Polls for 2011

Another year has passed, and it's again time to publish my graphs of all the year's national "voting intention" polls – this time with the daily (YouGov, top graph) polling figures separated from those of the less frequent surveys conducted by the various other pollsters (lower graph).

It looks like it has been worth doing it this way, so I shall continue the practice next year and beyond.

As usual, clicking on the images will display enlarged versions, and your web browser's Back button will then return you to the complete post.

The story of the year is plain from both graphs, though not identical. It is also useful to look at last year's (combined) graph to see just how much has changed since those pre- and post-election polls that saw Labour racing up to equal and eventually just pass the Conservatives at the end of that year.

During 2011, Labour generally maintained a modest lead of around three or four percentage points all year, though YouGov tended to show a slightly larger lead (typically 5% or 6%) than any of the others.

Who was right? We shall probably never know, as it has all moved on since then with no General Election yet in prospect. YouGov tend to show the Liberal Democrats at a lower polling figure than most others, giving those potential votes mainly if not entirely to Labour, and that appears to be the reason for this small but quite consistent difference, caused (I believe) by a slightly controversial weighting method applied to the raw data.

Whatever lies behind it, though, the yellow team appears to be more-or-less out of contention for the time being, and it really is a two-horse type of race for now. The big story is that the Conservatives have now caught up those few percentage points, and are (again fairly consistently) showing an equal footing with Labour or even a small lead over the reds.

Today's "poll of polls" for December, in The Independent, has these top-line figures: Con 39; Lab 38%; Lib Dems 12%, reinforcing the overall message and again pointing up YouGov's disparity re the Lib Dems.

The latest swing is largely down to David Cameron's "veto" at the EU recently, combined with what most commentators now agree is Labour's ineffectiveness and lack of public approval, as other survey results show. For example, in the last polls of the year the view was more than twice as many respondents judging David Cameron and (in appropriate questions) George Osborne more competent and able to deal with the big issues facing the nation as thought the same of Ed Miliband/Ed Balls.

Whether this situation will persist into and through any significant chunk of 2012 is open to conjecture. I happen to think that it won't, and that this is how it should be – for now. It would in a sense be "wrong" for the electorate to be that supportive of a Government – especially one in coalition – that is taking the country through a necessary period of austerity, especially as the nation's real situation is largely hidden from public view, unlike (say) in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties when Callaghan was voted out of government in favour of Mrs Thatcher.

No: the tide will turn, I think, far more solidly and convincingly toward the Conservatives somewhere around two years from now, possibly up to half a year later. By mid-2014 at the latest it ought to be solid enough to be confident of a decent Conservative overall majority post-election.

Meanwhile, the past year's polling gives an idea of how overall public voting intention has settled down since the early months after the May 2010 election, so there is more "mass" to them now than there was a year or so ago. This bodes well, and I thus have confidence in my above prediction.

Big Stories of the Year 2011 (2)

There are plenty of others out there, but this time I wish to concentrate on those smaller, yet still of significance, featured here.

I don't often blow my own trumpet, and tend to do so somewhat diffidently on those rare occasions, but looking back over the year has reminded me that even this seemingly modest and comment-quiet 'blog marks and makes public a number of issues. Many of these originate elsewhere, some I start and handle throughout.

So, during the past twelve months I can state that I have posted some 580 separate 'blog entries covering a range of topics. On the political front this has included quite a variety of statistics, analysis, reporting on meetings and other local events, and much more besides both serious and humorous. Much of the humour I have created myself, so is exclusive to this 'blog.

Much of what you read here has involved a considerable amount of searching, research, data recording and evaluation, so that you don't have to plough through all that I have to work at on a frequent if not exactly regular basis. It's my job to do the hard graft, and I have something of a feel for such things, which has come in handy on many occasions.

Therefore this works well and has produced a wealth of new material that might encourage others to do similar exercises in their own localities, adding to the body of localised knowledge and helping to "calibrate" people's thinking.

Some of the facts and figures both this year and previously reported have revealed surprising and unexpected significance – such as the relative "bit player" status of the non-Conservative members of the local council here, and the real shifts in local voting patterns over the years. Here are a few highlights...

• April – my predictions for the local elections, in which I got 52 of the 55 seats correct, the most accurate prediction by anyone and proved correct despite what certain others were claiming.
• Aug to Nov – my Walkabouts in various parts of Medway
• October – my publishing of the year-by-year rail fares and actual rises for several years, something that was not available anywhere else: it told an interesting story.
• October – the launch of what looks set to become a full-blown campaign during the next year to expose the truths behind the Cabinet system of local government and have its scrapping here in Medway voted upon, and hopefully agreed so that we can return to hugely better democracy in the Council.

Throughout the year I have continued to report on work I have done in my local area that had been neglected by the elected (Labour) councillors for this ward, with before and after photographs as proof. This practice is now being copied by Luton and Wayfield Labour who – to their credit – have taken on a fresh approach (for Medway Labour) to their own work, apparently after learning from me, which is not only flattering but also bodes well for the future.

That's how it should be done: we all gain from studying others who have gone before, and from a genuine desire to give and to serve. If only their longer-established party colleagues would now deign to learn from their party's newly-elected colleagues, who in turn apparently learned from me and have said so on occasion, which I have on permanent file...

Overall it has been a very successful year, despite the difficulties introduced by my illness in April that persists in some degree today and probably for the rest of my life. My aim in trying to make this 'blog a lot more than a reporting medium but without an over-the-top sense of importance has probably struck more or less the right balance.

Perhaps I might like the idea of being more influential than I am; but that would be self-seeking rather than society-serving, and I hope never to fall into that trap. There are others who can be far more effective at that higher level than I shall ever be. My aim is to make a positive difference, and even the necessarily brief summary above suggests that it has at least been better that I was here than my not being here.

That is a legacy I shall be content to leave behind when I eventually depart...

New Year's Eve 2011–2012

No doubt I shall stay up as usual to see in the New Year. This has been an interesting year in a number of ways, and 2012 looks set to be equally interesting for its own reasons.

I therefore decided to have an interesting meal this evening, comprising Farmhouse Chicken (stuffed with a cheese-and-herb filling and wrapped in bacon), croquette potatoes, watercress and a Chinese stir-fry vegetable mix which actually went very well with it. The wash-down was Bonne Nouvelle non-alcoholic Chardonnay.

This allows me to have a Sherry to welcome in the New Year at midnight tonight. I have some chilled Tio Pepe ready for the occasion...

Now, I am not one of those who have tended to make predictions at this time of previous years, though I always have a few possibilities in mind that I suspect will happen. The only ones I shall (just for a change) mention this year are one national and one local.


