A Whitehall Agenda ...

I am saddened by the news that the Fire Brigades Union is once again balloting its members in the Fire and Rescue Services for a national strike. While I have never gone on strike, and do not believe that striking ever actually achieves a satisfactory long term solution for the workers, I have every sympathy for the underlying reasons for this one. Sadly, however, it will not achieve what the service needs, and it will simply facilitate what Whitehall really wishes to achieve. A return to the old "Insurance style" fire service provision - a service provided by a private contractor and no longer the responsibility of the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The 2004 Act makes full provision for it, and a strike will simply bring forward the date on which the moment when a Fire and Rescue Authority "contracts out" the provision of the fire and rescue services it is legally required to provide. The only requirement for such a contractor is that they "must employ fire fighters."

Why do I, a person who does not believe the Union has been "good" for the service, or that it has always had the best interests of the service at its core, have sympathy with their cause on this occasion?

It is this, the Minister for Fire has laid before Parliament, proposals to extend the retirement age of fire fighters, currently set at the completion of 30 years service at age 50 or age 55 for everyone below senior (Assistant Chief or higher) rank. There were very sound and solid reasons for setting these as the retirement age back in 1948, and they are even more valid today. The Fire Brigades Pension Scheme was set up to cover it, with the members paying into it at between 11 and 14% of salary for the 30 years. Some, who could not be expected to complete 30 years service by reason of having joined at age 30 or later, paid in more. Their employers, operating under Whitehall 'rules' did not invest a single penny of this money they have collected over the years, instead spending it on all manner of pet projects, such as parks, gardens, luxury offices, schools and 'social engineering' schemes.

Now they claim that falling income from contributions means they cannot afford to pay the fire service pensions. Of course not, they spent the money, and have padded and protected their own, but to hell with the fire fighters.

The Minister, advised by his Civil Service nonentities - the majority of whom are earning five and six times what a fire fighter earns and look forward to gold plated and protected pensions themselves - now want to make the fire fighters work to a minimum retirement age of 60 years. The Minister has told Parliament that "perhaps" 23% of the fire fighters will be unable to do this due to ill health, injury or age related inability to maintain the required level of fitness (described by a doctor in a report NOT released by the relevant department, as being equal to that required for Olympic competitors) that is virtually unachievable by the vast majority over 55. In fact, their own report estimates that a "worst case" scenario will result in over 90% of fire fighters being sacked between 55 and 60 because they cannot maintain the level of fitness required.

The Union rightly says that a national survey shows that a maximum of 12% of those affected MAY be  "redeployed", which means the rest face the sack. Out you go, sorry, but we've no job for you - oh, and you can't get the full pension, and you'll have to wait until you're 60 ...

So what, you may say, this is only what every other worker faces. That is, to an extent true, but now we come to the reason the age limits were set in the first place. By the age of 50 a range of health issues start to bite. There is a very good reason that a large number of my former colleagues (all at least 10 years my junior) have had hip and knee replacements. Many have cartilage problems, many more, like me, have serious back problems which can only degenerate with age. I retired at 60, but I was in a non-operational post, and had to give up wearing Self Contained Breathing Apparatus at 56 (my doctor at the time actually asked me if I was trying to worsen my back condition) and I have a few other little problems which will worsen with age.

Reflexes are important in a fire fighter and with age these get slower, not a good thing in a tight corner. hearing loss, loss of smell, degenerating eyesight, all of these militate against someone continuing "in the job" beyond 55, and even now, many who should retire at 55 find themselves having to retire earlier because of these problems. Yet along comes a Minister and lays before Parliament a proposal to ignore all of this, all of it very, very well documented and verifiable, and extend the pension age for everyone in the service by 5 to 10 years. All to solve a problem the political classes (and I include the Civil Service in that) have created by their own stupidity and cupidity.

Sadly, I do believe the Whitehall agenda here is to remove the Fire and Rescue Service operational provision from public management to private. This change to the pension scheme is, in my view, simply a means to an end. By making it impossible to reach the pension age as a fire fighter, they hope that fewer people will stay on long enough to qualify for the full benefit. Those who don't will, as usual, be offered the opportunity to 'freeze' their contributions (the Treasury rubs its hands with glee!) or to 'transfer' them to whatever new scheme they can join - which will, undoubtedly offer far less benefit. By forcing the issue and provoking a strike Whitehall is laying the foundations for a "sell off" to their lobbyists and future directorship providers, of the Fire and Rescue Services. THis will do two things - it will remove the responsibility for the reduced service from Ministers and Civil Servants, and it will weaken, and even possibly destroy, the Fire Brigades Union, possibly the most militant and Left wing of all the remaining Unions.

