got me another room in another part of the hotel.  I could not believe it when I got into this room and yet again there was this low-level buzzing.  It was at this point that I realised it was coming from my suitcase.  Opening the case, I located the source of the sound as my shaving bag and within that my toothbrush was buzzing away.

This isn't the only time this has happened.  Recently I returned from South Africa to find that my electric toothbrush had gone flat on the flight.  Unfortunately, it was packed right beside my deodorant, and the vibration had caused all the deodorant to leak out and I now hold the world record for the sweetest smelling shaving bag (Guinness Book of Records, 2011 Edition, page 278).

So when I went to buy a new toothbrush, I wanted one with batteries that you can take out when you travel.  However, with an ear finely tuned to customers' needs, toothbrush makers appear to have stopped making these.  You have to buy a rechargeable one.  Like Blackadder in the trenches, it then takes 18 hours to charge.

On the plus side, it comes with a manual.

I don't know what these people who design toothbrushes are thinking, but if your toothbrush needs a manual, you've got it wrong.  We all know how a toothbrush works: you apply some toothpaste to the bristles, aim it at your mouth and away you go.

Not any more.  You have this damn manual to read, and just in case you are bored during the 18 hours it takes to charge the stupid toothbrush, they give you the manual in six languages, four and a half of which I don't speak.

And then it came with this spare toothbrush head that looks like it was designed for a jackhammer.  I have no idea what it's meant for: perhaps removing calluses from feet, removing plaster from walls or possibly crowd control in case of riots.  But it's certainly not going anywhere near my teeth.

So listen up Braun.  Listen up Colgate.  Here is what I want, what I really, really want.

• An electric toothbrush
• That can be unpacked without danger of physical injury
• That can use ordinary batteries.
• That doesn't need a damn manual.
• And comes with a toothbrush head that doesn't scare children, or adults for that matter.

Can that really be too difficult?

Save Your Green Fields!

There is a pernicious paragraph of government policy that will unnecessarily lead to houses being built on hundreds of fields across the land.  To explain what it is and why it matters is a little bit tedious, but I ask you to read this carefully because of the danger being faced.

Across the country, local councils are engaged in a massive exercise.  They are building a plan that will ultimately say how many houses will be built and where over the next twenty years.  Very simply, this process decides

• how many houses are needed
• where they will be put

It's the second part of this we need to be aware of.  Houses can be built either on brownfield (ie previously developed sites such as disused factories) or greenfield (previously undeveloped) land.  As part of the process of building the plan, council officers look at what brownfield land is expected to become available.

However, there is a third category of land we might build on.  Indeed, we build on it every year.  These are so-called windfall sites: previously-developed land that was not known about when the plan was drawn up but that becomes available later.  Pretty much every year developers build housing on windfall sites in my district, and this is common elsewhere as well.

So what you would expect is that a local plan for development in any one district or borough would have a table along the following lines

    Number of new houses needed   10,000
    Houses built on brownfield sites   4,000
    Houses built on greenfield sites    5,500
    Houses built on windfall sites         500

As you can see, windfall sites are a small but significant proportion of the total.  The number can be estimated without too much difficulty by using trends over the past few years.  The 500 houses in the above example would cover a good-sized field.

The problem comes in Planning Policy Statement 3, paragraph 59, which reads

"Allowances for windfalls should not be included in the first 10 years of land supply unless
Local Planning Authorities can provide robust evidence of genuine local circumstances
that prevent specific sites being identified. In these circumstances, an allowance should be
included but should be realistic having regard to the Strategic Housing Land Availability
Assessment, historic windfall delivery rates and expected future trends" 
 
In short, councils are effectively forbidden from including an estimate of windfall sites when drawing up the 20 year plan.
 
The result is simple.  Instead of the table above, you'll get
 
Number of new houses needed   10,000
Houses built on brownfield sites   4,000
Houses built on greenfield sites    6,000

Those 500 houses that would have been allocated to windfall sites are now set to be built on greenfield land.  Repeat that process across hundreds of districts and boroughs throughout the country and you will see hundreds of fields being built on unnecessarily.

What do we need to do to avoid this?  The government needs to withdraw paragraph 59 of PPS3, or change it to allow authorities to make a reasonable estimate of what windfall sites may be expected to become available.

This won't happen unless enough MPs feel it's a problem.  So please write to your local MP today.  You can find their contact details here. This is urgent: unless something is done quickly, it will be too late.

You, dear reader, need to take action if this country is to remain a "green and pleasant land".

The future is Not orange, but ...

