On civilised behaviour...

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From an email received the other day regarding travellers camping on playing fields in Cottingley near Bingley:

...my husband has been to the playing field this evening and reports there are several large mounds of tipped rubble/earth around the perimeter of the field, bags of "household" rubbish and waste, i.e., bottles, cartons, empty tins and general rubbish, strewn around.  The main problem is the large volume of human excrement on the path over the stream between the playing field and the Yorkshire Clinic and possibly on the land adjacent to the banks of the stream bordering the Yorkshire Clinic grounds - my husband did not dare venture this far, deterred by the stench of the visible excrement and also the smell of urine emanating from the immediate area.

Employees of Bradford Council's Parks Department are now undertaking the clean-up with the costs falling on local council tax payers. What makes me most angry about this invasion isn't the fact of some travellers parking on some council-owned land (this is despite the Council making more than adequate provision for travellers in the District) but that they then proceed to leave us, quite literally, to clear up the crap they leave behind.

I have no quarrel with people who make the choice to live a nomadic lifestyle trundling from place to place with their vans and caravans. But, if they want the host population in places they stop to treat them with any sort of respect, it is necessary for travellers to behave with at least a modicum of human decency and civilisation. If such a disgusting experience were unusual we'd perhaps be understanding but it is repeated time and time again by groups of travellers passing through the locality. Broken gates, ruined football or cricket pitches, copious dumps of rubbish and a cavalier approach to what we might call waste management - this is what people see from travellers rather than some sort of adorable and misunderstood minority ill-treated by us folk in houses.

It simple terms whoever you are, don't leave your mess for the rest of us to clear up and expect any sympathy or consideration.

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Transforming Finance Charter - the worst sort of 'curate's egg'

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It all starts so well the Transforming Finance Charter:

The banking sector needs to be transformed in the following ways:

• There should be no bank in the system which is too big to fail, so the taxpayer is not underwriting their costs with an implicit subsidy.
• Retail and investment banking should be regarded as entirely different businesses and separated accordingly.
• There should be increased competition and diversity within retail banking allowing for frequent new entrants, and exits, multiple ownership models including mutuals, credit unions, local banks and sector banks

Not quite sure how you actually separate retail and investment banking but I can see the point. And the idea of more competition, easier market entry and greater diversity is a great one.

But then our friends go and spoil it:

• Banks should ensure they invest a far higher proportion of their balance sheets to the real (non-financial) economy and for productive uses. Policy should be actively used to reduce speculation and the creation of asset bubbles.
• There should be a permanent and legitimate role for the state in banking, at a local or national level, either to reduce the cost of risk capital for socially desirable activities and innovation, or to influence the overall allocation of credit to the economy.

With one hand we open up the market and extend choice and competition. While with the other we dictate to the banks how they should invest - as if it's not bad enough having agents of government fix the interest rate these people then want to subsidise it for "socially desirable activities". It was this sort of stupidity, not speculation, that created the financial crisis in the first place.

But then the proposal is from:

The Finance Innovation Lab, along with founding signatories, New Economics Foundation, Share Action, Positive Money, Move Your Money and Friends of the Earth...

Link this bunch of nonsense-peddlars with the egregious "Tax Justice Network" and it's no surprise at all that any good ideas are swamped by stupid proposals for state-directed finance.

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Tim Farron wants expensive fuel to go with the expensive food....

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You have to admire the populism of Tim Farron, president of the Liberal Democrats:

Mr Farron told The Sunday Telegraph: “I am afraid the Government has seen flashing pound signs, and has not considered the long-term threats fracking poses to the countryside. “I think this is a very short-sighted policy, and we will all be left to live with the consequences.”

Now this is a man who campaigned for expensive food. I know it didn't look that way but rather as an admirable campaign to protect the livelihoods of farmers (many of whom Tim represents). Nevertheless, the impact of his campaign - and his continued support for agricultural protectionism - will lead to higher food prices.

So now, in the interests of a headline, Tim is supporting expensive energy. I know it doesn't look that way. Rather it's portrayed as caring for the environment. But the effect of Tim's campaign - if it succeeds - against fracking will be higher energy prices. Meaning that less well off people (perhaps there aren't so many of these in South Lakeland) will struggle to heat their homes especially since Tim's campaigns already mean such folk pay more for their food.

Even worse Tim's campaign already misleads:

“With a wind farm you can actually choose where you put it; that is not the case (with) fracking,” 

Actually you can't 'choose' where to put a wind farm - to have a chance of viability turbines have to be in places where there's lots of wind, which isn't just anywhere.

