Vince Gets His Cables Cut

I am waiting; just waiting. Waiting to go to the North of England for Christmas. My original travel plan was to drive on Tuesday, 21st December but weather was bad in the Midlands and there were reports of blocked roads and long delays. We are not very good at coping with snow and the country has been gripped in an icy chaos during the last month. There has been little snow in most of England and Wales in the last couple of days but the BBC, RAC and AA were all warning us this morning that 14,000,000 motorists would be out on the roads today travelling from somewhere to somewhere, and advising them all to travel on the motorways. Sure enough, by lunch-time there were lots of traffic jams. I suspect that today will be the same so I am now intending to travel on Christmas Day. Hopefully the car will be OK and the roads are traditionally quiet on this day.

Meanwhile the Liberal part of the coalition government has got into trouble because of a scam by Daily Telegraph reporters posing as constituents of various MPs and ministers to get them to make unguarded remarks about their Tory colleagues. But the biggest gaff has been Vince Cable telling two reporters that he was at war with Rupert Murdoch and that he would see that Murdoch would not get 100% control of BSky B. Most people in the country believe that this would be the right result but after this gaff was revealed - not by the Torygraph but by the BBC's Robert Peston who had the story leaked to him via a mole in the Torygraph offices - Murdoch is looking like the wounded party. The newspaper, anxious to show us that it was revealing weaknesses and disputes inside the coalition stopped short of making the Cable gaff public because they too are against Murdoch. Now David Cameron has taken all responsibility for media matters away from Vince Cable and moved it to the Dept of Culture and Sport, where the Tory minister is more sympathetic to Murdoch. The result will be probably that Murdoch will get his way - as he usually does - and this is bad for Britain.

There have been many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission and it is to be hoped that they will come down strongly on the Daily Telegraph - but I am not optimistic.

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Count 'em In Again

I have been quiet for over two weeks; not because I had lost all interest in the world around me. No, it was simply a loss of internet connection. The modem went down and then the computer played up a bit. Everything seems to be working normally again now. You know what normal is? Periodic Windows crashes and lock-ups and unexplained deletions etc.

Well, having counted them all out, we will now have to count them back in again. I am talking cricket, of course. I did warn at the end of November that predicting an easy ride and an Ashes test series win in Australia was asking for trouble. So many articles in newspapers about how we were going to trounce the Aussies, etc. Now England are back to their usual form of dodgy bowling and batting collapses. They were over confident and dismissive. Aussies do not take well to that sort of treatment and came back with a vengeance to win this third test by 267 runs - and a day to spare. Mitchell Johnson took nine wickets in the match and scored a wild 62 for Australia in the first innings. England bowling was not superb but the batting was pathetic. In the 2nd innings when they were all out for 123, only Trott managed to score more than 18 runs. I don't think the wicket was that treacherous.
So now the England team need to either draw both of the last two games or win one of them. Ricky Ponting is looking happier, even if he has an itchy ear and a broken little finger. Now I think his team will come to the next test feeling far more confident. Hopefully England will play with a full squad available and no one away on paternity leave. Anderson and co nipping back to England for long week-ends because their wives are having babies is not acceptable. I am with Bob Willis on this. These are professional cricketers, well paid and playing for England against Australia. They are not part of a week-end team of part-timers playing for a team cobbled together by Social Services where political correctness is a greater priority than being able to do the job. The liberal do-gooders and the Guardianistas are the people that draw up regulations for maternity leave and keeping jobs open etc etc. Great for public sector non-jobs but not very good when you are part of a small team where what you are doing matters.
Anyway, i will still wish the England team well. They now know that they are going to have to work at it. They should be going out to win this series, not cobble together draws.
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FIFA Awards Russia World Cup 2018

So, after all the efforts, the expenditure, the compliments and the expectations, England will not get the World Cup in 2018. Neither will they get it in 2022. They can try again for 2026 at the earliest. But why bother? They failed so resolutely in this case that we have to suspect that we will never get the World Cup unless either we are the only bidder or FIFA is drastically reorganised. There have been one or two hiccups along the way in getting our bid together but at the end of the day we presented a very professional proposal, generally acknowledge as the best "technical bid". In Zurich it was supported by the heir to the throne, the Prime Minister and David Beckham as well as many of the organising team. On the day of their final presentation all three of the final team leaders did a good job. We have all the stadiums necessary for the event; there is immense interest in football in the UK; and the country would have organised the event very professionally. But in the first round of voting we collect just two votes and we were immediately eliminated. In round 2 Russia got over 50% of the votes and they were awarded the contest. I have to admit that I am not heart-broken but I do believe we were screwed. FIFA is an odd autocracy that has had Ssep Blatter at its head for 30 years. There have been many accusations of corruption - some of them proven - and both the British press and the BBC have reported on serious concerns yet FIFA is too arrogant to even investigate. If any of the allegations are even half right, we have to wonder whether the British PM and the heir to the throne should be dealing with them at all. It has been suggested that the Panorama programme on Monday alleging corruption should have been suppressed. On what moral grounds can we sustain an argument that corruption should be suppressed in order that senior figures in the British establishment should be able to deal with any persons or organisation unrestricted by any suggestion of corruption - even when they may well suspect it to be true. It is ironic that the event has been awarded to Russia - a country, which has itself been accused of having a less than open and uncontaminated government. They may have done nothing wrong in this case but I am sure that I will not be the only one suspicious of some kind of collusion when England was eliminated so quickly. It may just be, of course, that the secretive group that is FIFA just did not want anyone suggesting that they were not entirely honest - no matter whether it were true or not.

I do hate these bidding processes. In many ways they are obscene. In this case four countries or groups of countries have wined, dined, courted and fawned over a group of officials while spending about £20 million each to put forward their proposals only to find that for all but one everything was a complete waste. Here we have a world with poverty, corruption, deprivation, starvation and disease and £60 million is casually thrown down the drain in order to persuade a group of highly paid carpet-baggers that this or that country is best able to organise a few football matches. The World Cup is a sports event that could take place in any relatively rich country - and in some cases the locals may even have a big interest in the Game. Still it is not so nonsensical - at least in England's case - as spending £35 million in order to be allowed to chuck £10 billion down the drain staging 2½ weeks of school sports known as the Olympic Games.

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Funny Old Game Cricket

One of the great things about cricket - at least for the mathematically minded - is the ease with which an unending list of statistics can be generated. This Ashes match in Brisbane is certainly no exception. First an Australian bowler takes 6 for 54, including a hat-trick. Do you know how many bowlers have achieved a hat-trick in Ashes tests? No? In fact in modern times there have been only two; Shane Warne [inevitably] and Darren Gough [surprisingly - I didn't think he was that good - and I am not disparaging a Yorkshireman]. Before them you have go to back to 1904, when the Australian Hugh Trumble did the deed for the second time - he achieved a hat-trick in 1902 on the same Melbourne cricket ground. To this day, he remains the only player to have achieved two hat-tricks in Ashes tests.

Moving on to the batting, Hussey and Haddin hammered England to score 307 for the sixth wicket - the highest score for any wicket ever in Brisbane. This record survived for only 24 hours before Cook and Trott achieved 329 [undefeated] for the 2nd wicket. Before this Strauss and Cook moved to a joint partnership total of 3,415, which [incredibly] betters the 3,249 achieved by Hobbs & Sutcliffe - an opening pair who have near mythical status.