I would like to take a moment to defend the Liberal Democrats.

No, I am not about to cross the floor.  I am entirely comfortable in the Conservative party.  However …

Every day I listen to Today on Radio4 driving into the office and PM driving home.  On several occasions I have heard interviewers score cheap points off LibDem MPs, asking how they can possibly be trusted as they have broken so many of their manifesto promises since they set up the coalition government with the Tories.

Yes, they have.  Here’s why.

The unspoken assumption behind any election manifesto is that the party issuing it will win the election, but no party did so this time.  For the Liberal Democrats, the choice was either to sit on the outside looking in while the Tories ran a minority government or to form a coalition and get some of their policies implemented, while others would have to be abandoned.

By the way, it was no different for the Conservatives.  The coalition government will be doing things that simply wouldn’t have happened if the Tories had won an overall majority. 

What’s most important is that this makes good sense for the country.  Both parties have put their tribalism to one side, if only for the moment, so they could get on with fixing so much that is broken.  By working together the two parties are getting more done than would otherwise have been achieved.

This is something that their supporters must remember, despite the frustration that the coalition sometimes brings.

More important, it’s something that must be made clear to mischievous radio interviewers.

Just Pushing Your Leg

There are, I believe, people who enjoy pain just as there are people with blonde hair or clever people or athletes or people who are inclined to be fat.  I don’t understand this but I believe it’s true.

I am not one of them.  My motto is “No pain, no pain”.  One of the really annoying things about pain is that once you have it, it tends to hang around for a while like one of those boring friends who don’t understand body language.

The problem is that I am gullible so when my wife and younger son explained that the Big Issue, which helps homeless people, was a really good cause I agreed and that is how I found myself walking 25km/15.5 miles last night.

It was the 19^th Big London Walk, with a few hundred people walking around London to raise money for the homeless.  Oh, how exciting!  We signed up and I recruited two “friends” from work and we nobly enlisted our friends, workmates and merest acquaintances as sponsors.  Somebody in our team wanted to know if she would get a free jacket and I decided I would bring my stupidly big camera.  Why do Nikon make these so big?  I am sure people buy big cameras with big lenses because they feel inadequate.

Then autumn came.   Cold rain.  Oh joy.  Hourly checks on the weather report by anxious team mates led us to believe the rain would drift away as the walk started. And so we met up in the late evening of 1^st October at the Imax theatre near Waterloo station.  Yes, there were free shower-proof jackets, but apart from a few spots of rain we didn’t need them.

Off we went, with the “fast” walkers.  Zip, zip.  Vim and vigour.  Enthusiasm. Past the Oxo tower, Tate Modern and HMS Belfast and over Tower Bridge, which looked gorgeous in the evening light.  Then the first rest stop but we were through it quickly.  It was midnight and we still had 12½ miles to go.

Fortunately we had with us the 3^rd Best Novice Orienteer in the UK.  So after the rest stop we set out briskly past the Royal Courts of Justice.  Some walkers behind us popped up Greys Inn Road but the Third Best Orienteer (Novice Category) in the UK told us they were wrong.

It’s a funny thing with orienteering.  A fold in the map can be very misleading.  Indeed it was.  It took us half a mile out of our way; a critical half mile, although at the time we were blithe and ready to walk fifty miles.  We got back on the right route and stopped off near St Pancras, the second rest stop.

After this stop, some of us decided we weren’t walking fast enough so they picked up the speed.  Some of us were more civilised.  We cruised through Camden, over the lock (what’s a lock doing so far from the Thames?) past a strip joint called the Spearmint Rhino and some ladies with pelmets.  Third stop.  We’d been promised chocolate brownies at one of these stops and were getting hungry.  Some of us set off at high speed on the next leg.  Some of us were more civilised and sauntered, mainly because our legs were starting to develop this pain thingy.  I don’t know if I have mentioned it, but on my list of Top 100 Things I like, pain doesn’t even make it to position 1000. 

We were now somehow going down the “Outer Circle” of Regents Park.  Very Posh.  I would have been in awe but my brain kept getting interrupted by my wimpy hip, which was complaining that it needed an operation and now would be a goodtime for it.  I managed to shut it up by pointing out that the Outer Circle was a closed road and no ambulance could get there.  Then the bloody calves and thighs started whining.

I can tell you that Outer Circle is a very long road.  One big consolation was that at least I wasn’t walking as fast as some members of the team and therefore logically they must be feeling more pain.  Yes!

