William Shepherd

A few years ago China had a serious Drug Problem. So they rounded up 6 000 drug dealers and shot them in the back of the head. China no longer has a Drug Problem. I thought of this today while in a car with three women being driven to Frewen School Carol Service in Northiam Parish Church. Under discussion around me was the Suffolk Strangler whose murder of five young women has been filling the newspapers these past few days.

The Feminist in the back wanted to eliminate the demand for prostitutes by going for the men…although just how she proposed to do this was not explained. The driver beside me in the front remarked that when she had lived in Nottingham they had tried this. Clients’ names were published in the local newspaper...although she didn’t know what effect this had on prostitution. At the time I was allowed to keep my counsel. But here is my take on the issues.

The truth is that Our Feminist is living in a time warp. Her views are out-of-date. Mary Wolstencroft and political activists for Women’s Liberation like the Suffragettes were first and foremost Realists. They saw their Society as it was…and they dared to think for themselves by outgrowing their conditioning. They did not collect hand-me-down opinions from other places or other times but created their own responses to the Women’s Slavery before them.

For much of the history of the oldest profession Prostitution has been blamed on the base desires of men. There was always an element of slavery about it. Men who lived off immoral earnings had tarts under their control…the relationship was one of power and fear. But the equations have shifted…ask any policeman and he will tell you this is true.

Most decent Englishmen…a figure as high as 95 percent based on the statistic that one in eleven has paid for sex…find prostitution revolting. Those with a wider awareness of the social context also have profound sympathy for the victims of this trade and for their families. Nowadays these women are not enslaved by men but by drugs.

If you are a desperate drug addict and you are neither a trust fund babe nor a doctor with a prescription pad you have only three ways to pay for your habit. You steal, you deal or…if you are a woman and have scruples about stealing or dealing…you sell your body. There is nothing else you can do.

Our Feminist might prefer the woman to sell her body to another woman…and there might be a few nice men willing to talk things over for an hour and pay therapist rates. But the brutal reality is that beggars are in no position to be choosers. These young girls take what they can get.

According to a Home Office study 95 percent of prostitutes are problematic drug users. Drug addiction is a Medical Condition treated as a Criminal Offence. Nearly all the crime resulting from Drug Addiction is a result of its illegality not of its effects on its victims. The street gangs with their gun crimes, stabbings and intimidation; the muggers, burglars, car thieves, shoplifters, drug dealers; the pimps and prostitutes would all be wiped out with the right public policy on drugs. Globally and nationally this is impossible…but town by town the way forward might be found.

Few spectacles in English Politics have been more dispiriting than the ridicule heaped on the Conservative Party Home Affairs Spokesman Ann Widdecombe six years ago when she tried to launch a debate about drugs and to start a dialogue about the Judicial and Medical Regimes needed to deal with Drug Use and Abuse.

Between half and three quarters of prisoners are in jail for crimes related to raising money to buy drugs. Half the women prisoners are there for drug offences and three-quarters have a Drug Problem. The cost to the criminal justice system is enormous. The cost to individuals, families and the wider society is greater still. In enlightened European cities where heroin is available on prescription property crimes by drug-users have dropped by as much as a half.

Prescribing drugs instead of arresting Drug Users would have a much wider impact. Turf wars, gang violence, gun crime, street dealing and prostitution would plummet. Organised Crime’s largest profit opportunity would evaporate …and with it much police corruption. The prison population would fall by between a third and a half ending over-crowding and the need to build more jails.

Billons of pounds spent enforcing prohibition and coping with the consequences of drugs would be saved as hundreds of thousands are treated as patients instead of criminals. Drug-related deaths would fall dramatically…and desperate young women could be rescued from pimps, rapists and murderers. Is it really so hard for English Society to talk about its Drug Problem…this side of a Chinese Solution?

There are five big banks on England’s High Streets…HSBC, Lloyds-TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland-NatWest, Barclays and Halifax-Bank of Scotland…and there are rumours that one or two of the big American banks are eyeing up Barclays for their branch network rather than their Barclaycard Credit Card operation. The reported 2006 profits of these five commercial banks were £31 billion…and they are forecast to rise by 15% next year.

