William Shepherd

Jane Jacobs died last week a few days short of her ninetieth birthday. She was the subject of one of my first ever published pieces in Fourth World Review…a review of the three best books in America in 1986. In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations I found a kindred spirit…and somebody talking seriously about city regions replete with their own city currencies. For Jane Jacobs cities were best understood as organic systems…complex, evolving live beings…that take precedence over nations, set moral codes, and die when they stagnate. Jane Jacobs was also one of the first career dissidents to realise and resent the power of the military-industrial complex in the Cold War years.

Her last book Dark Age Ahead was published in 2004. She foresees the collapse of American culture as fecklessness weakens social bonds and dissolves public responsibility and the collective memory of history. Had she been born in 1936 instead of 1916 she might well have gone further and been one of the first to realise that the power of the military-industrial complex was waning after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the politico-legal-media complex (PLM). I had occasion to discuss this in an exchange of e-mails with Tom Greco earlier this week about my intention to go public with my misgivings about the Global Warming bandwagon. The exchange went like this.

Tom Greco had written in response to my e-mail on Global Warming that it seemed to him there were far better uses for 'my considerable talents' (Hmm!). ‘Why not focus on what we can do something about rather than idle debates about matters that may or may not eventuate? Time will tell about that.’ I begun my reply by writing that I though we might be at cross-purposes on this. This is how I continued.

I have absolutely no intention of getting involved in the Global Warming Issue and will not be taking sides as an activist for or against... if this is what you fear. But I have some deep generic concerns about where this whole Global Warming issue has come from and it is these that I will be highlighting once a week in my Sunday weblogs over the next few weeks...in the second volume of my three volumes in 2006. Let me try to give some sort of overarching paradigm for this.

The military-industrial complex is not the primary driver of society. It all changed when the Berlin Wall came down. For the past two decades we have been under the control of an entirely new complex...the politico-legal-media complex (PLM)...which is far more powerful and far more pervasive and is dedicated to promoting fear under the guise of promoting security.

Western nations are actually really safe and secure by any objective standards yet people are being made to feel insecure by the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population; lawyers need dangers to litigate and make money; the media need scare stories to capture an audience and so on. These three estates are where power is being exercised...the tail that is wagging the dog...and the place where much funding is going...to such an extent that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.

And then there's academia. Global Warming facts are coming out of the ivory towers’ computer models…and there is no longer any disinterested Public Science Forum to verify the data and adjudicate between rival scientific claims. The universities have invented a new role for themselves as the factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties; all the new restrictive codes; the words you can't say; the thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers and reporters. Foods that are bad for you; behaviours that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't think etc. Dr Aidan Rankin was getting close in his focus on political correctness...but this is just one part of a much larger complex.

In the course of pulling together my Global Warming research to write my Sunday weblogs...I will be trying to clarify why I believe the issues behind the emergence of Global Warming are very pertinent to concerns such as reclaiming the commons, evolving strategies for our peace parties to outwit their War Party etc. I see it as a brief but necessary diversion to make sure radical politics does not get spun off into the weeds and lose sight of the ball.

Once I have had my say about this I think we can start looking at how the money boys keep the whole of the PLM show on the road…because there may be some way to cut off the funding at the pass…once we find out where we should be setting up our ambush.

One final little remark...at the personal psychological level, fear and love are directly opposed to each other...so if there is an axis of evil anywhere then this is where it is...and this is where the battle between Good and Evil may need to take place. i.e. the personal response to all this is to refuse to be made insecure and Make Love Not War...which brings us full circle to the sixties and the hippies where we all grew up. We were actually right all along. That at least is probably what this Sunday's weblog will say. And that is what it said.

The boat goes down at a bit of an angle…and the bow line needs doubling up as it’s taking a lot of strain stopping Vemara slipping back and falling off the mud cliff at the stern into the river. But otherwise we have settled in at our new mooring on the River Rother just along from the newly constructed two million pounds Rye Fish Market Quay. Heidi came for a celebratory wine and cheese lunch yesterday and declared the moorings an improvement.

I have a new walk into town each day. Along by the side of the football pitch on The Salts, up the Ypres Steps, past John Ryan’s house by the Gungardens and through St Mary’s Churchyard. The cherry tree was in full bloom and reminded me of a painting Priscilla Ryan did a few years back of the self-same tree…made up into postcards.

On Wednesday 12th April I suggested that London’s Mayor…Man of The People Ken Livingstone…should start eyeing up the City of London for controlled demolition as his personal contribution to Socialism and Global Justice. The Lord Major of this English Province has long been a private fiefdom for my old school. I have pedigree.

The genesis of Christ’s Hospital was the dissolution of the monasteries and the resultant overflow onto London’s streets of the poor and destitute. Encouraged by a sermon from Nicholas Ridley…exhorting mercy to the poor…the king wrote to Sir Richard Dobbs, Lord Mayor of the City encouraging him to act. He set up a committee of merchants to sort it out. Had this been 21st century Bogotá…instead of 16th Century London…these street children would have been rounded up and forced to endure a life of hunger, harassment, sexual abuse and death…and we talk of progress?

Henry VIII had already granted the use of Greyfriars to the City for the relief of the poor and the boy king Edward VI granted The Palace of Bridewell, his lands of the Savoy and rents and other chattels to create three Royal Hospitals - Bridewell, St Thomas and Christ’s, which was for the education of poor children. The first boys and girls entered the school in Newgate in 1552 and the Royal Charter was granted and signed by its founder Edward VI the following year.

Christ’s Hospital occupied a site in Newgate for 350 years. From time to time children were farmed out around the country…after the Great Fire of 1666 made parts of the school uninhabitable for instance. Eventually the girls settled at Hertford and in 1897 the boys were relocated from Newgate to the purpose built site in Horsham. The foundation stone was laid by Edward, Prince of Wales on 23 October 1897 on behalf of the Sovereign, the date being the anniversary of the birthday of Edward VI. A decade ago Hertford was shut down and the girls moved to Horsham.

Christ’s Hospital was given a second Royal Charter by Charles II in 1673. This charter created the Royal Mathematical School to train navigators for careers as naval officers or merchant seafarers. Samuel Pepys Secretary to His Majesty’s Navy…and later Vice President of Christ’s Hospital…features strongly in Christ’s Hospital history.

HRH the Duke of Cambridge started a tradition of Royal Presidents in 1854. In 1919 George V became the first Royal Patron followed by George VI in 1937 and Her Majesty the Queen in 1953. The support of the City of London Corporation and Livery Companies of the City has carried on uninterrupted. Each year on St Matthews Day hundreds of boys march through London for lunch with the Lord Mayor at his Mansion House residence. Christ’s Hospital’s founding principles were to support disadvantaged children and to remain a school for the general public.

The more enlightened radical Old Blues…there will not be many…might like to help Our Ken by chiselling away at the monolithic horrors of the London-based imperial mismanagement from inside the crumbling edifice. We are the school of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb and not just the purveyors of cannon fodder for the English Imperial Navy and providers of clever clerks to speculate in overseas adventures with the people’s savings…and the billions of pounds of ill-gotten imperial gains…under The City of London’s fiduciary control.

It really is time for the common people of this green and pleasant land to get rid of all this imperial nonsense once and for all by withdrawing from The Killingry Business. Shutting down the arms factories in Mercia is one place to start. Another is to cut off the political need…oil for fighter jets…and the money supply from the Global Policeman Business…much of it orchestrated from The Square Mile…with little concern for the collateral damage.

In the 1990s there were worries that Frankfurt would replace London as the capital of European Global Capitalism. It never stood a chance as anyone who has passed through that charmless German city realised. But Gordon Brown was sufficiently concerned that he made it a separate test in HM Treasury’s assessment of whether to abolish the English Pound. No other part of the economy was singled out for such special treatment.

London is the most European place on the planet and the most cosmopolitan city in the European Union. It is also the driving force for integration across the entire continent. It is not Brussels but London that is the evil in our midst. It must be treated as the Roman Senate treated Carthage. But serious talk about dismantling The City of London and getting out of the Imperial Killingry Game will arouse the wrath of some awfully powerful enemies…and not very nice ones either.

For many years I have kept a hand-written journal and I am now on Journal XLI started in September last year. I have evolved a fairly rigid format of one A5 page per journal entry but my writing is small so I cram 15 words onto a line and 40 lines onto a page…600 words in all. This compares with the 900 words in my typewritten weblogs. So far this year I have made twenty-eight journal entries…about eight a month. To give you the flavour of this little corner of my regular literary output here is the journal entry I wrote at The Ship Inn yesterday afternoon at five o’clock.

‘Three more weblogs and the first volume is ready for posting on my website as a pdf file costing £6.99. It will be interesting to see if there are any takers. Several little pockets of good news. Vemara is now on Lochins Moorings so it is convenient for Martin and David who live on Fishmarket Road [just across The Salts a few hundred yards away].

When the crane comes I was promised a lift-out for my mast if I wanted it…for a tenner. It certainly needs to be worked on but I’m pretty worried about getting it all back again in the right order…and there is also several hundred pounds worth of rigging replacement. Today I declared the boat to be 27-foot long and paid two months mooring fees to The Rye Partnership. The cost is £71 per month and should be recoverable from Rother District Council. The figure they need is £213.40 per quarter plus harbour dues.

The other piece of good news is that I had Marie Appelquist on the phone and she is happy to go ahead with the JAK Blancolån without a guarantor but needs a temporary Swedish address…to be swapped out for my Lund address once I have registered and am resident in Sweden. I may still have to explain about my dispute with CSN [Sweden’s Student Loans Agency] so we are not home and dry yet but this is a significant concession that brings me closer.

Roud couldn’t resist some more nastiness even when he was getting rid of me…as he wanted. To me he said, ‘Berni was here this morning. She said you owe her £ 2000. Pay your debts!’ It then transpired that he had also successfully persuaded Peter Butler to muck me about by telling him that I had told Taxi Man John he had been ‘inside for arson’. As it happened it didn’t work as Kevin…who has also been on the receiving end of Roud’s wicked ways…volunteered to come with me when I moved the boat. Peter had decided he didn’t want to walk back from Lochins so went off to get his bike…but then didn’t come back when Roud sabotaged things. I phoned Peter when I got round to Lochins and got no answer and then tried later and found out why he had not returned.

In the river opposite Derek Phillips Boatyard there was a sailing boat keeping right over on my side of the river. I assumed he was going to turn right into a mooring and cut across in front of me. But he held his course as I attempted to go past him on the inside…my port to his port. For a few moments he turned one way to avoid a collision and I turned the same way. Then I made a sharp sixty-degree turn to port across his bow so we passed starboard to starboard. It was close. Indeed Kevin told me afterwards he thought we were going to hit.

Anyway as we passed I saw it was a French visitor with four young lads aboard and a very frightened lad on the tiller. It was only afterwards that the thought struck me that they might have been under sail…in which case I was at fault. It is almost unheard of for anybody to sail up Rock Channel nowadays so the thought had never crossed my mind. Gilbert used to do it as a party piece if the wind was right and Alec Bradley did it because he had no engine. But the French don’t have inboard engines like the English…for tax reasons…and only have little outboards.’

And there my journal entry ended. But I was curious to find out what had happened. So on leaving The Ship Inn I went along to The Strand to have a word with the young French mariners. I met them just coming off their boat. I apologised profusely and told them how embarrassed I was to have greeted them in so rude a manner when they were visitors to my town and my country. They were much relieved and we shook hands and chatted happily away in our respective bad French (me) and poor English (them). At least now they will go off with a good impression of England and the English. But it was something of a ploy to find out what I wanted to know…and I did.

It turned out that they had been under engine and were indeed at fault. But worse than this was the fact that none of them had any idea about the rules of the road. They thought…quite reasonably unless you think it through…that because the English drive their cars on the left they must also drive their boats on the left. Whoops! I explained to them that this is not the case. Even the Aussies and the South Africans follow international rules of the sea and pass port to port as if driving on the right-hand side of the water road.

Of course racing under sail is a different kettle of fish with its own rules. But for ordinary folks out for a jolly the only exception to the right-side rule is that Steam gives way to Sail. But this can be hard to ascertain until you are close enough to crash into each other...and that is a little too late. So the de facto rule is that you get out of the way of anything…and particularly anything that is bigger than you. Vemara’s nine tons would have made a very nasty mess of their 24-foot fibreglass yacht. So on all counts the French were in the wrong.

In Chernobyl the engineers now have plans to build a gigantic hangar to prevent a second disaster. The Ark…an arch-shaped tubular structure…is 360 feet high and 900 feet across. An estimated 200 tons of radioactive matter lies within the temporary structure and everything inside is contaminated. The European Union has spent tens of millions of pounds trying to stabilise the structure but many still fear a collapse and another catastrophe.

The £600 million Ark Project will contain the radioactive remains for the next 100 years while remote-controlled devices or specially trained teams try to dismantle the reactors and store the lethal material. David Sycamore, a Brit working for the EU in Kiev commented: ‘The new shelter is going to be the eighth wonder of the world – it’s an amazing piece of engineering which is on the scale of the Egyptians building the pyramids.’

The engineers may be coming to grips with the scale of the catastrophe but they represent a world of sanity in the smoke and mirrors world of Chernobyl as officials seek to play down the casualty figures. Here is Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine.

‘At least 500 000 people have already died out of the two million people officially classed as victims of Chernobyl. 34 499 people who took part in the clean up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The death of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population. We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident.’

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation are ignoring this information according to Omelyanets. Yesterday The Independent quoted figures from The Chernobyl Forum…a group of a hundred scientists drawn together by the UN. They estimate the final death toll at four thousand from the fall-out with an additional five thousand radiation-related deaths in the heavily contaminated regions. The response of the Nuclear Industry is to insist that Chernobyl couldn’t happen in Western Europe because the Chernobyl Reactors had no strengthened containment shell, which are standard in the design of our nuclear reactors. So how safe are our sites?

Sellafield is one of the biggest nuclear sites in Europe, employing more than 10 000 people and is far more complex than sites like Chernobyl that tend to house only power plants. The Sellafield site is home to Calder Hall, the first British civil nuclear station and an array of other operations including Thorp, the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, and SMP, which was built to produce Mixed Oxide Fuel for overseas customers using plutonium and uranium.

Formerly known as Windscale, it is the site where plutonium was produced for nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority believes that the Sellafield clean up will take at least 75 years. Legacy issues there include the continuing clean-up resulting from the 1957 shutdown as a result of a fire, and dealing with a number of ‘ponds’ where waste was dumped fairly indiscriminately.

The scale of the problems at the 770-acre site near Whitehaven is spelled out in the decommissioning authority’s draft strategy. ‘At Sellafield it has been estimated that there may be as much as 20 million cubic metres of contaminated land, some of which is deep underground, resulting largely from leakages from legacy sites,’ it says. At the B30 storage pond the European Commission has complained that it has not been possible to carry out checks to ensure that fissile materials intended for the civil nuclear programme have not been diverted to the military.

The Blair government denies this but the decommissioning authority admits: 'Delays in spent fuel retrieval have resulted in serious degradation of the fuel.’ Dave Skilbeck who is in charge of the B41 solid waste storage ‘silo’ at Sellafield, admits that there is only a partial inventory of what was thrown into the facility he is decommissioning. According to managers at the site, some of the problems stem from when the plant was asked to work flat out during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 - 5 to keep the lights on. Waste problems were rather pushed to one side with no thought of how you dealt with this later.