Well there was just no point in stopping at the next rest point.  My hip, thighs and calves were clearly plotting against me and I just knew they would insist that I sat down and then they would mutiny at the first sign I wanted to leave so I foxed them and walked past the rest near Centre Point.  Down Great Russell Street, down Southampton Row and then a right turn and through a very quiet Covent Garden.  Surprising, really.  I’d been told that Covent Garden was a buzzing centre of London Fun but all we saw was somebody sitting on a step.

The lower body extremities had caught on to my dastardly trick.  They tried going on strike but I caught them in the nick of time.  My two loyal sons, Craig and Anthony, had taken turns carrying the heavy camera.  3am.  How long can this stupid walk take?

Suddenly we found ourselves in a very dodgy area.  Dark, mysterious and threatening people.  I couldn’t care less.  They couldn’t hurt me more than my legs.  Past St Martins in the Fields.  I wondered how far ahead some of my team were.  The impatient ones.  I tried to call them but their mobile was switched off.

Now, the finish line was ½ a mile away.  Unfortunately some clever clogs had decided that instead of going straight there, we should go via the Lambeth Bridge, which is so far south it’s practically in Brighton.

My legs decide to play good cop with me.  “Look”, they say “just over there, a few hundred yards away, is the end.  You really don’t need to walk those extra two miles, do you?  Remember … they have a massage at the end.”  This is very persuasive.  I look left at Westminster Bridge and Big Ben.  I concede.  My legs are right.  I have done my best, but it wasn’t good enough.

Then the miracle occurs.

The others in my team phone up. 

“Where are you?” they ask.

“Big Ben” I croak.  I haven’t yet turned left, but the guilt is surging through my veins.

“Big Ben?” they ask.

“Yes”, I reply.  “Where are you?”

“St Martins in the Fields.  How did you get to Big Ben?”

“We didn’t stop at Centre Point.”

“Oh, thanks very much for going on without us,” they say sarcastically.

Oh, great!  They are behind!  A few hundred yards behind.  Adrenaline pumps through my system.  Excluding the leg bits, which are very annoyed because they know now that there is no prospect, no chance whatsoever that I will cheat.  South we head towards Lambeth Bridge as Big Ben chimes 4am.  Well, the others “head”.  I hobble.

Do you have any idea how steep Lambeth bridge is? 

At the top there is a good view of the London Eye.  I stop to take a photograph.  Later on, I see it is blurred.  I am conscious that the others are doubtless increasing their pace to try and catch us.  

Now there’s just a mile of the South Bank to walk along.  I cannot possibly imagine walking that far.  I have to do this one lamppost at a time and explain to the calves, thighs, hip and back (yes, my back is snivelling now) that we are just walking to that lamppost.  No that one.  And the next one.  And on.  We cross the road by the Westminster Bridge.  Getting close and no sign of the others.

And then suddenly, there they are.  Merrily chatting and walking as though they have just set off.  Oh, how smug they are and they cruise past, just as we get to the London Eye.  They talk some tosh about going for a personal best.  Well, sweetie, so am I.  If I don’t die before the end that will be my personal best.

I think I have slipped into a delirium because suddenly I find myself turning right at Waterloo Bridge and a few hundred yards later it’s the finish line.  A medal.  A medal?  Is that bloody all, scream my legs and back.  No, I reply.  Come with me.  And just over there are three sports scientists from University of Kent who have got up at stupid o’clock so that they can offer massages to the walkers.

 

My body cheers while whispering “Don’t even think of doing this again next year.”

So, I have a suggestion: if you are the kind of person who enjoys pain, have a go at this.  You’ll feel immense pain while raising money for charity. 

Win-win.

Footnote: we take a train back to Hook and arrive just in time to see a glorious sunrise.  This is the point where I am supposed to write that the sunrise made it all worthwhile.  It didn’t.  But it was a pretty sunrise.

Credits:  This walk wouldn’t have happened without our sponsors.  So thank you very much Alicia, Alison, Allan, Andrew, Andy, Anna, Anton, Christina, Claire, David, Doug, Faye, Geoff, Hasit, Iain, In San, Inderpal, Jamie, Joe, John, Lawrie, Leigh, Mariana, Marisa, Mark, Michael, Neil, Pascale, Paula, Robin, Ruth, Sara, Scott, Simon, Suzanne, Verity and Viv.  As I write this, we have raised £987.22.

The Thin Blue Line

As we look to the future and how the UK government spends its money, it may be worth while looking to the past.  How did we spend money then?  Why have things changed?