Ordinary people assume…incorrectly as it happens…that the Main Business of these five commercial banks is to borrow money from savers and lend it out securely to home-owners with their homes as collateral. But ordinary people are starting to notice that hundreds of millions is being spent on Media Advertising to smother complaints with spin and propaganda. They have also noticed that interest rates for savings are not the same as those for mortgages…less a small few percent for administration and profits…but actually bear little relationship to them.

Conceiving a Local Economy without the High Street Banks is not hard. Tom Paine had a good stab at it in Agrarian Justice two hundred years ago and I adopted his method in 2001 when I wrote a paper on The Wealth of Counties for the Radical Consultation. My 2001 paper begins with Economic Ideologies and the roots of Environmentalism in the Botany & Economics of Carl Linnaeus in the 18th Century. Having set the scene the paper then looks at The County of Kent in chapters entitled Counting by Bailiwick, Food by the Hundred and Shelter by the Score. Rounding off the 7500-word paper are chapters entitled Profits for Everyone; Income for The Poor; Public County Services; Money, Justice & Credit; Tickets & Tokens; and Early Retirement. Here is an extract from the Counting by Bailiwick chapter.

Kent has a population of 1 500 000. It has fine arable soil and excellent pasture. Kent can also boast of some 500 parishes from the 16th century, overlaid on a medieval structure of 7 lathes, 13 bailiwicks, 65 hundreds and two market towns...Canterbury and Sandwich. Currently about 225 000 (15%) of the population live in the Medway Towns of Maidstone, Rochester and Chatham. 375 000 (25%) live in rural hamlets, villages and small towns of 500 or less. The other 900 000 (60%) live in 450 small Parish Regions of around 2 000 souls. The County of Kent is currently served by 100 county councillors and 50 000 county council employees. There are 14 boroughs, 16 parliamentary constituencies and two euro constituencies…East and West Kent.

In this model each Parish Region is collectively responsible for its self-sufficiency in food. Half the people of each Parish Region are assumed to live in urban settings of a few hundred households, 10% or 200 people in each Parish Region live in single homesteads and the remaining several hundred households are neither Homesteaders nor Urban Dwellers but something in between. The calculus assumes only one communal association of citizens and places this at the county level with a tax base of one and a half million for its Communal Services.

To develop the dimensional aspects of the calculus a Utopian Society has been assumed, living harmoniously within the 1440 square miles of countryside of the county...three quarters of which is covered with rich food growing soil...in nested Parish Regions…i.e. within bailiwicks within lathes within the county. Food self sufficiency or 80%-90% is at the Parish Region level with progressive nested self-sufficiencies up to the level of the County at which 95%-100% Self Reliance is assumed. In other words our model is of a Walled Garden with one gate…and drawbridge…in the outer county wall but with plenty of gates for local movements in the urban centre of each parish.

From an economist's point of view we are designing for virtually Full Protectionism at the county level. Once we have that working we can start sending out some mariners to roam the world for spices and mobile phones or anything else not made or grown in Kent. The calculus assumes Kent will choose to have its own Currencies and its own Mints and will issue money directly to each of its half a million urban and rural Households in quantities based solely on the needs of its million and a half citizens. We must begin and end with people.

We now need to get a handle on the Idleness of our local race so let's look at some statistics. The current employed workforce of the county is estimated at 500 000 with 10% unemployed. One waged person is therefore supporting two unwaged people. And so the money wage per job needs to be sufficient to support not one but three people. Another way to do the calculation is to recognise that a normal working life is 40 years from 25 to 65 and planned retirement is 20 years from 65 to 85. On this basis one pound in every three pounds of wages needs to be put aside as savings for retirement.

Adding these together means that each worked wage packet must support the needs of six people. Eliminating double counting of retired people by treating these 250 000 as self-supporting, 500 000 worked wages need to support 750 000 non-workers. This brings the multiplier down from six to five.

This calculation assumes all 1 500 000 of Kent's citizens are supported monetarily by money paid out as wages to the current working population of 500 000. So we have an Idle Young, an Idle Old and an Idle Rich…much as we find things at the moment. But in my next chapter Food by the Hundred we put the Idle Young to work at Harvest Time.