This all interesting stuff for any cricket anorak but the most important thing is still the spectacle of Australia only managing to take one wicket after nearly 2 days of play. That will be keeping Ricky Ponting awake at nights - and that, surely, cannot help his batting.

As I meandered through the pages of cricketing statistics I came across a remarkable bowling and batting performance. At the First Test between new Zealand and England in the winter 1932-33 series, Dennis Smith of New Zealand bowled Eddie Paynter of England for a duck with the first ball of the second over, reducing England to 4 for 2. England recovered to 568 for 8 with Wally Hammond scoring 227. Dennis Smith finished with 1 for 113, was dropped for the next test and never played for New Zealand ever again. So, he achieved the ridiculous record of taking a wicket with the first ball of his first over in test cricket and never took another. As Jimmy Greaves may have said, "Funny old game is cricket!"

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Big Numbers In The Ashes

Well, I was half wrong. I said in my last posting that I thought few people would have put much faith in the England cricket team doing well enough to make the Australians bat again in Brisbane. In fact the top three batsmen confounded all the Cassandras. They declared their second innings closed at 517 - 1. It turned the match into a fairly convincing draw and even though the Australians made 107 - 1 in their second innings, it will be England who go away from this match with the most encouragement. The Australian bowlers succeeded in taking just one wicket in the best part of two days as England posted their impressive total and how long is it since that happened? The pitch has to be considered the most dead pan of all dead-pan batting surfaces and getting a result here could take several weeks but the England batsmen must be given a lot of credit for destroying the heart on the Australian side. It is widely acknowledge that this Australian side is not the best ever but Aussies do not give in without a fight and this test series will be a struggle for both sides. Unless there is rather more life in the pitches at other grounds the series could be drawn.

Cook and Trott put on 329 for a still untaken second wicket exceeding the previous best on this ground of 307 set one day earlier. It was also the highest partnership by any England batsmen on Australian soil. Further, Cook's 235 NO was the sixth highest score by an England batsman in Ashes tests and exceeds the previous highest test score on this ground by any batsman - previously held by Don Bradman. And so on and on. How often have England scored over 500 runs for the loss of only one wicket? I don't know the answer but I am sure that a simple answer would be "Not very often!"

So now we look forward to the 2nd test with a rather more optimistic feeling. I hope it is not more misguided optimism. Let's just wish them luck.

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Winning the Ashes in Australia

I just knew that it was going to happen. If I had said as much a week or two back, I would have been considered a Casandra; a profit of gloom, doom and despondency. It's not the first time and as sure as eggs are eggs, it will happen again. It has actually happened at least six times this year alone. But still no one sounds the alarm. I am talking, of course, about expectations of sporting success. It is like politicians who ultimately come to believe that their own propaganda is the truth. We have so many ready to predict sporting success that the whole population comes to accept its inevitability. it seems inevitable - until we actually take to the field. We thought that the England football team would win the World Cup - it was almost a certainty. In practice, the team performance was abysmal and these over-paid prima-donas were out in the early stages. Then it was suggested that Andy Murray would be the first British winner at Wimbledon since 1936 - or was it 1836. Of course, he failed. We will gloss over the rugby team[s]. In the search for the player of the year not a single one of those on the shortlist plays for a team from the Northern Hemisphere!! All the candidates play for South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Why?

But, the latest is the cricket team. This was the team that would win the Ashes in Australia for the first time since Mike Gatting was in charge. It started off well. Andrew Strauss was out to the third ball of the first over of the series. After that things went downhill. The Aussie bowler, Siddle, achieved his best ever bowling figures in first class cricket when he took six wickets - including a hat-trick. In the modern game, only Shane Warne and Darren Gough have achieved that. Previous to those two requires a search back to 1904. At the end of Day 2 the Australians were on 220 for 5 and the match evenly balanced. But most of Day 3 was to elapse before England took another wicket. Hussey and Haddin put on 307 for the 6th wicket. This was a record for the ground. It was well below the world record for a 6th wicket partnership; that was George Headley and Clarence Passailaigue at Kingston, Jamaica in 1931-32. But all this does not augur well for England's chances. It looks like they will lose this test unless there is a superhuman effort to [a] score some runs and [b] take some wickets very quickly. First of all they have to score 221 to make Australia bat again and that is not something anyone would put a lot of money on at this stage.

Still, I will wish them luck. They are going to need it.

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Bolton Wanderers in Champions League?

Yesterday was a cool and grey day with the weather struggling to drop some more rain on our sodden island. In Edinburgh Scotland's rugby union team managed to defeat World Champions South Africa while Ireland again failed to beat the NZ All Blacks in Dublin - a game mared by heavy rain which made the ball difficult to hold onto. But at the Reebock Stadium, Bolton Wanderers were hard at work thrashing Newcastle united 5 - 1. If they carry on like this, not only could they gain a place playing in the Champions League but they could build a creditable goal difference. Today they stand in 4th place in the Premier League. If Manchester City win today at Fulham - something which should be expected were it not for the fact that they have failed to score in their last two Premier League games - then they will move above Bolton. But lets us not ignore the achievements of Bolton in rising so high. The three teams above them are three of the established top four in the English league - the fourth, Liverpool, are languishing in ninth spot having clawed their way up from the relegation zone - and all of them awash with money compared with Bolton Wanderers - one of the poor relations in this league. Bolton now has debts of £93 million - after suffering a loss of £35 million last year - but that could disappear if Bolton did actually end the season in the top four - and hence would play in the hugely lucrative Champions League next season. Bolton Chairman Phil Gartside has said this month that they may have to sell two of their best players in order to balance the books. That would be a pity. They have the advantage that most of the debt is owed to the owner Eddie Davies. I hope he will tolerate the debt for a bit longer to see how the team progresses.

Let's wish them the very best of luck; not just because they are Bolton Wanderers but because they will have done it without spending trillions of pounds on buying players. They have big debts but it is impossible to be solvent in the present Premier League. Manchester United and Liverpool have huge debts and Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City rely on having owners with limitless supplies of money. Things will get worse before they get better now that Wayne Rooney has been allowed to raise the bar for wages to £200,000 per week [or more].

It's a funny old game is football.

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A Royal Wedding

So we are to have another Royal Wedding? Who cares? I certainly don't. I wish the couple well and that as far as I am concerned is an end of it. Eventually William will be king but he may have to wait another 30 or 40 years, like his father has had to. By that time many things will have changed and the monarchy may be on the way out. One group of crystal ball gazers have suggested that by then immigrants will have changed the face of Britain so much - they will already be in a majority - that the country will no longer be the country that I and millions of others grew up in. There will still be people in industry and commerce telling the nation that they need yet more immigrants to fill the job vacancies that cannot be satisfied from within. It will be rubbish then just as it is rubbish now but they will get their way. There must always be a supply of cheap labour. The new society will be some kind of homogeneous monstrosity which oozes political correctness but is characterless, ignorant - in the sense of ill informed - and divided by ethnicity even more than it is now. It is not a place where I will want to live but without the divisions there will be no peace.