Fortunately, there is a wonderful web site that makes it possible to do just that.  It's called UK Public Spending and it tracks budgets (and lots of other interesting numbers) over the past 20 to 30 years.  I looked at it the other day when I was wondering about where it made most sense to make cuts.

Here's a chart I made, comparing spending on Defence with spending on Health.  In 1990, for every £100 we spent on Health, we spent about £80 on Defence.  Today, for every £100 we spend on Health, we spend £20 on Defence.  To put it another way, in 1990 Defence represented 11.6% of the Budget and Health 16.6%: today, in the middle of the war in Afghanistan, Defence represents 6.7% of the Budget and Health 35.9%.

Here's a graph that shows it.  Blue is Defence, Green is NHS.  Click on the graph to see it in full size.  The bars show each department's funding as a proportion of the budget: the lines show each department's budget as a proportion of GDP.

So if you were looking for savings, where would you look?

The next Labour Prime Minister

As we move into the last days of the Labour leadership contest, it's worth wondering who will be the next Labour prime minister.

The problem is that, I suspect, it will be none of the above.

I don't think anyone takes the candidacy of Andy Burnham or Diane Abbot seriously.  That leaves the two Milliband brothers and Ed Balls.

Ed Balls was Gordon Brown's closest advisor as he took Britain's economy from being the strongest In Europe to almost the weakest.  If he became the next Labour leader, the Tories would make hay with this.  As for the Milliband brothers, they have lacked political courage.  Where was Ed Milliband (a Blairite) when Tony needed him?  Why did David Milliband not challenge Gordon Brown for leadership of the party?

In short, the Millibands remind me too much of John Major, who was a decent man but an example of the Peter Principle.  Ed Balls was the architect of our current economic disaster and the others won't make it for one reason or another.

So where is the next Labour leader?  How do political parties recover from the kind of electoral collapse that Labour has seen this year?

In the case of the Tories, it took years and a few leaders to come right, but they did eventually regain power.  However, there can be a number of false starts along the way in any such process.  The Republicans in the the USA serve as an example of what can go wrong, being in danger of losing mid-term elections that should be won, as the radical Tea Party pulls them to extremes.

It would be a shame if this happened to Labour.  Democracy does best when there is a vibrant opposition, well led that poses a real intellectual and political threat to the government.  Sadly none of the candidates for Labour leadership look set to lead such a revival.  Ask any Tory which of these candidates he fears and the reply will come "None of them."

Years ago my elder son was running for election at university.  In addition to each of the candidates, the students had the option of voting for none of the above by ticking the RON (Re-Open Nominations) box, which they quite often did.  It's a pity that this option is not open to Labour voters, because if they want another Labour Prime Minister it won't be any of these five.

The Few

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend the Battle of Britain ceremony at RAF Odiham.  The ceremony, of course, remembers the RAF pilots who defended this country during the Battle of Britain seventy years ago.

There was a flyby by a Spitfire.  Sadly my eyes are not as young as they were but I thought it looked like a late model Spitfire and every eye followed it as it danced in the  sky.

There were also two flybys by Chinooks, which are awesome up close.  RAF Odiham is the home of the Chinook squadrons in the UK and these Chinooks are closely involved in the war in Afghanistan.  At any one time, a third of the Chinooks are in Afghanistan and about a tenth of the service men and women are there too.  They transport thousands of tons of supplies: they move troops; they rescue them, in many cases seriously wounded from the middle of firefights.

One example of the danger they face is the case of Flight Lieutenant Fortune, who flew into the middle of a firefight to evacuate wounded soldiers.  Taking off he flew directly over a hidden Taliban machine gun nest, was shot and yet continued to fly the Chinook and its wounded passengers to safety and land it.  On a number of occasions Chinooks have been hit.  The design of this amazing aircraft and the skills of the pilots and aircrew keep them flying in extraordinarily challenging conditions.

So last night while we remembered the Few of 1940, I was very conscious of the Few of 2010 who maintain the best traditions of Royal Air Force.

Banking on the Chairman

A few years ago I was unhappy with Lloyds Bank so I wrote their Chairman, Maarten van den Berg, a letter.

Dear Maarten

Surely it's impossible that there should be a run on Lloyds Bank. After all, with 2002 interim results for the Lloyds TSB Group showing a total income increasing by 4% to £4,911 million and operating expenses falling by 1%, this must be a healthy business, right?

And yet, one has to wonder just how these results are achieved. Sometimes it pays to look at the fine detail: the bank in microcosm; the anecdotal evidence; the holistic approach; the 360 degree input.