And then, having misled, Tim scaremongers:

 This technology can lead to earth tremors and I’m particularly worried that buried nuclear waste in my part of the country could be affected.

There have been around 100,000 fracking wells drilled and the biggest tremor recorded from this is 3.6 on the Richter Scale, which is a bit like having a heavy lorry drive past the front of your house. Typical tremors are 1.3 to 2.6:

If there is an earthquake of 1.5, they have to stop. The British Geological Society says a tremor like that is not usually felt by anyone. It describes an earthquake of 2.3 as being like someone dropping a bucket of water. To put it in context, there have been three of those in Britain in the last month. 

So - getting a cheap headline, presenting misleading facts and scaremongering. A good day's work from the Liberal Democrat's president!

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On waste permits...and Leeds

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It seems that the Leeds City Council spokesman couldn't resist twisting the knife into Bradford:

Leeds City Council said it did not know how much it cost it to dispose of waste from Bradford. A spokesman said the authority recognised it might be more convenient for householders from Bradford to visit a Leeds tip, and that they were welcome to do so. 

He he! Of course Bradford doesn't have any idea how much it's disposing of either, it just pretends it does!

And the comments sum it all up:

I'm assuming that the tips that are being used by people from outside Bradford are the ones near the boundaries such as Queensbury & Keighley.

If they don't know how many Bradford residents are using tips in places like Menston & Yeadon how can they possibly use this 'net import' argument as a reason for introducing permits?

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We voted not to do this...

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A while ago, Bradford Council - by which I mean the full council of 90 elected councillors - decided not to indulge in more research into the supposed "housing crisis" in the District. I recall the debate as I spoke in it and argued that the money spent on a Strategic Housing Market Assessment and a Strategic Housing Land Allocation Appraisal was probably enough to tell us about the District's housing needs.

However, our shiny new portfolio holder, Cllr Slater, thinks differently. We've got into bed with lefty think tank IPPR to play the game of "let's create a housing crisis" (for connoisseurs of crisis I shall mention "lintilla"):


The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a well-known think tank, is working with Bradford Council to look at issues surrounding housing.

The online survey is aimed at learning about residents’ housing ‘aspirations’, including where they would like to live, whether they would prefer to own or rent and what could most affect their chances of achieving their ambitions.

Where would I like to live? Sometimes it's a top floor penthouse overlooking the marina at Monte Carlo, on occasion a vast, ancient pile set in a rolling North Yorkshire park or perhaps a palazzo in Venice. And I can't achieve this ambition because I'm not yet a billionaire. How this helps with housing issues in Bradford, heaven alone knows! Yet Bradford Council is prepared to waste its resources (against the views of the majority of its elected members) on asking daft questions like this!

What we'll find (and I give you this exclusive insight now) is that people want to live in pleasant surroundings, they want to get out from cramped terraces, to escape from the dreariness of estate life, to dwell in a place with a little less anti-social behaviour and, ideally, to own their house.  People don't want to live in Holme Wood, in Girlington or in Bolton Woods; they want to live in Ilkley, in Addingham or (dare I suggest) in Leeds.

Simply asking a self-selecting (this is an on-line survey with no quota sampling, no randomisation and no checks) audience is both bad research - the IPPR should know better - and lousy politics. What this silly Labour councillor is pushing is an agenda where her scramble for votes justifies a housing policy based on me wanting to live overlooking the marina at Monte Carlo.

There will be lots of lovely words wrapped around this project but, in the end, it will not make a jot of difference to ordinary people in Bradford. What it will do is provide Councillor Slater and other well-off, middle class Labour councillors who don't live anywhere near the places they represent, a platform to pontificate about "exclusion", "poverty" and a made-up "housing crisis".

If Bradford has housing problems, they won't be solved by the IPPR. Of that I'm absolutely sure. And they certainly won't be solved by this indulgent, biased, poorly designed piece of "research".

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The lunatics are definitely in charge at the Guardian!

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Communism wasn't all bad, you know. Forget the mass murder, the suppression of dissent, the imprisoning of opponents, and the impoverishment of millions. There is this:

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

People at the Guardian still believe this rubbish?

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On the matter of lunatic statistical projections....

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...this one is a real winner!

It would take 1.4 million years to clear the backlog of northern families waiting for social housing if the housing market does not improve, the National Housing Federation has said.

What are these people on?

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