But coming back to this Royal Wedding, we are already being subjected to a tsunami of mush, of sickly meringue covered pronouncements, of boring platitudinous trivia of no interest, surely, to either man or woman in this nation of ours? The Daily Mail on Wednesday had 30 pages of vomit inducing guff that surely was a waste of paper and printing ink. And it will go on and on until the wedding finally takes place some time next May [perhaps]. There will be souvenir mugs and tea towels and shirts and scarfs and socks and rock and etc. etc. All that stuff will have to be made - in China.

Why do we have to have all this stuff? Do they think that a Royal Wedding of two extremely rich individuals cut off from ordinary life will somehow make up for the mess that is our economy and persuade us not to question the incompetence of government nor the exploitation of the poor? It seems that the parents of Kate Middleton tried to engineer a meeting of the prince and their daughter by sending her via public school to St Andrew's. It seems that the couple did meet almost by accident at the University up in Fife and they have had some sort of relationship for about seven years. Neither has done anything particularly scandalous during that time and no doubt Prince Charles and HM Queen will be hoping for an uncontroversial partnership.

It does seem to be the case that in spite of comprehensive schools designed to give equal education to all, more and more of our institutions and government is in the hands of millionaires with public school educations. At least back in the days of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher the people in charge were more likely to have come from the middle classes via the grammar schools. But grammar schools are a bad thing because they are selective. At least they selected on the basis of academic potential and not just on the basis of wealth!

Right, that's it I have nothing more to say. Good luck to the two of them.

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Irish Debts

I used to be a frequent visitor to the Irish Republic but I have not been there in the three years since I retired. It was always a pleasure to go there - particularly to the area around Cork which I came to know very well. I was there when Ireland was experiencing the most prosperous days in its history, when wages were high, the economy was booming, people were buying splendid houses and with high inward investment - particularly in pharmaceuticals - it looked as though the good times could never end. But it was an illusion. They built an economy on debt and an unsustainable growth in house prices. The banks lent too much and investors were guaranteed the safety of their assets up to 100% by the Irish government.

In spite of more cut-backs, reductions in government spending, lower wages and increases in taxation, the government is seeing the economy shrinking more and more. Yet the bank debts still loom. It now looks as though they will be bailed out by the EU - whether they like it or not. This bail out has more to do with the potential up-coming disasters of Portugal, Spain and Italy. We can forget Greece. Greece will go bust.

Ireland has been invaded, exploited, wrecked, subjected to mass murder and ignored at various points by the English and later, the British. Above everything, of course, stands the Great Famine from 1845 to 1850, when half the population died or emigrated - never to return. It was a catastrophe of the first order, which need not have happened and should not have happened. The generally poor and indigenous Irish population lived almost entirely on potatoes and when potato blight destroyed the crop, partly or totally during every year of that five year period, they had nothing to eat. Yet throughout the period Ireland remained a net exporter of food. Had they been ordered to cut exports by 25% there could have been enough food to feed the whole population. But no! This was the era of unrestrained laissez faire capitalism. The markets must decide. And one million Irish men, women and children died.

Now with unemployment rising and graduates unable to find jobs, homes left on building sites unfinished and empty houses unsaleable, the young people are starting to leave again. They are doing what the Irish have always done. They are leaving to get jobs in England and America.

The bankers will be OK, of course. They will take the bail out money and stoke it into their bonuses as reward for doing that which they do best. Steal , spend and squander other people's money and wreck the economies of the world. Not just Irish banks but any banks.

I wish Ireland and the Irish well. I don't doubt that they will survive this disaster like they have survived all other disasters. And like most other disasters, this one should never have been allowed to happen — but it did!

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Are We Defended?

I have written little this month. I am not quite sure why. There has been much to talk about. Some of the time I have been too stunned to write anything. The new coalition government is definitely drifting off course at the moment. Maybe they are just giving themselves too much to do and are becoming punch-drunk. I still can't get to grips with our defence plans. To add to the nonsense - that still will cost £45 billion per year - Call Me Dave has told the bankers gathered in The Guildhall for the annual do, that he does not intend to let Britain get involved in fighting several wars at the same time. With our current defence arrangements it would be best if he avoided fighting wars all together. Yesterday, I was told by my friend Harold at the gym - he is an expert on military vehicles and knows about these things - that the MOD has decided to scrap 250 armoured vehicles having just spent £100,000 on each of them to improve the protection and armour plating. So we spend £25 million and then just chuck it away. The intention is to sell them for scrap at about £11,000 each - a net loss of over £22 million. Is is surprising that we need to cut government spending when money flows down the drain like this? At the same time we are scrapping Ark Royal - a perfectly adequate working aircraft carrier - with aeroplanes on it - and building two new aircraft carriers - bigger than any we have ever had before - at a cost of £5 billion. Yet these ships will be unique in the world of aircraft carriers in that they will have no aeroplanes at all. This will render them useless. Perhaps we can borrow one from France - after all, they will never need it - complete with aeroplanes now that we have a special relationship with them?

As all this goes on and our troops in Afghanistan are starved on many essentials, we carry on with the nuclear deterrent. If anything should be abandoned, it is this. David Cameron is concerned that we do not get involved in more than one war at any time but feels the need to retain the ability to wage nuclear war against God knows whom. Of course, it's politics. He doesn't want to upset the sabre rattling wing of his party. He wants to face the future while living in the past. The nuclear deterrent is madness and should be scrapped. Then, possibly, we could afford to put some aeroplanes on the aircraft carriers.

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FC United of Manchester

It was Jimmy Greaves who used to tell us over and over that football was a funny old game. I think in the years that have passed since his playing days, football has become a game that is no longer funny but is crackers. Players get ever greater wages and all the top clubs are owned by foreign billionaires looking for something to do with their vast wealth that might conceivably relieve the boredom of owning yachts, palaces and huge piles of money. But occasionally there are some bright spots. Blackpool are promoted to the Premier League at the end of a season when it was expected that they would struggle to stay were they were and avoid relegation. Clubs are resurrected from bankruptcy and allowed to live again. And sometimes there is a player that plays for the love of the game and not for the riches and the extra Ferrari. But one of the really bright spots has been the creation of FC United of Manchester, a club envisioned by a small group of "angry dreamers" in a haze of beer fumes and curry in a Manchester restaurant. In 2005, they sought to create a new team run by and for the fans in contrast to the Glazers' control of their old club of Manchester United which was now saddled with vast debts. The new club was set up with money donated by fans and well-wishers and is run as a fans co-operative. It has been playing non-league football ever since, getting better and better all the time and gathering a weekly crowd of 2,000+ supporters. As a result of their efforts they have qualified for Round One of the 2010 FA Cup. On Friday 5th November, as the fireworks went off around them, they played Rochdale Town in Rochdale and with a crowd of 7,000 they pulled off the surprise of the night by winning 3 - 2. There were shouts and cheers; much waving of green & gold scarves; inspired singing and a general enjoyment of football. By all accounts it was a great game and at the end 4,000 fans came to celebrate the unbelievable. FC United had beaten a team four divisions higher than them in the league and only two steps down from the Premier.

The team has become involved in many community projects and they have been much supported by Manchester City Council in their efforts. At present they play their home games at Bury's ground, Gigg Lane but they have applied for planning permission to build a new stadium in Thornton Heath, where Manchester United started life at the end of the 19th century. The club's involvement in Round One of the FA Cup was shown live on TV and will bring them in an extra £67,000, which will be put towards the stadium fund. Many of the club officials work for nothing and their star player gets paid £80 per week. Their accounts look better than many a Premier League side.