Nationally, I have a feeling that the Liberal Democrats are going to be split hugely over the actions of their MPs in coalition, and that this will cause short-term difficulty for the Coalition Government, but far more severe and lasting effects on that party.

The Lefties in the party will move to Labour (where many if not most of them belong anyway) which will allow those who remain to sharpen their focus and become again the party that they once were. From there it will be a long, slow climb back to a decent level of popular support – though much of that will be achieved by the time of the next General Election in 2015.


Locally, Medway Council Labour Group will, I think, have a leadership contest to replace their largely ineffective group leader. It has been a long time coming, and they do need someone frsh to lead them if they are going to move forward anew, rather than continue to stagnate as they have done under the present leader.

Even the gifted extra Council seats they gained last May didn't stop their enemy (the Conservatives) increasing their own seat count further, as they have done at every all-out election since the Unitary Authority was created (in shadow form for the first year) some fourteen years ago. Medway Labour still has fewer than half as many councillors as the Blues have.

Their current deputy leader is the best bet they have, as I have told him before, years ago in fact (I was probably the first person to even suggest this, possibly being responsible for planting the idea in his mind) as there is little if any capability elsewhere within the group for such a position. I know them well enough to realise that – also, how factioned they have tended to be and the fallout that would result from their picking the 'wrong' person. This was a very real fear during their parliamentary candidate selection process not so very long ago, between the Murray supporters and the Esterson fans, so there is precedent for this.


We shall see what happens.Meanwhile, I do hope for a better year ahead for all of us than those in the know believe is all that likely, and that we come through the next twelve months feeling that it was a year of accomplishment and improvement in our nation. Post-Olympics, and after the Queen's jubilee celebrations, Britain should be starting to really feel good about itself once again.

Medway might even be made a City during the year ahead, much to the disgust of the local Greens and the other misery-guts who like to knock anything that has a whiff of improvement or advancement about it. If they like stagnation and decay so much, perhaps they should have tried living in East Berlin before the Wall came down – it would have suited them far better! Their specious (and utterly transparent) 'objections' will hopefully be completely ignored in the decision on this, and Medway be accorded a status that will encompass the old City of Rochester area in its entirety, but also go far beyond those narrow boundaries.

Even if it doesn't happen, it will still have been worth the effort of trying for it, and will have been noticed in places that could prove beneficial in future endeavours.

All in all, it should be a good year, with lots of aspects to what happens on both the local and national stages. I'm looking forward to it, in more ways than one!

Just Manure

I assume this must be Labour's new slogan for 2012. It would have the merit of being a more accurate description of their policy position than anything so far...

"Just Manure". Image from Ed Miliband Has Long Arms

Computer Gaming Then and Now

I've been looking at the old Acorn games scene during this holiday period, as it was quite an inventive part of our market, bearing in mind that we were generally behind almost everyone else in this field.

Nevertheless, it was games released for the Acorn platform, written by choice on Acorns by talented programmers, that occasionally rocked the world and ended up being ported to other systems. Of these, David Braben's Elite is the best known and probably the most successful, although his later Zarch (ported to other platforms as Virus) also did fairly well, I gather.

Anyway, here's a video of a little of TBA's Cobalt Seed as played on a lowly A3010 – that's the machine with the bright green function keys – so limited to 256 colours and a total of just 240,000 pixels. Here it has been recorded via a TV quality output (i.e. not exactly brilliant), some eleven years ago. Cobalt Seed had been out a little while by then, and was actually very well done, as this shows...



Some didn't make it. Iron Dignity, despite having lots of promise and years spent on its development, never appeared in the end. The excellent Tower of Babel is another Acorn-platform game that at least did appear, as a port from the Amiga. It was being updated formore mainstream systems, but the project fizzled out a year or so ago. Perhaps it will start up again one day – who knows?

As usually happens when big players tend to dominate a market, the more original thinking give way to corporate diktat and the subsequent products tend to be 'safe' re-workings of essentially the same ideas.Thus there is no end of first person shooters (FPS) with American marine voices and mannerisms, long after the basic idea became old hat. They're still appearing even today, I see from posters I pass on my travels.

Elite was original in its day, back on the BBC Micro, as a hugely engrossing space trading game. It doesn't matter how big or complex an FPS is made, it's still an FPS, and those all too frequent American voices are very off-putting, I find. It's all clever but not good gaming, and certainly not original even if there are 'new' elements or ideas added to the package.

Perhaps an exception was Tomb Raider, which had some originality to it and, at the time of its release, something extra – but it is worth noting that it was produced by Eidos who have their roots firmly in the Acorn market. They might have moved on some years ago, but the Acorn market way of thinking obviously influenced them strongly. That was then...

Perhaps it has now all been done, and there is nothing that remains to be tried. I doubt that; and even the Tower of Babel project – though working with an old game – would at least be re-creating something different from the mainstream and definitely original in its heyday. There is scope for broadening the games market, but probably not while big corporations effectively own that market.

This is of course what happened to the hardware side of the industry, which is why so many good and original product lines vanished during the 1990s. Today's computer hardware market is boring, with really just two (both American and both bloated) systems on sale in the High Street or at most on-line dealerships.

There are thus no prizes for guessing which direction the computer/console games industry will continue to take. They might have minor titles to fill their catalogues that are quirky and non-mainstream, but those are the bit-players to give the publisher an air of breadth and variety, essentially nothing more.

Occasionally such a title will do surprisingly well, and a secondary purpose could well be to suss out new directions that will themselves become mainstream. One can understand the mentality, which is corporate in nature rather than enthusiast-driven. It makes the mega-bucks but stifles and limits the market. It has become too big a business area.

I have no obvious or immediate solution to this stagnation, especially as modern society is so heavily adrenalin-fed. When even Doctor Who has become more-or-less reliant on bid effects, explosions galore and the more subtle aspects have shrunk to some degree (but thankfully are still there) we know that there is no real place for the likes of Repton and James Pond in today's world of video gaming.

Fortuntely, society tends to change in a cyclical fashion rather than all one way, so one day this should all change. Big corporations need huge regular turnovers to survive, and once again in that changing world it should become possible for the smaller and cheaper independents to move in and collectively restore a sensible balance to the future games market. That'll be good!

What A Silly Mili !

Just a few Ed[ward] Miliband images as we approach the end of the year. You might have seen a few of them already, though I suspect that others will be new to most people.

I invite suggestions for captions to be left in the Comments. UPDATE: I didn't get any suggestions, which is a little disappointing, so have added my own instead...