For example, a friend who has banked at Lloyds for decades mentioned to me recently how unhelpful her local branch in Wokingham has become. I wondered whether this was just one of those things that happens in big organisations until last week when I wanted to deal with my local branch.

Now, I am sure you are a busy man, but I do need your attention to the fine detail here. Eight years ago when my wife and I came to the UK we opened an account at your Basingstoke in the Basingstoke Mall as we were both working in Basingstoke. Some time later we wanted to put share certificates and Ernie bonds into safe deposit. There weren't any safe deposit facilities apparently in our local branch but we were told that if we walked 200 yards up the road to the Winchester Street branch they could help us and we did and they did.

Matters rested there for some time. Life moved on. My wife's job moved her to Hursley (not far from Southampton) and I now work in Bracknell.

We decided to withdraw the documents and share certificates from safety deposit and sell them to pay down our mortgage. I'd guess that the value of these shares and bonds is £40,000, which for someone in your position is doubtless a trifle but means quite a lot to us. So on Saturday 21st September we drove into Basingstoke and called in to the Winchester Street branch of Lloyds TSB to get our documents out of safe deposit.

We were a little surprised to find that the branch office was closed. Basingstoke is not exactly a booming city, but it is a good-sized town and the streets were packed with shoppers. We decided to walk the 200 yards down the road to the Basingstoke Mall branch and found it open. I noticed a counter labelled "Customer Service" and my dearly-beloved wife (not the grumpy one who has the temperament of a bad-tempered Rottweiler with a hangover) explained the situation.

Now you know what comes next, don't you? You're sitting in your executive leather chair reading this letter and thinking "Oh, dear. This is where they tell me that the person behind the counter gave them the verbal equivalent of the one-fingered salute."

You could not be more wrong.

The gentleman we spoke to was polite, pleasant and helpful. He confirmed our observation that the Winchester Branch was closed on Saturdays. We pointed out to him that as we now work many, many miles from Basingstoke, coming in to collect the documents during the week was not practical. He understood at once; he is clearly bright and helpful and trying to offer good service to customers. He said that if we wrote him a letter at the branch in Winchester Street, where he normally works, he would arrange for the documents to be available the following Saturday in the Basingstoke Mall branch. Coming back the following week was not really convenient and, given we have a mortgage that charges interest on a daily balance, was going to cost us some money but on the other hand I could understand that he could not open the branch especially for us. So we agreed to write a letter, which I did that evening, posting it off first class on Monday 23rd September.

Yesterday, Saturday 28th September, armed with our passports as proof of identity, my wife and I toddled into Basingstoke Mall Branch. The lady behind the counter seemed a little pre-occupied with paperwork and I wondered briefly why she should prefer paperwork to dealing with customers. The answer was not long in coming. Eventually she looked up and asked if she could help us and we explained the situation.

It deeply grieves me to tell you that she was immediately, emphatically and unambiguously unhelpful. She started by crossly telling us that the person we'd spoken to the the previous week was wrong and had no right to tell us that we could collect our safe deposit from the Mall Branch. It was "impossible". I suddenly had a flashback to when I was a small child at school and a bossy headmistress ticked me off for making a mistake. There may be times when making someone crawl with embarrassment and feel an idiot are useful talents to have, but I am not convinced that these ideal qualities in someone who works in customer "service". I also don't see how this correlates with Lloyds TSB's Strategic Aim (as stated in Peter Ellwood's [the MD] briefing to analysts) of "customer value creation, customer trust". However, that presentation was done way back in August and it's a full month later so possibly customer trust is no longer strategic.

But I digress. I will spare you the painful details and leave you with my impressions. In my view this young lady was obnoxious and unhelpful. Some might even say rude. When I explained our difficulty in getting to the Winchester Street Branch during the week her response was not supportive but simply to restate that in no circumstances whatsoever would it be possible to collect our documents from the Basingstoke Mall branch. My dearly beloved wife was at my side, but I did fear that the Rottweiler might appear at any moment, so I sent her off to buy a knife.

In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.

However, all I can say in my defence is that we really do need a new, sharp kitchen knife. Oh, and that these do not appear to be for sale in Basingstoke. While my dearly beloved was away, I tried to reason with this customer service employee. I asked that since she said it was impossible for documents to be made available in the Basingstoke Mall branch and my wife and I work many tens of miles away, what did she suggest as a solution? I tried this question a few times in different forms but each time she just pointed out that it was quite impossible for us to collect the documents from the Basingstoke Mall. She must have thought that I was very dim, since she repeated this, with variations, several times. We would have to, she said, go to the Winchester Street branch during the week to collect the documents. My wife and I are both senior professionals in the IT business and our time is typically charged out at high rates. I asked whether Lloyds would be prepared to recompense us for taking off several hours to make this journey and she said it would be up to the manager.