Brighton & Hove Albion - leaders of League One - played in the FA Cup First Round yesterday and were held to a draw at home to non-league Woking. Whoever wins the replay will have the pleasure of playing FC United at home. May FC United's cup run continue. They will get some more money from the Round 2 match which will further help the stadium project. This is all real Roy of the Rovers stuff. Good luck to them.

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How Much Is The Rent?

I have been away in the North of England - you know, the wild country 200 miles beyond Potters Bar - for the last 2 weeks so I have had less time to comment on the day to day happenings of this tortured country of ours. Today, there is much hand wringing by the charity Shelter about potential homelessness in and around London. With the government's cap on housing benefit at £400 per week for a 4 bedroom house, Shelter tell us that no benefit claimant will be able to afford even a 2 bedroom house or flat any where near London. I doubt if this is true. At present - particularly in the London area - we, as tax-payers, have been shelling out vast sums of money to private landlords and encouraging them to charge high rents on their properties. If someone in the London area with a job and a family possibly and earning £30,000 per year cannot afford the high rents in Central London and has to commute, why, in the name of God, should we be paying those on benefits to live there? The Daily Mail and other newspapers regularly regale us with tails of benefit claimants with huge families living in massive houses in expensive parts of London and costing perhaps £2,000 per week in rent, which with other benefits equates to some massive sums - upwards of £150,000 per year, in some cases, being handed out. For someone in work to be earning enough to have £150,000 after tax they would need salary levels near £300,000 per year - that is banker remuneration. There was recent case of an unemployed bus conductor who moved from a £900 per week house in Brent to another in a better area that cost £1500 per week because Brent was a bit too downmarket. Now, we are in cloud-cuckoo-land. If there is going to be this vast exodus from Central London as benefits cuts take effect, it can only mean that rents will fall and by implication it suggests that high rents are being maintained because the state is paying the bills. High rents in London are one big problem but nationwide there is exploitation of the system through fraud and complacency. In many households with generational reliance on benefits there is often an aggressive belief in their entitlement. With arrogant disregard for the realities of financing the system they assume that they should be paid what ever they demand for ever.

It is right and proper that George Osborne has set limits on benefit payments at £400 per week for rent and a total of £26,000 per year on total handouts to a single family. That should concentrate the minds of the irresponsible - yet otherwise bone idle - claimants who knock-out kids with total abandon, secure in the knowledge that they will get yet more money from the state. Even £26,000 per year is generous since an employed person would need about £38,000 of gross income to have that £26,000 net. The benefits system is suppose to be a safety net not a carte blanche free for all.

Now, George, what about the bankers; the 75,000 people in the city of London who are paid over £100,000 per year via generous salaries and bonuses, using our money? And then how about people like Sir Philip Greene paying their real tax dues - after all the super rich can afford it.

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Mining In Chile

I suppose I should comment on the one event that has captured the attention of the whole world in the last week - the successful release of the Chilean miners from their underground tomb. These men were cut-off by two explosions in the San Jose mine in Chile 70 days ago and it was 17 days before we found out even that they were all alive and well in a safety shelter deep underground. Mining everywhere has always been a hazardous occupation and in most places it still is. Safety has been much improved in many western countries but accidents still occur. The numbers of deaths in mining disasters annually is still staggeringly high and the deaths from accidents does not include deaths from mining related diseases. In this situation it has been uplifting for the whole world to see all 33 of the Chilean miners - to be successfully rescued one by one in an escape pod that was drawn up through a narrow tube drilled through 700 metres of solid rock. And the rescue operation, shown live on TV around the world, went without a hitch. It is a tribute to all the engineers, the miners and medical people that worked tirelessly to get the job done. It may be that the safety in Chilean mines has not been shown in an attractive light but the escape has given Chile's international status quite a boost. The president has given his total backing to the escape project and there is no doubt that he has been wringing considerable political advantage from the success of the project. But he used his authority to bring in any experts that could help to maximize the chances of success. Correspondingly, had it all gone wrong he would have carried the can. Now he has promised to give H&S greater attention throughout all Chilean industries and ensure that miners lives are better protected than they were in the San Jose mine.

Well done all concerned with this successful mission impossible. It is being suggested that the joy and Roy of the Rovers romanticism of this astonishing rescue will raise the image of engineering and encourage more young people to look seriously at engineering again as a possible career move. It will be a big improvement on rushing off to "socially useless" tasks in investment banks or pinning everything on X Factor success.

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A Flood Of Beer

As I am approaching my 70th birthday, I did what many people do periodically, I looked to see what other momentous events occurred on the day of my birth, 17th October. The records on-line are always incomplete because the degree of detail depends on who put the list together - plus the amount of data increases as we get nearer to the present day.

I found that the Battle of Neville's Cross took place on 17th October of 1346 near Durham and the Scottish king, David II, was defeated by English forces that were smaller in number but better organised. The King was captured and taken to face King Edward III of England, who was, at that time, involved in resurrecting the Hundred Years War in France. They met at Calais and Edward instructed that David be taken back to England and imprisoned in Odiham Castle in Hampshire - where he stayed for 11 years.

Also on 17th October 1660, after the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, the nine men who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I were arrested and ultimately taken away to be hung, drawn and quartered.

But I will put aside all stories of kings and prime ministers and concentrate on real stories. On 17th October 1814 in the Parish of St Giles in London, on the Tottenham Court Road there was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable horror. At the brewery of Meux & Co., a large vat containing beer ruptured and beer came gushing forth. The collapse of this huge tank caused damage to adjacent vessels which also ruptured and a total of 323,000 gallons of beer poured out into the streets. The area around St Giles was a notorious slum with masses of people crowded into tumbledown buildings and cellars. The beer washed away some of the buildings and poured down into the cellars where many were trapped. There were eight people drowned in this flood of beer and many others were injured as they tried to escape. One of the walls of the nearby Tavistock Arms was washed away and the collapsing pub trapped teenage employee Eleanor Cooper under the rubble. The brewery were taken to court over the incident but no one was found to be responsible for what, it was decided, was an Act of God; they obviously had no H&S executive in those days. The brewery's loss was considerable, of course, and what was the worst for them was that they had already paid duty on the beer. Ultimately, they managed to get their money back and this allowed them to recover from their losses. The brewery survived until the early years of the 20th century.

These catalogues of dates often give more clues about the compilers than they properly give a true picture of history. The one I have been looking at has American origins so once we pass the mid 17th century it becomes more and more Americo-centric. Why do we need to know that on 17th October 1831 Felix Mendelssohn's 1st Piano Concerto received its world premiere? It seems that nothing at all happened to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert on 17th October. There is no mention of the premiere of Schubert's 5th Symphony on 17th October 1841 - 13 years after the composer's death. A more important event, I would have thought, than a minor work of Mendelssohn.

I will examine some more happenings in the coming weeks - if anything interests me.

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Education For All?