1 – "Our policy? How should I know?"

2 – "I know our policy like the back of my hand. Oh, what's that!?"

3 – "This is what Gordon taught me to do. Worked for him."

4 – "You do the Hokey-Cokey..."

5 – "Go left or right? Um, left, I think..."

6 – "I can't help worrying about what Balls is up to."

7 – "Who invited Gerry Adams to this event?"

8 – "I hate waiting to see Derek Simpson every time we're broke."

9 – "Oops. Oh, and ouch! That tea was hot!"

10 – "See? I'm looking down on you, mister nasty Tory!"

Wheels to the Rails

That's what the trainee locomotives say in Chuggington. Yes, they talk, and much more besides! Each has a distinct personality.

It is a very well devised, designed and produced series, with the engines (known as "chuggers") even based on real locos, such as Brewster being a Deltic, albeit with only one cab, so perhaps a "Deltic lite". Olwin is a Gresley A4 Pacific steamer, and so on.

There are diesel, steam and electric locos – at least fourteen of them in total, as well as plenty of other rolling stock, including Emery the rapid transit train. Hoot and Toot are usually joined together, but are two locos, brother and sister, and can be separated.

The stories are good, the sounds and visuals are very mechanical and clanky, the whole production has the feel of quality and attention to detail, and the humour can be surprisingly good.

Include a large cast of characters and a complex but consistent storyscape (all the tunnels, bridges, places and everything else seems to have been planned out thoroughly) and the stage is set for some quite cleverly-written short stories lasting just ten minutes including opening and closing sequences. Here is the 45-second opening sequence...



On top of this is a collection of four-minute shorts – the "Badge Quest" series.

Among the best stories are those set in winter, with snow and ice to add to the fun: Chilly Chuggers, also Snowstruck Wilson, plus Wilson's Icy Escapade, and Heave Ho Harrison. That last one is particularly funny, with whoever voices Harrison doing a perfect job with excellent comic timing, so do catch it while it's still on BBC iPlayer at the link.

Clackety-clack!

Luncheon – 29 December 2011

A simple enough cold collation today, but presented well so it also looks appetising! This comprised Napoli salami, Feta cheese & olives (in olive oil), vine-ripened tomatoes, Florette salad from a pack, and a dollop of spicy tomato & red pepper chutney.

Today, the wash-down was alcoholic for a change: Hardy's Classic Shiraz...

Ed Miliband's New Year Message for 2012

Not on video (which some might be relieved to learn) but in written form only, reproduced here. I shall say nothing about it, but leave it to the excellent Pete Hoskin to do his usual perceptive job on it at The Spectator, and the almost equally forensic Dan Hodges at the Telegraph...



Politics can make a difference: Ed Miliband New Year Message

29 December 2011

Britain starts 2012 in the most difficult of moments. Economic gloom, rising unemployment, falling living standards.

What I have heard, going round the country in the last year, are the same concerns everywhere: young people struggling to find work, families feeling their living standards squeezed, parents fearful about what kind of future lies ahead for their children.

Take our young people. Some have applied for hundreds of jobs without success. When they are just starting out in life, they should feel a sense of hope. Instead, they feel desperate.

Yet just when the challenges facing our country are greatest for a generation, many people feel politics cannot answer their problems. Some believe things would be the same whoever was in charge. And others fear the Government is in the grip of forces so powerful that nothing can be done.

It suits the current Conservative-led government to go along with this idea. Having failed in their promise to make Britain a safe haven, they now say that there is no alternative to rising joblessness and years of falling living standards for working people. It is a counsel of despair.

When so many are sceptical about politics the easy route for politicians is to join in and accept the cynicism. To say simply that in hard times nothing can be done. But that's not why I came into politics and it's not what the Labour party stands for.

My party's mission in 2012 is to show politics can make a difference. To demonstrate that optimism can defeat despair. That politics can rise to meet the challenges Britain faces even when the challenges are so great.

How do we do this?

First of all, by showing things could be different now.

When those in power say, "You’re going to face five bad years and there is nothing to be done about it," that is a statement of their values and priorities

But neither in Britain, nor across the world, can anyone afford just to stand back and watch unemployment rise, growth stagnate and indeed borrowing go higher as a result.

When politicians shrug their shoul ders in the face of other people’s despair, they are not just abdicating responsibility, they are making clear choices. That is as true now as it was in the Great Depression during the 1930s.

There are choices to be made every day about how best to reduce the deficit and restore growth to the economy. There are choices to be made about who should bear the greatest burden in these difficult times, choices to be made about what Britain will be like to live in next year and in the future.

Tough times expose your values, because they force you to choose.

So when this government, in the Treasury’s Autumn Statement, takes three times as much from the working poor as from the banks, it shows where its priorities lie - with the privileged few.

And when Labour says it would choose to tax the bankers' bonuses in order to put our young people back to work, it shows who we are as a party and where our priorities lie.

Second, we will show that different solutions can build a different economy and a better society for the future.

The British people know the scale of the task. They know there is no going back to business as usual before the financial crisis. Our economy was over-reliant on one industry,  rewards were unfairly shared out, and we were not doing enough to build long-term wealth.

We must rebuild in a different way. Britain faces enormous economic and social challenges which go beyond the here and now: the rise of China and lndia, the unacceptable inequalities that scar our society and the need to build social justice in tough fiscal times.

To address these challenges  we need a more responsible capitalism, a new approach to our economy and our society.

Building an industrial future which goes beyond financial services to create more well-paying jobs. Tackling vested interests - from banks to utilities - that hold our economy back and squeeze living standards. And a fairer sharing of rewards so that we discourage irresponsibility at the top and the bottom of society.

Third, we will always seek to do politics in a different way. The best moments I have in this job are talking to people about their work and their lives.

It is a daily reminder of the values of the British people: fairness, equality of sacrifice, responsibility. I saw it in our troops that I met in Afghanistan. We all saw it after the riots with those who came out to clean up, and we see it in the everyday lives of the decent, hard-working people of this country.

Labour's task as a party is to be at the heart of every local community: making the case for what matters - from the living wage to the children's centre.

Labour councils throughout Britain and the Assembly Government in Wales are already showing the difference we can make. Helping advance the prospects of our young people, supporting families and listening to local people about the services they most want to see protected.

Finally, we rebuild on the basis of our ideals. I believe this country needs profound  change, not small change.  

Not to seek simply a continuation of what Labour did in government but to renew and reinvent our party's mission in response to the urgency of changed times. Everything I have seen and done since I got this job has convinced me I am right to believe that.