Meanwhile across the frozen North Slopes of Alaska the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil pouring into the Arctic Ocean after a badly corroded BP Pipeline ruptured. As oil is increasingly transported through environmentally sensitive areas by pipeline the dangers posed by poorly maintained rotting pipes has become increasingly clear. To quote a BP oilman: ‘Something happened to the corrosion rates in that line between September 2005 and the time of the spill that we don’t yet fully understand.’ At the last count clean-up crews had removed 40 000 gallons of crude oil and melted snow off the frozen tundra but indications are that this is the second largest crude oil spill in Alaska…second only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The publicity caused by the leak in the 30-year-old pipeline is set to seriously damage BP’s image, which has been carefully crafted to show it as a company concerned about the environment. BP boasts that it is fully signed up to the dangers of Global Warming and makes a conspicuous effort to flaunt its green credentials. BP has even been erecting wind turbines above its petrol stations. Now they are all doing it…with Tescos the latest to announce Rooftop Turbines.

It was twenty years ago today that the worst nuclear accident in history took place when one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl complex 80 miles north of Kiev in Ukraine exploded. Here is the official version of events. Prior to a routine shutdown, the reactor crew prepared for a test to determine how long turbines would supply power following a loss of power, by deliberately disabling a safety mechanism that shut down the reactor automatically.

When the crew tried to shut down the reactor manually there was a dramatic power surge which caused the fuel elements to rupture. A steam explosion lifted off the cover plate of the reactor releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. A second explosion blew out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the reactor’s core, air rushed in and the reactor’s hot graphite core burst into flames. Fire fighters took nine days to put it out. Huge amounts of radioactive material were released…hundreds of times the fallout from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

Belarus took the brunt of the uranium dioxide in the plant that escaped. Ukraine was also contaminated. In total five million people were exposed to radiation including the 600 000 workers who volunteered for the clean-up operations.

The disaster occurred in the early hours of 26th April 1986. My two children were living with their mother in Uppsala 800 miles north of Chernobyl and first heard of the disaster a couple of days later when a nuclear power station in Sweden raised the alarm as a radioactive plume passed overhead and drifted north putting Sweden at the mercy of the weather. Had it rained at the wrong time my children would have been covered with radioactive fall-out.

After the disaster the city of Pripyat was emptied of inhabitants. Today it has a chilling, post-apocalyptic look to it. Ragged curtains blow through the broken windows of apartments in deserted and crumbling high-rise blocks. The streets with their Lenin statues and fading posters exhorting a march towards a communist paradise are being reclaimed by vegetation. The four dozen villages in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl were also evacuated but scores of mainly elderly people who could not adapt to the cramped city apartments they were offered have returned surreptitiously. Eventually the authorities were forced tacitly to accept their presence.

The zone’s inhabitants can collect their pensions and once every two weeks a policeman calls by to check that everyone is still alive. Adam Lahovsky, an 82-year old war veteran who lives in a small single-storey timber cottage said: ‘I was not going to allow the Chernobyl disaster to drive me out.’ His wife Nina said that a van selling bread and other staples visited once a week and they spend their pension on food and medicine.

They keep chickens and supplement their diet with berries and wild mushrooms…which have five times the permitted limit for caesium-137. Their son visits regularly to help out. Herds of boars are among the wildlife now thriving in the exclusion zone despite the radiation. Free of human predators the area provides sanctuary for moose, rare Przewalski horses and even wolves.

Evgenia Stepanova of the Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation Medicine said ‘We’re overwhelmed by thyroid cancers, leukaemias and genetic mutations that are not recorded in the World Health Organisation data and which were practically unknown 20 years ago.’

In the Rivne region of Ukraine, 300 miles west of Chernobyl doctors say they are coming across an unusual rate of cancers and mutations. ‘In the 30 hospitals of our region we find that up to 30% of people who were in highly radiated areas have physical disorders including heart and blood diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. Nearly one in three of all newborn babies have deformities, mostly internal,’ said Alexander Vewremchuk of the Special Hospital for the Radiological Protection of the Population in Vilne.

Twenty years on restrictions are still in place on reindeer in Lapland and on 274 farms in Wales and Cumbria while caesium-137 levels are ten times above permitted levels in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Lithuania.

I just about survived Monday but it was a close run thing. I was meandering along quite well until two o'clock when I came out from the changing rooms at Rye Swimming Pool, switched my mobile on and found a rather panicky voicemail message from the Rye Harbour Master telling me that he didn’t want Vemara on The Strand. So I called him back to let him know I had got the message and to find out what had caused this change of mind.

As I was getting nowhere I changed tack and asked where there were vacant berths in Rye…reminding Carl that Vemara had been berthing in Rye for 20 years. The Harbour Master gave me the phone number to Ryepartnership who collect the fees for boats on Rock Channel Point. So I spent the rest of the afternoon organising to move Vemara onto Berth 15 at midday on Thursday. If Vemara likes her berth payments start the beginning of May. At 2030 in the evening I ran the engine for a quarter of an hour. It started with the starting handle…but as it’s seven months since the engine was last fired in anger I was pleased that it started at all. So all's well that ends well.

Global Warming was invented in 1988 by a prominent climatologist James Hansen. At the time he was giving testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee headed by Senator Wirth of Colorado. Hearings were scheduled for June so Hansen could deliver his testimony during a blistering heat wave. This would be fair enough for a Press Conference but Public Science should be beyond such ploys. However this was no isolated incident of media manipulation. Global Warming is awash with dodgy dossiers. Dossiers about Weapons of Mass Destruction are paragons of integrity by comparison.

In the late 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which comprises a huge group of bureaucrats…and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats. The idea was that since this was a global problem the UN would track climate research and issue reports every few years. The first assessment report in 1990 said it would be very difficult to detect a human influence on climate although everybody was concerned that one might exist. But the 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now ‘a discernible human influence’ on climate…echoes of the 45-minute claim when Alistair Campbell sexed up the WMD Dossier.

Much the same happened to the 1995 IPCC Dossier. Originally the document said scientists couldn’t detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn’t know when they would. They said explicitly, ‘we don’t know.’ The statement was deleted and replaced with a new statement that a discernible human influence did indeed exist. It was a major change…and one that caused a stir among scientists at the time with opponents and defendants of the change coming forward. If you read their claims and counter-claims you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth. But a review of the actual text changes makes it crystal clear that the IPCC is a political organisation and not a scientific one.

Back to James Hansen. In the summer of 1988 he accompanied his global warming announcement with a prediction that temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. The actual increase was 0.11 degrees and this prompted him to state…along with his fellow authors Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen and Elaine Matthews…in a 1998 article Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (127533-58) that ‘the forcings that drive long-term climate change are unknown with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.’ arguing for scientists to use multiple scenarios in future.

The problem is that climate is very complicated…so complicated in fact that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy…even though billions of dollars are being spent and hundreds of people are trying all around the world. Nobody is trying to predict weather more than ten days ahead but computer modellers are predicting what the temperature will be one hundred years in advance…sometimes a thousand years…three thousand years. And they are probably doing worse than the weathermen. The biggest events in global climate are the El Niños. They happen roughly every four years. But climate models can’t predict them - not their timing, their duration, or their intensity. Climate science simply isn’t there yet…not by a long chalk. It may be one day. But not now.

As for David Cameron’s trip to Norway, like Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas and Mount Kilamanjaro, Norway has nothing to contribute to the scientific case for Global Warming. 94% of all the ice in the world is elsewhere…4% in Greenland and 90% in Antarctica where the ice is 5 to 6 miles thick in places. This merely reinforces the need for an impartial forum for Public Science. What Cameron is doing is media manipulation.

The irony is that Cameron’s key adviser on environmental matters is Zac Goldsmith who took over the editorship of his uncle’s scientific journal The Ecologist and to Edward Goldsmith’s horror has destroyed everything that Teddy had built up over the years. The impartial and respected scientific journal that once reported scientific facts and the considered opinions of leading scientists in the new field of Ecological Science is now no more than a glossy purveyor of ethical chic for the chattering classes. With The Ecologist Zac Goldsmith has done for ecology what Satish Kumar has done for politics with Resurgence.

Thirty years ago Lake Nakuru had a pink flamingo population. Their pinkness came from the lake...they were what they ate. Flamingos are sensitive to water quantity and quality...and tourists think they’re pretty. So flamingos equals tourists equals foreign currency equals economic benefits. The way Classical Economics works is that if there are benefits then money can be spent off-setting them with costs...but only if you really have to...or you have someone you know (like your own contractors or even consulting company) to give the money to.

Then there are a few hitches in the economic method. For starters it is assumed that there is someone willing and able to pick up the tab for these benefit off-sets and someone else with the know-how to solve the matter costs are being lavished upon. Then there is the manner in which dollar signs are attributed to these costs and benefits.

Cost-Benefit Analysis has nothing to say about the distribution of costs and benefits and takes no position on whether or not there is any money available to invest in any capital works from which the benefits and costs are deemed to flow over time. Then there is Net Present Value theory which I won't go into here. Taken together these makes a nonsense of Economic Appraisals.

As for the fluoride, economics could not begin to grapple with this because any benefits depended upon a complex function that at the low end might be positive but at the high end was very very definitely seriously negative. Bones start breaking, mice get nasty things happening to them, teeth start mottling…and no scientist was willing to risk his or her neck about the long term consequences. The New Zealand Pure Water Association and Fluoride Action Network have links casting doubts on the veracity of fluoridation’s healthiness.

In Imperial Times the Kenyan Colonial Authorities sunk boreholes around the town of Nakuru to supply the town with water. The water came from the groundwater of the Rift Valley and was high in all sorts of chemicals…including fluorides. So it was diluted with surface rainwater flowing off the Aberdares to make sure it was drinkable. The Turasha Dam was to be built high in the Aberdares. Its size…and any staged development programme…depended upon forecasts of the growth of Nakuru and of its water needs…not necessarily the same thing.

The phased development of the groundwater sources also entered the equation along with the appropriate water mix…surface and aquifer…at different times of the year. In those days the Kenyan Ex-Patriots worked with the notion that rain came twice a year…a long rains and a short rains. This complicated matters…and was only a little bit true.

So the scene is set. I was interested in how high fluoride levels could be allowed to rise…while along the corridor the Sewerage Project was concerned about increasing water levels in the lake and its chemical composition because they didn’t want the pink flamingos to turn blue or fly off to the film set of The Constant Gardener up at Lake Rudolf.

In 1944 DuPont was producing weapon-grade uranium for the Manhatten Project. A major by-product of the process was the pollutant fluoride, which was producing death and disease on nearby farms. The farmers set out to sue DuPont, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture and Justice departments, the Manhatten Project, the US Army and the War Department. While the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service undertook fluoride testing round New Jersey, Manhatten Project directors convinced farmers, including those suffering from fluoride poisoning, of the government’s good faith, before the government spiked their lawsuit by concealing how much fluoride DuPont had let fly. ‘Disclosure would be injurious to the military security of the United States.’ You ain’t kidding!

It gets worse but let’s go back to 1941 for another strand in this twisted tale. In 1991 Covert Action Quarterly put out an article entitled Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?. Fluoridation was simply the aluminium industry dumping toxic waste at a profit. The villains of the piece were the Mellon Institute, the Mellon Family’s cash cow Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and one-time Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

Both these accounts of the hidden history of the push for fluoridation are pretty dark tales of industrial companies seeking to spin their toxic dumping into a profitable health benefit. But you can’t fool all the people all of the time. In the US, 60% of voters have been against fluoridation of their water supplies…and a third of American cities have managed to resist the contamination of their tap water. In the UK, water companies were permitted to fluoridate for the first time in 1985. But in 1995 Yorkshire Water refused to do so, not because they thought anti-fluoridators were a bunch of cranks but rather because they said, ‘we know which way public opinion rides’. We will see if this attitude survives the take-over of Yorkshire Water by the Essen-based power and utilities conglomerate RWE. But meanwhile the independent Welsh Water remains fluoride-free and refers to fluoride as a ‘toxic and potent chemical’.

In 2002 the Medical Research Council reported to the Department of Health that while fluoridation benefited teeth ‘much of the current evidence on benefits of fluoride comes from research conducted several decades ago’. By 2003 only five million of England’s population of sixty million had fluoridated water. There are better ways to cut down on dental caries without exposing 80% of the population to fluoride poisoning. Ralph Nader says that...and has done so for years.

The Fluoridation Saga will continue after the third and final instalment of Teatime at Marshbeck. The first instalment was two weeks ago on Sunday 9th April 2006 and the second instalment last Sunday. The story first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson and included the idea of an LHP…a Leisure Home and Personal Infomatic Set…indicating that James Robertson was already 25 years ahead of his time foreseeing the merging of telephones, computers and other digital devices.

It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050 and Herbert and Emily are continuing their conversation about The Good Old Days back in the 1980s and 1990s.

‘Let’s be fair to them, though’, Emily says. ‘The great transformation didn’t take place suddenly, out of the blue. Indira’s right. People had been discussing alternative futures for some time. Would it be Business As Usual? Disaster? Police State? We once retrieved some of the debates from the archive data bank through the LHP. And surely, Herbert, there was the big controversy in the ‘80s about masculine and feminine values, and whether the post-industrial future was going to be HE (Hyperexpansionist) or SHE (Sane Humane Ecological).’

Old Meg Jones can keep silent no longer. ‘This is all very interesting, Emily’, she says, ‘but the biggest thing that changed was politics. It’s only about fifty years since most people realised that politics was about how you lived your own life. Then they began to do politics for themselves.

When I was young in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a few thousand full-time politicians did politics for everyone else, mainly in places like Washington and Moscow, London and Brussels. They made a profession of it, a career. My mother was in the game herself for a while. She was an MP. And Herbert’s quite right; I remember her saying it was a very masculine game, even for women. For most people politics meant casting a vote from time to time. That was it. The politicians liked it, of course. It gave them a lot of attention, and made them feel really important.

No-one would want to go back to that now. But imagine how exciting it was at election time. Everyone stayed at home to watch the results on television. In fact, as that way of doing politics began to break down, it turned into an entertainment like horse-jumping and all the other spectator sports of those days. It must be difficult for you young people to realise what it was like, with everyone sitting passively in front of the television all the time, watching and listening to the performers. Ordinary people couldn’t communicate directly with each other all over the world as you do today through the LHP’.

‘Talking of politics,’ says Emily, ‘it’s nearly six o’clock, and time we all went to the monthly cluster meeting. There won’t be many domestic matters on the agenda this time, though I want to get the minifarm roster settled for the year and I think your Harley wants to propose up-grading the coppice, doesn’t he, Meg?

But there are some external questions to discuss: what should be done about the dispute over the Marshbeck Water Supply? What do we think of the proposal that Trentside District should stop trying to be self-sufficient in energy? Do we have any ideas for this year’s inter-continent exchange programme? And shall we take up the idea of a special link with the dolphin group at PISCES?

‘Come on Bruno and Shantih. ‘We want a full quorum of under-tens at the cluster meeting; the voice the future must be heard. Anyhow, we don’t want people saying you’re missing your education. They might suggest we send you out to school!’

The End of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson

God forbid! Schools? What were they? Prisons or Child Care Centres? And so to the second part of my three part essay on Me & Fluoridation. The first part of the saga is at the end of yesterday’s weblog…Number 112.

In 1974 a report went off to the World Bank about the future water supplies for the Central Rift Valley in East Africa. The engineers wrote their bit...and I wrote the rest. Once upon a time the rest meant demand projections which the engineers did themselves. This is how it worked. The Chartered Engineer would design his dam and set his demand growth rate to yield a positive Net Present Value. Then he would write his report, putting his demand projections as the opening chapter. Hey Presto! The Engineer's Dam is the only supply response to the expected demand for water.

Lake Nakuru was not quite that straightforward. In the Central Rift Valley there are two problems with the water coming in and going out. It goes in dirty and comes out different dirty. The in-problem helps the engineers get their dam...so they were happy to let the resident Economic Planning Engineer (me) loose on the problem.

But the out-problem was best hived off to a separate project. This would have worked just fine had our firm of consulting engineers not been awarded both the Nakuru Sewerage Project and the Rift Valley Water Supply Project. Big mistake. The engineer working on the Sewerage Project drank with me at the Impala Club, had lunch with me at the Lamu Coffee House and had his office just along the corridor from me opposite the Jomo Kenyatta Centre. So we talked to each other...something that was not really supposed to happen.