There is something wrong with education in this country; something seriously wrong. This week we have heard that the ship-builders in Barrow in Furness have been unable to recruit welders and similar craftsmen locally and have been employing Poles. They have even gone to the length of putting up notices in Polish for the benefit of the workers. What in the name of God is going on? This is the country that created the Industrial Revolution; that provided engineering to the world; now we cannot find welders. Don't give me any guff about our young people working in high tech jobs. We have 2¾ million people out of work and unemployment is particularly high among 16 to 25 year olds.
The Tories have proposed a cap on immigrant numbers from outside the European Union. Business and the Business Secretary claim that this will be an unsupportable burden on commercial and industrial activities. We have a union of 500 million people and we still need expertise from other places. Why? Is the whole European educational system failing?
In spite of our being told year after year after year that exam results are getting better and better, more and more we hear of companies setting up training courses for new employees to teach them the basics of English spelling and grammar and teach them rudimentary mathematics. Again, I ask, what is going on? They cannot construct a sentence or spell simple words or read easily after 12 years of education?
Now the coalition government is considering allowing universities to raise the fees they charge for tuition up to £10,000 per year. Add to this the loans to undergraduates and it is possible to imagine a new graduate leaving university with a debt of £80,000. How is he or she going to pay that back, get married, buy a house and/or bring up a family. Are they all going to go working for investment banks?
The whole system costs a fortune and seems to be an unmitigated disaster. I went to primary school in the 1940s, was taught in classes of 50, with shortages of furniture, books and equipment, yet I can hardly remember not being able to read. Sixty years ago I passed the 11+ exam and I went to a grammar school. An opportunity afforded me by the 1944 Education Act. Eight years later I went to a university and did a degree course in chemical engineering. I paid no tuition fees and I received a grant of about £250 [say £6,000 at today's prices] every year for my food and lodgings, clothing, books,etc. I graduated with no debts. My digs in Leeds cost me less than £4 per week. In the straightened times after the Great Depression and WWII, the country could afford to pay for my education and provide for my free attendance at a grammar school and a proper university. Now, a grammar school education is all but unobtainable except for the rich and the same will soon be true of universities. The Labour government, for some strange reason, decided that we should send 50% of children to universities. They didn't achieve this nor did they provide the resources necessary to allow such vast numbers to be so educated. They massaged the results by allowing second rate establishment to call themselves universities and to hand out degrees in pointless subjects. It has been mainly a waste of money. Now we have hundreds of thousands [millions even] of new graduates, ill educated, unemployable and with vast debts. Even some of these so called graduates can hardly read or write.
Education needs to be completely re-assessed via a new education act that sets out proper objectives and pathways to producing an educated nation of well qualified, employable young people. Many should be trained in apprenticeships for craft skills - once they have received a proper basic education. It seems that local authorities are most concerned in having impressive buildings - exercises in civic pride again - and armies of staff yet they are less interested in what the vast structure achieves.
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Blackpool Tower Over The Opposition

Are football players worth their enormous salaries? It is difficult to answer yes; certainly as far as English players are concerned after their abysmal performance in the World Cup. This afternoon, Blackpool defeated Liverpool 2 - 1 at Anfield. It was the first time that they had played at Anfield since 1971 and the first time that they had beaten Liverpool since 1967. Great result. Good luck to Blackpool. I hope they manage to stay up but they are showing a spirit and organisation in their play which gives us hope. Their players have been limited to a very modest - by Premier League standards - maximum wage of £10,000 per week. It is plenty of money for most people - £½ million per year. Live modestly for ten years [say] on £100,000 per year and invest about £250,000 per year and your average Blackpool player would have a nest egg of £4 million + which should allow him to live comfortably ever after without needing to get a job. The trouble is, of course, that footballers do not live modestly; they live to the limits of their earnings and need more once they retire. That is their problem. If most of us had a fortune of over £1 million we could live well without having to worry about money. We could not go out buying Bentleys and Ferraris.

Pay to Liverpool players allows them to buy the Ferraris but it does not seem to help them play football. Wayne Rooney is another player with buckets of pay but at present he is failing badly as a player. I hope he rights himself but I wonder if he has the mental strength to see what really matters and then to get on with the job. He should have a chat to Paul Scholes.

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Limerick Kills Man

I write this blog to help me keep sane and to allow me to keep a record of things that catch my eye from day-to-day. I try to write clearly and concisely and keep to the rules of the English language. When I was in an old-fashioned grammar school, I was taught about constructing sentences and avoiding ambiguity. We all remember the story of the chair that was being put up for sale by the old lady with Queen Ann legs. Today I spotted a tragic story in the Irish Times. It really was tragic and it should not be laughed at. But the headline said quite simply "Man dies after Limerick Attack" The immediate impression created in my simple mind was that here was a case of a man becoming so upset by a limerick that he either died spontaneously or had committed suicide. I started to make up the limerick in my own mind. "There was an old man on the Shannon, Who ............ But what? I had to look it up and, of course, the event they were trying to report was that a man had been attacked in a house in Limerick in the West of Ireland and had subsequently died in hospital. And if you think I am being insensitive, what of the Irish Times that produced a headline that was not just ambiguous but wrong. The man died as a result of an attack by another man. That was the important headline. The fact that it happened in Limerick was secondary. All to often we see sentences these days that are, technically, either misleading or completely wrong and they rely on the reader deciding what was meant. Surely this belongs with the chair and the lady with the Queen Ann legs.

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Stan Laurel Birthplace Moved!

I have been passed a copy of a report from a recording made in the artists' dressing rooms of the old Eden Theatre in Bishop Auckland. It relates a conversation between those stalwarts of the silver screen Laurel & Hardy.

"Now, Stanley, it's time to smarten yourself up because you have been chosen to help with promoting tourism in your old county of Durham."

"But why Durham, Olly?"

"Because, Stanley, as you should know, Durham is the place where you were born."

"I don't think so, Olly. In fact, I don't think I have ever been to Durham"

"Nonsense, Stanley! It's written here in the new Tourist Guide to Durham and they have printed 50,000 copies, so it can't be wrong. This Eden Theatre used to be managed by your dear old dad and we are here to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of your birth in 1890. We didn't cross the Atlantic in the middle of a war to come to commemorate your birth in a town that you never lived in."

" But, Olly I have still got the birth certificate given to me by my old mother and that definitely says that I was born in Ulverston, in Lancashire. I lived with Grandma Metcalfe and went to school in Ulverston."

"So, what do we do now? I thought you went to school in Bishop Auckland and Tynemouth. We are invited to a presentation in Bishop Auckland to tell the world about your life of poverty in the back streets of this fine English industrial town."

" But, Olly, I don't think Tynemouth is in Co Durham either. And I was only there for a short time,"

" No matter what I do, nothing changes . This looks like another fine mess you have got me into, Stanley!"

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How the city fathers of Durham have got themselves into this mess - without any help from the late Stan Laurel - no one can know. But they have actually printed 50,000 tourist brochures that claim that Stan Laurel was born inside the boundaries of Co Durham. It is easy to be confused. The local government re-organisation of 1972 shifted towns and villages into enormous and idiotic conglomerates that had little point to them then and still haven't. Some towns have escaped the bureaucratic nightmares but many are still swallowed up in these London sponsored tidy boxes - it can't matter much anyway because it's all just Up North! But Ulverston, the true birthplace of Stan Laurel has not, to my knowledge, ever been part of Co Durham. It used to be part of Lancashire but now is a parish in the Furness District of West Cumbria - and what that means, is a problem for the citizens of that noble town. It is true that Stan Laurel's father did manage the Eden Theatre in Bishop Auckland and Stan did go to the local grammar school but he certainly was not born there.