Throughout our country's history, tough times have seen us not lower our sights but raise them.  We need equal ambition for the future if we are to avoid our country heading further and faster in the wrong direction: a lost generation of young people, Britain struggling to compete in the world, and greater inequality.

These are the stakes facing my generation. This is the challenge to which our politic s must rise. This is the challenge to which Labour is determined to rise in the year ahead.

The Two EdEd Monster

Did I just hear a dagger unsheathed behind me?

Big Stories of the Year 2011 (1)

At this time of year the major news outlets and suchlike tend to look back over the preceding twelve months and post a kind of recap of the best/most significant stories from the past year.

These days, that includes front-line bloggers such as Guido, who has today quite rightly focussed on his biggie of 2011, the so-called Pilgrims – Trade Union officials who are ostensibly employed to do a public sector job but who instead spend all their time on Union activity.

I have encountered these myself, as well as their often subversive and purely political activities, so am very much conscious of what is going on and the motivation behind it. As I commented at Guido's post (something I do rarely, owing to the typically low signal-to-noise ratio, but the following triggered a worthwhile sub-thread – and attracted at least one troll!)...

"This is one of the most significant political stories in the UK this past year, and reminds us that the Left will always find ways to sponge off everyone else, as is their inground nature.

Apart from Pilgrims, there are other subversives embedded into just about every public body in the nation, from schools and hospitals to councils and police forces. These will include Common Purpose “graduates” and others not even (yet) known about by most people, still to be discovered.

Thus the Pilgrims issue, while hugely important in itself, is really just the start of a detoxification that will take years to deal with, and even then it is unlikely to be even close to being fully successful. That is the rot that the Left always bring to a society in pursuance of their self-centred agenda, and that’s why the Left *are* rot, absolute filthy, corrupt garbage! The Pilgrims are a good reminder of this."

Strongly worded, yes, but fully warranted. We are dealing with what are in effect thieves, subversives and con-artists, all at your expense and mine through our taxes, as Guido and his team have revealed during the year, and I already knew from my own experiences locally over several years.

The story to date posted today shows that the Coalition Government has taken the Pilgrims issue seriously and is dealing with this abuse of the public purse, so it looks like this loophole is about to be closed. There are, though, plenty of others either already in operation or that will be devised by the corrupt to supersede this lost avenue of public funding for their political and subversive activities. There can be little doubt of that.

The main purpose of my comment was to ensure others are alert to this, and not to assume that the demise of the publicly-funded Pilgrims will be the end of the story. It will, however, be interesting to see if the same number of Union bodies is maintained after they have to be funded from Union subscriptions, which is what should have been the case all along.

If not, it will show that those Unions place greater importance in their other uses for their subscription income, which as we now know is predominantly in political campaigning (including all those year-round hoarding posters), paying their bosses huge six-figure annual sums and donating to the Labour party. It is already an irony that it isn't members' subscriptions that go toward benefiting those members by paying for local representatives, but our tax money.

As for next year: perhaps Guido will take on Common Purpose, as I and at least one other commenter to that post have touched upon as a possibility. With the huge amount of research and other work already done by the StopCP people, there's nowadays a lot of material that – with the aid of Freedom of Information requests among other aids – could enable a dismantling of their network of embedded "graduates" within the nation's governmental and other bodies. We could all play a part in that.

Perhaps 2012 will thus turn out to be a really good year!

Nick Clegg's New Year Message for 2012

Genuinely worth taking three minutes to watch, especially after the recent business over David Cameron's EU "veto"...

The Split Remains

Any hope that the Miliband fraternal discord would abate in the run-up to Christmas appears to have vanished.

This comes to our notice via the disclosures of Labour activist and insider Dan Hodges spilling the beans on what is really happening within the Labour party, and in regard to the two Miliband brothers in particular.

The linked article is ostensibly about Ed's changes at party HQ, but we find out that (a) the staff are still behind his brother David rather than him; (b) Ed's actions are causing problems, not solving them, for everyone from fundraising organisers and party donors to shadow cabinet members; and (c) the party under his leadership has become a shambles (and often described thus) but without even the activity that the word "shambles" implies.

There is more, so do follow the link if you are curious about what else is going horribly wrong at the top of the party. Essentially, though, the split between the Miliband brothers is mirrored inside the party machine, and the effects of that one factor are immense. That is on top of the state of the party's policy and management issues.

Little if any of this comes as any great surprise to those who, like me, have studied and watched what is going on for some time, but it is very useful to have solid confirmation from someone who really knows. All that appears in that piece just backs up what some of us have been saying for some time, myself included (and not just here on this 'blog either).

A secondary effect will be to see how much local Labour folk in one's own area are aware of the real state of their party. Perhaps they'll try to deny it, or possibly they won't even have been aware of it. They might well have and use "the line to take" that someone has no doubt concocted and circulated to party activists in case of it all spilling out into the public arena.

If so, that is obvious acceptance that it is true, otherwise there would have been no need to prepare such rebuttal. An experienced questioner will have the skill to get activists to give the game away, and I do hope that is done, as I think a lot of people will learn a lot about Labour's true nature, or at least a part of it, as a result.

There is much, much more that could (and some probably will) come out as further parts of the underlying story, so this is an early notice that there are several more installments yet to be written. I foresee several direct, and even more indirect, consequences of the party's current state and direction (or lack of one), with other big players intervening within the next two years at most, probably a lot sooner and certainly well before the next General Election campaign run-up period begins.

Interesting times lie ahead...

What Narmoles Like

In the Waybuloo episode Narmole Day, we learn what Nara's version of moles like, including eating carrotbeet leaves (something we first learned in Carrotbeet Day), the pitcher plant Nara tune, roly-polies (from which activity the Yogo move "Narmole Roll" derives) and – a little odd for an animal you might think, but this is Nara – it also likes huggles...

 Yojojo is a bit slow on the uptake, but one of the cheebies puts him straight on this...

Chatham at Christmas

I decided to go out and capture in photographs something of the nature of this part of the world on Christmas Day.

I found that the somewhat bleak and largely deserted landscapes, both natural and man-made, combined well with the activity of other, non-human residents who are currently preparing for their imminent period of hibernation by stocking up ready for the long winter ahead.

So here it is, from Victoria Gardens to Chatham Railway Station 'Bus Stand (click on any image to enlarge)...

Christmas Dinner 2011

This year I did something just a little different, by having barbecue-style pork (though cooked in the conventional oven) along with crispy potato cubes, plus the festive-seasonal roast parsnips, sprouts and chestnuts (cooked with a little red onion and a tiny amount of olive oil) and a salad leaves garnish. It was a three-plate job...

