17 December 2007

on 17 December 2007 at 04:30

Scepticism the healthy option

My article last time on our drift into an Orwellian society was proved right by an immediate accusation from one reader – that the figure I gave for the percentage of accidents caused by exceeding the speed limit contradicted government statistics.

Well, if she chooses to believe the spin put on statistics by a Government heavily committed to speed cameras, that is up to her. I believe scepticism to be the more healthy option.

Other analysts have shown that the Government crunches together different accident causes under the heading of speed for dramatic effect; and that the five per cent for exceeding the speed limit – as opposed to excessive speed, impatience, losing control and driving too fast for the conditions, for example – is accurate. In 2003 the chief constable of Durham, an obvious anti-Orwellian, put the figure even lower at three per cent, and very recently the chief constable of Lincolnshire admitted that “simply driving above the speed limit” could not cause an accident.

But there will always be those who like everyone to agree with the Government. Presumably anything else makes them nervous.

They should take care that they are not like Sir Thomas More – at least as portrayed in The Tudors on BBC – who always sounded very reasonable until his belief structure was threatened. Then he started burning people.

Other recent Orwellian symptoms:

• Yellow and red tags are coming to rubbish bins near you if you throw the wrong thing away. How long before people are asked to inform on neighbours who are rubbish at recycling? I put plastic bottles in my green bin last week – encouraged to do so by the council’s own magazine – and my entire green bin was rejected. No sign of a tag, but my neighbours are looking at me oddly. Admittedly, that is not much of a change.
• A road safety website aimed at young people invites them to inform on their friends and hand them “deadly” speeding tickets. Can’t think of any way that might be abused.
• The Prime Minister signs a treaty that he knows most of the electorate are opposed to and refuses to let them vote on it.
• And (in Australia, admittedly), there is a suggestion that parents who have more than two children should pay a hefty climate change tax to offset the effect of their greenhouse gas emissions.

To cross or not to cross, that is one question

After declaring rashly that I would rather move to an Undecided area of Norfolk than remain in what might become a cash-wasting unitary authority, I was alerted by a correspondent to the peculiar goings-on in the shadowy borderlands where Norfolk, Suffolk and the coast meet.

Here the Government had declared that no unitary authority would be created that crossed county boundaries – thus ruling out the creation of a Yartoft authority – or as I prefer to call it, Lowmouth.

But the stone this was carved in now seems to be unexpectedly fragile, and Ministers have hinted that a brave new cross-border unitary council is still on the cards.

The cost of it all could be higher than you might imagine. What will happen, for instance, to the planned £50 million Waveney Campus, planned for the shores of Lake Lothing in Lowestoft as a joint home for 1000 staff from the Centre for the Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Sciences, Waveney District Council and part of Suffolk County Council? Rumour has it that the compulsory purchase orders going through are going to cost Waveney council tax payers £3 million, for a start.

My correspondent writes: “Obviously, not until after this building is completed and occupied will a unitary authority for Yarmouth and Lowestoft be announced, and plans for a new building somewhere in the Gorleston / Hopton area - between Yarmouth and Lowestoft - started. All this will of course be heralded as the most efficient solution for the area.”

Surely some mistake? Or is the European Union involved in some way? Or both?

Stonehenge no, Pondhenge yes, if we could find it

If I ran a satnav company, I would think twice before promoting a survey designed to expose people’s lack of geographical knowledge.

The other day I was being driven from Norwich to Wymondham town centre by someone who possessed a satellite navigation system. Admittedly German (we give the directions), it was correctly programmed but took us most of the way to Attleborough on the A11 before turning back and entering Wymondham from the south, adding at a guess about five miles to the journey.

Most of us have a better idea of geography than that, even if some think Leeds Castle is in Yorkshire (forgiveable, in view of the obvious deception) and Hadrian’s Wall is in Scotland (right direction, and it was supposed to be the boundary at one time).

The survey also revealed that about 200 people (a tenth of those surveyed) think Stonehenge is in Norfolk. Well, it would certainly be more convenient if it was, but surely that’s also an understandable mistake. After all, we do have the original site of Seahenge at Holme and the equally inaccessible Pondhenge, somewhere in North Norfolk.

I would be more worried if people did not know that Norfolk sometimes contains the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, a beautifully formed area that displays some of the most intriguing time-space distortions in the known universe. Apparently, this was not included in the survey.

A bridge too far away

Not that I think Lottery grants are the best way of creating and distributing money for deserving projects, but I was delighted to see that the plan to connect Norwich city centre with Whitlingham Country Park was awarded £900,000.

Charles Clarke says, for some reason, that this is a “victory for sustainability”. I would have said it was a victory for common sense, until I read that work was scheduled to start – yes, start – in four to five years. Now I see what he means: we have to sustain our interest even longer. Or shall we cross that bridge when we come to it, if we’re still alive?