I then asked to see the manager. She said she would check and then came back a few minutes later to say (with what I thought was satisfaction but cannot swear to it) that the manager was busy and would be for at least an hour, as he had a prior appointment. I asked about the manager's manager (since I needed to be in Reading at about the time the manager would be free) and I was told that he did not work on Saturdays. Nor does the manager's manager's manager. I certainly wouldn't want to face customers who had been given the psychological going over by customer service, if my experience with this lady is anything to go by.

I am sure you will be glad to know that she won. En route to her famous victory, she explained that there was no safe way for Lloyds to transfer these valuable pieces of paper from one branch to another. I wondered how Lloyds managed to transfer other valuable pieces of paper (in the form of £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes) thousands of time every day. Is it not done safely?

I walked out of the branch defeated. It did occur to me to stand in the middle of the branch and explain to the other customers the situation, namely 

• several years ago I made a valuable deposit at Lloyds and 
• when I want to withdraw it they find that this is "impossible" 
• Lloyds own representative has stated that your bank does not have the ability to transfer valuables safely over short distances. 

Then I realised that such suggestions might well cause a dramatic loss of confidence and a run on the bank that might be seen as unreasonable. It seemed to me to be far better to check with you (and who better than you?) that Lloyds is indeed a safe place to bank, that Lloyds will looks after my cash and valuables and - just as important - will return them to me when I need them. I am glad that Lloyds is profitable. I do wonder whether it might be worthwhile spending just a tad more on staff training or recruitment. But most of all, I would like to see two things from you.

1. A letter of apology 
2. A workable suggestion on how you will get the papers that I have in safe custody at your branch in Winchester Street returned to me in good time. Time, in this case, really is money. I am sure that you reached your senior position by being competent and so I am sure it is not beyond your competence to get these papers to either myself or my wife by the end of this week. 

As Peter Ellwood [MD] pointed out in his analyst briefing, 2002 was a challenging year because of (among other things) "low consumer confidence in financial markets and services". Here's your chance to start to turn the tide. Good luck!

The letter was posted at the weekend, first class.

Two days later I received a phone call from my Lloyds bank manager. He explained that my letter had been "very effective" and asked when it would be convenient from him to visit us at home and deliver the papers. True to his word, he arrived with them the following evening (and may I say what a pleasant person he was).

Maarten van den Berg is no longer chairman of Lloyds but I have to say how impressed I was with the speed at which Lloyds fixed things up.  Every large organisation gets things wrong from time to time: I wish most other large organisations were as fast in fixing their errors.

4 million reasons to say "Thank you".

There has been a lot of press in recent days about Tony Blair's donation of the proceeds of his memoirs to the Royal British Legion.

On one hand, the amount of money, typically estimated to be in excess of four million pounds, will make a substantial differenceto the Legion, which looks after the welfare of serving and ex-service men and women.

On the other hand, some have criticised it as "blood money" or as a publicity stunt from an already wealthy man.

Blair was a disappointing Prime Minister.  This is perhaps best revealed in Anthony Seldon's two volumes of history about him, Blair and Blair Unbound. 

However, unless you are among the super-rich, £4m is a great deal of money.  Blair didn't have to give it and was under no pressure to do so.  It's a pity that some people and journalists have chosen to sneer at his action rather than consider the benefits it will bring to wounded service men and women.

Bob, the Rocket Scientist

Hat tip: http://twitter.com/27bslash6

Pickpocket Politics

If my memory of history serves me well, it was Charles I who was the last king to claim to be above the law. You may recall he was not entirely successful.

This was brought to mind this morning when, listening to BBC Radio4, I heard that the question of party funding is back on the political agenda. Indeed, according to Sir Hayden Phillips, state funding of political parties is inevitable.

The problem political parties in the UK face is simple: over the past few decades, membership numbers have collapsed but they have carried on spending regardless. The result is that the main parties are all in debt to a greater or lesser extent and have become increasingly dependent on a small number of donors.

Now, if political parties were run as a business or even a club they would do one of the following:

• Make themselves or their products more appealling so that they would get more members or customers
  
• Cut their spending to match their income
  
• Go out of business
  

But if there is just one thing all parties agree on it is that their survival is paramount. So if the public won't voluntarily support them, then they will pass laws to take the money regardless.