For the first time at any Christmas, I had non-alcoholic Carl Jung's red wine, leaving me 'capacity' for a little ruby Port with some blue Stilton cheese later today. Sherry (Tio Pepe) will have to wait until tomorrow, because of the strict limit on daily intake of Units necessitated by the Warfarin I take these days..

Happy Ed's-mas

This picture reminds us of two things:

1. even our political leaders can today relax at home, away from the hustle and bustle of political life, and
2. Christmas is the time for Wallace and Gromit.

"Cracking photo pose, Ed!"

Santa has been here!

As the NORAD display shows, and there's even a Santa Cams video (non-embeddable, unfortunately) of the London fly-past, Santa has now been to the UK. He left me this double gift...

Now, okay, however much I enjoy the show, I do realise that I am a little old for the activities in the annual, but I will say that it is very well produced, with large images that really bring the (as always excellently drawn) characters to life. I am pleased to have one, but I shall never need another: I asked for it, and for a magazine, so to find out what they are like so that I can advise anyone thinking of getting one or the other.

With the magazine, I'll leave that sealed up until tomorrow; but for today I shall concentrate on going through the annual – apart from when it's dinner time, of course!

The Best Christmas Present

From CBS News. I found this had been posted yesterday, which was just in time for Christmas...

Christmas Eve 2011

Here it is, my perennial Christmas Eve special video, except for last year but back again this time. The day wouldn't be quite the same without this...

NORAD Tracks Santa

Yes, NORAD is deploying its huge resources to scour the skies and keep track of where Santa Claus is making his deliveries, which is probably most easily visualised on this Google Maps display. There are photos and/or (animated) videos at each visited location, so it's never boring. Just click on the overlaid icons.

Although the videos as presented are tiny, they do have the usual full screen toggle button, and I recommend always switching to the big view.

As I write this, Santa is approaching the capital of Thailand, and then he's off to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The map view is being continually updated as he travels around the globe.

I haven't found a way to embed it here (the picture is just a static 'snapshot') so it's necessary to follow the above link.

UPDATE 25 December, pm: Well, it looks as though Santa made it all around the world on schedule, and completed  his journey a little earlier, as the linked page's latest update now shows.

Busy Time

Sorry for not posting much here during the last couple of days or so. Apart from the usual busy nature of this season of the year, I also have a new drive system on my oldest RiscPC Acorn computer – the one I bought in August 1995.

I have been busy populating that with mirrors of backups, after partitioning the drive into no fewer than eight parts, of various data sizes between eight and 64 gigabytes.

Before that, I mounted the drive into a spare RiscPC 'slice' which has now been added to the machine, making it a three-slicer.

Much of the current activity, which is essentially just copying, can of course now be left unattended, after creating the partitions and starting all the copying operations.

It is certainly no problem to have multiple copying – or other, or any combination – exercises going on at once (standard practice for me since around 1992/93) as the above screenshot shows.

However there have been some consequent actions I have needed to take, mainly on other computers around the place, to ensure I have sufficient local backups of my biggest files (videos, PC partition files, photograph raw images, and local newspaper PDF files) now that space is being released from those other drives.

Thus I have been popping in and out of rooms every now and then, doing this and that to one machine or another, sometimes starting something, sometimes pausing it, or perhaps speeding it up (as one has been in the above image) for a while:there are good reasons for all that I do, though a bit technical to explain. One day I might even write a post going into some of it, starting with Large File Allocation Units (LFAU) which would illustrate why I created all those partitions for one thing.

Not today, though, as it's Christmas!

Marx Goes to Frankfurt

One of the most interesting features of the New Labour years in government was that, with the veil over what was really going on, the essentially Marxist core of Labour within government felt free to pursue the faster route proposed many years ago by the Frankfurt School, which I have referenced previously.

This is a touch ironic, as the Frankfurt School policies derived from a dissatisfaction with the Marxists' pace of bringing down societies so that they could be transformed through a "Glorious Socialist Revolution". Now we find them adopting the faster pace via the Labour Party, who were after all created largely by the Fabians.

The odd twist is that the Fabian Society is named after their hero, Fabius Maximus of Rome, whose methodology was to make very gradual, step by step advances to his cause, largely through slow attrition of his enemies. The Fabians devised the Labour party to operate in such a fashion.

The outcome was that New Labour, while appearing on the surface to be a more modern, libertarian and free-market favouring entity, was in reality implementing the "fast track" Frankfurt School policies though using its traditional methods as far as possible. We can all recognise just about every policy listed at that link as having been put in place here in Britain during those thirteen years from 1997 to 2010.

The trouble was that it was, to use Ed Balls' favourite expression (though from a different context!) "too much, too fast", and it set of alarm bells in people's heads. There was a very good reason why the Fabians favoured the softly softly approach: it was to minimise that side-effect so that their essentially Communist agenda could continue to be put in place.

I can see how slow but continuous pursuance of that ideology would be better, from their point of view, than rushing too fast, having it all stopped by an annoying election that Labour lost, and before they can get back in again a lot of their work being undone in between. The veil was wearing very thin by the time of Tony Blair's third election win, with a further decrease in Labour's majority, so all too many voters had by then been alerted and were now not merely failing to vote for that party but were actively voting against them in ever increasing numbers.

Of course, it all went even more wrong once Gordon Brown took over from Blair, as despite all his cunning and ability to tell plain untruths to augment his long-held skill at fiddling statistics to suit his needs, he was unable to hold sway against s by now attentive public and a hugely capable opponent in David Cameron whose team was also far stronger, more competent and often better briefed than Brown's team. They also worked as a team.

Put all that together and it was bound to start unravelling, with the result we have today – but it still nearly didn't come off the way it needed to, even then. The lesson for Labours in all of this, though, are: (a) choose your leader wisely, regardless of the factions within the party, and (b) don't try to go too fast.

Fortunately for the country, they haven't anyone who could replace Tony Blair, and even he is no longer trusted by anywhere near as many of the electorate as he was in the early days (so there's no point bringing him back), and their Union paymasters (and de facto bosses) won't let them delay policies that they want implemented either, especially after the set-back – to them – of having a Conservative-led government undoing some of Labour's damage in the interim.

There are other barriers facing Labour as well, but too long to write about here today.

Thus Britain is safe from the tyranny of Labour in national government for a decent spell, probably fifteen to twenty years this time, and it could be even longer.For that, we can all be thankful – well, apart from the corrupt and the dimwits who form the body of Labour supporters. It is a good sign that they form very much a minority in this country, and their elected representation has grown ever closer to accurately reflecting that.