The final episode of The Fluoridation Saga is in tomorrow's weblog...Number 114

The last couple of nights I have worked late at Rock Channel Quay with Francoise de Naillat putting together a Powerpoint presentation on Dale Chihuly. I get well-fed and Francoise shaves rather a lot of unavailable hours from her hectic schedules. Something that takes me ten minutes might take her two hours. Ricardo would be impressed.

By the early hours of Saturday morning it was done and Francoise was pleased enough to slip me £20 for my efforts...to be gambled away on three-card brag. I was pretty exhausted as my day had started at seven and much of my timewas spent staring at a computer screen. Tiredness is one of the two sets of ideal conditions for falling ten feet into the Rye mud upon returning to Vemara...a state of inebriation being the other...so I trod the catwalk carefully.

Today was Radcon Planning Group day in Wiltshire and my bus was scheduled to leave Victoria at 12.30 pm. By eleven o'clock I was sitting beneath the church of St Martin in the Field eating a splendid late breakfast and at 11.30 I strolled across to The Strand to buy my ticket for the Number Eleven bus.

I shouldn't have bothered. The buses were at a standstill...and the taxis and cars weren't going anywhere either. Tomorrow this would make sense as it was London Marathon Weekend but not today. I had no explanation. Perhaps this was a rehearsal. Whatever the hold-up the alternative was Shank's Pony .

It was a lovely day and I had the time so I walked down Whitehall, crossed Parliament Square and headed up Victoria Street past the Houses of Parliament towards the Victoria Coach Station. My thoughts were on the thorny economic conundrum on the precise economic category for my £1.50 expenditure on an unused bus ticket. Single journey tickets in Ken Livingstone's New Model London are only valid for one hour.

John Papworth was taking his afternoon nap upstairs when I let myself in at 3.30 pm after an £8 taxi ride from Swindon Bus Station. It was a lovely warm day in Wiltshire as well so I sat out in the garden under a tree with beautiful upturned white lilyesque blossoms...with a cat and a dog for company.

The Radcon Planning Group met for its monthly session and exchanged their respective progress reports. Zac Goldsmith has pulled out from the conference but by way of an apology for doing so he is donating a free insert in the Ecologist. This is no trivial matter. The Ecologist has 400,000 readers across four continents and is the biggest environmental affairs magazine in the world. The Magazine Group tells me that The Ecologist 'provides information the commercial press cannot print whether it is health care, oil prices, school food, product ingredients or climate change' and 'will cause you to rethink basic assumptions about the world we live in'.

John Papworth is Conference Convenor, Committee Chairman and Cook. This helps ensure that meetings are brought to a timely conclusion. 'Meeting closed. The lamb is done. Time to serve up!' Later in the evening at The AngelI won one of the kitties so returned home six pounds better off. It seems some time since I lost money at three-card brag. Perhaps there is some skill in the game after all.

When I was living in Llangolman the biggest explosion in Europe since the end of the Second World War took place on the other side of the country. Dense clouds of black smoke hung over Southern England for several days and were picked up on satellite photographs. Four months later we have no news from the Buncefield Oil Depot Investigators on what sparked off the inferno. The finger of suspicion is being pointed at a petrol leak from a six thousand gallon tank...but it takes a leak to know a leak. Six hundred firemen battled for sixty hoursto bring the blaze under control.

As with the Camelford Disaster when aluminium sulphate was dumped into the local water supply, all the authorities sang from the same hymn sheet to assure the public that water supplies around the Buncefield Depot were safe. Humbug! How can water supplies be safe when eighty-eight gallons of diesel oil have to be pumped out of a borehole next to the depot? Answer? When the borehole is cut off from the local water supply. Unfortunately this one wasn't. In fact it was feeding directly from the same underground aquifer as the one being pumped dry by the water company to ensure the effectiveness of their hosepipe ban this summer...no water; no garden watering at midnight for the neighbours to report.

Drug Companies are accused of many things and one of them is that they actively seek to make people ill so should be regarded as part of the Toxic Chemical Industry. A variation on this theme is the accusation that the Toxic Chemical Companies have been trying for years...and with considerable success...to become part of The Drug Business. Specific allegations have been made against Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and the Mellon Trust which gets a slice of their dividends on the one hand; and against DuPont de Nemours and the Nuclear Bomb Making Industry on the other. The issue is the fluoridation of the world's water supplies. I was not in at the start...which can be traced back to The Manhatten Project in the 1940s...but I found myself involved in the debate when it was still in its infancy thirty years ago in the 1970s. More in tomorrow's weblog.

Sir Francis Drake is an English hero but there are surprisingly few Drakestowns or Drake statues around the country. Perhaps he ended his years in disgrace after the howler on his world expedition of 1579. Drake was sailing the Golden Hind along a mysterious coastline shrouded in ‘thicke mists and most stinging fogges’...as he wrote in his ship’s log...so dense and persistent that Drake sailed away after 30 days without any of the usual explorations that Captain James Cooke would have done two hundred years later. Big mistake. The ‘fogges’ were hiding the entrance to one of the finest natural harbours on the western coast of the Americas...San Francisco Bay.

After Drake’s close encounter San Francisco was not officially discovered until the 18th century…by the infidious Spaniards. The fogs are caused by the cold Pacific waters swept down from the Arctic running into the warm moist air wafting off the California mainland. When the hot air hits the cold sea it cools and its moisture condenses into a ground-hugging cloud. Then further south there is smog and Los Angeles…which brings me to Global Warming.

Four hundred years later California was one of the biggest economies in the world…and an actor from Hollywood was Governor. Most people regarded Ronald Reagan as deeply conservative but his policies ran counter to traditional American conservatism. Noam Chomsky referred to Reaganomics as military keynesiamism. In Towards A New Old War he summarised Reagan’s programme as ‘the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich by slashing social welfare programmes and by regressive tax policies, and a vast increase in the state sector of the economy in the familiar mode: by subsidising and providing a guaranteed market for high-technology production, namely military production. This is in no sense a conservative programme, as it is customarily mislabelled’.

One of the most conservative American politicians of the last 75 years was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio…known as Mr Republican. He condemned the cold war ideology constructed by the Liberal Democrat Harry Truman at the end of the Hitler War and echoed by Neo-Conservatives today. Taft represented farmers and small businessmen who had no interest in global markets and feared militarisation of the economy and conscription as threats to their liberty. Taft rejected the idea that America should become a world policeman saying Americans ‘were not fitted to a role of imperialism and would fail at an attempt at world domination.’

Robert Taft saw small wars in the post-war world: ‘Certainly however benevolent we might be, other people simply do not like to be dominated, and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves in the nineteenth century.’ America and England are two countries divided by a common language. Words like conservatism and liberalism have very different nuances and associations. In the United Kingdom the latest leader of the Conservative Party has been on a three-day fact-finding mission to see at first hand the impact of climate change. David Cameron’s 15-mile journey by dog sled…the ultimate in environmental friendliness…took place on the Svalbard Peninsula in Norway. Big mistake. Spitzbergen is definitely not the place to go for a photo opportunity on glaciers and the melting of the Arctic ice.

Some computer models tell us that higher temperatures in the Arctic lead to more snowfall as more water is evaporated off the oceans and carried north on the prevailing winds. Conclusion? Glacial Advance. Unfortunately other computer models predict that warmer weather will lead to less precipitation…and Glacial Retreat. In the Svalbard Peninsula both processes are taking place at the same time…in different glaciers. Some climate is local.

Here was another problem. Before David Cameron jumped on his canine caravan he had to get to Norway. So he arranged to be driven from London to Farnborough in Hampshire by Government Car. Over the 38-mile journey his Vauxhall Omega spewed out 30 lbs of carbon dioxide. At Farnborough he boarded a 10-seater private jet which flew him and his entourage to Longyearbyen in Svalbard…a distance of 1909 miles. Another five tons of carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere. The coordinators of the trip…World Wildlife Fund-UK…insisted that all carbon emissions would be offset using Gold Standard credits which will cost the Conservative Party a total of £200. So that’s all right then. Perhaps they might like a non-repayable interest free loan to cover. Conservative Central Office might see this as yet another example of Sod’s Law…on which more below.

Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: negative expectations yield negative results positive expectations yield negative results. Howe's Law: every man has a scheme which will not work; Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics: once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can; Skinner's Constant. the quantity which must be multiplied by, divided by, added to or subtracted from the answer you get to give the answer you should have got; Law of Selective Gravity: an object will fall so as to do the most damage; Jenning's Corollary: the chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet; Barth's Distinction: there are two types of people - those who divide people into two types and those who do not. Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: the first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90%.

DEFRA’s two mile quarantine zone around the Scottish town of Cellardyke was lifted today. All other restrictions on the movement of poultry and captive birds around the fishing village in Fife will be removed in ten days time. Try as they might DEFRA have failed to find any more whooper swans with bird flu since Cyril floated in a few weeks ago. Incidentally an instant hand sanitiser that goes by the brand name of No-Germs can be purchased at all good high street chemists for £2.99p. This handwash kills 99.8 percent of the bird flu H5NI virus in half a minute.

Excitement on River Brede Moorings this week as Roud delivered another little piece of maritime theatre. For me the drama started on Tuesday with a phone call at 2.11 pm from Peter Butler…my eyes and ears on the moorings. ‘They are taking your boat away!’ I was in East Street Antiques with Heidi at the time with my mobile phone switched off so I didn’t collect the voicemail until 3.30 pm. Time and tide wait for no man.

By the time I got to the boatyard Vemara was in the berth next to her old £500 per year mooring. That was the good news. The bad news was that to get myself aboard I had to risk life and limb crawling across a narrow rickety metal catwalk…the wooden one had collapsed a year or two ago…ten feet above the Rye mud. From there it was a simple matter to step aboard…at high tide. The tide was falling fast but was still high enough to allow me to step aboard.

However at low tide there is a vertical drop of twelve feet onto the deck. I took up my defensive position aboard and awaited the inevitable altercation. It took place an hour later at 4.30 pm. ‘You are trespassing! You are not welcome!’ from him; ‘More theatre! More illegalities!’ from me. By then it was low tide. Twelve feet above me was the bank. Nothing a ladder couldn’t handle…and where there are boats and hard standing there are ladders. But they were up there and I was down here…and the next high tide was at two o’clock in the morning. I set the alarm.

Since then I have returned to the boat late at night, collected a ladder, taken it aboard with me and then in the morning taken myself into town at seven thirty…after returning the ladder to the place it came from. It does not take long to slip into new routines. Unfortunately Murphy was on the prowl. Returning to my new berth at ten thirty on the first evening I selected my ladder from one of the boats on the hard standing and took it and myself aboard.

At seven o’clock the next morning I was awakened by an angry bellowing from above. ‘I want my ladder! And I want it NOW!’ I had chosen the only boat on the hard standing with someone aboard. ‘Didn’t you hear the television?’ Profuse apologies from me…irritated mutterings from him. ‘I owe you one!’ I said tamely as I clambered off Vemara and put his ladder back against his boat. I choose a different ladder the following evening.

I deliberated on the situation overnight and on Wednesday morning phoned the Harbour Master…rather than my solicitor. After ten minutes with R.K.McGregor…his deputy…it was agreed. Today a nice polite letter went off to Mr Roud. ‘Dear Mike. I have made arrangements with the Rye Harbour Master’s Office to move Vemara to a long-term berth on Strand Quay immediately Jackson’s have completed construction work on The Strand. The move from River Brede Moorings has been tentatively scheduled for 11 am on Thursday 27th April 2006. Please contact me if you anticipate any difficulties with this scheduling. Yours faithfully.’

My new Mooring and Harbour Fees will be £793.76p per year with electricity extra. This compares with the £650 (including electricity) being paid on Brede Moorings from 1998 to 2002 and the £750 (with electricity extra) demanded after Vemara was moved to the far end of the moorings ‘to allow work to take place on the old berth’. The good news was that the new berth was further down the Rye Harbour Road and more secluded…but the bad news was that Vemara sat higher on the mud so could only get away on the tide about one day in three.

After I discovered in August 2005 that Roud had been accepting fees from both myself and Connie’s Estate for the same berth throughout 2003 and 2004 I refused to pay any more until Vemara’s credit had been used up on mooring fees and electricity. Instead of a little humility…an apology even after being caught with his fingers in the till…Roud tried to bluff his way out by claiming that Vemara had been given ‘residential moorings’…which cost the equivalent of £1150 per year (without electricity). I would expect the Courts to take a rather dim view of such a transparent self-serving defence against the charge of Fraud. Perhaps I will pursue it. Perhaps not. We will see.

After writing about Murphy being on the prowl I thought of my extensive readership in foreign parts. Hmm! So I thought I better explain myself. Google to the rescue. I have linked Murphy to his very own website…one of 85 000 that responded to my Google “Murphy’s Law” request. However Murphy’s Law is often known as Sod’s Law so I tried that in Google too. Another 85 000 responses. Here are a few little gems. Sod's Law: if anything can go wrong, it will; O’Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law: Murphy was an optimist; The First Corollary to Sod's Law: anything that is to go wrong will do so at the worst possible moment; The Unspeakable Law: as soon as you mention something, if it's good, it goes away; if it's bad, it happens. Have a nice day!

Over Easter I was asked what motivates me to keep in touch with what is going on in the world and offer analysis, commentary and solutions. When asked a similar question in an interview with Radio Havana in October 2003 Noam Chomsky responded that privilege confers responsibility and that intellectuals are privileged. They have education, training, resources and opportunities. In England there is also no repression. So we have much more responsibility. After that, Chomsky said, it’s just a matter of choice. You just do these things naturally and automatically. It doesn’t merit any credit or applause. It’s just being a human being and using the opportunities you have.

It’s not quite that simple. Take repression. In England what intimidates is not the police but defamation. Departure from the conformist subservience to those in power is dealt with by tantrums, lies and endless vilification. Lies repeated long enough become truths…you become anti-Semitic or a Conspiracy Theorist to name two epithets thrown at dissidents and free thinkers. But this is nothing compared to what other people face around the world.

Noam Chomsky was asked by Bernie Dyer if a better world were possible. Possible certainly...but attainable is another question. If people undertake their responsibilities seriously a better world is very possible. But there is an inverse correlation between opportunity and commitment. Typically it’s the people who live under repression and deprivation and face serious penalties and lack privilege who are working hard to build a better world. Those who have the opportunity and every kind of privilege typically throughout history subordinate themselves to power.

People who are really sincere about the belief that a better world is possible will refuse to take power. In fact they will try to undermine institutions that even grant power. Maybe to some extent certain kinds of authority are required to delegate responsibility but one who is really interested in a decent world would want to reduce that to the absolute minimum…in fact to constantly be challenging authoritarian relationships and institutions and require them to justify themselves. Sometimes they can be justified but the burden of justification is always on authority and domination. It is never legitimate in itself. That’s true even if it’s a family or an international society.

Noam Chomsky was also asked whether popular movements were taking the place of the organised Left Political Parties in the task of building a new society and whether this explained the disarray of The Left. Well, he replied, I have never really thought that The Left was much in ‘array’ as far as political purposes were concerned. These new popular movements are not taking the place of anything. They’re really new.

The Left has never been anti-globalisation. What is happening now is really international with participation from a vast range of components from society: peasants, working people, environmentalists, intellectuals, poets etc. How far this will go? Who knows? There are a lot of disruptive forces inside and a lot of pressures outside. Maybe this one will fail but even if it fails it succeeds by laying the basis for something that comes next.

You don’t expect anything important to happen in a day…whether it is the elimination of slavery or women’s rights. These are things that take time. If you want to achieve something like an electoral victory that means something you have to spend decades organizing the basis of groups so all local communities can take part. It’s a lot easier in countries where there are more opportunities and wealth and less repression.

