Chris Whiteside's Blog

If you only read one article on the internet this week, make it " What we get wrong about technology " on the Financial Times site by Tim Harford, author of " The Undercover economist ." Tim argues that it is not the miraculously impressive new devices and techniques which make you think of Clarke's law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") which really change things but the simple, cheap basic things like paper, batteries, shipping containers and barbed wire. An extract: "Paper opened the way for printing. The kind of print run that might justify the expense of a printing press could not be produced on parchment; it would require literally hundreds of thousands of animal skins. It was only when it became possible to mass-produce paper that it made sense to search for a way to mass-produce writing too." "Not that writing is the only use for paper. In his book 'Stuff Matters' Mark Mio...

Transport Minister Chris Grayling announced £6.1 billion this week over the next few years for roads improvement as I mentioned in an earlier post. He also wrote an open letter to residents of Cumbria this week confirming that the A595 is one of the roads which the government hopes and expects to see improved. The letter below first appeared in the North West Evening Mail here , because some of it replies to an untrue allegation made by a Labour MP via the Mail that the government was ignoring the A595. Here is what he had to say: "WHEN I visited Cumbria during the election I made a promise – I promised action on the A595. Contrary to a report in The Mail yesterday in which claims were made I had forgotten that promise, I can tell the people of Cumbria that the A595 is top of my roads priority list. Not least because Trudy Harrison is holding me to it. I understand Cumbrian concerns about the road, having seen it in ‘action’. It’s clearly not viable for the f...

The local authority waste disposal department can can ...

Two extracts from the Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Fry 2006 version of Mozart's "The Magic Flute." The first clip shows the Queen of the Night, sung by Lyubov Petrova, making her entrance on top of a Mark IV tank. Be warned that if you have not seen "The Magic Flute" this second clip, possibly the most beautiful piece of music ever written for the female human voice and a shocking paradox in terms of the actual meaning of what is being sung, is about as major as spoilers get.

One of the most evil and bloodthirsty regimes in recent history - a strong contender to be considered the worst since the fall of the Hitler's Nazis in 1945 - is about to lose the last of its territory. On 4th July America's allies in Syria who have been laying siege to Racca, the capital of the self-styled "Islamic State" caliphate known in the region by the Arabic acronym " DA'ESH " breached the walls of the old city. Meanwhile in Mosul, the second city in Iraq which had been occupied by DA'ESH in June 2014 but has been gradually recaptured over the last few months, all but a few alleys are now back in government hands. The recapture of DA'ESH territory in Iraq and Syria will shortly make it untenable for the organisation to sustain its claim to be a "caliphate" which all Muslims are supposed to give allegiance to, because one of the conditions for a caliphate laid down in the Islamic sacred writings is to be in control of an a...

I welcome the news announced yesterday that the government is making £6.1 billion more money available to invest in Britain's roads. Yes, it's taxpayers' money but this is one of the things I pay my taxes for. Trudy Harrison has asked for and been given an assurance that this will include the A595. More details to follow.

The issue of student financial support was a hot potato in the eighties when I was a student and has never ceased to be. At that time students not only didn't have to pay tuition fees but actually received maintenance grants, and complained bitterly about how the miserly government of Margaret Thatcher didn't pay them enough money. (The actual language used was often considerably ruder than that but you get the idea.) There was some debate about the possibility of replacing grants with student loans which, with a very few exceptions, was popular only with the sort of people who got the Federation of Conservative Students closed down by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. (Yes, that sounds like a joke. No, it isn't one.) If as a Conservative student I had told my contemporaries that when Labour finally got into power they would scrap what remained of the grant, introduce tuition fees instead, double the tuition fees a few years later, and offer a loan to p...

