Stuff not printed by the Guardian & other thoughts

September 2006


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Saturday 23rd September - "Choice" in the NHS

James Purnell (junior Health Minister) is quite mistaken if he thinks people want choice in the NHS. What we want is certainty. We are not sufficiently educated in medical matters to make meaningful choices & "choice" is often just a way of making a market. On TV, the "Grumpy Old Women" set their washing machines to 4 because they are bewildered by the "choices" on offer. We are also disgusted by the idea of people making money out of sickness. Becoming ill is not usually a market "choice" (except for smokers).


Thursday 21st September - Climate change

To: my MP Emily Thornberry apropos the meeting the Party held on climate change:-

Dear Emily, Good meeting. Here is a list of points I made & some I didn't:-

1. Petrol rationing - 500ltr per car per year. Dratic gesture but people have got to come to realise that the day of the car is numbered. People talk about bio-fuels solving the problem. They will - for buses & lorries but not for cars. If people are honest, most car journeys are frivolous.

2. Cement uses lots of carbon in its manufacture. Don't pull down concrete-framed buildings if a little ingenuity can reuse the frame. (Incidentally, nuclear power uses lots of cement if you are going to have secure shielding...)

3. There are WTO agreement problems with "banning SUVs", as governments are expected to compensate companies who's profits they interfere with. This will be a problem in other green areas, I fear but you are the lawyer...

4. Smash English Heritage. The swine listed our house after we moved in & insisted on energy-inefficient windows in the name of conservation, when I had to replace one. Conserving what? Not energy. We stayed in the Hotel Goldener Hirsch in Bayreuth in 2000. 500 years old, it had U-PVC double-glazed windows which, from the outside, looked just like the originals. We have low-energy light bulbs & turn stuff off but windows are our big problem, heat-wise.

5. If you run a small business, the only way to get a pension is to buy flats & rent them out, which we do. To insulate the flats better costs money but although they are among the cheaper flats in Islington, I don't want to put the rent up from what seems a pretty obscene rate anyway. Chicken & egg situation. Like our house, they all date from about 1840.

6. Roof wind turbines. Now too expensive because there is not a big enough market because they are too expensive.... Needs government action. The power converters are imported from Germany at vast expense, so some firm needs jogging to make them here. They are worth doing & any conservation area rules need to be relaxed to allow them.

7. Pedestrianised town centres. Nearly all in Germany. Very few here. When Westminster Council tried it in Old Compton Street, they soon gave up. This failed because the area was too small. You need to do a biggish area all at once, or the traders in the area suffer unfairly. There is a photo of Strojet in Copenhagen on my Mayor website. They did the pedestrianisation in big chunks.

8. Experience has shown that reducing the available road area reduces the level of traffic. People say, 'it has to go somewhere' but in practice, it doesn't happen. Home Zone areas need the number of access points restricted, which discourages rat-running. This ends up saving fuel. (The "Miracle of Kufstein" happened when the motorway bridge there fell down. People expected Austrian local road 117 to be clogged solid. It wasn't. The bridge was rebuilt at top speed, the German government hoping no one would notice the "miracle" but it has wide currency, not least in this e-mail!)

9. When fuel becomes expensive because of the shortage, globalisation becomes lunacy. Don't allow building on 'setaside' or golf courses, as we will need those fields for arable use. We may need to start breeding up shire horses as well & that should start now. If it proves unnecessary in the long run, we can always eat them. Beef production should be stopped eventually, as it is a very inefficient use of land. Reindeer venison can be produced in otherwise unusable land in Scotland & there will be plenty of hill sheep to eat. (We don't eat beef on principle).

10. A corollary of point 9 is that we will need to get the population down eventually. We can probably feed 20 million. This could be a really contentious issue. However, in the Euro-Union, there will be plenty of jobs for agricultural labourers when the fuel shortage bites, so the otherwise unemployable can go to France or Poland (in exchange for the plumbers?) to work the land.

11. The fuel shortage, & remember that we will need to preserve as much oil in the ground as possible as industrial feed-stock, is not going to be pleasant unless governments can agree drastic action soon &, given the glacial speed at which governments come to agreements, they won't move fast enough. The idea that, if people don't take personal action now, the future will not be very nice, needs propagating.

It is interesting that "The Sun" has discovered climate change. Since the paper exists to convince poor people that they should rush to the aid of the rich, Murdoch has probably worked out that the poor will need to tighten their belts to preserve his life-style, the very thing we all joined the Labour Party to change.


Monday 4th September - Computer servicing

I see the Currys/Dixons/PC World group are going to offer the servicing of personal computers of all sorts in their stores. About time, too. I cannot be the only retired computer professional spending time fixing old ladies computers for cups of coffee & biscuits


Saturday 2nd September - Dealing with our Neo-Fascist Council

To re-open Islington Green, turned into a rather bland area by the Council, a so-called "green' festival was held today. I told one stallholder, who said that comments received were going back to the Council, that the Council were hanging on by a thread (the Mayor's casting vote), that they were a bunch of Neo-Fascists who were trying to re-invent themselves as Greens & that they would use any comments they received for propaganda purposes but not take any action.


Saturday 2nd September - Nimrod 'accident' in Afghanistan

To: Guardian Editor: We are being lied to again & I am terminably fed up with it. "Mechanical failure"? The Nimrod is a Comet, a fifty-year-old design. Everything about that machine is known & it has an infinitesimally small accident record. after the crashes in the Tyrrennian Sea. It was interesting that the Press at first assumed that the aircraft was a Chinook, as the Computer Industry has fought a long campaign to have it recognised that the Chinook that crashed on the Mull of Kintyre was brought down, not by pilot error but by inadequately tested American software. At least, the Press had understood that message.

I reckon the Nimrod was shot down & yet more British military personnel died, in their task of relieving American troops so that George W Bush has a better chance at the polls in November. The number of UK citizens who do not want this impossible man to go down to a crashing defeat can probably be counted on the fingers on one hand & they will not include David Cameron, who would not want another scion of the Bush dynasty interfering with his quite difficult Long March leftwards towards electability.


Contact: Ken Baldry at 17 Gerrard Road, Islington, London N1 8AY +44(0)20 7359 6294 or e-mail him
URL: http://www.art-science.com/thoughts/t4.html
Last revised 3/11/2006 ©2006 Ken Baldry. All rights reserved.