Over the Easter weekend I saw the first bluebells opening in the woods around Rye. There are many more waiting to open but with their flowerheads still curled up. Another blue flower now spreading vigorously along the edge of cornfields is veronica agrestis otherwise known as green field speedwell. It has masses of white-eyed bright blue flowers on every plant. By the time MayDay arrives the woods will be carpeted in blue. My horoscope tells me I am due for a strange but pleasing week. If this pans out I will be in southern Sweden on the first of May.

A hundred years ago a foreshock rocked the San Francisco Bay area in California. The great earthquake erupted half a minute later with violent shocks punctuating the strong shaking for about a minute. Most of the damage was inflicted afterwards not by the quake but by the fires that broke out. Roads folded up like paper and gas lines underneath ruptured setting off an inferno that tore through the city. Winds generated by the blaze created a firestorm that sucked air out of buildings and whipped up giant flames. Most of the water mains broke during the quakes. Six thousand people died and 300 000 people were left homeless from a population of 400 000.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in 1981 visiting the ex-boyfriend of Rachel Kowalczyk who had a small trust fund he used to fund good causes…small by American standards. My expectations were not high…ex-boyfriend didn’t strike me as quite the right connection…and I turned out to be right. With me in my briefcase was a project I had been working on with a Harvard Law School graduate friend David Halprin.

We felt a need to set up a Center for Conspiracy Studies. David took the idea to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University while I was dispatched to the West Coast to do the rounds. I would have ended up spending ten years of my life on the project so it was just as well that no West Coast funders showed an interest. But somebody took our ideas and ran with them because I have in front of me The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies which is very much the end result David and I had in mind 25 years ago.

A strange thing happened to me when I arrived in East Africa in 1972 after a three month trek by long wheel-base Land Rover from London in the company of my Swedish wife Ingrid, my Cambridge flatmate Robin Garnett and a young bookseller and barrow boy from Manchester Les Smith who I had met on my previous trek to South Africa.

Ingrid had a degree in microbiology and soon found a job with the Wellcome Trust at a laboratory in East Africa. With Ingrid’s job assured I then went job hunting and ended up with a part-time posting at the University of East Africa alongside a full-time job with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners…a firm of civil engineering consultants.

It was at this juncture that Ingrid found she was pregnant with our first child which led to something of a moral dilemma for her. There would be no sign of her pregnancy for several months…by which time she would have made herself indispensable…so my advice was for her to officially discover her pregnancy in a couple of months time. But being young and naïve and Swedish, Ingrid felt distinctly uncomfortable taking up her new job under false pretences and resolved to confess all to the Wellcome Trust. She never got the chance.

Wellcome called her up and told her they had changed their minds. Their job offer was withdrawn. Ingrid was delighted with this outcome but I thought it a little strange and wanted to push for an explanation. With hindsight I conjectured that they changed their minds because Ingrid was young and naïve and Swedish…and not necessarily in that order. Ingrid had learnt in her interviews that the laboratory was doing research on green monkeys.

AIDs or Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome is the final fatal stage of infection for people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Sufferers have their immune systems wiped out which makes them susceptible to diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and Kaposi’s sarcoma…a form of skin cancer common in the end stages.

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Studies informs me that the precise origin of HIV remains unknown but according to one broadly accepted scientific theory the disease originated among green monkeys in Africa and somehow become transmitted to people, possibly because they hunted and ate the monkeys as ‘bush meat’. However not everyone goes along with this explanation. Many link the higher prevalence of AIDs in Africa to something more sinister.

In late 2003 the Catholic Church instructed people in AIDs-stricken countries not to use condoms. The head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family Cardinal claims HIV was small enough to pass through the net formed by condoms. The WHO says this is nonsense. But then what does the World Health Organisation know about pins and angels?

Men and women cope with cancer very differently. Men seek information about their illness and the latest treatments whereas women mostly seek emotional support and advice about the impact of cancer on their family and friends. The report in Social Science & Medicine was based on a study of internet postings.

I try to give Rye’s Own an article every other month. The obvious subject for the May 2006 issue was the Rye Marina as last week’s Rye Observer had announced that the Millward Homes Development Plan had been kicked off the Rother Local Plan. But so murky is the planning process that nobody has much idea what this means in practice. So instead I cribbed some remarks about planning from John Papworth’s Purton Today and wrapped it inside an article entitled Real Local Power. Here is is the start of the 1375-word article that went off to Rye’s Own at midday today.

Most small towns in England have a local environment group. Here in Rye it is the Rother Environmental Group looked after by Christopher Strangeways. They brought the Wednesday Farmers’ Market to Rye. One vital function performed by these environmental groups is to monitor planning. No subject breeds more copious paperwork. A few paragraphs later I introduced Woking’s carbon emissions strategy. Here is most of the rest of the article.

Woking Borough Council calculated that in 1990 their population of ninety thousand souls emitted collectively a million tons of carbon dioxide. They read the report by The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and decided to see if they could reach the report’s targets by reducing these emissions by eighty percent. They never asked anyone’s permission. Who’s business is it other than their own? They just went ahead.

Woking did not feel the need for a Kyoto Treaty with Wokingham. Nobody came up with the idea of a Carbon Emission Trading Exchange for Berkshire. There were no thoughts that their share of the sixty billion pounds promised for cleaning up Nuclear Power Plants should be diverted to a County Fund for Countering Global Warming…as James Lovelock has proposed. They just had a few bright people think about the local problem of carbon emissions and come up with a local plan and a local strategy to reduce their own pollution to 200 000 tons.

One key element in Woking’s local plan is to convert the town to combined heat and power sources of energy. How can a town do such a thing? Actually quite easily. The economies of scale are one of the myths of our age. Producing your own power is much more efficient than taking electricity from the National Grid. Most fuel cells run on hydrogen but there are some that convert natural gas to energy at the cost of little more than a conventional boiler. Gas consumption is unchanged but electricity is generated as a byproduct. There are 25 million households in this country and British Gas who will be backing the Ceres micropower initiative reckons two thirds of them are suitable for these home micro-power plants…like disconnecting your BT landline and going with Skype.

Buying electricity from unscrupulous foreign-based intermediaries and letting the French off the pollution hook by paying rigged prices for the surplus nuclear electricity they clandestinely pipe through the Channel Tunnel is a mug’s game. Rye does not need to play. After all, what is best? A small group in Rye battling for the public weal or a small group in positions of power (presumed to be) battling for it for the nation at large?

The Rye Town Region has a tenth the population of Woking so our carbon dioxide emissions will be around 100 000 tons per year. The town should reduce this to 10 000 tons. That will bring in tourists from all around the world to find out how we did it. Next year’s Independent Rye Town Council should join with other like-minded town councils in associations like the South East Climate Change Partnership to claim back real Local Public Powers over airborne pollution as an extension of their responsibility for land-bourne pollution such as sewerage.

Rye Town Council already has the right to be consulted on planning matters. The new council should not feel itself limited to reclaiming old powers that have fallen into disuse. It should get ahead of the game and start wielding Future Public Powers locally. It should insist that Planning Applications within the town…and by agreement with the surrounding parishes also within the Rye Town Region…comply with Rye Local Plan Carbon Emission Targets. One of the golden rules of power is that it must be won. Sometimes this can be done without a fight.

Christopher Strangeways may have missed out by 111 votes in the May 2006 elections but his slate of a couple of dozen new local candidates from an Independent Democratic Rye Party should be a shoo-in 12-months hence when all sixteen council seats are up for grabs. It is time that Rye once again had a local scene of disinterested and dedicated citizens devoting their lives to making things better for the people in Rye and her surrounding parishes.

As such people start to acquire real power to make real decisions on local affairs…rather than to serve on powerless committees…so they will involve more and more local people in their work and the present cult of passivity in politics will start to change. When asked how to invigorate democracy my thoughts never turn to Messrs. Blair-Brown, Cameron or anyone up there to tell us local people how to run our local matters. ‘What do you thing of John Major?’ my mother once asked me. ‘I don’t think of John Major,’ was my response. Instead here in Rye…and in all the other Ryes around the country…I turn to good people like Sonia Holmes, John Izod, Jo Kirkham, Christopher Strangeways and others whom I know can be trusted.

I promised I would take you for Teatime at Marshbeck. The first instalment was a week ago on Sunday 9th April 2006. This is the second of three instalments. The story first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050. It’s difficult now to imagine how things must have been when life for most people was empty of meaning - before they were seized, as we are, by the commitment to develop our potential as persons, in society, as part of planet Earth. Everything must have seemed quite different for them - much emptier, you would think - and yet they used the same words - like sane, humane and ecological - as we do to refer to those aspects of life.’

Emily interrupts, ‘Yes, and human potential is another good example. A lot of people used to think that developing human potential meant escaping to places like ashrams in India or beaches in California. There was even a ‘human potential movement.’ Whereas we now take it for granted that developing our potential as humans means living our ordinary daily lives in creative, productive, enriching ways, including our relationships with other people and the natural world around us.’

Indira chips in, ‘Those old people must have seen what was coming, don’t you think? After all, history makes it pretty obvious that by the early ‘80s a change of direction was taking place. Here in England they had celebrated the bicentenary of the Industrial Revolution - two hundred years of fantastic progress on the material side of life - and all their good writers and thinkers had begun to discuss what post-industrial society was going to be like - the ‘coming age of human growth,’ ‘psycho-social invention and innovation,’ ‘personal self-development in an eco-planetary culture,’ and so on - maybe they still felt a bit awkward with these concepts and phrases, but their vision corresponded more or less to what actually happened.’

‘That’s not correct historically, you know,’ says Eskimo. ‘We tend to remember now only the people who got it more or less right, and whose books and recordings still have something interesting to say to us. But most of the experts and spokespeople seventy years ago were firmly imprisoned in an altogether different set of assumptions.

Take a simple example, which I happen to know about. Many people, like me, have a natural capacity for healing, in the same way as many people have aptitudes for swimming, or music, or whatever. No-one today doubts that most people have some capacity for healing which can be trained and developed with practice. But in the early ‘80s almost all the accepted people in medicine and science, including medical and scientific writers, ignored or rejected it. It wasn’t until about 1990 that they really began to take it seriously and to train healers in a big way. It was then, of course, that they began to conquer the killer diseases of industrial society like cancer.’

‘Exactly the same was true of economics,’ Pik says. ‘You have to put on a different mindset to understand what people then thought economics was about. It’s fascinating to hear and watch the speeches and discussions on the old tapes and videos. Even in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s one of the main aims - this is what ‘full employment’ meant - was that as many people as possible should work away from their homes, and should do their work for people and organisations, and on tasks, unconnected with their own lives. That seems crazy to us, I know. But for people then ‘employment,’ ‘unemployment,’ ‘jobs’ and so on, were passionately important.

‘Some historians of the transformation argue that all the debate and discussion about that kind of economics was just a complex tangle of empty quibbles and sophistries, with which the ambitious and clever people blinded the rest and achieved power and privilege for themselves.

‘But the riots of the 1980s showed that these questions were real and relevant to people’s lives. It must have been a bit like the theological debates (how many angels can stand on the point of a pin and all that) which mattered so much to people six or seven hundred years ago and then seemed such nonsense as soon as the Middle Ages were over.’

'I suppose all this was connected,’ says Herbert, ‘with what we see as the over-masculine psyche of people at that time. I mean, they always wanted to push outwards and spend their energies on someone else’s patch, not on their own - working in jobs outside their home, sending their children out to school, trading with people in other countries, converting people with different beliefs, sorting out other people’s problems instead of their own.

‘It was only about sixty years ago, you know, that people in the so-called ‘developed’ countries realised that putting their own way of living on a permanently sustainable footing was the most effective way of helping people in the ‘less developed’ countries to do the same. When my grandfather joined the Nigerian representatives at the U.N. just over fifty years ago, the old hands were still recalling the panic which had hit the place in the late 1980s when that simple fact began to sink in.’

to be continued next Sunday

Late Breaking News! Archduke Ferdinand Found Alive! Wars of Twentieth Century all a Big Mistake!

Meanwhile along the Rye Harbour Road…a little closer in time and space…the cycle path continues to be notable by its absence despite watch-my-lips promises that it would be up and rolling by the end of March 2006. Jim Hollands, the editor of Rye’s Own tells me that the latest delay is due to objections from a lobby group for the disabled. They argue that the new path should be for the use of their mobility scooters…while cyclists should use the road.

Harvard University Press has just published Are Women Human by Catharine MacKinnon. It ends with a rhetorical essay on Women’s September 11th where she makes the point that the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year (2800) as were killed in the Twin Towers (3000).

There is a big difference between cause and correlation. And comparing apples and oranges seldom makes much sense. One person is killed every minute somewhere in the world by armed violence. But MacKinnon goes on to imply some relevance in the comparison by arguing that violence against women ‘qualifies as a casus belli and a form of terrorism every bit as much as the events of September 11th’. Apparently ‘it’s only because it’s men doing it against women that it isn’t seen as war.’ Hmm!

The North American brand of Fundamental Feminism espoused by MacKinnon and her disciples stresses fixed gendered polarity and women’s need for protection from men’s domination of them. In MacKinnon’s view women’s status as a group relative to men has never been much changed from what it is now…a disempowering view for women as it trivialises a century of practical struggle and a vast array of major advances towards Social Equality.

If Machiavelli had been writing in the mid-20th century instead of the mid-16th his prince would have been instructed to invent Fundamental Feminism to drive a wedge into the movement for Global Justice spear-headed by Socialism and Communism in the aftermath of the collapse of the old order following the diplomatic debacle of the Kaiser War and the incompetence, greed and sheer nastiness of the Great Depression.

This strategy of divide and rule is as old as the Seven Hills of Rome. Even today large areas of the Feminist Movement have a case to answer against the accusation that they are dupes of the One World Police State Project which has as one of its minor tactical manoeuvres the blunting of the leading edge of the movement for global justice by making men and not poverty or the abuse of power…any power…the real enemy of female activists.

As a group English Socialist Feminists has been influenced (to their detriment) by American Fundamental Feminism but have not been taken in. Wiser heads have usually prevailed. Nonetheless the ideas of these militant rights-based foreign feminists have infiltrated the legislative apparatus in Strasburg, Whitehall, Westminster and Millbank. Their intolerance as well as their goals stands in sharp contrast to the tolerance and the dreams of the duties-based attitude of both the Old Gendered Aristocracies and the New English Socialist Feminists.

Men are not women’s enemy…although Patriarchal Fascism certainly is. Noble men and women everywhere need to make common cause not only against poverty and violence but also against fascism and fundamentalism…especially when it hides behind the sort of pseudo-science and false socio-biological truths wielded by American Feminist Fundamentalists to obscure the illogicality and irrelevance of many of their positions.

In America for instance while white middle-class women form campaigns against pornography the real victims of the Republican Party’s Right Wing’s conservative agendas…working class, black and ethnic minority women…are campaigning for welfare and healthcare. Specialisation is one thing…and Adam Smith had a very positive view of it…but the problem here is that much of the middle-class Fundamental Feminist campaigning…through the courts and law schools…actually strengthens the power and appeal of an anti-feminist Moral Right that is threatening to enclose women anew in repressive patriarchal structures…replete with notions of female helplessness wrapped up in the sugary pill of female virtues. This is not the sort of gendered society most of us wish to see. But no doubt Machiavelli is smiling benignly in the wings.

Sonia Holmes won the only place up for grabs on Rye Town Council this year with 266 votes. Christopher Strangeways came in second (155) with Jessica Neame bringing up the rear (137). A sixth of this ancient town’s vote-force of 3000 turned out to place their marks upon the ballot paper. No ballot papers were issued…it was enough to announce your name and confirm that your address was the one the Returning Officer told you it was.

Elspeth Wrenn reckoned she could have voted several times so I asked her to put a cross for Strangeways on my behalf. She refused not on the grounds that it was illegal but because it was wrong. I’m not s sure it isn’t the other way about. Since I live in a post-office box I have no address and having no address means I get no vote.

