An Englishman`s home

Minister of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Charles Hendry certainly understands the importance of reducing our collective carbon footprint. In his world, we must reduce ours so that he can increase his.

A few months after coming to power in 2010, he said this:
“We have pledged to be the greenest government ever. We must lead by example. Leadership from government departments is something we cannot – and will not – shirk. We are not asking others to do things we will not do ourselves.”

Following a career as a PR executive, the last thing this son of a stockbroker is doing is shirking his responsibilities. After a hard week in Westminster cutting subsidies to solar power, reducing winter fuel allowances for the elderly and refusing applications for wind turbines, the guardian of our climate deserves a bolt-hole to gain some respite from the rising waters of nimbyism. Accordingly, he has purchased a modest pied-a-terre for weekend breaks and holidays away from the maddening crowd.

With an asking price of £2.5million, Blair Castle near Dalry in Ayrshire is clearly a necessity as a second home for a busy cabinet minster. He, his wife and his two children can now enjoy the peace and quiet of the 20 bedrooms, 16 bathrooms and outdoor heated swimming pool. When in opposition, the MP for Wealden in East Sussex, claimed £7,300 of tax payers money for wages paid to his servants at one of his other homes. He also claimed £1,300 for a new oil tank and regular £500 bills for oil. Tax payers also paid £90 per month to have his windows cleaned. In January this year, the Minister demanded that the OFT should investigate the cost of domestic heating oil. No self interest there then.

Clearly, what this proper Charlie does in his own home is his business and he is obviously allowed to spend his money as he sees fit. Sir Edward Coke, in 1628, enshrined in common law the concept of individual freedom for the home owner. He wrote in The Institutes of the Laws of England:
“For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium (and each man’s home is his safest refuge)”

Consider then, the plight of those less fortunate than Charles Hendry who cannot afford a first safe refuge let alone a castle for weekend use or those that face a simple choice between food and fuel this winter. The renters at the mercy of corrupt landlords and the homeless need not fear, our coalition of fools have come up with a plan.

As the planet still teeters on the brink of financial catastrophe brought about by toxic sub prime lending, our government has announced that more toxic sub prime lending is the way to return to prosperity. The tax payer will underwrite 95 per cent of first time mortgages and so at last, people without jobs or money can buy their very own castle at an artificially inflated price. After cutting £4billion from the housing subsidy, Gideon Osborne is giving £400million to property developers and the directors of construction companies. Does everyone understand the difference between a billion and a million?

Add to this the relaxation of planning procedures, the removal of the irritation that is the green belt and a denial of the thousands of unsold, empty and over priced dwellings and we have a housing policy designed to make the rich richer and make the poor sleep in doorways. Building new houses that nobody wants or can afford will only benefit the shareholders of building firms and reptilian developers and the jobs “created” in the construction industry will be short term and transitory. With an elitist oaf like Osborne in charge, the economy is built on sand.

Should Charles Hendry find the 430 mile Friday night journey from Westminster to Dalry in the back of the ministerial limo tedious, he can take comfort in the fact that the ironically named Blair Castle has a dedicated helicopter landing facility. Final approach should not be problem as there are unlikely to be any wind turbines on the spacious estate and the carbon footprint of his castle can be seen from outer space.

As Kermit the frog said: “It`s not easy being green.”

Where`s the bin?

First it was Birmingham and then it was Liverpool who had the honour of hosting an annual party political conference. Now Manchester has to endure the hot air, tub-thumping, back-slapping, back-stabbing farce. Surely these cities have suffered enough.

In Birmingham, the Diet Tory leadership of the Liberal Democrats ignored the party membership and told each other how wonderfully they are doing in government. So well, in fact, that yet another “ring of steel” had to be placed around the ICC to protect a very small group of parliamentarians from the very people they claimed to represent. The cost of the police operation was eye watering. The party grandees partying on the top floor of the Hyatt fully support cutting police budgets and workforce yet next year will no doubt expect the same level of protection from the attention of the public. For the public of the West Midlands, however, who paid for the police operation, times are hard, kids, you’re on your own.

In Liverpool, the Labour Party decided to all but remove any reference to people with disabilities out of the conference agenda when discussing welfare reform. Ed Miliband delivered a “risky” speech that managed to annoy just about everyone on the planet and the response the poor sap gave about being “weird” made him seem, well frankly, weird. His advisers should really tell him to blow his nose before he speaks and make some attempt to remember people’s names.