"We collected 55% more last year at the 19% Corporation tax rate than they did at 28% in 2009-10" (John Redwood MP delivers a "killer fact" on twitter.) Lower corporation tax means companies have more of their profits available to invest and history shows that they do indeed re-invest much of their after-tax profits. More investment means more productivity, more jobs, more wealth created and eventually, even at the lower tax rate, more tax revenue. This is why Labour's high tax policies will not deliver better public services. In my youth a Labour government put tax on investment income up to 98 pence in the pound. It ended with a bankrupt government having to call in the International Monetary Fund to borrow money from them, and the IMF insisted on drastic cuts as a condition of the loan, including the most savage cuts ever imposed on the NHS in it's entire history

As Dan Hannan points out here, the old convention of civility which used to define British politics in breaking down, and the British abhorrence of using violence as a means of expressing political disagreement is not as universal as it used to be. He makes a convincing argument that going from "Punch a Nazi" to "Shoot a republican Congressman" is a difference of degree rather than kind - and starts you down the same road which, taken further, can lead to actions morally equivalent to the man who drove a van into a crowd outside Finsbury Park Mosque.

Rule Britannia performed - musically, at least - as Thomas Arne originally wrote it for the finale of the opera "Alfred." Don't know if it was ever sung in his lifetime by a mezzo-soprano wearing an Admiral's full dress uniform, though as the 18th century was rather less buttoned-up than the one which followed it, that would not in the least surprise me!

Following the events of the call-in meeting of the Cumbria Health Scrutiny committee at the tail end of the last County Council term, first the electorate and then the political groups have made some changes to the composition of that committee. For those who are not aware of this, following the Success regime consultation on their proposals for healthcare in North West and Central Cumbria, the Health Scrutiny committee originally voted unanimously to "call in" three elements of the decision for review by the Secretary of State for Health: 1) Maternity 2) Children's Services 3) Community Hospital Beds. They then adjourned the meeting - and a number of councillors went home, claiming subsequently that they had been told it was the end of the meeting - but went into a huddle with the Success Regime, following which the meeting reconvened and the councillors who were still present took the vote again. Maternity was still called in, but the decision to call in Childre...

Under the British constitution, passing an opposed amendment to the Queen's Speech is an attempt to bring down the government (or prevent one being formed.) The debate about Labour's amendment to the Queen's speech about public sector pay has to be seen in that context. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that the 1% cap on most public sector pay above a certain level should be reviewed or changed, but just bear in mind that the fact that MPs on the government side voted the Labour amendment down does not tell you that they disagree with it. Passing Labour's amendment would not in itself have paid nurses, teachers or other public servants affected any more money, but it would have brought down the government and might have made Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister. In reality there is a big debate doing on within the Conservative party about whether to change policy on this issue, but it was never going to be done by changing the Queen's Speech. All the vote on t...

Latest Fire Safety tests on cladding samples from buildings around the country carried out by the  Building Research Establishment BRE) in Bricket Wood continue to show a 100% failure rate. The evidence is even stronger that, as I wrote a few days ago, this is far worse than a failure by one council or landlord or even one part of the political spectrum, this is a widespread and serious systemic failure of fire safety regulation which imposes a duty on those in all political parties and none to work together to improve safety. At the time of writing samples of cladding from 190 tower blocks in 51 local authority areas have failed fire safety tests . These included both private and council-owned residential properties. Samples of cladding from three NHS hospitals have also failed the tests. King’s College hospital NHS foundation trust in south London announced on Monday that cladding at one of its buildings was being taken down following tests. A spokeswoman for NHS...

The first Copeland Local Committee meeting of this term for Cumbria County Council will take place today (Tuesday 4th July) at Cleator Moor Civic Hall and Masonic centre from 10.15am. The Copeland Local Committee consists of all Cumbria  County Councillors representing divisions within Copeland Borough Council. It has a fair amount of influence over the provision of local county council services within the Copeland Borough area, particularly on Highways matters. The agenda for today's meeting includes a petition being presented by a local resident in my division, Dugald Sperry-Lamb, calling for a 20mph speed limit through Moor Row. The detailed agenda can be found here .

I was rather concerned to learn that Sophie Turner, who was 12 when she auditioned for the part of Sansa Stark, has said that Being on "Game of Thrones was her sex education . I do hope she's joking. Spoiler alert for anyone who has not picked up that lots of people die in the "Song of Ice and Fire" books and the "Game of the Thrones" TV programme based on it. Learning about the facts of life from that programme might be the way to imagine that it's OK to cheat on your husband with your own brother  cripple any small children who might be in a position to give you away by throwing them from the top of a tower, kill your mistress when you find out she's been spying on you for your dad, and kill all the guests at your daughter's wedding  Offhand it wouldn't be the top my list of the best sex education programmes ...