Third time lucky. My Body Shop Christmas present to Heidi went back to L’Oréal after Christmas and then last month’s birthday present Chocolat…the book by Joanna Harris...was immediately remaindered as Heidi had read it months before…and seen the film. But Ayn Rand was gratefully accepted. What Heidi will make of The Strike is something else…this was its working title before Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand should be at the forefront of women’s claims for intellectual equality. She is a philosopher of top rank who crafted her novels to articulate her Objectivist philosophy in action. She stands head and shoulders above literary heroines like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austin.

In my digital filing cabinet…distinct from my digital library as it contains my writing and not everybody elses…there are some preliminary notes written (I remember) at my ex-wife’s house in Uppsala Sweden 12 years ago and entitled Ayn Rand’s World. Here they are. Ayn Rand sees two forms of tyranny…public and private…where the Public Tyranny refers to Topside, Taggart, Dog Eats Dog, etc. while Private Tyranny refers to Nearside...wife, family, etc.

Two key concepts are needed to understand Ayn Rand´s thought in these two domains: looting or expropriation by fear and mooching or expropriation by guilt. Ayn Rand´s basic premise is that the First Rater must struggle against both Topside and Nearside looters and moochers at all times. There is an implicit assumption that the little individual First Rater cannot achieve anything individually once the First Raters have lost power. From this derives the unstated premise that the only hope is for all First Raters to form their own brother- and sisterhoods, withdrawing from the non-producers into Galt´s Gulch where ironically they live in a socialist paradise.

Ayn Rand´s Socialist Club is open to all First Raters but entry must be earned. Nobody has an automatic right to participate in somebody else’s Socialist Paradise. Lunch tickets are not free but are earned by developing a value that can be exchanged. This is a very Jewish idea, the Talmud insisting: ‘the father who does not teach his son a trade, teaches him to steal’. Catholic Christianity seeks to trump this Talmudic doctrine with Altruism. Objectivism does not mix well with the doctrines of the Jesuits. The Virtue of Selfishness is the title of one of her collection of essays.

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An interesting question is what happens in a Randian world to those who can’t or won’t deliver value for exchange. Perhaps like Nietzsche she would eliminate them. Tom Lethbridge speculates in The Legend of The Sons of God about two races...one with the blood of gods and one without...We The Dying as a sequel to We The Living? Perhaps pastoralising Lesser Breeds is another option...the original plan for Germany after the Kaiser War...with paternalistic policies towards Second Raters like Dagny Taggart’s right-hand man Eddie Withers in Atlas Shrugged.

My note ended with two remarks. The first was that Liberalism...and some strains of Catholicism...are the western theologies that elevate Toleration above all else and see an individual’s right to do their own thing as a virtue when it is not at someone else’s expense. Taoism takes a similar line. The second remark was that there is a Puritan streak in Ayn Rand. Her heroines and heroes have no humour...traits often associated with the Certainty of the Intolerant.

American Legalistic Feminists like Katharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have airbrushed Ayn Rand out of their herstories. But the more practical and effective…but heretical…approach of British Socialist Feminists with their focus on redressing real world grievances right now…domestic violence, prostitution, female circumcision, poor pay, undervalued work, pension rights etc…should have found a way to embrace Ayn Rand’s gendered society of noble karlmen and wyfmen. Is the future female? as Lynne Segal asks in her ‘troubled thoughts on contemporary feminism’. For me this is the wrong question. Our future Sane Humane Ecological (SHE) Future will be in Gendered Societies…and not neutered ones. Ivan Illich’s Jesuit tract Gender and Ayn Rand’s John Galt could become key writings in the development of Feminist Thought in Europe and Asia…although America may be beyond the pale.

At 08:32:47 Greenwich Mean Time on 11th April 2006 a wardrobe-sized spacecraft did the astronaut’s equivalent of a handbrake turn that slowed it down enough to be trapped in orbit around Venus. Venus Express was launched atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 03:33:34 GMT on 9th November 2005. The £140 million space probe is beginning a 500-day odyssey to map and measure the planet. Small orbit adjustments will be made for the next month to set a path that passes 150 miles above the surface at its nadir and 40 000 miles at its apocentre.

Venus and Earth are roughly the same size and were formed at the same time and from the same materials. But while Earth is a watery paradise in a cold dark universe and a haven for millions of life forms, Venus is the evil twin with temperatures high enough to melt lead and clouds of sulphuric acid blanketing the planet in 12-mile thick layers. Venus has no water and no oxygen. It also lacks the magnetic field which protects Earth from the solar wind…a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. But there are many unanswered questions. The atmosphere of Venus is leaking away at the poles at a hundred tons a day but atmospheric pressure is a hundred times that on Earth.

Meanwhile back on Earth half a million human life forms…men women and children…are killed by armed violence every year. Ten years hence death and injuries from wars and violence will outnumber deaths caused by killer diseases. In one planetary bioregion…home to 456,953,258 human life forms according to the latest count by a peculiar grouping called the European Union…life is controlled by Economic Science.

This Economic Science instructs very large Food Exchange Centres with names like Tesco and Wall-Mart to pay dairy farmers in a province called England seventeen pence for a litre of milk while selling it to customers for fifty pence. They get away with this cold-blooded blackmail by threatening to ship surplus milk by motorised transport across the planetary bioregion at prices kept low by Subsidies and Cheap Production. The result is that English and Welsh Dairy Farmers are going out of business in droves…but very scientifically with the help of a technique of the money system called Bankruptcy. Some of the farmers even kill themselves violently. It is called Suicide.

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It is not often I get a second chance in life. But recently a Solar Eclipse at the pivotal mid-heaven point of my Astral Chart allowed me another shot at a goal that had once meant a lot to me. But I was not alone. Thirty eight million other people in Europe were given the same opportunity. With odds of one in twelve this must be better than playing the European Lottery. But it was important to read the small print. Had I got distracted or made too many concessions I would have failed. That was obviously what the rest of my fellow Cancerians in the European Union did.

The Solar Eclipse on Wednesday 29th March was a marvellous sight…in the Libyan Sahara. Dr John Mason is my stringer. The Sun seemed to be ringed by fire. The rest of the sky was so dark that Venus and Mercury shone bright and the horizon burned pink orange and yellow in twilight. Solar Eclipses are astronomical events but they also produce their own weather phenomena. In the Sahara it had been a gloriously hot day but suddenly cooled off at Totality when the Sun was completely blocked out by the Eclipse. It also grew windy just before and after Totality.

For years scientists dismissed such Eclipse Winds as myth. But measurements made of the Solar Eclipse of 11th August 1999 over Southern England proved it was a real phenomenon. The Moon’s shadow creates a local cooling and as the cold air in the middle of the shadow sinks it hits the ground and pancakes outwards creating a brief and gusty wind. The 1999 measurements also picked up small fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. These carried on for hours after the Eclipse and may have been created in the upper atmosphere as the cold Eclipse Shadow raced across the sky at supersonic speeds. Over the next few hours these disturbances gradually filtered down to the surface.

Pity Debby Reynolds...Her Majesty Government’s Chief Veterinary Officer. Now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB ) and New Scientist are going for her too. It seems there is a device called a Rapid PCR machine that can carry out instant diagnosis of diseases like swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease and…yes you got there before me...avian flu. A dozen of these located across Scotland might put the taxpayer back a few hundred thousand pounds but if the technology works and the technicians know how to use it then Debby's avian suspects would be diagnosed at £3 a time in six hours instead of six days.

But the conspiracy thickens. The New Scientist reports that 6 to 7% of birds should test positive for mild forms of bird flu distinct from the H5NI strain. DEFRA found only two cases of low-pathogenicity bird flu in 3343 samples collected in December - 0.06%. Hmmm! Dr Björn Olsen homed in on storage and collection. ‘Swabs should be immersed in a saline solution and then frozen,’ he tells the scientific journal. DEFRA shoves them at the back of the fridge and hopes for the best...or perhaps the worst. We are hearing murmurings from DEFRA about the need to bring free-range flocks indoors, to end organic farming and to ‘monitor’...but never introduce...vaccination. Cock-up or Conspiracy? The DEFRA website sets the tone. Here from DEFRA’s Guidance on Avian Flu. ‘Signs of disease may include increased mortality’. Er…duh!

It’s good to know that the boys at the International Monetary Fund are on the ball. They have just noticed that hedge funds...otherwise known as trust funds for the super-rich...have ‘adopted the practice of significantly leveraging the balance sheets of the companies they have just acquired so as to pay high dividends to themselves straight away.’ No! Surely not? Shock! Horror! Now there’s a surprise. But that’s hedge funds for you.Respectable establishments would not dream of behaving like this.

Actually they would. Yesterday Deutsche Bank was fined ten million dollars for ‘failing to observe proper standards of market conduct.’ Here's why. At 10.30 on 4th March 2004 Deutsche announced the sale of Volvo’s 64 million shares in Scania...a Wallenberg imperial asset...at SEK 234 to 236½ each. By 11.30 Deutsche had received ‘indications of interest’ for less than half. Whoops! This is not supposed to happen. But resourceful to the last David Maslen...boss of Deutsche’s Equity Trading Desk...dashed boldly into LSE's Open Market and bought up another 30% on the bank’s own account...but forgot to mention the identity of the buyer…echoes of Rogue Trader Nick Leeson.

Of course traders had already noticed thatDeutsche's play was stalling so Scania’s shares slipped to 231½. But after Maslen’s Baring's Splurge they recovered to 233. At 12.30 Deutsche announced that 80% of the Scania shares were spoken for...but failed to mention that they had spoken for many of them themselves. By 1.30 demand for the Scania shares had dribbled to a halt. So, dynamic and resourceful to the last, Deutsche double-bluffed and announced officially that it was buying 10% of the Scania shares.

At 2.30...after four hours of dodgy trading...Deutsche closed the book...it’s really like betting on the horses...and set the offer price at SEK 234. Next day Scania shares opened at SEK 229. Nobody is telling which Nominee Companies and the Hedge Funds traded away on the inside as the Scania share price bobbed up and down between 231 and 237 kronor. But following the announcement of their fine by the Financial Services Authority out came the PR boys. ‘Deutsche Bank voluntarily reported the matter to the FSA and has fully cooperated with its investigation while also carrying out its own detailed internal investigation.’ So that’s all right then.

Despite much opposition Ken Livingston got himself re-elected Mayor of London…he ran the city for the Greater London Council back in the Age of Thatcher…and got the trains, buses and cars running. As a good socialist of the Old Labour persuasion perhaps he should now go for broke and set about squeezing the Golden Square Mile until the pips squeak. Perhaps they will even up sticks and decamp for Delaware or the Cayman Islands where their sleazy business belongs.

One contribution English voters could make to Global Justice would be to elect a party to get the English out of the killingry business with its gun-running and funny money dealings. Ken could start the Clean Slate Party…the CSP. Do we really need these suits walking upon England's mountains green? And were England's pleasant pastures really meant for armament manufacturers? Perhaps it’s time to discover what William Blake meant when he wrote about divine countenances shining forth upon our clouded hills? Surely we can do better than send Gordon Brown running around promising schools for the rest of the world…while ignoring the shocking state of socialist education back home?

What would everybody do after we got out of making weapons and loans? Make love and not war. Make music. We are actually rather good at doing festivals. A lot of us might like to return to the soil as Yeoman Farmers. In 1995 Britain produced 109% of its beef...now it's 71%. Ten years ago we had 476 000 acres of fruit 'n veg under cultivation...now it's 373 000 acres. There were 35 000 dairy farms ten years ago...now it's below 20 000. As a country we do have choices.

Last Friday’s disparaging remarks about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs prompted a response from our Chief Veterinary Officer. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am concerned that you described [DEFRA’s] response to the discovery of the dead swan in Fife as ‘worrying’. The bird was reported at 6.40 pm on March 29 and picked up at 1pm the next day. It arrived at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge the following day.’ Debby Reynolds continued. ‘The VLA works 24 hours per day 7 days per week. It conducts its work based on risk. Suspected cases in poultry are dealt with more quickly and out of normal office hours because of their potential to have more serious consequences than wild birds collected as part of routine surveillance.’

Debby then goes on to inform me that there have been 1100 wild birds submitted to Weybridge since the end of February’ and that ‘the swan samples were subjected to tests on April 3-4. These were more challenging than usual because of the state of decomposition of the tissue. These tests led to the announcement on April 5 of the H5 strain. Identifying the N-type and isolating the virus took longer and the VLA were able to do that only on April 6.’ So that’s all right then. But is it? If I understand this aright then we have hundreds of dead birds coughing and sneezing their way to Weybridge from the far reaches of the kingdom…spreading bird flu as they go. Now I am really worried.

A couple of months ago James Robertson posted on his website a new introduction to Future Work…first published in 1985. Helen Dew in New Zealand brought it to my notice over the weekend. According to James Robertson world society is in the early stage of a great transformation. One outcome will be a liberation of work as we go beyond slavery, serfdom and wage slavery…otherwise known as employment…all of which involve people working for a minority superior to themselves. As this process continues people will work more freely than conventional employment allows. They will do good, useful and rewarding work for themselves, for other people and for society. In Future Work James Robertson called this ownwork…a term included in my Curriculum Vitae.

Such progress as there has been in recent years has been destroying the ecosystems of our planet to a point where people all over the world now realise that the future of the human species and many other species is endangered. Globalised capitalism in its present form has been systematically widening the gap between rich and poor countries, and between rich and poor people in every country, to a point increasingly seen as intolerable and unsustainable.

The impoverished Third World is now exerting effective opposition to the unjust system of international trading and finance imposed on them by the Euro-American powers. Combined with the growing strength and economic power of countries like China and India and Brazil, this will spell the end of the 500-year period of Euro-American world domination and leadership. All this means that world development is going to take a new direction which will bring changes in the kinds of work people do, the ways they work, and the way work is organised.

In Britain although official unemployment has gone down the number of people receiving disability benefits instead of unemployment benefits has gone up so much that the government has decided it is out of control. The number of people in employment has increased partly because both parents of young children have found it financially necessary to get a job outside the home and the government has positively compelled many single mothers to do so.

Many new jobs created in the past 20 years are not pensionable. In general the ability and readiness of employers to contribute to pensions for their employees is also declining. The Old Labour assumption that most people will be able to rely on employment to provide them with a decent pension when they retire is no longer valid. There is not only a pensions crisis on the horizon but the certainty of a breakdown in the employment way of organising work.

But in his new 2006 introduction to Future Work James Robertson mentions more positive, forward-looking factors in favour of the Future Work approach. Projects by the New Economics Foundation have been generating practical understanding and practical experience of that approach to the future of work at local level. Practical proposals have also been worked out for a systematic reconstruction of the scoring system for the game of economic life at every level This will make it easier for people and localities to control their own economic lives.

Nowadays politicians talk about social entrepreneurs and enabling public policies first floated in The Sane Alternative and Future Work. Not too far from the public domain is the idea of a Citizen's Income referred to by James Robertson in Future Work as a Guaranteed Basic Income. James Robertson sees a Citizen's Income replacing an equivalent amount of public spending as one element in a reconstruction of money and finance.

In Future Wealth Robertson proposes that a Citizen’s Income be financed by new sources of public revenue that replace existing taxes on incomes, value added and business profits. Robertson’s new sources of public revenue include taxes on common resources…such as the value of unimproved land and unextracted energy…along with new non-tax revenue such as the profit from creating additions to another common resource…the national money supply.

I had my day well-organised. But so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. ‘Events dear boy events’ as Harold Macmillan remarked when asked the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister. At 0901 Swedish time a text arrived. ‘Need your help urgently this morning.’ It was a Film Synopsis for SKF… by midday. So that was the morning shot. On the other hand thirteen hundred words is a hundred pounds in the kitty so I can’t really complain.