3 December 2007

on 3 December 2007 at 04:30

Orwellian vision sneaks past our defences

Not many people would vote for the Orwellian vision of constant surveillance, citizens informing on each other, and laws covering what we say and think.

But you don’t have to vote for it: it sneaks by in a thousand small ways, and if there seem good reasons for it, you just let it happen. In a Norfolk school, for instance, children are being encouraged to spy on their teachers and expose their failings.

We are told that “gangs of diligent children patrol classrooms to make sure all televisions and computers are switched off” - and if a teacher has left one on, he or she gets a red card.

This may seem harmless and in a good cause. After all, no-one is being locked up and tortured. But in a society where so many children have no respect for teachers, it sets a bad precedent.

It also presents as fact what is conjectural – at least as far as the effects are concerned – but of course we’re used to that.

Elsewhere children are dangerously encouraged to see cars as evil, and no doubt it is just a question of time before they hand out red cards to drivers who they don’t think are parking properly.

Already unqualified adult volunteers are encouraged to gang up and use radar guns to catch drivers exceeding speed limits – and this at a time when exceeding the speed limit has been shown by government figures to account for fewer than five per cent of accidents, with most of those caused by the driver being drunk, on drugs or engaged in criminal activity.

This is an open invitation to people who want to impose their own prejudices on others, as are most Orwellian innovations.

Most of these wheedle their way in because people are frightened – usually unnecessarily. Last week, for instance, a professor of philosophy made it clear that he wants us to be “scared stiff” – so scared that he wants us to stop using accurate language and use scary words instead.

He suggests that the precise term “climate change” should be dropped, and we should start using terms like “climate crisis” and “climate catastrophe”.

He may be convinced that we are in dire straits atmospherically speaking, but many of us are not convinced. He calls us “climate-deniers”, which I presume means we think there is no climate at all.

He calls his own belief “telling the truth”, and he would like to impose his own “life-improving” lifestyle – which coincidentally would fit in nicely with tackling a climate crisis – on everyone else.

This man is not a scientist: revealingly his UEA colleague Prof Mike Hulme, who is, has written at least twice to the EDP correcting wild assumptions on “catastrophic” climate change.

The philosopher is already a politician locally and would like to be on the national stage. He thinks we should speak honestly. I think we should too. So I have to say that I believe he would be not a change but a catastrophe. Of course, that’s only my view.

Meeting the challenge of throwing money away

A conservation charity I know has recently built itself a bright new meeting room. I can see it from my bedroom window, and I’m very happy they hold meetings there.

If they didn’t, they might do what the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority does and book expensive hotels. In 18 months the QCA spent more than £4.2 million of taxpayers’ money on top hotels and conference centres to host meetings in the course of a wide-ranging review of the secondary school curriculum.

This, in case you were wondering, is equivalent to the annual salary of about 150 fully qualified teachers, but hey – who need fully qualified teachers when you can enjoy reviewing the curriculum instead?

Of course. the education sector is not alone in spending far more than it needs to on the comfort of its employees – or its consultants. The EDP reported last week that Defra, which has spent over £1bn on consultants over five years, booked staff tackling a bird flu outbreak into the luxury Ickworth Hotel, near Bury St Edmunds, where the lowest bed and breakfast rate is £185 a room.

Still, at least they’ve taken foie gras off the menu at City Hall. That’s not a financial saving of course, but no doubt the reorganisation of Norfolk councils into three unitary authorities will be. Or might there be some slight cost involved in rebranding, restaffing and completely changing everything?

Happily there are two areas still marked “undecided” on the brave new county map. I think I’ll move there. It’s bound to be cheaper.

Narrow escape for radar gun police

I hear from an unimpeachable electronic source that two traffic patrol officers from a few miles north of Norfolk were involved in an unusual incident while trying to catch motorists exceeding the speed limit on the A1.

One of the officers was using a hand-held radar device to check the speed of something approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300mph. The machine then stopped working and the officers were unable to reset it.

The radar had in fact latched on to a Nato Tornado fighter jet over the North Sea, which was engaged in a low-flying exercise. The chief constable fired off a stiff complaint to the RAF and received the following reply: "Thank you for your message. You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had automatically locked on to your hostile radar equipment and sent a jamming signal back to it.

“The Sidewinder air-to-ground missiles aboard the aircraft had also locked on to the target. Fortunately the Dutch pilot flying the Tornado responded to the missile status alert intelligently and was able to override the automatic protection system before the missile was launched.”

Wonderful things, Tornadoes. We should have more of them.

Wrong place, wrong time

Shortly after being mistaken for a small town by the BBC, Norwich has emphasised its city status by being voted second-best small city in the world, though how it could be beaten by Ipswich (even Ipswich, Australia) is hard to comprehend.

Not many people know that Hingham was on the long list for best small autonomous republic but was sadly disqualified for time and space distortion.

“Same old story,” said local expert Prof V A R Scheinlich. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”