This is corrupt. This is pickpocket politics.

The corruption infests all three main parties:

• Labour gets millions from Unions such as UNITE, whose members by default have part of their dues set aside for Labour.
  
• Liberal Democrats received millions from Michael Brown, a convicted fraudster.
  
• Tories have received millions from among others Lord Ashcroft, who used non-dom status to minimise paying taxes in the UK.
  

This must stop.

Funding for parties needs to be legislated in such a way that opportunities for corruption are minimised: a fairly low limit on donations from individuals or organisations; legally mandated accounts which must balance: no state funding.

It's time that political parties learned that, like the kings of old, they are not above the law, nor should they be allowed to change it for their own ends.

Salamander politics

Remember Elbridge Gerry?

Mmm, I thought not. Yet it is he who has the distinction of being the source of the word gerrymander. Almost 200 years ago, as governor of Massachusetts, he arranged for the electoral boundaries of one district to be drawn in a contorted shape that would help his party win election. The shape was so bizarre it was likened to a salamander and the word gerrymander is a combination of "Gerry" and "salamander".

Strangely, the ability of politicians to manipulate electoral boundaries, remains a feature of US politics to this day, and one example of this is shown in the diagram above.

The reason I'm blogging about this is that "gerrymander" has become a favourite term of many Labour MPs in recent days. The word itself sounds evil, and such words are a delight to politicians. But is it accurate to use this word to describe what the coalition government is doing?

I think not. Tories have felt for some while that the electoral system has a built in bias against them because typical Tory constituencies have more people in them than typical Labour ones. The reason is because people are leaving the towns and cities (often Labour strongholds) for the country (typically Tory, at least in England). This means that, with more residents per constituency in the country, a country vote counts for less than a city one. Re-drawing boundaries to make constituencies have roughly the same number of residents is not gerrymandering: it's a simply matter of fairness.

However, since Labour would be the main loser in such an exercise, they are naturally keen to portray re-drawing boundaries in a poor light. This is a pity, because there is a real problem with voting in Labour constituencies and it's this: too few people register to vote in the cities. Why did Labour allow this to continue during its thirteen years in power? And why don't they focus on fixing it now?

Voter registration was a powerful tool in enabling equal rights in the United States in the 20th Century. Instead of fraudulently shouting about gerrymandering, Labour would be wise to learn from the American example and empower their residents to vote.

That would be good for British democracy and a way to bury the political legacy of Elbridge Gerry.

The School Run (or walk, or cycle)

There's been a bit of fuss about young children cycling to school in the last few days. It started when Oliver and Gillian Schonrock, who live in a pleasant part of SE London, decided to let their two children cycle to school.

The children are aged five and eight, and this immediately led to an outcry and reaction to the outcry, not least from Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London. If you want to follow the pros and cons of that argument, there are plenty of places online where it's being debated: try here (Telegraph) or here (Positive Parenting) for example.

I'd like to present a slightly different view, which is this: in too many parts of Britain, cycling is positively dangerous, regardless of your age. I blogged on this a few years ago, after a near death experience on my one and only attempt to cycle to and from work. While footpaths, which by default are reserved for pedestrians, are common, cycle paths are rare. Cyclists are expected to share the roads with cars.

However, most roads are far too narrow to accommodate a dedicated cycle lane of adequate width. It may have escaped your notice that cyclists seldom cycle as fast as cars, but I assure you that it is true (except perhaps in Central London) and so you get queues of cars building up behind cyclists on narrow roads, their drivers getting impatient and then accelerating past at any opportunity. The margins for error are slim, the risk to the car perhaps a scratch, the risk to the cyclist perhaps his or her life.

It doesn't have to be like this. Oxford and York, to name just two, offer high quality cycling facilities. The lack of safe cycle routes elsewhere really needs fixing.

It's a constant policy across the major political parties that they want more people to cycle to work (and to school, college and just in general). Local councils often try to make facilities available, with varying degrees of success. See the Facility of the Month link here.

What is needed is a co-ordinated and consistent approach across all levels of government:

• All new developments should have dedicated cycle paths mandated.
  
• Many existing roads are broad enough to accommodate a cycle path of acceptable width, rather than the few inches of crumbling surface at the edge of the road. Councils should actively identify all roads broad enough to support dedicated cycle paths and to paint the roads appropriately.
  
• In other areas, councils should be required to create plans to make facilities available wherever possible to link up cycle paths and enable residents to safely cycle around towns.
  