Ed certainly caught a cold when challenged in a Q and A session by the inspirational Kaliya Franklin, also known as @BendyGirl on Twitter. Ed, in an attempt to defend his suggestion that people who are ill and even suffer a disability are “scroungers”, managed to come across as both weird and shallow. No mean feat for an adenoidal light-weight. And Ed, her name is Kaliya, not Harriet. For an insight into the day-to-day reality of living with disability under the coalition and the betrayal of those who should and are able to stand up against discrimination, Kaliya`s Broken of Britain blog is essential reading.

So now the three ring circus has moved on to Manchester and even before the first champagne corked has popped at the Midland Hotel, the Conservatives are celebrating a hugely successful conference. Two carefully placed “announcements” prior to conference ensure standing ovations from the party faithful and acres of front page attention.

Secretary of State for Transport, Philip Hammond, not to be confused with Dr Phil Hammond who actually does make a living as a comedian, announced a proposal to raise the motorway speed limit to 80mph. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, not to be confused with another Yorkshire comedian by the name of Wilfred Pickles, announced the miraculous discovery of £250million to empty bins. The good people of Bradford still shudder at the thought of Eric and Wilf.

Now there will be some that might suggest that these proposals are a cynical attempt at placating white van drivers, travelling salesman, curtain twitching Daily Mail readers and Neighbourhood Watch busy bodies and a strategy to ensure the votes of “middle england” that Ed Miliband so covets. This might be so but the Conservatives are smarter than that. By announcing these non-policies prior to conference, the Tories have managed to deflect scrutiny of more serious issues that face the nation and threaten the very viability of society, broken, big or not, and also allow for vanity ovations to grotesques like Hammond and Pickles. More importantly, critics of this hopeless coalition have been duped into turning their fire onto these stupid ideas and are not concentrating on the important threats. The parlous state of the economy under the tutelage of the hapless Osborne, the destruction of education under the idiot Gove, Iain Duncan Smith threatening to withdraw benefits from the terminally ill and Andrew Lansley`s murder of the NHS have been on the back burner for the last few days. Clever, huh?

The arguments against an increased speed limit and weekly bin collections have been well documented and are fairly damning. Hammond, not to be confused with the equally annoying little one with brain damage from Top Gear, claims that most people flaunt the speed limit anyway and so the law should be changed. Using that weird logic, if the coalition is correct in suggesting that most benefit claims are fraudulent in direct contraction to all the evidence, then the law should be changed in favour of claimants and the most vulnerable in our society should not be left to die. With the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Gove and Lansley tailgating their Audi, Merc and BMW nonsense at 100mph in the outside lane with the rest of us stuck behind two lanes of trucks doing 56, it will take more than a mothballed air ambulance to sort out the inevitable mess.

Pickles, not to be confused with the stuff that accompanies pork pies, wants local authorities to be more accountable to their council tax payers and have more independence from central government. He then forces town halls to spend money on emptying bins rather than social care. Nice one Eric, keep taking the tablets.

There is a probably apocryphal story of a newly qualified teacher from the home counties taking up her first teaching job in a village primary school in Yorkshire. At the end of her first day, she sweeps the classroom after a successful craft lesson. The Head Master, a local of literally the old school, enters the classroom to see how she got on. With a dust pan full of litter, the NQT says:
“Where’s the bin?”.

The Head Master, with a face suddenly turned purple, replies:
“Ah`ve bin in`t bloody office. Yerl get nowt round ere lass wi that kind a attitude.”

Perhaps it’s time we showed Eric and his chums exactly where the bin is.

Tilting at windmills

Cervantes knew a thing or two about farce, delusion and deception, but even in his most ingenious inventions, good old Miguel could not have imagined the man of La Mancha crossing the Rushall Canal at Riddian Bridge and riding towards Aldridge to save the good citizens from big, scary giants.