Durham has now admitted to the cock-up but due to government cuts, they cannot afford to have the brochures re-printed. So Stan Laurel remains a son of Durham. It's all very confusing.

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A New Leader

Over this last week-end the Labour Party at its conference in Manchester elected its new leader. They chose Ed Miliband over his elder and more experienced brother David by just 1.5% after the four rounds of voting. The elder Miliband always looked to me like Mr Bean. The younger one looks more like Wallace from the plasticine characters Wallace & Gromit. But they are an odd couple. Here are two brothers who express undying love for each other yet they have fought each other for leadership of the party. It's not that there is some great policy divide between them. They say the same things via vague, ambiguous platitudes and cliches. It was always obvious that if David had won it would not have been too catastrophic for Ed but the other way around, the more experienced Milliband was doomed. So why does any brother want to junk his elder sibling's career. Usually, it is because he doesn't like him much. "But I love my brother very much. He is something special to me." You can feel the hypocrisy and insincerity dripping off the words. Like his lack of marriage and name on his child's birth certificate, everything comes after his job. Does the Labour Party seriously think that this out-of-touch geek will ever be Prime Minister? If so, they are even more deeply lost in Space than I thought.

During this latest, incredible party conference I was struck by the fact that to many of the apparatchiks that sit on front benches nowadays politics is an end in itself, not a means to an end. But look at the three party leaders. They are all the same. They went to school - at least the Millibands went to state comprehensives - then they went to Oxford or Cambridge universities, went to Harvard for a bit, then became party officers, engineered into safe parliamentary seats.

The Labour Party now has to construct a shadow cabinet from the biggest pile of well-educated dead wood that I have ever seen. Roy Hattersley writes about the wealth of talent in the party and Neil Kinnock is over-excited. Why? Where? Who? I can see no Aneurin Bevan, no Ernie Bevin, no Clement Attlee, no Jim Callaghan, no Roy Jenkins, no Dennis Healey. And where are the great thinkers like Michael Foot, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn. We may not have agreed with some of these but they stood for something and most [all?] of them had done proper jobs and/or fought in wars.
Perhaps the fundamental cause of the problems is the abolition of the grammar schools. David Cameron is an Old Etonian - the first to be Prime Minister since Sir Alec Douglas Home. All those in between went to grammar or secondary schools and came from ordinary families. I wanted Ken Clarke [also a grammar school boy] to have lead the Tory Party because above everyone in the party now, he had experience. It matters to know how the system works, who does what and how. I was unimpressed with David Cameron at the start but so far he has done well as Prime Minister. In spite of his background and my continuing doubts about the lack of experience, at least he comes across as human.
We will have to see what happens but in all parties much needs to be done to re-introduce real people and to connect themselves with the electorate.
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Francis Drake

It was exactly 330 years ago today that Francis Drake sailed into Plymouth harbour having completed the first circumnavigation of the World by an Englishman. He had crossed the Atlantic, sailed down the coast of South America, proceeded up the west coast of America as far as Alaska, then crossed the Pacific Ocean, rounded the Cape of God Hope and sailed back to Britain. He had been away for 3½ years and much upset Spain with his attacks on their colonies and wealth. A few years later he cause even more consternation when he took such an important part in repelling the Spanish Armada. Although as the captain of a ship, Drake was probably little better than a state authorised pirate and slave trader - he gained considerable wealth from the latter activity - there seems little doubt that he was a sailor of the highest ability. To have sailed around the world in his tiny vessel - the Golden Hind weighed in at a mere 300 tons - was an impressive achievement. Nevertheless, he suffered considerable losses of men and ships on his voyage. His Golden Hind was the only one of six ships that returned to England. He was ruthless in the command of his men but showed great qualities of leadership. However, it has to be said that he executed mutineers on the basis of a dubious authority.

For a time he was a Member of Parliament, a Mayor of Plymouth and for 15 years lived at Buckland Abbey in Devon. He returned to the sea and on his final voyage in 1596 he contracted dysentery off the coast of Puerto Rica. He was buried at sea in a lead lined coffin.

A replica of his vessel [see above] is displayed at Southwark. This replica was launched in Devon in 1973 and has itself sailed around the world. It is now estimated to have sailed 140,000 miles - although I assume that the crew would have made use of modern sensible navigational aids which would remove a great deal of uncertainty from what they were doing.

Sir Francis Drake was one of those romantic heroes in English history whose life has, over the years, become a muddle of fact and fiction. He lived in a more robust age where little was decided by the niceties of international law or of political correctness. And, perhaps, that was its advantage.

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The Road To Happiness

The question of wealth has been in the news again recently - apropos of the pay in the public sector. We learn that over 6,500 people in the NHS are paid more than the Prime Minister. This ridiculous. Apart from over-paid bureaucrats there are many GPs - now working shorter hours - being paid buckets of money; one is even collecting £½ million per year. Staggering. Still, as long as the DG of the BBC thinks he is worth £835,000 per year we know that we are in cloud-cuckooland.
All of us always feel that we need more money but how much more? I see very unhappy footballers earning millions of pounds each year wondering what to do with their wealth. Wayne Rooney apparently handed over £200 to a boy doing room service who delivered him a packet of cigarettes. Sir Alec, why is Wayne Rooney smoking as well as being out and about in night clubs in the middle of the night? I see things in newspapers, magazines and on TV which show some of the vast mansions occupied by the rich and famous and am I jealous? No! I would like a few hundred thousand pounds extra so that I could buy the house of my dreams and enjoy my twilight years. But my house would have a maximum of four or five bedrooms, a double garage, two bathrooms and set in beautiful countryside in Lancashire not too far from a major town - Bolton. It would cost less than £500,000; it would have a well laid out garden with a small, sheltered outdoor area for relaxing, eating and entertaining. I don't need a swimming pool - indoors or out. I don't need a Bentley or a Rolls Royce. A good medium size luxury car Jaguar, Mercedes or some such. I don't need a games room; or a bar; or a wine cellar.
If I had a huge house I would use very little of it; I would need to employ staff to look after it and would I be happier sitting out alongside my swimming pool? No! I think that if I did have some such useless luxury item I would be wondering what next to spend my money on and what I needed next to become happy. In my house, I would have my own bedroom, a guest bedroom, a library, an office and, if I had a fifth bedroom, a hobbies room for my painting, drawing and making things - and, of course it could be overspill storage. I could, at a pinch combine the office with the library in a four bedroom house.
The house above is in Firs Road, Bolton, only about 2 miles from where I was born, in a nice area and it would suit me well. It's up for sale; a snip at £370,000. I have no interest in the celebrity life style. My life would be more one of the recluse; cut off from neighbours, other peoples kids, and noise.
I suppose that I should consider myself very lucky when I look at my family history and find just what earlier generations lived through. The horror of the Great Famine in Ireland and my great-great-grandmother making her way across the country on foot, with four starving children, through overcrowd squalor in Liverpool until finally she got a job as a domestic servant in Atherton - yet still she survived into her mid-eighties. Her life must be rated as very successful in what she achieved but much of it was surrounded by suffering. All of my Victorian ancestors suffered in some way during the Industrial Revolution when the working classes were all but invisible as individuals. I went to a grammar school - still the only one of my family to do so in 300 years - and then I enjoyed a university education, have always been employed, have managed to travel to many parts of the world and to meet some wonderful people. I did all of this without obscene wealth and I find it sad that so many young people now want nothing more than fame [or infamy], great wealth - in simple money terms - and have no appreciation of the value of a proper education. The children sent by ambitious parents to private schools do understand and that is one of many reasons why the rich will continue to run the country while a few footballers wonder how to spend their own suddenly acquired wealth. Five luxury cards will not be enough to find your way along the road to happiness.
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Peace In Northern Ireland