"Lawrence Fisher, a stripe-shirted 1980s Tory with smoky glasses, complained that a school in Brampton wrote a letter to the county council’s Legal and Democratic services department in November 2015. 'They are still waiting for a reply,' said Mr. Fisher curtly but in his politest voice. Why someone would wait for two years for a reply wasn’t explained. Stewart " (Cllr Ian Stewart, Labour leader of Cumbria County Council) " apologised and then chuckled. 'There is a standard practice for responding to letters and it is slightly less than November 2015…' Cue lots of guffaws from his benches. Lawrence wasn’t laughing. Neither are his constituents." ( Ellis Butcher a.k.a. Cumbria Journo, from his sketch about last week's meeting of Cumbria County Council which you can read in full here .)

Great news for Cumbria as UNESCO confirms that the Lake District has been listed as a World heritage site. The Lake District is the second World Heritage Site in the county, the first being Hadrian's Wall.

This performance of Wood's classic masterpiece took place during the celebration in St Paul's Cathedral of Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee.

In quick succession the Barron Knights parodied "By the Rivers of Babylon" with a song about a dentist in Birmingham, then the  Smurf song, and finally the LS Lowry tribute song "Matchstalk Men."

Believe it or not, Jeremy Corbyn does have something in common with his arch-enemy Tony Blair - both managed to get coalitions of voters with widely disparate beliefs and hopes supporting them. Indeed in Corbyn's case it is all the more surprising because he has attracted support from people who want things which he has made no secret he opposes - for example, the pro-Remain young people who have been supporting Corbyn and Labour because they felt betrayed by Brexit, apparently not noticing that labour is all over the place on the EU. Most Labour MPs were pro-Remain, Corbyn himself has been an opponent of the EU for decades, and appears to have reverted to a "hard Brexit" line since the referendum. As the Evening Standard put it here in response to Remain supporters like Gina Miller who professed herself "astonished" that Jeremy Corbyn sacked pro-European frontbenchers, "We suspect it will take many more such acts of infidelity with socially democrat...

Whatever your opinion of Jeremy Corbyn - and mine is not very high - an awful lot of people have seriously underestimated him. He only got onto the ballot for Labour leader because a number of Labour MPs who did not support him, or think he had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, nominated him to widen the debate. One of those MPs, Margaret Beckett, subsequently said she felt like a "moron" for having nominated Jeremy Corbyn and added that it was one  of the " worst political mistakes I have ever made ." Then there were the opponents of the Labour party who paid their £3 to join Labour and vote for Corbyn as Labour leader in order to wreck the Labour party. I thought at the time that was a damn silly thing to do and I hope the people who did it realise now that they were every bit as unwise as the moderate Labour MPs who nominated him. Actually, whichever way the next general election goes, in the medium term the people who voted for Jeremy Corbyn ...

Here is the supercarrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest warship ever constructed for the Royal Navy, on her sea trials this week, escorted by the frigates HMS Sutherland and HMS Iron Duke.

"Cumbria Journo" Ellis Butcher has written an exceptionally entertaining (and pretty accurate) account of Thursday's double meeting of Cumbria County Council which you can read at https://cumbriajourno.com/2017/06/30/cumbria-county-council-the-sketch/ . I particularly love the "Reservoir Dogs" riff on the newly elected Conservative county councillors. There are about sixteen Conservative County Councillors who have just been elected for the first time to Cumbria CC, including myself, plus a couple of returning members who had been county councillors before. Of the new Conservative members quite a number are tall, generally smartly dressed, and aged in their twenties or thirties. I qualify under the first of those descriptions but sadly not the third. All three descriptions apply to half a dozen of the new Tory councillors and "Cumbria Journo" has a picture of James Airey and five of those  - Ben Berry, Ben Shirley, Gareth Ellis, Stephen ...