Controversy is nothing new when it comes to the installation of wind turbines. In the north of wild and woolly Scotland, the patrons of a grouse moor howled in indignant outrage at a proposal to harness the power of the wind to bring electricity to the humble crofts of the local peasantry. Astonishingly, the Barboured landed gentry argued that the turbines would kill birds and would therefore be inhumane. The second objection was the thinly veiled threat of the “accidental” unloading of Purdey 12 bores into masts, fans and any passing maintenance engineer. The real objection, of course, was that the shooters wanted to preserve their right to blast God’s creatures out of the sky for fun without the competition of machines supplying the national grid.

The banks of the Rushall Canal are not usually frequented by the inbred heirs of lords and ladies toting shotguns, but the hackles of the locals have risen at the thought of an inhumane turbine being placed in the same borough as their back yards, spacious back gardens, car ports and conservatories. A petition against the blot on the landscape has been signed and presented, posters of objection have been placed between the chintz and the double glazing and, once again, the ridiculous idea of free, sustainable energy has been exposed as a bird killer.

Add to this horror the nuisance of the noise from swishing blades that will create “an almighty din” beyond shotgun range from the nearest house and the fact that the turbine will spoil the view of the architectural magnificence of the Redhouse Industrial Estate and you will realise that the residents have a just and honourable cause. Given the vehemence and decibel level of the opposition presented by the nice people of Rushall, Aldridge and the eastern wastelands of St Matthews, it is blindingly obvious that the single turbine will now not propel itself through the planning process. Safe in the knowledge that the giant will not be erected, Walsall’s own Don Quixote, in the formidable shape of Councillor Mohammed Arif, now offers his lance to topple the imaginary behemoth.

No longer a member of Walsall’s Planning Committee, Don Arif still knows a thing or two about the planning process and must be fairly confident that the twirly thing ain’t gonna happen, hence his very public and slightly delayed objection to the scheme. After his St Matthews Conservative ward colleague Barbara McCracken legged it over the border to Paddock to ensure her cabinet seat, the good Don must be worried about securing his own cabinet allowance. His implacable silence when confronted by the concerns of constituents in the poorer parts of his domain is in marked contrast to his shrill condemnations when the better off kick up a fuss. This sudden interest in ornithology and all things green and pleasant will, no doubt, please the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Friends of the Earth who both support the idea of a sustainable source of power at College Farm. It is difficult to gauge who is the more deluded but given the horticultural activities that went on in the empty carpet warehouse he co-owns, Don Arif seems to be under the influence of the laughing lettuce. For some, the grass is always greener in a safe Tory seat.

Councillor Arif, irrespective of cannabis cultivation, knows a thing or two about farms and he and his fellow ward councillors will “continue to work with residents to stop plans to cover Walsall with wind farms by organising public opposition”. Whatever next? Will the desperate councillor chain himself to a cow demanding that electricity pylons be removed and the new fangled canal be filled in to protect our heritage? I think not.

Arif, clearly under pressure, is sniffing out votes for next May and his job in cabinet involving counting the paper clips and over ordering office furniture at the civic centre is ripe for outsourcing. The ridiculous Eric Pickles might want to destroy local authority planning procedures but with men like Arif in place, happy to see the ruin of Mellish Road Church for example, the political contradictions are a delight to behold.

The real Don Quixote, when attacking windmills, was given a warning by Sancho Panza. “Take care sir. Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seems to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the the wind, turn the millstone.”

Sadly, Don Arif has no Sacho Panza to accompany him on his quixotic quest. If he had, no doubt his companion would say that the arms of the giant are whirled around by the wind to power the plasma TVs, microwaves, phone chargers, Nintendos and intruder alarms of Bosty Lane and the Mellish Road. Perhaps Don Arif would like to see an increase in expensive, imported Polish and Russian coal to keep our home central heating burning?

Perhaps he would like to see working men in the claustrophobic hell of twelve inch seams in Welsh drift mines?

Quixote started and ended mad. As for Arif, only your vote counts.

Hold fast that which is good

There are very few examples of architecture that can provoke stunned open-mouthed amazement. The Trafford Centre in Manchester is one such building, but for all the wrong reasons.

A recent visit to Manchester required enduring the “quality retail experience” of the sprawling mega-mall between the Bridgewater and Manchester Ship canals. The Lego Discovery Centre might lie within the boundaries of the vast shopping complex, but the building shares none of the charm and all of the pain of an unseen Lego brick encountering the sole of a bare foot on the upstairs landing in the dead of night. Quiet understatement is not an epithet attributable to the Trafford Centre.