Things have been getting worse in Northern Ireland for some time now. I don't just mean the economy; that is getting better. It's the undercurrent of terrorism. We have had the usual summer disturbances associated with Apprentice Boys and Orange Order marches and so on and there have been a few car bombs. The Chief Minister, Peter Robinson, has been involved in legal wranglings involving money making and money laundering. But this is Northern Ireland. Today we have been told that there is a much increased risk of terrorist attacks by breakaway republican organisations on mainland Britain. Maybe it will happen and the shaky power sharing agreement in Belfast will collapse. If it does it will be the final blot on Tony Blair's record as Prime Minister. I can't blame Blair for the problems of Northern Ireland. These have been around for hundreds of years and have their origins in British oppression of the Irish but, in spite of all his failings, it did look as thought Blair had achieved something in Northern Ireland. He had stopped the killing - and that is an enormous achievement. But if they go back to violence again, Blair will have his record finally wrecked. He will become one of many British Prime Ministers who did not solve the Irish Problem. And we can then add this to his record on Iraq, Afghanistan, Civil Liberties, ID cards, Financial Disaster, Government Debt, etc., etc.

But what do these Republicans want? What is it that they hope to achieve? Are we back to a United Ireland - something which the government of the Irish Republic does not want; they have enough problems of their own, at present. Or is it just that Republicanism is no more than a cover for criminality? But, if it is, what have the IRA and their off-shoots done with the money they have taken over the years through smuggling, money laundering, diesel oil fiddles, etc? I have never seen any Republican from Northern Ireland that has looked particularly prosperous.

I don't think the people of Northern Ireland want a return to violence but they make little progress in eliminating religious divisions. I suspect it is still the case that companies there either employ Catholics or Protestants but not both. And as long as that goes on Northern Ireland will never be at peace with itself.

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Battle of Britain

Last night there was a very enjoyable 1½ hours on BBC 2 TV in which actor Ewen McGregor and his brother Colin related the story of the Battle of Britain and took the opportunity to fly in a Spitfire. Elder brother Colin is an RAF pilot who flies Tornados and has served in Iraq. He took Ewen for a high speed flight in his Tornado before he [Colin] took some lessons in flying old aeroplanes - starting with a Tiger Moth and then progressing to a Harvard trainer. After that his instructor was happy that he could have a go in a two seater Spitfire. Although even for an RAF pilot this was still a boyhood dream come true, I was slightly surprised that most of his problems in flying the Spitfire were on the ground. Of course the Spitfire has a tail wheel and a very long nose so it's almost impossible to see what you are doing while on the ground. Added to that steering on the ground is not easy. He had a very good take-off but his landing was a bit ropey. Later Ewen was given a flight in the Spitfire - with the instructor at the controls, not Colin - and he was like a child with a box of toys and sweets. He was gob-smacked and over-joyed at having the opportunity to fly in the most iconic aeroplane in British history. Then with an ex Hurricane pilot from 1940 they watched as his old aeroplane - the only Hurricane survivor from the Battle of Britain still flying - flew low across Kent. I do not generally feel any envy for the rich and famous or for their life-styles. But this was an exception. I was very envious of their having the opportunity to fly in a Spitfire. They enjoyed its a lot. I once made a control line flying model of a Spitfire, which was built with much loving care and attention. The Spitfire may have triumphantly survived from WW II but my Spitfire model could not survive my mother's cleaning jobs. Somehow she contrived to drop a door onto my Spitfire and it never flew again.

As background to this messing about in aeroplanes they recounted the days of August and September 1940 and did it very well, talking to some of the few veterans still alive and visiting the operations room, Biggin Hill and so on. One thing that struck me was a comment from one of the veterans when he responded to a question from Ewen - while Ewen & Colin were talking to two of them in a pub. Asked if they suffered from a loss of morale when their comrades were killed or did they just get on with the job, he said that they just got in with it. "After all," he said, " with only a few exceptions, we were not really close friends. We had only met them for the first time in July." I never thought of it like that before, but I suppose it had to be true of men who joined up, learned to fly and spent as little as 10 hours in a Spifire before being sent into dog-fights.

We seem to be giving very wide coverage of the anniversary of the Battle of Britain this year. I suppose it has to be that by the time the 80th anniversary comes around few, if any, of the veterans will still be alive - they would have to be at least 98 years old in 2020.

During last night's programme, I was also struck by the comments about how superior the Spitfire was to most [if not all] other fighter aircraft of the time. Nowadays, it is fashionable for the chattering classes, even the intelligent ones - you know, those with degrees in Politics, Philosophy & Economics - to tell us that we are no good at technology and that we have to buy everything from foreigners. Maybe we need to re-look at that idea and consider that perhaps we are not actually very good at financial and economic management.

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Tax Collecting?

It has been revealed, yesterday, that HM Revenue & Customs failed to collect £42 billion of taxes owed last year. This is another impressive best ever record. The last Labour government has managed to build up a massive accumulated debt of about £800 billion, which cost us £40 billion in annual interest payments and now it turns out that we have a similar amount in uncollected taxes. So more than half of the annual government spending debt is a result of building the debt up and up and failing to collect the taxes. How incompetent can government get? It is staggering. I have said for some time that much of our government's deficit could be eliminated if [a] they stopped legislating for no purpose - what Chris Mullins would have described as "moving the deck chairs," only this is on a monster scale - moving millions of deck chairs, year after year; and [b] get rid of the vast layers of bureaucracy. This last, I think the Coalition is trying to do.

The failure to collect taxes is due to incompetence, the black economy - and nobody is quite sure how much this amounts to, tax evasion, delayed payments and so on. The HMR&C is in a mess anyway and is now trying to collect tax from individuals whose PAYE calculations were wrong. If they can't get this right, it is not surprising that they are failing to collect all taxes.

If the government can simplify things they may be able to reduce the pointless costs of running the system but they may never reduce the staff because the unions will insist that we employ armies of people doing absolutely nothing.

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Supermac

I was reading in The Daily Mail yesterday of the publication of a considerable tome on the life of Harold Macmillan - Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan. I don't know how big the book is but we are told that the notes at the end stretch to 150 pages. Phew! The writer, D.R. Thorpe must have been thorough. Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister during my formative years. He achieved the job after Anthony Eden's disastrous Suez campaign in 1956 and Eden's resultant ill health. When I went to Leeds University in the autumn of 1959, I remember being a member of the University's Conservative Association for a while. I am not quite sure why I did this. The Labour Party at the time was lead by Hugh Gaitskill, a man for whom I always had the greatest respect. I do remember attending meetings at the beginning of that autumn term and discussing the likely outcome of the General Election which was to take place on 8th October. In those days polls were few and far between and so we had to judge form on gut feelings. The general consensus at those meetings was that the Tories would win but with a much reduced majority. In the event, they increased their majority by 20 seats to over 100. It was then that the image of Supemac had been generated with his 1959 election slogan of "You have never had it so good!" For those of us growing up after the Second World War and those who had survived the Great Depression, it was probably true. As usual the Labour Party had been divided with many of the Left Wing opposed to the leadership of Old Wykhamist Hugh Gaitskill.