Blair started this trend, the present government is merely seeing through what the Civil Servants already had in the pipeline. The Minister is either blind, or a fool if he continues down this path. No good will come of it for anyone, least of all the taxpayer.

A little knowledge ...

As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I was struck by this yesterday as I read the comments to a fairly comprehensive article about the hazards presented by certain 'designer' drugs currently returning to popularity among the younger scene. One commentator, responding to someone else who had, rather bluntly, pointed out that people who use drugs of unknown provenance, and die of the effects of bad reactions and impurities, are actually exercising a Darwinian "natural selection" response, came back with a rather ignorant attack about the first commentator dying nastily of cancer "caused by the GMO food you eat".

Recently there have been a number of serious scientific responses to the so-called ecologists and others who have campaigned to have Genetically Modified crops banned on the grounds they MAY cause diseases, spread uncontrollably or decimate insect populations. The irony does seem to escape them that virtually everything we eat today is "genetically modified" in some way. In fact, one reason we see so much Celiac Disease (sensitivity to gluten) is that the wheat we eat today is very different from that cultivated a thousand years ago, and different again from wheat grown even two hundred years ago. Modern wheat, has been developed by selective cross pollination of different grass species over the millennia since it was first cultivated. It is a hybrid, and today does not produce pollen and does not self propagate. However, the result of the wholesale transfer of genes from one grass species to another, and then from one hybridised wheat strain to another, is why the gluten content of modern wheat is high enough to cause allergies.

Another of the major causes of rising allergy sensitivities is pesticide usage. GM crops use far less of this, so the exposure is reduced in the consumer, which is not the case in the normal strains the campaigners don't want replaced. Once again, we hear of the Bio-foods being better and healthier, but, if you use natural fertilisers (cow droppings, pig droppings, etc., you are actually increasing the likelihood of spreading e-coli, listeria and a few other nasties including tetanus. Plus, not using pesticides (so-called natural pesticides are terribly inefficient), means that loss of crops to slugs, beetles, caterpillars and so on reduces yields and increases prices. Bio-food can never produce anything like the volumes of food required to feed the world's current population. Its exponents actually reveal either a naiveté or are concealing the fact they actually want to reduce world populations drastically and return the globe to their idealised vision of a perfect human/natural balance.

What the GM crop developers have done is splice in selected genetic material ( a technique really only possible in the last 40 or so years) to reduce the gluten content, make wheat more resistant to things like Ergot (a toxic fungus now known to have triggered the Salem Witch hunts), to attack by insects and drought. Once again, the hysteria by the anti-GM activists, fuelled by irresponsible headlines like "Frankenfoods given the go-ahead", and even more irresponsibly emotive reporting which highlighted "the risks" without pointing out that all the testing and all the trials had shown these to be almost non-existent was whipped to a frenzy. It followed exactly the same pattern as the anti-innoculation campaigns run by a small group of campaigners and based entirely on their own fear.

As a recent article I read on this subject points out, often the anti-campaigners have a hidden agenda. They are opposed to the commercial interests developing and marketing the GM foods, or the vaccines. They want a world filled with benevolent governments where everything is free to everyone, and hate commerce - so they attack the product on the grounds of "public concern for safety/the environment". The result, in the case of GM foods, is that genetically modified crops which could go a long way to alleviating the regular famines in Africa, are now universally banned from those countries that would reap the most benefit. Rice, which is very low in Vitamin A, but is a staple food in the Far East and many other countries is a major problem. However, the GM version, modified to produce the Vitamin A and address some other deficiencies, is banned, and not grown - ostensibly because of fears over its 'safety' but the reality is the political opposition to the US based firm which developed it.

There is no evidence to support the claims that eating GM foods can increase allergic reactions, rather the opposite, yet throughout Europe the "Greens" campaign against it on the grounds that it MIGHT. Likewise forty years of testing have failed to provide a link to cancer, but, again, the "Greens" shout loudly that one, very specially selective and now discredited trial by an anti-GM campaigner "proves" that there is such a risk. (The trial used specially bred rats that are very susceptible to tumours. They have been 'modified' so they will develop tumours and are generally used to test methods of controlling a tumour. And there must be an irony there, for an anti-GM campaigner to use a genetically modified rat to prove his case ...)