The notion of a gargantuan, out-of-town űber plaza is a curious concept. On the one hand, placing a variety of retail outlets in one location would seem to make sense if a canny developer was intent on catering for the day-to -day needs of the consumer. On the other hand, however, accessing the goodies on sale is only possible by car or the poorer relation that is public transport. Car parks outnumber the shops and it is impossible to reach the treasure on foot. There are no pavements or pedestrian crossings on the six lane highways that encircle the drive-in superstores designed, it seems, as a kind of moat to keep the shoppers in rather than keeping marauding bandits out.

The idea of everything close together is not new; it’s called a village or a town centre. The point that the developers have missed is that the needs of consumers cannot be imposed because needs constantly change as communities evolve. Gathering together for communal protection against wolves, bears and foreigners, people needed to buy stuff like food, woad and sacrificial goats. Luxuries like soap would have to wait until the blacksmiths became a garage, the bank became a wine bar, the school became a detention centre, the church became a ruin and the pub became a bonfire. Huge supermarket chains, who seem to think that their brand name should end in a vowel to induce familiar joviality, opened massive aircraft hangers filled with dubious provender on ring roads and near to motorway junctions. Traditional and ancient market squares evolved into urinals ringed by charity shops and mobile phone outlets and occupied by surly youth and bewildered dossers.

The Trafford Centre is of a different kidney than the bland missile silos of out-of-town hypermarkets. Costing £600million to build, it opened in 1998 and is characterised by a rather strange mock rococo architectural style. Along with murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, there are portraits of the developers in the garb of Roman emperors and a vast replication of the deck of an ocean liner in the cavernous food hall. Subtle it is not and the place displays the crass ornamentation of lottery winner chic. If it had a soul, the Trafford Centre would be delighted to be described as a Temple of Mammon. With a 20 screen cinema, 60 fast food outlets and acres of prime retail floor space, everything on sale is a luxury. An attempt to buy a bag of apples ended in fruitless failure.

As ghastly as the interior is, it was left to the exterior main entrance of the grandly named Great Hall to take the breath away. A centurion, flanked by a Gryphon and a Unicorn sat atop the pillared entrance. Reclining pert trumpeters, full size plastic palm trees and fibre glass “Roman” statues completed the scene. Strangely, each statue had the same title according to the plaques at the base. “Children must be supervised. Do not climb”. The artists remain uncredited.

Above the main doors, the borough motto of Trafford has been chiselled, or more probably moulded, into the pre-stressed concrete. “Hold fast that which is good”. For some reason, the hoards of shopper decided to ignore this advice and were not attempting to pull down this monstrosity using only their bare hands.

After escaping the temple and travelling past the boarded up shops, derelict pubs and abandoned cafés of Trafford and Hulme and beyond, at least local people unable to find apples will know where they can get their hands on some good quality sushi, some Vivienne Westwood haute couture and something cuddly from the Disney store. All major cards accepted.

The lunatic is on the grass

Today, Saturday March 19 2011, at precisely 7-10pm, the moon will be 356,577 kilometres from the earth, the closest it comes in its elliptical orbit. If we are blessed with clear skies over Walsall just after dusk, the moon at its fullest and rising in the east, will appear larger and brighter than usual. There are some idiots who are terrified.

The happy conjunction of a full moon and such close proximity is really rather rare and if clouds do not obscure the view, we will be treated to the sight of a Perigee Moon not seen since 1993. Back then, the UN Security Council were passing resolutions about no-fly zones and armed interventions. Earthquakes and tsunamis killed people and a royal wedding was in meltdown.

There are some that suggest that this close encounter has, in some way, triggered the dreadful events in Japan. Because the moon influences tides, the crackpot logic of strangers to science and astrophysics claim that the gravitational pull of the moon produces movement in tectonic plates, mood swings in human beings who are 80 per cent water and the draining of coolants intended to keep nuclear reactors safe.

This might explain why the hippo is dragged every lunchtime from his repose and into the nearest pub.

The soothsayers, Mountebanks and mystics who display a complete ignorance of actual science are comparable to cavemen who are frightened by something shiny in the sky. As Shakespeare said in Othello:
“It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.”
Act V Scene II

The capricious moon will be 406,655 kilometres away on April 2. Will that make the world more sensible?