My son almost worked for SKF in the days when they were part of the Wallenberg Empire. If my memory serves me right he was up for interview in Gävle…but perhaps it was Sandvik. Anyway he ended up wage-slaving for Asea Brown Boveri in Västerås. With hindsight everything probably worked out for the best because the Wallenberg holding company Investor offloaded SKF in one of their recent investment shuffles…while retaining ABB.

Investor has 85% of its holdings tied up in ten core investments…ABB, AstraZeneca, Atlas Copco, Electrolux, Ericsson, Gambro, Saab, Scania, SEB and WM-data…where SEB is Sveriges Enskilda Banken. Investor bunches these into four groups…technology, healthcare and financial services…worth two billion pounds each at stock market prices…and engineering worth four billion with Atlas Copco and ABB hovering around two billion and Scania and Electrolux making the Investor grade at five hundred million pounds apiece. Not bad for a small country with a population of just nine million But transnational corporations assure us they don’t think in nationalistic terms…although my son tells some amusing stories about the Swiss and the Swedes inside ABB.

Heidi texted me mid-morning and we arranged to meet for lunch. Alan’s last minute discovery of an untranslated piece of synopsis meant turning up without shaving but this has its advantages…a kiss on the lips instead of on my stubbly cheek when we parted at two. I am not sure what to make of these meetings. In the past when a relationship ended I usually moved away avoiding the emotional fall-out problems. Ah well. All part of life’s moth-eaten tapestry.

I felt strangely depressed most the day. I hate Mondays so put the blame on the Romans. But there was the sense of anti-climax after the concert the night before. Sandra said she had enjoyed the concert and it had gone well enough. In Faurés Requiem the basses came in two beats early at one place leading to a ripple of confusion for the tenors, alto and soprano entries. But we recovered quickly and inflicted only ten seconds of dodgy harmonies on the audience…which went unnoticed by nearly all of them. Then there was lunch with Heidi.

Every year well over a hundred thousand divorces take place in this country involving getting on for half a million people. During our lifetime we have a 1 in 2 chance of getting directly involved in divorce. In a sane world we would probably arrange to get married by lawyers and divorced by priests but this is not the way we do it. I know people who still suffer from the trauma of badly handled divorces from decades ago. And for every divorce there must be several times as many break-ups…and breaking up is hard to do. Here is a list of 32 social realities that are not adequately addressed in our present doctrine of divorce. Goodness knows what is to be done? So much misery

Costs of litigation / rise in property values / change in expectations / change in matrimonial roles / the multicultural society / religious differences / employment & earnings of women / the mediation service / choice of jurisdictions / father access to children / prenuptial contracts / no-fault divorce / civil partnerships / long-term impact on children / length of marriage / length of previous partnership / separation of partnerships other than civil partnerships / pension rights / impact of rising longevity / press freedom to report / change in attitude to extra-marital sex / change in attitude to physical violence / acceptance of promiscuity / abuse of children / the 50-50 split / share of future earnings / tax treatment of marriage / decline of the extended family / grandmothers in full-time employment unavailable as child carers / impact of care for the elderly / impact of drink & drugs / impact of modern working hours.

Heidi and I had quite an extensive exchange back in January before our private equivalent of the Valentine’s Day (emotional) Massacre we inflicted upon each other. At one point I remarked that I didn’t feel she was seeing me but was instead inventing some caricature of her theories about me muddled up with her theories about men and her experience of other partners in her life. And I followed it up with a plea to ‘please try to see me’.

In my exasperation I also felt the need to point out that I was not a bundle of categories like man, white, English etc. but a person. ‘Please look for the person’, I pleaded, ‘and not some straw man you set up so you can knock him down to boost your own self esteem. You don't need to do this’. Perhaps not the most diplomatic thing to say.

I ended the exchange by remarking that I did not accept Heidi’s idea that people ‘sort things out and then move on in happiness and harmony’. In my view by sharing oneselves and one’s life one gradually learnt to be kinder and more caring by talking with each other and reflecting on the conversations alone afterwards. There is not some magic make-over with a before and after. Life is problems…and the interesting ones were worth grappling with. T’is said that hell is people…but then so is heaven. William Blake’s The Clod & The Pebble is saying much the same.

I promised I would take you for Teatime at Marshbeck. Today is as good a day as any. LHPs are leisure, home and personal informatic sets and this piece first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050. A few days ago the 21st century reached the half-way mark. The occasion has made people think. They are still talking about the New Year Celebrations, and the various ideas about the past and the future that came up.. Emily Malik, Eskimo Johnson, and their two children, Bruno (aged eight) and Shantih (aged six), are a typical English family group. Their way of life is typical too. They live in a village called Marshbeck a few miles from a town centre called Trentside about a hundred and fifty miles from London.

Emily and Eskimo originally came to Marshbeck as a result of a contact made through the LHP. A house and work-role had become vacant and the members of the cluster concerned were seeking a new family group to take the place of the people who had left. As they were reminded during the New Year celebrations, their grandparents and great grandparents seventy years ago did not have LHPs linked to the worldwide networks. The possibility of combining telephones, television sets and computer terminals had long been foreseen but it was not until after 1990 that LHPs began to come in as standard domestic equipment. Similarly, it was not until the ‘90s that clusters of houses owned in common by the residents came in as a regular form of home occupation and neighbourhood living, after the final breakdown of the old money system had brought publicly provided housing virtually to an end and put personal house purchase out of most people’s reach.

Emily’s and Eskimo’s predecessors at Marshbeck has been invited to move to PISCES (the Pacific Inter Species Communication and Empathy School) in Tahiti to work out their growing commitment to the Marine Consciousness Movement. The cluster needed someone to take their house who would also take responsibility for managing the minifarm. This suited Emily well and Eskimo discovered that the Biodegradable Plastics and Recycling Unit in Trentside would give him three days work a week, monitoring their automated quality control. He also found that the Marshbeck Community Health Centre would be an ideal place to develop his capacities as a healer. So Emily and Eskimo visited Marshbeck and met the residents of the cluster. Then both sides made a few enquiries, agreement was quickly reached, and the newcomers moved in and took up their share in the common ownership.

That was about five years ago. Their cluster is a little smaller than the average. It covers about six acres. The minifarm occupies three. Buildings and private houses occupy the rest. There are three other family houses, two four-room bungalows for elderly people, one of which is shared by three people and the other by two, and a teenagers’ mess containing six bedsitters, a common room, kitchen and shower room. In addition to the teenagers’ mess and the sheds for the minifarm, other shared buildings contain: the deep-freeze units; food-processing equipment for making breads, meats, jams, chutneys, cheeses, wines, beers, and so on; the laundry; and a repair and maintenance workshop with tools for repairing clothes, household furniture and equipment, minifarm equipment, electronic and electrical equipment, bicycles and other vehicles, and buildings.

There is also a coppice, a small communications and operations office with informatic facilities more sophisticated than the ordinary living room LHPs. Several of the cluster’s residents use the coppice for their work: for example, Harley Jones does Environmental and Architectural Consultancy; Sheelah Mackenzie calculates personalised diet and exercise optimisations; and Pik Musgrove puts together multi-media skill-transfer packs. It is Pik, in fact, who - with his nineteen-year-old daughter Indira and her friend Herbert from Lagos - has dropped in on Emily and Eskimo this afternoon. Harley Jones’ mother, Meg, an elderly widowed lady who shares one of the bungalows, is also there. Pik is a recent widow; Marika, his partner, died last summer after an accident at a solar-powered bike-plane show in Arizona. Indira met Herbert during her community service last year at a Biotechnics Centre in China, where they learned to use bacteriological techniques in urban horticulture. They came back together by Round-the-World Windship just before Christmas.

Herbert remarks how strange it is that in England mid-afternoon is still called tea-time and mid-morning is still called coffee-time although it must be thirty or forty years since people living outside the tea- and coffee-growing areas of the world have drunk tea and coffee regularly. Emily doesn’t find this surprising; surely, she says, one of the functions of language is to reassure us that things haven’t changed all that much; later generations use the same words as earlier ones, and don’t recognise that what the words refer to is something quite new. Pik has recently been doing historical research with the Trentside Community Communications Society for their contribution to New Year’s Eve Worldwide. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and I think this is especially true of the last sixty or seventy years. The biggest changes that have taken place since the 1980s, when the great transformation gathered speed, have been intangible changes…changes in what some of our grandparents used to call software, meaning people’s ways of thinking, communicating and organising. The deep, unspoken priorities have changed…to be continued next Sunday.

For the past few days I have been stepping over a box of spilled matches…half of them struck…when leaving my boat to go into town in the mornings. They are the first thing I see as I step off the catwalk onto the bank. Today I noticed the matchbox itself on the other side of the wall and this gave me just enough of an incentive to clear up the mess. So imagine my surprise when I got to Jempson’s Coffee House and read in the Rye Observer that Sussex Police had put out a call for help to catch the Rye Arsonist. Over the past four months there have been 25 deliberate fires in litter bins and in the undergrowth with many of them being set very early in the morning. Hmmm! A set-up?

While perusing The Times in Jempsons, Taxi Driver John popped in for coffee leaving his dog outside. Taxi driver is something of a misnomer. John is one of three partners in a firm that owns a couple of hundred London Cabs and he is seriously rich. He owns Gallant Maid who sits in the berth next to Vemara…so you could say we are quite close. As the police have identified Dog Walkers as their key suspects I thought I would fill John in on the details. Well one thing led to another…as they do…so by the end of our conversation we had our own Prime Suspect.

Peter Butler has been my eyes and ears on the moorings. It was Peter who told me somebody had walked off with Vemara’s compass while I was in Llangolman. Peter has a record. He has done time. His story is that the owner of a petrol station in Lincolnshire failed to show him respect so he set fire to the place…and then waited until the police came to give himself up. Peter is the most important person in Rye as he opens and closes the Public Toilets every day and makes sure they are clean and in good working order. John calls him Peterloo…and this is how gossip starts.

This week I sent out a bunch of invoices. These take time to prepare. Nowadays most go by e-mail and arrive on the client’s desk in the twinkling of an eye. But they can be rather fiddly because errors are not allowed. Also no two translators have the same rates. But my wordsmith plus microbusiness has not been this healthy for several years. Nine invoices were sent out during the first quarter …£ 5773 in total in four different currencies...pounds, dollars, euros and kronors. Two have been paid putting £ 1093 in the kitty. The balance of £ 4680 will be through later this month. My Barclays Business Account is what the solicitors call a Client Account with beneficiaries dotted all around the globe...in Sweden, United Kingdom, New Zealand and then some.

I manage my microbusinesses by cash and margins. The theory is that with a decent handle on margins I can improve cash budgeting and operating profit. The first quarter figures worked out quite neatly. William Franklin & Sons earns ten percent for managing everybody’s money...and paying UK taxes. In the first quarter I earned another ten percent managing the more complicated projects (6.6%) and making my own contribution as an English Wordsmith (3.3%).

Add a few dozen zeros to my micro-figures and much the same is going on at Her Majesty’s Treasury. My big day each year is 22nd March. My father was born on this day 100 years ago. Each year on this day I file online the Annual Return for the company I inherited from him...retrospectively...William Franklin & Sons Limited. This year on 22nd March The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP delivered his Budget Speech in celebration of the centenary of my father’s birth...which was jolly decent of him even though he forgot to mention it in his preamble.

Blair stands up at the Dispatch Box and tells bare-faced lies. Brown has a different approach. He doesn’t lie. But he doesn’t tell the truth either. He just leaves out the really important bits in the vain hope that nobody notices. Matthew Parris is not so easily duped. If Brown sent Our Boys to Hong Kong to protect British Interests when China attacks Taiwan...or when civil war breaks out in China...there would be no dodgy dossiers…he would just fail to mention it.

Brown is planning the most sweeping change to English Trust Law for centuries and he intends it to apply retrospectively. As it happens I applaud the Chancellor for this. But Retrospective Legislation is unfair. So unfair in fact that it amazes me that no Court has seen fit to throw out measures based upon such an illegitimate principle.

On my father’s anniversary Brown delivered a long tedious Budget Statement. It contained everything but the kitchen sink yet his radical reform of the Trust Laws...the most controversial and far-reaching of all his proposals...was simply left out from his speech and relegated to some obscure corner of the reams of small print that always accompany a Brown Paper. I have no problem with a Socialist Chancellor abolishing the division between the Britain that hires accountants and lawyers to avoid Inheritance Taxes and the Britain that does not.

But Brown should say he is doing it. And he should be proud that he is doing it. So proud in fact that he announces it in The House before an audience of his peers...and I don’t mean those Blair have appointed to the other place. My suspicion is that Brussels is the treason that dare not speak its name. Brown may be doing the right thing…but he may be doing it for all the wrong reasons. English Law comes in two flavours: Common Law and Equity Law. There is nothing remotely like this in the Napoleonic Code. Trusts comes under the jurisdiction of our Courts of Equity which apply the strange judicial notion of fairness to their deliberations. Methinks I smell a great big EuroRat.

Most mornings I wake up and ask myself: What am I going to do today. Some days I do what I want. Some days I do what is necessary. Some days I do something important. Some days I get nothing useful done. Before going to sleep in the evening I ask myself what I did all day...and make value judgements. Not a lot; nothing harmful; some good work. I like the idea of A Good Day's Work for A Good Day's Pay. What do you do all day?

Those remarks were extracted from my introductory weblog nearly one hundred blogs ago in December 2005. After four days delving into the murky morass of parallel currencies and energy coupons I am now returning to station to fill you in on my week. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoon I travelled to Winchelsea Church with Elspeth Wrenn...a fellow Ryesingers Tenor...to lend vocal support to the Winchelsea Singers and their performance of Fauré’s Requiem tomorrow evening.

Yesterday in the car Elspeth told me the gruesome tale of the pigeon killed outside her window by a sparrow hawk…Nature raw in tooth and claw. Today the newspapers are full of bird flu. My sentiments tend towards those of Littlejohn...formerly of The Sun but now of The Daily Mail...herewith his comments.

We’ve been building up to the news of the first case of bird flu in Britain for months. There’s nothing like a good health scare and it’s been a while since a decent epidemic. Mad cows, foot-and-mouth, salmonella in eggs. We love it. Helicopters are scrambled, front pages cleared, exclusion zones cordoned off, temporary mortuaries prepared, emergency action plans implemented. I’m surprised the dead swan hasn’t been given a nickname. How about Cyril?

If the Government handles this as well as foot-and-mouth there won’t be a bird left in Britain by the weekend. There’ll be bonfires of budgies, pyres of parrots, conflagrations of cockatoos everywhere. Exports of British chickens will be banned by the EU and cost the British taxpayer billions. I don’t want to put a dampener on all this excitement but it is birds who get Bird Flu but no matter. The Chief Veterinary Officer has imposed a Wild Bird Risk Area east of Perth between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. That should keep them out. Within DEFRA’s 1500 square mile exclusion area are 175 poultry farms, three million birds and a quarter of a million free-range chickens.

In the post today was the April issue of Purton Today with its banner headline Making Local Government Local and Serving the Lydiards, Hook, Minety and other local beauty spots. It’s as good as any local paper in this land or any other. I really must persuade the editor to accept my offer of blog space here for this monthly journalistic tour-de-force. The editor has bird problems. Here is John Papworth from his Perambulator Column.

Unfortunately the Anti-Fox Hunting Bill recently quite uselessly passed in what is left of our Parliament and its powers after the unelected commission of fixers, schemers, bribers, plotters and deceivers of Brussels have done their secret nefariousness, omitted to include any prohibition of foxes hunting chickens. I only had six fine ladies, and all of them recycling all my kitchen left-overs, and laying eggs as though on a permanent parade for that sole purpose. Then one day a friend rang to say would I like to give home to a cockerel. I thought that was a splendid idea and had visions of lots of little chicks running all over the place.