In almost all these campaigns fear is the driver for the wider majority. Few have more than a vague idea of what they are afraid of, or of precisely what is actually involved or modified. None I have met actually knew that the crops they were so keen to destroy don't self propagate, so cannot 'spread' across 'natural' plants and 'destroy the natural diversity'. The focus is always on the fact that some crops have been modified by splicing in segments of viral and bacterial genes, and their battle cry is always 'we don't know what will happen if it mutates'. Actually, the scientists and biologists do have a pretty good idea - that is what all the trials and tests are about. Nothing that can mutate into something dangerous ever leaves the lab now, the lessons of Thalidomide and a few others have been learned by the leading companies involved.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but far too many people today think that they can become experts on a subject by consulting Wikipedia or some other 'source' that reinforces their views. Sadly, it is impossible to debate with these folk, and because the media are currently locked into sensationalism, poor fact checking and emotive reporting, this is a debate that isn't going to happen any time soon. Probably not before all the anti-campaigners have succeeded in triggering the next major famine.  

Now there's a surprise ...

Over the last couple of days I have been reading reports of cars being damaged in the City of London, by sunlight reflected and focused on them by a new building under construction there. The building, nicknamed the "Walkie-Talkie" has fully glazed facades on all four sides. The difference between this building and other fully glazed structures in the City is that it has a concave profile to its outer walls. Those of my readers who have, in a misspent youth, played with a shaving mirror, will know that the concave reflective surface has an interesting property when one gets it to reflect sunlight onto something at just the right focal distance.

It seems that the architect has managed to achieve exactly the right focal distance between his building and the parking spaces in that section of Fenchurch Street. The result is some very expensive damage to luxury cars parked there. If the reports I've read are correct, someone in the construction team noticed this some time ago - because the developers aren't putting up a fight about it. They just pay for the damage and hope you'll not make a fuss. Now that it has reached the press of course, the City has reacted, and closed the affected parking area. The worrying part is this, no one appears to be considering the affect walking along the pavement there may have on someone should the reflected light hit their eyes, or the impact of such intense heating on the structures nearby.

We have long known that tall buildings, their services, the tarmac and concrete roads and pavements and the reflected light can cause local 'weather anomalies' around them. It is equally well known that more tarmac, more buildings and paved surfaces, cause a rise in local temperatures and, when it rains, increase the 'run-off' raising the risks of flooding. Since antiquity it has been known (Archimedes is reported to have built a weapon on the principle) that a mirror big enough and with the right curvature, can focus light to an intensity sufficient to blind and burn soldiers and - according to ancient reports - set ships on fire. As far back as the 1960s experiments showed that banks of mirrors could focus light on a 'target' - usually an arrangement of tubes filled with liquid - the produce steam and generate electricity with a turbine, so we really shouldn't be surprised that a building focusing light onto parked cars can melt the plastic trim. The surprise is that it 'only' melted it. Those 1960s experiments showed you could actually melt metals with that rig. It wasn't dubbed a "solar furnace" for nothing.

This development raises an important question for me, and perhaps it should raise it for the professions as well. The question is this: Does no one carry out an analysis of the impact of creating a structure which reflects light onto adjoining properties and surfaces? It does sometimes seem that almost everything else is considered (often in isolation and by different 'specialists' who often don't consider anyone elses reports or work), yet I have, in the past, often been astonished that some highly qualified professionals don't understand (or see) some fairly basic issues which can, and do, impact on what they propose.

Hopefully this Archimedian Mirror building will draw attention to the need to think a lot more carefully about the way so many today ignore every other discipline and focus only on their own comfort zone of knowledge. From the press I understand the designer and the developer are trying to find ways to 'mitigate' the problem. I'd suggest its a little late, this should have been identified at the design stage. Any 'mitigation' is likely to introduce some new problem somewhere else.

Out of the mouths of babes ...

Sometimes one stumbles across some little thing when you are reading, that leaps off the page and tells you more, in a small insight than all the learned history of a period even hints at. One such moment leapt off the page as I read a book of short biographic memories of women who lived through the war years in different parts of Germany. One woman, now in her 80s recalled getting into trouble for repeating a 'prayer' doing the rounds at her school in early 1942.