Political Dividing Lines

The political Left are so find of their so-called "dividing lines", that I wonder if – purely as a thought-exercise – we could learn anything from a theoretical divide of Great Briatin (I shall leave Northern Ireland out for the time being, to make the illustration easier to follow) into its constituent nations, but with movement of population to suit the general political mood of each of those parts.

Thus we'd have all the right-leaning and thinking folk staying in, or moving to, England as this country is far and away of that political complexion. Lefties would all be required to move to either Scotland (where there is plenty of room) or Wales. Those two places already have their own elected bodies, and the Westminster-based parliament could be changed to England-only, plus an oversight (or whatever) body for anything that goes beyond an individual component country alone.

Now, advance the clock a few years, and for the first time we'd be able to perceive what if any differences would develop within each of the resultant societies, and how well each would or wouldn't prosper. What would be the physical state of each place's localities, the levels and nature of crime, employment, trading, and personal wealth and well-being?

I shan't even answer that, as by putting this segregated scenarion before you, I have effectively already answered all of that. Think GIGO, the well-known "Garbage In, Garbage Out" saying and you just know, instinctively, that by putting all those who espouse and suppose a garbage policy outlook are going to produce a failed society. Just think it through; and by all means use the precedents of all Left-run and more Lefty-populated parts of the world as background material if that would help.

By taking all possible variables out of the equation, through total segregation, we can have absolute proof of what we already know but which can be fudged at present in our more mixed society: all the Left is garbage – always has been, always will be, and that can never change for obvious reasons. The Left means automatic failure, and a corrupt and inhumane form of society, as just about every instance in the world has shown throughout history and certainly in today's world where it is nowadays more difficult to conceal what such places are really like.

Thus again a lesson can be learned, and this is probably the only way this particular lesson can be learned decisively and unambiguously. I just hope that we don't end up having to put it into practice as the only way out of a hole we one day dig for ourselves. We have already come close to that scenario and barely dug our way out then, in May 2010.

Hopefully next time we'll have learned through less drastic means than what I have postulated here, and will make a decisive choice to kick out as much of the old Leftie rot from positions of power and influence as feasible.

Perhaps they'll then naturally gravitate to climes more favourable to their outlook, and we might see the likes of Bragg, Brown, Crow, Harman, Livingstone, Meacham, Serwotka, Simpson and the rest all emigrate to (say) North Korea, where I'm sure they'll all be much happier!

Print Shops in Gillingham

I have rarely had need to go to an outside printing facility myself, as I put very little onto paper and have my own capability for single prints and short runs. Anything beyond that I can probably get done at Staples here in Chatham, just a few minutes walk away.

For bigger jobs, though, and for those based in nearby Gillingham, it is great to note that there are at least two print shops that are easy to get to within Gillingham itself – possibly others too, though I don't know of any more nowadays (a former such outfit, Minutecircle, that was actually in Rainham anyway, seemingly vanished a few years ago).

The two of whom I am aware are Reader & Phillips (no website that I can find) at 121a Barnsole Road, Gillingham, ME7 4EB (tel: [01634] 851 153)...

...and Medway Print at 33 Skinner Street, Gillingham, ME7 1HD (tel: [01634] 281 718)...

 I have no particular personal experience of the quality of their printing, apart from some local political literature that one or the other has done – not a vast amount, but typically, Labour materials have been produced at Reader & Phillips (I have a number of those on file here) and those for the Conservatives at Medway Print. If you read any such that are delivered to your home, check the small print at the foot of (usually) the back page and you'll probably see there who printed it.

I am aware that the Blues have their own in-house facilities, and for all I know the other parties might have too, so I accept that this is a necessarily limited indication of capability, and nothing at all regarding pricing, speed or anything else.

I do know that Medway Print has been there for years and always seems to be at least moderately busy (and occasionally more than that!) whenever I have visited or looked in when passing, and their three webcams show the level of activity around the shop at any moment. They also provide on-line hosting facilities, at reasonable rates, and seemingly very reliable (I have used them myself for several years without hitch).

All this suggests that they must be doing something right...

Anyway, just for public information purposes, I present the above contact details and other info for anyone in the area who needs such a facility, either now or in the future.

Doctor Who Christmas Special 2011

Don't forget that this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special, "The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe", will be shown on Christmas Day at 1900 hrs on BBC-1. According to Matt Smith, the title isn't the only Narnia-esque characteristic of the special!

Here's a one-minute trailer: see what you think...

Christmas 2011 – The Christmas Story

This is the real story of Christmas (well, more or less!) as told and performed by some children in New Zealand...

Nokia Lumia Light Show

This Jarre-like idea of using a building as a backdrop for a huge light show – in this case, London's Millbank Tower – works very well here, especially when the show seems almost to switch off and the original structure re-appears, only it isn't...

Video from Telegraph TV

From Green to Blue

Now here's an unusual defection, from the Green party to the Conservatives, of a councillor in the Greens' fourth largest council group. In fact, he was the leader of that group of no fewer than seven Green councillors with County Council seats.

It would be very interesting to know the reasons Cllr Phil Hardy has given for making the switch away from a more or less Communist policy-style party to what many would consider to be almost the opposite end of the political spectrum. Although this isn't the first time something of that kind has occurred in British local politics, it is always useful to know the background to any such major shift.

So far I have been unable to find any statement or similar, which is disappointing, as usually such things are prepared before the announcement is made (we have had two recent instances of that in my own area this past year) but hopefully something will emerge either later today or during this week.

Bearing mind that only a few weeks ago, the same Cllr Hardy made this statement about a Lib Dem councillor at the County Council (on which cllr Hardy sits too, apparently) also defecting to the Conservatives, saying that the Greens are "the most effective alternative" there, this still seems a little odd and that explanation for his own defection will certainly be needed – and it will need to be a good one!

UPDATE @ 1815 hrs: the BBC now has a little more detail on the story, which seems (rather weakly, I feel) to be based on a range of specifics that are completely inconsistent with the Greens' outlook along with a personal regard for David Cameron. I remain to be convinced that this is the real story, let alone a complete one, but at least it's something...

Christmas 2011 – Twelve Days of Christmas

You've never heard the classic song done quite like this before!

It's the Business

A parliamentary constituency's activities are conducted from a constituency office that often includes the MP's office where that party holds the seat, and such places can perhaps suggest something about the local party and/or elected members (MPs, councillors) nature – not necessarily accurately, but a mental association can be tempting and occasionally just about unavoidable. (These offices also handle local council campaigning and related activities, not just nationally-orientated matters.)