Well, the cockerel duly arrived, a fine, proud, imperious-looking fellow with a huge gold crest, a majestic beak like a Roman Emperor’s nose and a steely glare in his eye like a churchwarden on the warpath; and he had lots of feathers on his legs as though wearing trousers. Since he had six wives I decided to call him Henry, but the fact is, despite the magisterial arrogance of his deportment he proved to be made of less sterner stuff. His wives bullied him mercilessly, constantly stole his food, chased him away and generally made his life a misery.

But other forces were at work to also make it shorter, to say nothing of the fate of two of his wives; the neighbouring field seems one of those places the local hunt has neglected, legally or otherwise, for Mr Reynard flourishes there and one day I found a wide scatter of feathers as all that remained of them, and then I found Henry himself half devoured and no longer the cock of the walk.

Not one to cry over spilt milk John Papworth found a new source of hens and another male bird…Henry IX. Local reports tell me the hens have settled in well but the new Henry is just as timid and afraid of his wives as his unfortunate predecessor. But it is early days. Perhaps Purton will be seeing lots more little chicks running around before long.

Meanwhile a few hundred miles north of Wiltshire DEFRA officials are scurrying around testing any swan they can lay their hands on. DEFRA is the country’s front-line defence against this avian conspiracy to take over the world. If the media-induced mass hysteria is justifiable then this is just a little worrying. Cyril’s carcass was spotted on 29th March. It was rotting and had clearly been dead for some time. It took sixteen hours for DEFRA to react as the alert was phoned in outside office hours. And then the media needed seven days to coordinate their proclamation of a National Panic. But let me end this weblog on a helpful note. If you are in the habit of flaunting the Royal Prerogative and eating swan for Sunday Lunch make sure you cook it properly. Virus H5NI is killed by cooking.

In yesterday’s trading the British pound fell three fifths of a cent against the Yankee dollar to 1.75 and dropped a fifth of a penny against the euro to 1.43. The media paraded the usual suspects to explain this...expectations of a narrowing of interest rates relative to the eurozone, unexpected evidence (as if any more was needed) of the continuing collapse of Britain’s manufacturing sector and so on...and then started edging into apocalyptic mode.

More interesting than the wobbling of the pound was this reaction of the media. The herd were clearly spooked and began to write in terms of the pound tumbling, 2-year lows and the resurgent industrial sector in the eurozone. The gloss is starting to flake off Brown’s New Britain as reality breaks through. The sooner JAK deposits the 75 000 Swedish kronor promised for my account this month the better. If the arithmetic works a third of it will be speculated on the collapse of the British pound against the Swedish krona before the herd twigs and destroys my profit.

In The Ecology of Money Richard Douthwaite argues that ‘an international currency should be based on the global resource whose use it is highly desirable to minimize’. Actually he doesn’t argue this but merely states it. So this is a premise. Bear that in mind. Douthwaite then picks up the old Limits to Growth argument from 30 years ago. Economic growth needs piped energy, piped energy and economic growth produce pollution and pollution brings economic growth to a shuddering halt. The structure of Jay Forrester’s System Dynamics model for his World Dynamics modelling ensured that collapses were suitably dramatic…good visual effects. With me so far?

This is where Global Warming enters the argument. But first a cautionary note. Please remember that nearly everything in today’s weblog is either an assumption based on pretty dodgy science or a computer projection based on pretty dodgy parameters and incomplete theories. Global Warming is not caused by all piped energy but by bad piped energy...let’s call it BPE. Gross National Product is an arithmetical sum of goods and bads...and hence pretty meaningless...so goodness knows how the economists will cope with these BPEs. But that is their worry and not ours.

Enter the Global Commons Institute and their Contraction & Convergence agenda. We The World can stop Global Warming dead in its tracks, they claim, by reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. Think ration books in the Hitler War and coupons for Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Hey presto! You’ve got yourself a scarce resource. And a scarce resource is just what is needed for an international currency. Hold on to your hats. We are nearing the currency link.

In New York seven years ago a book was published entitled Kingpins of Carbon: How Fossil Fuel Producers Contribute to Global Warming. It included the interesting fact that 80% of the fossil carbon that ends up as man-made carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere comes from only 122 producers of carbon-based fuels. So the idea is that someone somewhere guesstimates how much Carbon Dioxide can be emptied into the atmosphere each year and expresses these annual emissions as Ration Book Coupons. This is what then happens to these coupons.

The Competent Receivers of these Carbon Emission Coupons sell them to the Gang of 122 who receive them in addition to cash from big users such as the electricity companies and the oil and coal merchants. This forces the wicked polluters to pay an arm and a leg for all the foul fumes they spew out into the atmosphere. This leads to shareholder profits plummeting and so they pull their money out and invest in profitable new carbon-free technologies like the 600-year old Windmill Business and the 60-year old Nuclear Fission Steam Kettle Industry.

So far so good. But you got there before me. Who? Whom? Who hands out these coupons to whom? The current ideas doing the rounds talk about half of them going to ordinary people as Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) so we can pay our energy bills with them instead of paying in cash. Someone has already designed the credit cards. The other half get auctioned off like the 3G licences for mobile phone companies. Economists from the University of Chicago have proved that auctions are an efficient way to allocate scarce resources. So that’s alright then.

You were there before me again. Who decides? And what happens to the money? The Global Commons Institute has worked out how to put the International Monetary Fund in charge. The IMF would assign Special Emission Rights (SERs) to national governments every month, issue the energy backed currency units (ebcus) and fix their value relative to the SERs. Then The Great and The Good would spend the money on noble causes like renewable energy development and energy conservation. If your mind is wandering in the direction of Lottery and Arts funding and sees Her Majesty’s Treasury at every turn you may feel a little sceptical about the whole scheme.

But why not think instead of Parish Councils with real teeth run by Pillars of Local Communities. Or a devolved version of the National Trust with hundreds or thousands of Local Community Trusts holding Brussels Milk and Fish Quotas, buying up local farmland when it comes on the market and administering the local libraries and community halls left to local people in the estates of local benefactors? Governments need us. We really don’t need them at all.

Three years ago Fourth World Review published a long essay of mine entitled Energy Wars. The main thrust of the article was that piping energy around the place made sense to monopolists and elites intent upon controlling and profiting from the demand for piped energy. But for the rest of us local energy catchment...the Woking Strategy...was the way to go.

In arguing my case I remarked on the dwindling importance of oil in the future of piped energy. Putting ignorance and cock-up aside...despite the fact that these loom large on the international stage where miscalculation seems to be the norm...this means that the Anglo-American grab for Iraq’s oil was an insufficient justification for the costs of an invasion and the maintenance of a permanent presence in Mesopotamia. Think of the people, the money and the energy costs. Wars use up an awful lot of energy. The Iraq War energy account might even be in net deficit.

Hence I argued that the real reasons for the invasion of Iraq were not oil but the extension of the techniques of Central Banking into the Moslem World and of course to shore up the State of Israel by more direct means than hand-outs from the long-suffering American taxpayer. Confirmation of the latter has recently come to light with the publication of the Walt and Mearscheimer report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Incidentally in case you took my earlier remarks about this for an April Fool the lads from Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government have written a short version for The London Review of Books.

But my case also rested on my review of the future development proposed by energy producing industries in the fossil fuel business, the nuclear fission and fusion fiascos and the more hopeful worlds of hydrogen and solar energy (wind, wave, biofuels etc). It was in this context that I mentioned Buckminster Fuller’s proposal in his 1981 book Critical Path of a Global Electricity Grid and the emergence after its construction of the Kilowatt-Hour as the Global Reserve Currency to take the place once held by gold. Here is what Bucky had to say in Critical Path (page 206).

It is engineeringly demonstrable that there is no known way to deliver energy safely from one part of the world to another in larger quantities and in swifter manner than by high-voltage-conducted ‘electricity’. For the first half of the twentieth century the limit-distance of technically practical deliverability of electricity was 350 miles. As a consequence of the post-World War II space programme’s employment and advancement of the invisible metallurgical, chemical and electronics more-with-lessing technology, twenty five years ago [now fifty] ir became technically feasible and expedient to employ ultra-high-voltage and superconductivity which can deliver electrical energy within a radial range of 1500 miles from the system’s dynamo generators.

To the World Game seminar of 1969 Buckminster Fuller presented his integrated, world-around, high-voltage electrical energy network concept. Employing the new 1500-mile transmission reach, this network made it technically feasible to span the Bering Straits to integrate the Alaskan USA and Canadian networks with Russia’s grid, which had recently been extended eastward into northern Siberia and Kamchatka to harness with hydroelectric dams the several powerful northwardly flowing rivers of north-easternmost USSR. This proposed network would interlink the daylight half of the world with the nighttime half.

Fuller argued that electrical energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring capacity into use at all times, thus overnight doubling the generating capacity of humanity because it will integrate all the most extreme night and day peaks and valleys. From the Bering Straits, Europe and Africa will be integrated westwardly through the USSR and China; Southeast Asia and India will become network integrated southwardly through the USSR. Central and South America will be integrated southwardly through Canada, the USA and Mexico.

Bucky’s idea is a dream-come-true for the lovers of macro-engineering projects. But it has two fundamental flaws. Firstly security. The power line will always be down somewhere. How can anyone stop the Global Electricity Grid being blown up by insurgents?

Secondly who needs it? The underlying energy truth is that the energy commons is not for privatising. Energy is not a scarce resource. In half an hour our world gets all the energy it needs for a whole year. Nature is prolific. The sun showers us with thousands of times more energy than we will ever need. The only energy pipes we truly need are within our village or parish electricity and hot water grids. All the other energy being piped around is not for the benefit of the users but for the profits of the pipe owners and the energy commodity monopolisers.

Bernard Daly read my Energy Wars article on the internet and e-mailed me to ask whether the world electricity grid was the only way that an energy-backed currency could work. My answer was no. They can evolve from within our existing energy and monetary infrastructures. As a result the idea is gaining support. Tomorrow’s weblog will discuss Douthwaite’s thinking behind Energy Backed Currency Units (ebcus) and Special Emission Rights (SERs).

Political money is like an illegal drug. Dealing with severe addiction means tackling demand and supply at the same time. Not normal demand…political parties tick over nicely...but peak demand. This comes at election times and is spent on a tiny percentage of the electorate now the whole country is regarded as a Rotten Borough ripe for bribing. Triangulation is the strategy of choice for both New Labour and the Tories. This is how it works. You buy off your core support with a few trinkets like a ban of fox hunting, colonise your opponents territory with double talk that confuses their core vote and then you spend your war chest on the floating voter in the marginal constituencies.

Political parties are legally allowed to spend £20 million in the 12-months to polling day. Reduce this to £5 million or less. This will make triangulation unaffordable and irritating posters and TV ads a thing of the past. There are no grounds for organisations that 98.5% of the country have decided not to join fleecing taxpayers just to provide a bogus legitimacy for a twice-a-decade voting and electioning operation that gets further and further removed from anything that can be called Democracy. The truth is that mass democracy is a contradiction in terms. Stealing people’s hard-earned money to pay for the nonsense is adding insult to injury. Now for more on parallel currencies.

You may find it hard going but you will not be alone. Richard Douthwaite in County Kerry, Tom Greco in Tucson Arizona, James Huber in the Netherlands, Anton Pinschof in Morlaix Brittany and James Robertson in Chorley Oxfordshire make up a significant percentage of those who do understand such matters. The rest of us struggle. And there is nothing special about our generation. 100 years ago Silvio Gesell was bemoaning the ignorance of his contemporaries about The Money Mechanism as Thomas Robertson refers to it in his 1947 classic Human Ecology.

The first step when entering unknown intellectual territory is to become aware of your own ignorance. Once you have the subject mapped out and know what there is to know you can get into the detailing. With a sound grasp of the basics…and the premises…you will understand the Zen master’s remark that a master is not better than a pupil but has gone before. Often with diligence and application you too can become a master.

Money can be created by three groups in society…commercial institutions, governments and users. Douthwaite thinks the job should be done by non-profit organisations representing the users. The money we all use is asked to play too many roles. One is as an international currency…like gold in the 19th century before the collapse of the gold exchange standard. Another is as a national currency related to the international currency. However four-fifth of monetary transactions in towns and cities are between the people who live there. They need a plethora of currencies which like LETS, the Wir and the commodity-based currencies are created by their users to mobilize untapped resources. Most user currencies would be geographically-based but some would link communities of interest.

There are powerful forces intent on retaining the current Debt-Usury Financial System we all use to keep afloat. The Peace Parties needs its own money. It will be defeated before getting started if it relies on the War Party. Quasi-governmental commercial currencies like the dollar provide a means of exchange. But they need a priesthood to create, destroy and manipulate money and with their fingers in the till it is not surprising that they cream off as much as they can get away with for their personal and private use. Another problem is that debt-usury currencies do a very poor job as a store of value…even though it is this that our pensions, savings and peace of mind depend upon.

Tom Greco has concluded that the means of exchange function invariably conflicts with the store of value function and cautions LETS designers against combining the two. What is needed is a currency for spending and another for saving. Between the 1950s and the late 1970s the Sterling Area did quite a good job in this regard as there was effectively capital sterling and consumption sterling. People moving capital out of the Sterling Area had to buy whatever currencies they needed on a special market at a special exchange rate. This is the key ideas in Richard Douthwaite’s proposals in his Schumacher Briefing on The Ecology of Money.

But Douthwaite’s Four Currencies System is wrapped around another idea. On 15th August 1971 President Nixon took the US off the gold standard which set currencies fluctuating at the beck and call of market whims. Hedge funds love this but the biggest hedge funds of all…Government Central Banks…hate to see their domestic economies jerked around by private speculators. So they have been in continuous conference about a new Bretton Woods.

Richard Douthwaite is also dismissive of the current floating non-system and wants to fix it with an energy currency. His proposal is the subject of Thursday's weblog...following on from tomorrow's discussion of a Global Electricity Grid and the idea of the Kilowatt-Hour as the Global Reserve Currency.

Two hundred years hence the current Debt-Usury Money will have been swapped out for something better. But nothing will happen this side of Crash unless thinking people take an active interest in Money Reform Theory and the Politics & Philosophy of Money. Getting the labour unions onboard is one place to start. Renewed interest in The Philosophy of Money by George Simmel published in 1901 might also be a sign of a new Monetary Revival Movement.

Last week the New Labour MP Alistair Campbell wrote an article that appeared in the national press making the case for public funding of political parties. He made it well and there is a case to answer. Behind the scenes the New Labour SD Alistair Campbell was orchestrating a clever PR campaign that Max Clifford would have been proud of to demonise the private funding of political parties by business, unions and party supporters. SP stands for Spin Doctor.

This is the first of two weblogs about parallel currencies…followed by a discussion of energy currencies. These were first suggested by Buckminster Fuller in connection with his One World Island Global Electricity Grid but have taken on new life in recent years as the Global Commons Institute in London has seen the possibility of using Special Emission Rights (SERs) and Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) to support their Contraction & Convergence agenda.

This primer on parallel currencies is based on The Ecology of Money...a Schumacher Briefing by Richard Douthwaite. The above diagram sums up his ideas. I will return to it tomorrow.

EM1 - people with earnings in a Wirtschaftsring-type system exchange them for the national exchange currency.
EM2 - members of a Local Exchange Trading System exchange LETS units for the national exchange currency.
EM3 - ensures that flows of money from imports and exports balance each other.
EM4 - allows people with exchange money to swap it for store-of-value savings money.
EM5 - balances capital flows in the store-of-value currency into and out of the country.
EM6 - composite of all the EM3-type exchanges operated by the rest of the world.
EM7 - balances the flow of money into and out of savings for the rest of the world.

The current Debt-Usury Financial System is seriously flawed. But it does what it was originally designed to do…it maldistributes money and finances wars. As a result those who benefit from the system have ensured that a network of international central banks and their handmaidens the commercial banks have taken over the world of money.

Double-entry bank book-keeping and the King and Country money system misruling the world started by ruling the waves when some old ideas, re-emerging in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century, were refined by Huguenot bankers into a coherent system. The Houblon Brothers brought the ideas to the Dutch and English Courts and in 1694 William of Orange incorporated them into English Law by giving a monopoly to the Bank of England Corporation.