In a remote house in the middle of Dartmoor six shadowy figures huddle around a small round table for a séance. Tension rises as the spirits spell out a chilling message: 'Captain Trevelyan...dead...murder'. Is this black magic? The only way to be certain is to locate Captain Trevelyan. His home is six miles away and with snow drifts blocking the roads someone will have to make the journey on foot.

The year is 1931 and the author of The Sittaford Mystery is a young writer of detective stories. American aficionados may know the book by the title from its New York publisher Dodd & Mead…Murder at Hazelmoor’s. It was the first novel by Agatha Christie to incorporate the supernatural.

Agatha Christie describes Sittaford as ‘a small remote village on Dartmoor under the shadow of Sittaford Beacon.’ ‘…they went upwards over a rough moorland road until they reached a village that was situated right on the edge of the moor. It consisted of a smithy and a combined post-office and sweet shop. From here they followed a lane and came to a row of newly-built granite bungalows…’

In the book Sittaford is six miles from Exhampton whose features match Okehampton pretty well. For Sittaford read Throwleigh…with allowance for the odd piece of artistic licence.

The trouble with nice places is hills. They look pretty but it rains a lot. But Science has the answer. It is not the rain per se that causes the trouble but being underneath it as it accelerates earthwards. With the same rain some people get wetter than others. Why?

If the children are driving you mad over Christmas then why not turn them into Gentlemen Scientists? Here is how. Mark out a 500-yard circuit around the garden and while the children are asleep weigh their clothes. In the morning when it is pouring with rain and the little brats are yelling the house down collar the one who usually gets the blame and make the little dear run the 500-yard circuit in the rain. Tell the rest to time it…or else.

By this stage the real culprit will be gloating. This is next one to send out into the rain…with the instructions to walk and not run the same circuit. Finally get them all involved in weighing the wet clothes. If more punishments are needed have at the ready a supply of toppers, bowlers…and the hat your mother wore for her wedding.

By now you will have discovered that the Walker’s clothes were 40% wetter than the Runner’s…plus or minus for the direction of the rain and the shape of the experimental object. It is a long holiday. Repeat the experiment as often as necessary to establish the relationship between wetness and (a) the shape ‘n pace of your test object and (b) the slant ‘n speed of your rain.

Your working hypothesis is that a fat person gets wetter than a skinny one…and the head and shoulders get wetter with rain that comes straight down. For a Doctorate in Displacement Activity (PhDA) find out the parts of the body that get wettest. To check your results click here for the frontiers of Experimental Science.

Should you wish to plan your Holiday Displacement Activities you can always phone the Met Office. But I should perhaps dampen your expectations. What you want to know is whether it will rain tomorrow. What you will be told is something more along these lines. ‘Over much of the European Region the situation is now finely balanced with approximately even chance that the winter will be colder or warmer than average.’ Douglas Adams almost got there before me…but I will claim it as Shepherd’s Law. ‘The more expensive the model the less useful its output’.

Forecasting Future Economic Behaviour is often taken as the proper test of an Economic Model but forecasting future conditions is a losing game…and similar considerations apply to past data. The near future is an extrapolation of the past because nothing can quickly divert the path. But the likely future range of the path diverges with time due to randomness and the dynamics inherent in the structure of the system.

The time horizon for an effective forecast is that interval during which little deviation is possible from future disturbances. Action taken at the decision time will have little effect in the forecast time horizon because it takes time for the effect of a policy change to affect the system. This means that any action at the decision time will be effective mostly in the action region…which lies beyond the forecast region.

So the usefulness of forecasting is limited by the relationship between the short time within which to make a reliable forecast and the long time required to affect the system. We can call this Forrester’s Law after the MIT Professor who discovered it.

‘One can forecast in the time zone in which one cannot act…and can act in the time zone in which one cannot forecast’. This does not mean models are useless. But effective models are different. They show how the nature of the behaviour of a system would be altered by consistently following an alternative policy.