I always think that Macmillan was a better Prime Minister than many have been prepared to give him credit for. He was only in office for 6½ years and he did lose touch at the end with the Profumo Scandal and his famous cabinet re-shuffle when he sacked seven of his ministers at one go and prompted the Liberal MP, Jeremy Thorpe to utter that memorable comment in the House of Commons that "Greater love hath no man than he should give his friends to save his life."

Above all things Harold Macmillan had a knowledge and a sense of history. He had a distinguished service record in WW I and like all men who served - as well as many who did not - he had a horror of war. Nevertheless, during the 1930s he supported Winston Churchill in his complete opposition to Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain with their policies of Appeasement. Macmillan was a strange amalgam of the Edwardian gentleman and the political moderniser who developed a rather sharp wit. I remember reading chunks of his memoirs - quite a task, when the books came along in six volumes, each of about 750 pages - and, in spite of their great length, found them quite readable and entertaining. I still remember a paragraph where, writing about a man who was to be put in charge of National Savings - an appointment being criticized by some - Macmillan told us that his appointee was a man of honour and above all suspicion. "After all," he told us, "the man is a member of the Bach Choir." And you can't get a more ringing endorsement than that.

Harold Macmillan was the last retiring Prime Minister to be offered and to accept an earldom. He became the Earl of Stockton - an industrial town that was his first parliamentary seat. He did not go to the House of Lords all that often but he did go there when he was in his 90s to criticise the privatisation policies of Margaret Thatcher, likening it to "Selling off the family silver." He was probably right about that.

His new biographer will, I am sure have a high regard for his subject and will point to the accuracy of his insight on many problems that plague us today. In a list of Do's and Don'ts for politicians that he set out in his later years he had as No.1 "Never invade Afghanistan." I think we will all agree with him on that one.

So many of our leaders from the past show us how we have in recent times been lead by some little men. Many seem to regard Tony Blair as a great leader. He may have lead the Labour Party from electoral oblivion but he was still the worst Prime Minister in my life time.

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Making Things

It was revealed at the end of last week that Britain had a trade deficit in goods in July 2010 of £8.7 billion. The surplus on trade in services was £3.8 billion giving us an overall deficit of £4.9 billion. Over the three months to end of July we had a net deficit on goods and services of £13.2 billion - which is the highest figure since we started keeping statistics in 1700. Impressive, isn't it. If we continue in this way for a year we will have an annual total deficit for goods above £100 billion. The value of the pound sterling has dropped by 25% and this was supposed to make our exports more competitive. The trouble is that it makes imports more expensive and because of the dire state of our manufacturing industries we have to import almost everything. And that stokes up inflation which devalues the pound even more unless we put up interest rates to attract foreign investment. It's a mess and a desperate mess at that. How we are going to get out of it, I have no idea. For starters, we need government ministers to tell us that they really do understand the problem and then to say how they are going to re-build manufacturing so that we have something to sell.

Throughout the years of the Labour government manufacturing has declined very considerably and we have kept the economy afloat on borrowed cash. Now the debts, like chickens, have come home to roost and they have to be fed with massive interest payments. Manufacturing declined under Mrs Thatcher's government - less so under John Major - but when the Tories left office in 1997 there was a small surplus on our annual trade figures. Manufacturing may have fallen from 27% of GDP to 22% during 18 years of the Tories but Labour managed a cut of 50% [from 22% to 11%] in 12 years.

We are repeatedly told by accountants, financial wizards [you know - the people who buggered up the World's economy in 2007/2008] and by politicians that we are no good at manufacturing. It's not true and it never has been. What we are not good at is investing in education [proper education], in technology and in large scale manufacturing. Until 1983 we never had a trade deficit at all [except during wars] but since then we have been going further and further into the red and our currency goes down and down. I can remember when we had about SFr 5.0 to £1.00; now there are SFr 1.57 to £1.00. Buying a box of Swiss chocolates is three times as expensive as it was then Even more unbelievable is the total decline since WWII; in 1948 there were US$ 4.00 to £1.00 and SFr 17.5 to £1.00. USA has gone down as well, of course, because they have been managed by the same economic and financial experts who have guided us towards ruin. Now US$ 1.00 is about SFr 1.00. The only group in both countries [UK and USA] that have done well have been the financiers

I was never impressed by the privatisation policies of Thatcher. She was wrong then and the 20 years since her demise have proved it. Selling off our essential services - water, gas and electricity have blighted these industries. Privatisation of the railways - John Major's only big sell off was crackers and, brilliantly, we now provide much bigger subsidies than we ever did when it was publicly owned. Only a banker could come up with a scheme like that. If we make a profit, it's ours; if we make a loss, it's yours.

These days our oil and gas outputs are declining and this will make the figures steadily worse unless something is done. The Coalition Government is intent on cutting government debts and in that, I am sure it is right - we can't carry on lashing out £40 billion per year on interest payments on the debt. But they have to do something positive so that we can make products that people want to buy.

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Boozy Footballers

So, at last a top manager in the English Premier League has commented on the problems of boozy players. He has said that booze is a major contributor to so many of the problems with young British footballers. At the same time he urges them to behave like foreign players, who, on the whole do not behave like British players. After the sad England performance at the World Cup - which was so embarrassing for our country - it is vital to get players behaving as professional sportsmen. In addition it is pointed out that the careers of many Italian players [for example] go on for far longer, since they are still fit enough to play at the top level at 40 years of age. Harry Redknapp does not look like a man who has kept well clear of booze and he admits that in his playing days he, too, was a regular drinker. Now he is firmly fixed in the abstinence camp. I hope he will enforce his beliefs at Tottenham and try to prove that abstemious players performer better than the boozers. As I have said before, I am amazed that people like Alex Ferguson do not come down like a few tons of bricks on the social and night-life activities of many of their players.

Amazingly - at least to me - the Football Correspondent of The Independent defended the players on the grounds that manufacturers of alcoholic drinks were much tied up with endorsing football. Booze, he tells us, has always been part of British football for decades and he points to greats from the past who were prodigious drinkers. He cites George Best and Jimmy Greaves. They were heavy drinkers even when they were playing but I suspect that in 2010 playing against or alongside fit and sober European players they would not perform quite so well. One of them died as a result of his drinking and the other needed a lot of drying out before he could carry on with his life. In a culture where so many young people drink to excess, why, The Independent asks, should we expect young footballers to be different. That's easy! We should expect them to be different because they are paid £100,000 per week to be different. At least we can point to some exceptions. Players like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and a few others who are still performing well in their mid-thirties and are at the top level as well. They behave responsibly, soberly and professionally. England Manager Fabio Capello tried to talk Paul Scholes back into the England team; he was right to try to do so. At least we would have known that he had a player who was playing without gallons of alcohol circulating around in his system.

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