Livejournal tells me that I am one of 78000 active British bloggers while the UK poliblogs website links to 257 blogs with an entirely political theme. The most popular attracts 15000 visitors a day. On which subject John Papworth had a couple of copies of the Rowntree Report on Power to the People lying around in his kitchen so I was sent off to London with one of them. I had read most of it by the time I arrived at Victoria Coach Station at two o'clock.

Unfortunately despite its title the report is not really concerned with Power to the People but is all about how to get people to vote so that their disengagement from election and party politics is reversed and the political class can carry on with business as usual, keep their salaries and expense accounts, look forward to fat-cat pensions and indulge s in undeserved privileges at tax payer expense while continuing to lead their electorates down garden paths they never asked to walk along and in a direction they repeatedly told their elected representatives they didn't want to go.

If that seems a trifle sceptical my second comment is a back-handed compliment to the Rowntree Commission for sprinkling their report with plenty of quotes from ordinary people so readers are not dependent on reading between the lines of the rather Pravda-esque prose of our ruling political elites who commissioned and wrote the Rowntree Report. These are the best parts but there are too few of them and they are disregarded when the recommendations are cobbled together in response to the problem of the 'disconnect between the political system and the people'.

Let me give you the flavour of some of the more sensible of the report's recommendations...and I exclude silly ideas like 'placing limits on the power of the whips' which gets my King Canute Award. A Concordat between Executive and Parliament might improve matters...and another one between Central and Local Government could be helpful. But a Concordat is a too-clever-by-half English device that takes the good idea of an unwritten constitution…for which there are good sound arguments…and makes a complete dog's dinner of it by putting some of it in writing...those bits being always the few rules of governance and power that the Mandarins do not mind making public...while retaining the power to rewrite it. No prizes for guessing how fast Brussels will kick that one into touch.

And then there are the Quasi Autonomous Non Government Agencies known as quangos to their rich friends in the private sector who use them to fleece the tax payer and enclose the commons. The Rowntree Committee wants them to be 'independently mapped to clarify and renew lines of accountability between the elected and unelected authority'. So it's all tweaking and twiddling with The World of Professional Politics as a prelude to Recommendation 20 which is state funding for political parties. Tick here and three pounds a year goes off to your bparty of choice.

The American Founding Fathers had the good sense to include a ceiling of 30 000 per representative in their Constitution. But only five lines in this 120 000 word tome touches on the question of scale...a crucial parameter in any discussion of governance, democracy and power. Here is the little gem on English Local Government from Gerry Stoker…a Professor of Political Science at Manchester University.

Our Local Government is neither local nor government and it's on too big a scale compared to democracies elsewhere in Europe. On average UK local authorities serve a population of over 100 000…at least twice the average in most European countries. Our system has been reorganised in a way which has taken it away from people. As to what local government does. Local Government, the professor tells us, is no longer government. It's largely administration, putting together programmes that central government wants put together. But let me not be completely negative. Within the framework of formal politics...which is the only framework the report embraces...there are a couple of good ideas from the Danes and the Swiss... which suggests that only small countries do real democracy.

Danish MPs have the power to scrutinise and mandate executive objectives and positions before their governments enter into negotiations with the European Union. Finnish, Swedish and Austrian MPs have similar powers. And the EU Constitution that the Dutch and the French kicked into touch last year enshrines the ambitious idea that national parliaments should have the right to require the European Commission to revise its draft proposals if a third reckons it undermines the principle of subsidiarity. How that stacks up with the European Court in Luxembourg which kicks out any measure from a national government that does not lead to ever-closer union is anybody's guess.

The Swiss who are doing very nicely thank you outside of the European Union enter the picture with Recommendation 24 where the Rowntree Report reaches the outer limit of radical thought by proposing that 'citizens'...we are not citizens but subjects but we can let that pass...be 'given' the right to 'initiate referendums on legislation by collecting a pre-ordained number of signatures on a petition'. Well thank you. How jolly decent of you. California of course goes much further with her Recall Procedures to kick the rascals out and much else besides...but none of this gets a mention in this deeply disappointing report. I do like the title though. Power to the People. Catchy. Could just be an idea whose time has come.

I was talking with John Papworth about Israel over breakfast this morning. Fourth World Review ran an article by Kirkpatrick Sale a couple of years ago which called for the Israel Experiment to be ended as it clearly wasn’t working. A year ago John followed this up with a piece that Professor Leopold Kohr had penned thirty five years ago in his daily blog in the San Juan Star. It was not called a blog back then but it had much the same style and the Kohr Columns provide an excellent model for any would-be bloggers.

The Jewish lobby and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are two of the most powerful organisations in America. AIPAC is described in a recent report by Harvard Professor Stephen Walt as a ‘de facto agent of a foreign government [that] has a stranglehold on the US Congress’. The report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy also mentions that ‘pressure from Israel and the lobby was not only a factor behind the decision to attack Iraq but it was critical…the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.’

In The Breakdown of Nations written in 1945 Kohr explains the principle of cantonisation in the Swiss Confederation. He returns to this idea in the San Juan Star column…entitled Israel’s Tactical Error in Fourth World Review. Cantonisation, Kohr explained, is the way to address the problem of Israel and Palestine. Disbanding the Israel Experiment was not on Kohr’s agenda. Instead he wanted to move forward with a Buen Consejo approach.

For Leopold Kohr the answer was to concentrate the bulk of Israel’s Arab population in two or three large city-states in the fashion of Swiss cantons such as Geneva and Zürich, or of the Hanseatic city-states of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen within the framework of Imperial Germany. These could be granted complete internal autonomy while remaining externally affiliated with the rest of Israel in a common market and defence union. In this way they would remain culturally separate from Israel and politically and structurally separate from the other Arabic countries.

Settling the Palestinians in large urban concentrations would also solve a host of other ‘Palestinian problems’. More than three quarters of any city’s inhabitants earn their living by engaging in transactions with each other. So building vibrant working cities would eliminate the vexing idleness and hatred-creating problem of Palestinian unemployment.

Moreover since urban occupations yield very much higher incomes than rural occupations the urbanised Arabs would experience a higher standard of living than elsewhere in much of the Arab world. The other 25% would earn their living through increasing commercial ties with the other partners of a highly efficient Israeli Confederation. The result of this would be that the Palestinians who now have a vested interest in the destruction of Israel would in the future have a vested interest in her preservation in order to ensure the continuation of their newly won affluence.

In his article Kohr then takes the same line as he took when proposing the idea of Academic Inns. The cantonisation of Old Palestine makes obvious sense so the only question is how to finance it. To the task of building three large cities Kohr brings a similar approach to the one adopted by The Duke of Buen Consejo. Kohr reasons that if the Palestinians are to create a feeling of belonging their cities must not just be ordinary urbanisations but communities offering graceful architecture and a sophisticated style of living. They must not be glorified refugee camps in concrete perpetuating the Palestinians’ feelings of subjection. Instead they should rival the best of Israel’s own cities thereby strengthening the bonds of a union among equals. Kohr sees no reason for this to present a problem.

These new splendid Palestinian cities would not be built in the modern way with foreign aid and reinforced concrete so they end up looking like the outskirts of Babylon. Instead they would be built in the old-fashioned way…the way that Venice, Salzburg and Rome were built…with the loving hands of those who intend to live there. The way to replicate the aesthetic joys of Venice, Salzburg and Rome is to use local material beginning with the alleyways and not the superhighways. These Palestinian cities can be built with no more than the means of subsistence for a labour force that costs as much when it lies idle as when fully employed. And these Palestinian cities can be built as fast as ancient Thebes which raised itself after every war from destruction to splendour within the span of two or three years.

Would that American Jewry and its AIPAC hedge funds have the imagination in diplomacy that the State of Israel has in military strategy. Expelling the Palestinians increases the problem. Leaving the Palestinians where they are doesn’t work because there are too many of them to be absorbed in a country specifically established as a haven for the Jews.

But the cantonisation of Old Palestine and the creation of splendid Palestinian cities is an idea whose time has come. It is the solution to what has become an American problem. But there is no sign of the statesmanship necessary to deliver so creative a solution. Instead Harvard University is distancing herself from its own report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy and agreeing to the Academic Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government who authored the report stepping down to become an ordinary professor. The Congressional Order of Merit would be a better idea…and a new job heading up a new American Peace Corps and a new Marshall Plan for Old Palestine.

Some people never learn. I should not have drunk three quarters of a bottle of cheap red wine last night. Restless night and all the symptoms of a hangover as I dragged myself out of bed and got myself ready for a trip across the country at seven o’clock the morning after.

Some systems were beginning to function normally and I was firing on two cylinders by the time I caught the 0954 Ashford train from Rye. By the time I emerged from Charing Cross station to look for a Number 11 bus to Victoria Coach Station at a quarter to twelve I was starting to fire on three out of my four cylinders. I could have done with all four though as the bus driver refused to let me into the bus without a ticket and refused to sell me a ticket.

So I played the lost tourist routine until he felt sorry for me…or came to the conclusion that he could not move off while I was standing by his window without a ticket…and directed me to the ticket dispensing contraption on the pavement next to the bus stop. Well how was I to know? That wasn’t there four weeks ago when I last passed through London. Fortunately I had the necessary £1.50 of coinage to deal with the ‘no change given’ apparatus without suffering significant loss. Even more fortunately the bus driver was in good humour and waited for me to finish my transaction with the machine and return to the bus with a valid ticket.

On my £36 000 yacht the previous evening…before the intoxicating brew took its toll…I calculated that I would have an hour to spare in Victoria before my two o’clock bus left for Swindon were I to forego an hour of computer access at Rye Library from 0930 to 1030 and took the ten o’clock train rather than the eleven o’clock. Prominent on all my mental town maps is the location of internet access points and watering places…cafés for liquids in and toilets, restrooms, gentlemans or public conveniences for liquids out. The best places are where the three coincide.

I had plans to use my spare hour profitably at the Internet Café on Victoria Street to write my Thursday weblog. Duly done and duly posted I had time for my planned 20p shave at the facilities in Victoria Coach Station before settling down with half and hour to spare to enjoy two large vegetable samosas and a cup of coffee. Back firing on all four cylinders again.

Samosas remind me of Nairobi. On my two days a week teaching at the University of East Africa in the mid-seventies I would often take lunch with Dan McDonald, a Canadian Professor of Accounting at the Faculty of Commerce. Some days we would take a beer beneath the jacaranda trees of the old colonial-style Norfolk Hotel. On other occasions we would wander over to the African commercial area next to the university and lunch on samosas.

Samosas also remind me of Buckminster Fuller. It’s their shape. Triangular. In Bucky’s World of Synergetics a pyramid was not a mausoleum but the biggest piece of disinformation ever built. The real secret of the universe was the three sided tetrahedron…from this the universe is constructed. The Egyptian priesthood understood this secret cosmic accounting but wanted to keep the knowledge to themselves. So they organised the building of all these four-sided pyramids to throw lesser mortals off the scent of true enlightenment.

Nowadays you can get quite a good quality of traveller on the National Express buses…young foreign tourists and old English pensioners. And they all talk to you…sometimes quite intimate life stories. Today there was the nice well-spoken lady from Cirencester who had been to Eastbourne for a trip down memory lane. She had lived in Battersea when she was very young and remembered going to the seaside at Eastbourne for her summer holidays. Her father came from Liverpool and flew with the Royal Flying Corps…biplanes…in the First World War.

Then there was the gentleman with the Guardian under his arm and no luggage who put my empty coffee cup and discarded samosa packaging in the waste bin while I guarded his guardian. He had left Cheltenham the day before to visit an old aunt in Southend. His trip had been in vain and he had got up at four that morning to make his way home. When he got to his aunt’s house he found she had been moved into a home. He left a large bunch of daffodils with the neighbours and turned around. His aunt had Alzheimer’s and so we talked about that for a while; how the sufferer seemed to be happy enough inside their world of forgetting but that those around them…the nearest and dearest…seemed to be the real sufferers not knowing what to do for the best and remembering the person they once knew.

We all know there is a very much better way of looking after the elderly than simply shovelling money in the direction of strangers in the hope that they will look after them in a retirement home run for business not for pleasure. It is only at Christmas and Easter that the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the inmates of England’s retirement homes come in any number to visit their elderly relatives. When they arrive most have a pious and dutiful look about them of martyrs going to a grim fate. When they leave, they are all smiles of relief at the thought that they won’t have to go through that again for another few weeks or months…or even another year. The very old in the Third World have a much better time of it. They are looked after by their families in communities bustling with life…and hope.

Today was a day of virtue with eyes glued to the computer screen and messages whizzing back and forth to Stockholm by text and e-mail. In between I dashed off a 350-word translation for a hotel brochure...£60 in the kitty for that...and did clever things online. Here are a few of them.

The Llangolman BT phone bill got paid, the Annual Return for William Franklin & Sons Limited was filed online with Companies House, my Rye post office box was renewed for another 12 months for £56, £40 went off to my daughter to reimburse her for the car aerial demolished at the Cardigan Car Wash back in February and Clare was paid £111 for some recent translation work from Swedish into English.

One of the strangest arrangements on the planet is the way China is shipping cheap goods to America and Europe, making a handsome profit and taking their winnings in very dodgy bits of paper and electronic promises. Economists have no problems with all this. They tell us that it keeps interest rates and inflation low and maintains growth in the global economy. The Thinking Man in the Street is less sanguine…being distrustful of economists and smart enough to wonder what will happen when China backs out of the deal and leaves the West to its own devices. Two American Senators…Charles Schumer and Charles Grasser…are also concerned. But they plan to do something about it.

This week the Schumer and Grasser double act were in China to warn the Chinese that the US Senate will take action to stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. Their message is ‘Stop dumping and destroying American jobs or we will slam a 27.5% tariff on all Chinese imports!’ If the Chinese want to avoid this then the Communists must stop controlling the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. The yuan was revalued by two percent last July and currently stands at eight to the dollar. Presumably the two Charleys are lecturing the Chinese on The Gospel according to Ricardo in which exchange rates are free to adjust to imbalances between currencies. What fun to be a fly on the wall and hear what the Chinese have to say by way of a response. They might mention their reserves.

Seven years ago China’s reserves were worth $ 150 billion. These reserves are increasing at the rate of $17 billion a month, currently stand at $854 billion and are expected to top the trillion by the end of the year…i.e. no let up in the rate of accumulation. The actual breakdown of these reserves is China’s most closely guarded secret…after its nuclear arsenal. But somebody somewhere has guessed that three quarters of China’s reserves are in dollar-denominated assets…a third of them in US Treasury Bonds where the Central Bank of China holds $ 263 billion and is America’s biggest holder of these bonds with the Central Bank of Japan not far behind.

The key factor in the ballooning of China’s reserves is the rapid growth in the gap between China’s exports and imports. To thwart any strengthening in the Chinese yuan against the American Dollar China’s Central Bank intervenes vigorously in foreign exchange markets by trading between two and three billion dollars every day. One rumour doing the rounds is that the inscrutable Chinese Communist Party is shifting more of its reserves into euros and yen to reduce its dollar exposure. But discriminating between information and disinformation with billions of dollars at stake is no simple matter.

When Luigi Genazzini was Chief Economist on the European Development Bank’s Africa desk…we had spent two weeks in Oman counting camels and donkeys together in the mid-70s…we spent a couple of evenings when I was passing through Luxembourg pondering the ways of exchange rates. Luigi was puzzling over the Zambian economy at the time but his broader agenda was to get the bank’s economists to develop a consensus view on how to handle exchange rates. As a trained economist he knew all the official theories. But as a banker he also knew they made little sense in the real world. Our conclusions? We didn’t understand exchange rates…why they were what they are…but nor did anyone else. What to do? I had no advice for him then. And I have no advice for anyone else now.