For example, when the local (to me) Rochester office of Labour was revealed to be located in what I believe is known as a "house of ill repute", some folk jumped to easy conclusions that frankly do not seem reasonable.

Also, finding suitable premises isn't always easy, for various reasons; and around the office the local scene can change too, during the party's occupancy. However, at Ed Miliband's office in Bentley Road, Doncaster, seen here...

...the impression given is hardly one of success and enterprise, as even the adjoining commercial premises reveal. It isn't a very good advertisement for the local MP, to be honest.

The scene across the road seems to have been much the same as it is now for a very long time, growing slowly worse over time through neglect by the looks of it. First, directly in Ed's office window view...

If Ed were to (characteristically) look to the left of this scene, he'd see this...

Note that all these scenes were taken from Google Street View, as I have made clear in the images presented here, so they are easy to verify for oneself, just by first facing Ed's office in Street View and then rotating the view.

I don't know the history of this place, but it does seem a shame that even the leader of the Labour Party has this very visible blot on his doorstep landscape, and seems to have done nothing about it for many years. It's really just a thought and little more, but I can't see a Conservative MP being content to let such an eyesore be, without at least something being done.

If Ed[ward] Miliband can't do anything about the site itself, perhaps he could at least have a high wall built to hide it from public view. After all, isn't the public realm, including the street scene, part of the (local, constituency) business, and isn't there a relevant office conveniently close by?

Luncheon – 18 December 2011

Today's Sunday Luncheon was a three-platter job: I find it works better spread out like this in some situations, rather than all on one or even two plates/dishes.

The meal comprised Old English Pork (wrapped in bacon, wrapping around sage & onion stuffing) with baby pearl potatoes, Chinese style stir-fry and mixed salads (plus a small vine-ripened tomato) as garnish.

All of that was washed down with Carl Jung's de-alcoholised Merlot, which went particularly well with this meal...

Christmas 2011 – Mr Bean's Christmas

With just one week to go now, here's a short clip reminding us of how Mr Bean fared on Christmas Day...

Computer Science is alive and well in Britain!

Well, it is now, after a not-so-good period that I saw developing when, as Professor Stephen Heppells mentions here, our ICT (as it was renamed some time ago) education moved away from teaching and enouraging development, innovation and creativity in favour of end-use of office software.

This I could see happening when at each year's BETT show (the technology-in-education event in London every January) those who had fuelled the broader field (such as Acorn in particular, and others such as Research Machines) were deliberately squeezed out by the sheer marketing clout of American mega-corporations, led by Microsoft.

This was a genuine phenomenon, as I personally witnessed happening, and also found out that behind the scenes the technology journalists were being wined and treated to slick and lavish presentations extolling the 'virtues' of their way – and over a period of a few years they had effectively put all their competition out of business as they had the relevant media firmly on-side.

If there were any doubt that those publications (or at least some of their contributors) hadn't been 'persuaded', the classic illustration is how (for example) reviewers criticised a particular way of working in a non-Microsft system – say, so-called walking sub-menus – but then being perfectly happy with exactly the same behaviour when it appeared in Windows 95.

For a good decade, Acorns, Amigas, RM's own designs and Ataris have been out of production, and we have a more or less monolithic marketplace these days, with a small fraction of that market going to another American computer system, the Apple Mackintosh. At least Acorn RiscPC models continued to be made by Castle for a while after Acorn closed down, which was something.

Successive governments did not help, for example specifying that all large government IT/ICT contracts must be for 'IBM compatible' type computers; but now there is light at the end of the tunnel. With the realisation within Whitehall that true computer science is a vital subject, and with innovative and cheap new (British!) technology appearing such as the Raspberry Pi, the country looks set to embark on a new voyage into the future.

It won't be like the first such journey, resultant from a government of thirty years ago where Sir Keith Joseph and Kenneth Baker were the ministers and the BBC launched its Computer Literacy Project in that year, but in a now-mature market it will find its own 21st-century form, and will help to shape the next two or three decades' technology in a world of mobile 'phones, tablets and desk/lap-top computers that never existed back then, anywhere in the world.

It's time to bring true innovation back home to Britain where it can truly flourish, separate from corporatism and stagnation and once more in young talent's bedrooms and, yes, even in the classroom or University campus. It has happened before (Irlam Instruments at Brunel uni for example) and it can happen again!

UPDATE 20 December: for some of the historical context and some background facts this lengthy piece is valuable, although I don't agree with everything it says. It is, however, especially interesting in regard to the two-stage shift away from creativity into becoming little more than a (predominantly Microsoft) consumer: the first, a change in emphasis but not product/make-specific and still teaching the principles, then a few years later losing even those plus points.

Join the Budgies today!

As a treat, here's a complete "3rd and Bird", just ten minutes long. Unusually, Elliot doesn't announce this episode's title at the start, as he is off somewhere...

Christmas 2011 – Disneyland

A time-lapse-sequence video of Disneyland on Christmas Day. Stick with it: the second half is better than the first...

Feltham and Heston By-election

The by-election at Feltham and Heston constituency has resulted in a Labour hold with an increased majority of 6,000 or so, which is consistent with what the polls had been indicating.

This was hardly surprising in that place, any more than a Conservative win in any by-election in Kensington and Chelsea would be. It is considered to be a safe Labour seat (there's this and lots of other interesting info about it here).

UPDATE at 2230 hrs: Medway Labour blogger Cllr Tristan Osborne is trying to claim it was a marginal seat and that this win is "significant". It is at times like this, especially with all recent polls now showing Labour has lost its lead and several showing a Conservative lead instead, that Labour spinners make themselves look idiotic. Never mind: it's their choice...

It didn't even benefit to a great extent from David Cameron's post-veto 'bounce', as a large number of postal votes will have been cast before that happened (thanks to local Conservative Joe Armitage for pointing that out a little earlier).

I have no indication regarding possible postal vote fraud, by the way – something that a couple of people have asked me about, and tending to happen mainly in Asian-dominated areas so it was unsurprising that some folk thought of it. If anything comes to light, I'll add an update here.

Here are the full results...