Saturday evening was the first of my five Carol Concerts before Christmas…at St Thomas the Martyr Church in Winchelsea. It went well. Our Choirmaster Jean Taverner was pleased with us and the audience went away happy. Winchelsea Singers always make sure that the congregation gets to have a good sing.

With my next concert not until Thursday 14/12 at Frewen School in Northiam I had booked a £26 return ticket with National Express to get me from Victoria Coach Station to Exeter the day after the Winchelsea Concert…returning by 7.30 pm on Wednesday 13/12 for Ryesingers final practice before their Carol Concert at East Guldeford Church on Sunday 17/12.

Time and Space are still wondrous things to me. One moment you are in one place and a few hours later you are somewhere else. My daughter’s trusty little Peugeot 106 collected me in Exeter and drove me the 20 miles to the village of Throwleigh high on the north side of Dartmoor…10-minutes drive from Okehampton.

The journey to Exeter was not without incident as the onboard computer confounded all the efforts of both coach drivers and refused to allow the engine to deliver enough power to take us along at the 55 miles per hour programmed into it. On the motorway it wasn’t so bad as we gained on the downhill what we lost on the uphill. But Exeter is seriously hilly and it was touch and go whether we would make it to the Bus Station. We did…just 20-minutes behind schedule.

The house my daughter and her friend Lou-Anne are renting for two months while the owners are in India boasts a sauna at the bottom of the garden. There was no lake to plunge into…a garden hose had to suffice...but otherwise it was just like the Bastustuga at Rasta on Ekerö…and much the nicer for being a complete surprise.

Instead of pouring with rain at two o’clock in the customary manner, the afternoon stayed dry and bright as the wind whisked the clouds high over the tors. After two-hours beating the bounds of Throwleigh Parish we posted my cards and my daughter’s letters and drove to the nearest grocery store…10-minutes drive away in the oddly-named village of South Zeal.

Throwleigh has a Post Office which sold milk once upon a time. But over the years with the advent of refrigeration, supermarkets and Chelsea Tractors its stock has dwindled to a few cans and chocolate bars. It is a wonder it has not been shut down. But it is hard to see how it will escape the next round of closures with their whiff of Gerrymandering. Nowadays this accompanies every withdrawal of Public Subsidy…local post offices and cottage hospitals…and civil service or quango allocation of jobs and grants. But with post offices the corruption case is weak.

In the twenty-five worst hit constituencies in the country 1122 rural post offices are scheduled for closure…or removal of their Government Funding…not necessarily the same thing. The political breakdown is 608 Liberal Democrats, 338 Conservatives and 176 Labour which is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the party political colour of the English Countryside…Labour being predominantly an urban party.

Nonetheless the case is being made and will stick…irrespective of the facts…because nobody trusts New Labour anymore and can’t wait to kick the rascals out. It used to be possible to start a war and generate patriotic fervour but after the Iraq Debacle this would have the opposite effect. Gordon Brown provides no answer.

So the Labour Party’s only hope of putting up a fight at the next election is to skip a generation and find some Barbara Castle or Shirley Williams lurking in the ranks who is female, five-years younger than David Cameron and comes with a track record of competence.

It took two attempts to get the hang of the wood-burning stove at Little Burrows. I had been more respectful to the stove in the sauna earlier in the day which went first time. So I was overconfident in my approach to the modern contraption in the sitting-room…although in my defence I would confess to being a firelighters man myself.

However long experience has taught me that when a fire doesn’t take first time around it is best to rebuild it from scratch. After removing the ash and laying a base of screwed-up newspapers a good blaze welcomed my daughter’s delicious Leek & Potato Soup and an evening sharing family news updates and watching The Return of Martin Guerre on DVD.

Towards the end of the film Lou-Anne arrived back from a visit to her parents in Tewksbury on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border where her father is Lock Keeper. An eventful trip that included rescuing Christmas Presents flooded out by the rising waters…and then leaving them at a garage twenty miles away when her car ground to a halt on the return journey. I remained in Throwleigh long enough to hear the glad tidings that the accelerator pedal was faulty…a cheap and easy thing to repair. It could have been much worse. The things people do all day!