I don't know at what age it's responsible to allow children to cycle to school. I do know that for cyclists of all ages, we need to do a great deal more to make cycling safer.

Cruel or Kind?

Well, it's the time of year that Total Politics builds its list of the top political blogs of the year.

I am not expecting to win it but, given I didn't even enter last year, any position would be good. So if you'ld like to vote for me, please click below.

Also please note the rules:

1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and ranks them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

Yes, yes, yes. This is me asking for your vote. I'm a politician. I've done it before.

So whether you do it by email or clicking below, please vote! And fyi, here are some of the more popular blogs and more here and here and here.

Dolphin apologises to witches

Tom Dolphin, a member of the BMA's junior doctors' committee, ... said he had previously described homeopathy as witchcraft, but now wanted to apologise to witches for making that link.

From The Guardian, reporting on the BMA Conference.

(He was more moderate alsewhere in his speech, referring to homeopathy as "pernicious", "nonsense on stilts", "irrationality", "made up science", "insidious" and "something ...[that] does not work".)

Physician, heal thyself

I have an undistinguished B Sc degree. I am a very minor politician and I work in marketing and it is for the last of these that I apologise.

Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the annual lecture of Sense about Science. The key speaker was Dr Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal, who combined being interesting, thoughtful, thought-provoking and witty.

The essence of her presentation involved failures in science, particularly medicine. In many cases the culprit was business. For example, she showed how business-sponsored scientific reviews of medical products were almost always positive, while independent reviews were far more mixed. Is it likely that these sponsored reviews are unbiased? Statistically the answer is no: the probability is so remote that it cannot be taken seriously. Over fiften or twenty minutes she presented her case cogently and with eloquence.

I started to disagree with her when she looked at some ways to address the problem. I must say I did so with trepidation. As I have already said, I have an undistinguished BSc while she has a strong scientific resume. But since my view is based on the philosophy of science (if that is not too grand a term), I'm going to put it forward anyway.

In the Olden Days, when I was at school, there was a fairly simple approach to science. It went roughly as follows:

1. A scientist would think of an idea - the hypothesis.
   
2. She would devise an experiment to test it.
   
3. She would run the experiment and collect the necessary and relevant data.
   
4. If the data supported the idea, it would become a new theory.
   
5. Other scientists could repeat the process and get the same results, so independently validating the theory.
   

Intellectually this works. Practically, in the real world, it sometimes breaks down. For example, developing new drugs is extraordinarily expensive. Pharmaceutical companies invest huge amounts of money in each new drug and their scientists invest years of their lives. The must be a great temptation, even in the most scrupulous scientist, to look for the good effects and play down the bad. Possibly that may be succumbed to unconsciously: perhaps dismissing a strange result as an outlier. The commercial pressures will be there too.

At present, science does too little to eliminate opportunities for these errors or for fraud. I suspect outright fraud is fairly rare, although cases such as

• Disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose stem cell research was found to have been faked
  
• Andrew Wakefield's MMR scare
  
• and in physics, the cold fusion controversy
  

show that they happen often enough to reach the mainstream media.

If I understood her correctly, the core of Dr Godlee's proposals to address these problems was to reduce commercial involvement in science, especially medicine. I think that would be wrong.

Science needs to look more to itself. Some of the finest brains in the past few centuries have been involved in science: why then is the very core of science, the scientific method, so subject to abuse?

I suggest that a fundamental issue is that scientific research is not sufficiently open to a basic commercial technique: audit. If at key stages research was subject to audit, the results would be more credible. This does not mean making the data or area of research prematurely public but it would mean that when it came to submit a paper for publication or to launch a new product there would be confidence that the research had been adequately conducted.

Who could do this auditing? I think that is less important than defining how it is done. For example, in the UK perhaps the Russell Group of universities could define: what independent checks should be made in each key area of science as that research progressed; what records must be verifiably submitted at each stage; what are acceptable ways of discounting results ("the subject died in a car accident") and unacceptable ("this outlier was so different that I suspect a measurement error was made").

This would not replace peer review. It would give reviewers greater confidence in the underlying methods and might well give them access to the underlying data.

It would benefit science. It would also benefit commerce: whether in medical, physical, chemical or any other area of scientific endeavour, the results of audited research would rightly be more trusted.

This, I think comes back to Dr Godlee's fundamental point: unreliable research undermines good science. If we can improve standards in research it will be of benefit not just to the scientific community but also to the public at large. Trustworthy results will lead to better decision-making, whether it means buying a new pill or investing in technology.

And should that day happen, I won't have to apologise for being in marketing.