It goes -

Lieber Gott, mach mich taub,              (Dear God, make me deaf,
Dass ich nicht am radio schraub,         [So] That I won't turn on the radio,
Lieber Gott, mach mich blind              Dear God, make me blind,
Dass ich alles herrlich find.                  [so] That I think everything is good,
Bin ich taub, und bin ich blind,            If I'm deaf and if I'm blind
Bin ich Adolf's liebstes Kind.               Then I'm Adolf's most loved child.)

It speaks for itself that this was circulating among the children, and that it terrified their parents to hear it repeated in innocence. What it does show is that the fear of the Gestapo, or of informers, was a major factor in keeping the adult German population under control, but that there were still brave souls able to think up this sort of simple rhyme which children would learn and repeat. The line concerning the radio also tells a careful reader that the ordinary German wasn't only listening to the official channels controlled by Goebbels Propaganda Ministry as the lady who recorded this memory makes clear, describing how, have punished her daughter for repeating the above prayer, her mother would take the radio beneath the duvet on her bed at night, and tune it to the forbidden broadcasts from England.

From the memories of the women in this short collection, it soon becomes very clear that you had to be blind, and the majority certainly weren't, not to see that things were not the way Hitler and the media said they were. You had to be blind not to see the abuses around you, and to not be aware of the oppressive control exercised by threat, by punishment and ultimately by being sent to a Death Camp. Even so, some of the stories contain other little insights, of farmers hiding refugees, of priests and ordinary citizens hiding Jews in the full knowledge that, if exposed, they faced imprisonment or death.

That this little prayer was circulating as early as 1942 suggests also that it had begun circulating earlier than that. Sadly, as the stories make plain, many of the children who recited it probably didn't survive the bombing and destruction that followed.

The Middle Eastern Conundrum

Reading the papers and listening to the news on radio and television, one hears a great deal of self-righteous rhetoric about 'red lines' and 'international law' being overstepped or broken from politicians who obviously feel they are obliged to 'do something' for one side of the conflict in Syria or the other. The truth is that they seem not to be listening to their own electorates here. A YouGov poll in this last week showed that less than 20% of the UK population supports the nation's involvement in any military action in Syria. A similar Poll in the US shows a somewhat similar picture. So why are the politicians still discussing miltary action?

One reason, I suspect, is because they think it makes them look like 'leaders'. The thinking is that by taking unpopular but, in their arguments 'necessary' decisions and actions, they show they are in charge and on top of events. The reality is that they are actually interfering in events and affairs of which they know dangerously little and understand even less. What they are doing is simply creating an even more unstable and dangerous situation in which fundamentalism can and will breed like the proverbial flies on a carcass. The problems there are extremely complex, the culture completely at odds with modern Western culture and some of the problem is deeply rooted in the very nature of Islam itself.

The so-called Arab Spring has descended into a blood bath, just as almost all revolutions do, but this one is probably more akin to the religious upheaval of the 16th and 17th Centuries in Europe. At its heart is a struggle for dominance between the religious fundamentalists and the modernisers who want a more open and liberal society. One which tolerates those who wish to live differently to the strict Muslim ideals of dress, listen to different music, perhaps tolerate other religions or lifestyles. Ranged against them are the fundamentalists who wish to take Islam back to their idealised version of the 7th Century. The dichotomy for Western Leaders is this. If they support regimes like Assad's, which was anti-fundamentalist, draconian, but at least enforced some freedom of choice and tolerance, they are damned for supporting the dictator. If they arm and support the rebels, we end up arming and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, Fatah, Hamas and Al Qaeda.

There are some powerful voices of the permanently outraged moralists in the West who insist that only by intervening in some way, can we guarantee the emergence of a more tolerant western style society in Syria, Egypt, et al. Unfortunately, the majority of these folk are either anti-religion, agnostic, atheist or humanist and ignore the manner in which religion forms and moulds any society. Their vales are simply not shared by the vast majority of Muslims. Ergo, no matter what we do, it is unlikely a society like ours will emerge from this upheaval.