  Party                 Candidate            Votes   %    ±%
  Labour                Seema Malhotra      12,639 54.4 +10.8
  Conservative          Mark Bowen           6,436 27.7  -6.3
  Liberal Democrat      Roger Crouch         1,364  5.9  -7.8
  UKIP                  Andrew Charalambous  1,276  5.5  +3.5
  BNP                   Dave Furness           540  2.3  -1.2
  Green                 Daniel Goldsmith       426  1.8  +0.7
  English Democrats     Roger Cooper           322  1.4   N/A
  London PBP            George Hallam          128  0.6   N/A
  Bus-Pass Elvis Party  David Bishop            93  0.4   N/A

Majority 6,203 (26.7%, +17.1% from GE)
Rejected ballots 75
Turnout 23,299 (28.8%, -31.1% from GE)
 Labour hold: Swing +8.6% to Labour

Turnout was low at just 28·8% – under half the level for last year's General Election which had a near-enough sixty percent vote. With the ease of postal voting, which the previous (Labour) government claimed would improve turnout, this is surprising; and it is in fact one of the lowest by-election turnout figures since 1997, as Full Fact has evidenced. A higher turnout would have been unlikely to change the result, though.

Thus the result was more or less a foregone conclusion, helped significantly by keeping Labour leader Ed Miliband completely out of Labour's election literature, as I mentioned a week ago. There was a small possibility that Labour's lead would be reduced, but the EU summit veto came too late for that, and might not have made a great deal of difference anyway, as I don't get the feeling that what happens in Europe is of particular interest to those communities.

For the Conservatives, as the only credible alternative there, this by-election will have been a useful exercise and I suspect much will have been learned – such as the futility of putting up a non-Asian candidate in such places nowadays. An incumbent could be expected to be re-elected, but not a caucasian challenger.

With the "them and us" culture that has been nurtured and encouraged by the political Left, that in itself was almost certainly a significant vote-loser. Mark Bowen simply wasn't "one of us" to a large proportion of the electorate – nowhere near all, as it's mixed there, but enough to make a big difference.

That's just how it is, right or wrong, as we have seen in similar areas in the past. Therefore, for now, it was probably more an intelligence-gathering exercise to feed into the next General Election campaign in the constituency, and valuable for that reason. It was also important that the Conservatives ran a proper, serious campaign out of respect for their body of voters, of whom over six thousand cast their vote for their candidate.

Finally, I shall hold this post in draft form for a while, to wait to hear if there is any mention of concern over any postal votes, and will post it around midday tomorrow.

UPDATES: I have no news on that front, so this post has now been published. 18 December: this useful comment, apart from getting the winning candidate's gender wrong, affords possible additional insight that backs up by suggestion above regarding (quote) "inward-looking Asian community".

Also Please Note: That same Labour Cllr Tristan Osborne, whom I mentioned above, has labelled it an "attitude" on my part, rather than recognising it as knowledge and cultural understanding, thus demonstrating yet again that sticking to Labour fixations is one of the quickest ways to make oneself come across as a complete fool. Perhaps Cllr Osborne should read this item of mine from a couple of years ago, concerning another Labour bod who put his own self-importance and publicity-seeking agenda ahead of cultural understanding.

Christmas 2011 – Mahna Mahna

A joint effort for this year's BBC Children In Need. It has its moments – lots of 'em!

CBeebies Award

I'm not sure whether I'd really want to receive one of these...

Festive TV, Labour-style

I hear, from a none-too-reliable source, that Labour are planning a live action version of this children's favourite cartoon...

It's to be called EdB, EdM and Eddie.

Now, if only they could get them all together at once, rather than just in pairs...

This scene has these two looking up admiringly to their superiors who are actually in government right now...

















And here we see a different pairing of them at an (out of) focus group...

Elected Police Commissioners

There is still a certain amount of rumbling about this idea that one can hear, but in general the public seem broadly content (some are quite keen) to give it a try. Perhaps they've had difficult experiences with the police, as I know some people have, although this always seems to have been because of directives on high rather than anything locally generated.

Actually, that brings us neatly back to the idea of elected Commissioners, who would be locally accountable and directly so, not via a complex structure of administrative hurdles that seem to have been designed specifically to make any disturbance to the status quo near-enough impossible.

By now, not all that many voices oppose the idea of elected Police Commissioners – it ia really only the political Left who thrive on centralisation, and the current Police Authority chairman who personally do very well out of the present set-up.

Indeed, information coming to light today indicates that there would be a considerable saving of your money and mine under the new scheme, as the current chairmen (or "chairs" as many of them like to refer to themselves, giving a clue as to their own leanings, perhaps) are very well remunerated for doing an admittedly heavy and important job, but at poor value and with very mixed quality outcomes.

Here are two illuminating tweets from Blair Gibbs. This...

"New @the_tpa report: police authority allowances topped £10m - with most spending 10th of budget on chief exec's pay: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8958519/Police-authorities-spend-tenth-of-budget-on-chief-executives.html"

...and this...

"The allowances & top pay listed in @the_tpa report suggest most PCCs will earn less than current police authority CEOs: : http://lowtax.es/slKYry"

Now perhaps we can perceive what seem almost certainly to be vested interests that could well explain the main remaining opposition to the Commissioners. There will always be the gullible who will add their own voices, believing what they have been told and a (rather dim) light bulb having lit up over their heads (I see a lot of that in the letters pages in local newspapers, so it is a genuine phenomenon) but the information in those tweets, if borne out by rigorous checking, looks to be the real McCoy and is hardly a new thing in this business.

Of course, the top priority remains the outcomes of our policing and its relevance and accountability to the communities it serves. That would be better with Commissioners than with the present structure which, as I have mentioned before, is made up largely of elected politicians anyway, just not elected to the present body through public voting.

A secondary (but valuable) priority would be to improve value for money, so that less funding can go to the oversight function and more resource can therefore go into the actual job of policing. That too would seem to be the case with the Commissioners methodology.

As for the suggested politicisation of the police that is being claimed by some would result from the change: I think this is what was happening under Labour anyway, which is what resulted in the disconnect of the police from the community's real needs.

There was some tokenism, and even a little real action (to keep the natives quiet), but essentially it was a new style of militia that did far more harm, especially to the innocent and to vistims, than it ever did in fighting, dealing with and discouraging crime, especially violent crime. That is factual, and something that everyone knows and most admit.

The new arrangement would in reality be less politicised than what we have with the Police Authorities today, as anyone who has been in politics personally, and for genuine community serving reasons will realise. This takes away the direct party political conflicts that result in so much deleterious and time-and-effort wasting activity. Those political opponents would still be there, especially if a successful candidate had stood as a known member of a particular political party, but not directly interfering. Their own allegiances would be known too, putting all that they do into proper context.

Overall, it would be a new climate of greater freedom to actually do some good, which is a very constrained environment in any party-based assembly of elected members and too prone to an aura of remoteness as bodies of members with hugely different views tend to be.

Committee-style structures have their uses and they have their times, but twenty-first century Britain needs something different for police oversight and localised steering, as the Labour years very clearly demonstrated. Let's go for it!