One article I have recently read suggests that some, at least, of the origins of the problems in the Middle East can be traced back to the progressive disintegration of the Ottoman Empire which started in the mid-19th Century and reached its conclusion with the sundering of its remaining territory in 1918. By that time many of its provinces had become the fifedoms of local warlords whom the western allies fostered, armed and supported because Turkey was then an ally of Germany. Post 1918, these same warlords became the various Kings, Sheiks, Emirs and so on that 'ruled' the newly created countries under League of Nations Mandates handed out to the British and French. Many of the boundaries between these new states owed nothing to population groups or ethnic allegiances, and everything to the need to protect oilfields or other 'international' interests. Thus were the foundations laid for the present conflicts, genocides and mass displacement of populations and even the suppression of other religions.

Since the various bureaucracies and political players whose forerunners created this mess, cannot now acknowledge their complicity in the first instance, and cannot now correct the original botch, they feel they need to address it. That will simply compound the original error and, if anything, make it worse.

At heart, this revolution comes back to the ideological. The city dwellers of the Middle East, by and large, wish to have the same things westerners have, stability, security, tolerance and the freedom to live their lives as they see is right. Ranged against them are large rural populations with a more fundamental view of how life should be lived, and that doesn't necessarily include tolerance of other religions, lifestyles or ideas. Behind that stand the vast throng of Muslim 'scholars' who see any diminuition of their influence - for instance, by allowing people to change religion, or at least hear another religious view - as a loss of power. The 'scholars' have their supporters as well, the vast army of ill-educated, disaffected and disempowered who flock to the fundamentalist rallying cry of 'defending Islam' from Zionism, Western Immorality and any concept of equality of the sexes.

I very much doubt that any of these revolutions will produce a liberal regime, at least in the short term. Our involvement will simply ensure that the regime which does emerge is even more fundamentalist than it could have been.

Iraq, Afghanistan and several other 'interventionist' adventures should have taught our leaders at least one thing - that the enemy of our enemy is NOT necessarily a friend. He may well be a far worse enemy taking advantage of the opportunity to advance his cause. Unfortunately, Whitehall/Westminster, Washington, Paris, Brussels and the UN never seem to learn from history. I suspect we are doomed to repeat the failures of the recent past here, but I hope and pray it will not be so.

Keep Out! Stay Out!

No, I'm not on a Fire Safety message, though the principle applies. The US and the UK need to stay out of the conflict in Syria. The UN does NOT make law, their 'Treaties' bind those who sign them, not those that do not. As far as I can establish, Syria is NOT breaking "International Law" (there is no such animal) though the regime there (and some of the opposition) seem to be breaking every "moral" code known to man. They simply are not 'signed up' to the treaties the interventionists in the media and government want to wave.

Neither Britain, nor the US should get involved in this conflict. We are not the world's policemen and all that can happen if we attack the Syrian Regime, is that there will be more casualties, more hardship and even less likelihood of a government that is any better emerging. Surely Cameron, Obama and the rest of them have learned this from Iraq and Afghanistan?

Apparently not, if the news media are right.

Changing Email Accounts ...

One could start by screaming and tearing one's hair out in chunks. It would probably be less painful  and far, far less annoying and frustrating. The reason? BT, with whom I have dealt for longer than I care to remember, despite a range of hassles and problems over the years, has notified me that, unless I pay them to keep my email addresses, these will cease to function next month.

I have, as a result managed to create a new email for myself with Google Mail, which is fine, but which comes with the problem that I cannot now change the email for this Blog to a 'gmail' address! Why? Who knows, getting in touch with anyone at Google or Blogger to find out is like ... well, let's put it this way, I could probably get to Mars with less difficulty. So, now I'm stuck with a Blogger Account that won't let me change my email, and won't allow me to change the primary email account on it to my new 'gmail' address - even though Blogger is a part of the Google empire.

To make life even more entertaining, I have now tried every trick I can think of (and a few suggested by computer gurus) to get my address book from the old BT account, transferred to my 'gmail' account. Don't be silly, it ain't happening. The BT system says I can move it to Yahoo. Tried that, didn't work. It also says I can move it to Microslosh Outlook. Don't want to do that even if I had Outlook, because I use a Mac.

So, it looks like I'm going to have to go back to basics, and find a way to print out the entire BT email address book, then manually re-enter the addresses I want into my new mail account. If anyone can tell me how to resolve all the other issues, like changing my email address with PayPal, various things I subscribe to, Blogger and the hundred and one things I seem to have a "registered email address" for - please let me know in the Comments - email seems to be a problem at present!