Chris Whiteside's Blog

Like many people, I was quite shocked when I heard that a football player had, as it was reported, been cautioned by police for making the sign of the cross at a Rangers v Celtic match. The sign of the cross is made by both catholics and protestants. I'm Church of England myself and this weekend my wife commented on the fact that I made the sign of the cross without even thinking of it when we passed the site of Friday's fatal car accident on the A595 and I sent up a short prayer for the victims. So if the situation had been that someone made the sign of the cross in prayer with no other context, and had then been cautioned on the basis that showing reverence to God is itself provocative, that would be disgraceful. Some of the initial reports of the incident certainly read as if that is what happened. However, I am very grateful to my old University contemporary and friend Iain Dale. He wrote a blog piece expressing concern at the caution, but to his credit Iain also put in a l...

Residents of Whitehaven and surrounding villages should have received a letter this month about the Digital switchover. In Autumn 2007 Whitehaven will become the first town in the UK to experience the change to a different system of TV broadcasting. Some residents of the area already have arials, televisions etc which are fully compatible with the new digital system. Others will not. If residents with older systems do not take appropriate action before Autumn next year their TV will stop working come the switchover. Details of the digital switch can be found online >here There is also a public meeting, chaired by Jedi Jamie, in Whitehaven Civic Hall, at 6.30pm on Thursday 21st September. I would strongly encourage any Whitehaven resident who is interested in television, or who has friends or relatives who depend on their TV, to come along and find out more about what is going on.

On Friday, for the second time in a few weeks, there was a fatal accident on the A595 near my home. It seems that every week we hear of yet more death on Cumbria's roads. The butcher's bill so far this year is 41 human lives. Because there is such a lot of nonsense applied in the name of health and safety, and because some politicians and officials are too quick to take every opportunity to bash the motorist, you have to be very careful how you discuss road safety. It is far too easy to sound like a car-hating killjoy. And anyone who is himself or herself a driver who says anything meaningful about road safety takes a huge risk of appearing to be a hypocrite. Show me any regular driver who claims that they have never driven too fast or made a potentially dangerous mistake when behind the wheel of a car, and I'll show you a liar. But I think that all of us who drive regularly on Cumbria's roads, particularly those like the A595 on which death or serious injury are a depr...

A letter in the News and Star by a Dr K Davis, headlined “Terrorist scare was bogus” suggested that the recent airport security alarm and associated police raids were not based on a real threat, and inferred that this had been manufactured by the government for political purposes. The letter appears to have been written before any charges had been brought and before it was announced that bomb-making equipment had been found: it predicted that no evidence would materialise and all those arrested would be released without charge. The fact that Dr Davis could write such a the letter, and get it printed (It appeared on August 19) demonstrates how far Tony Blair’s government has damaged trust in politics in this country – not because the letter was right, but because it demonstrated that sane people can take seriously the possibility that the government and police would organise a large number of raids, arrest twenty people, and disrupt the travel arrangements of many thousands, on the basi...

Any comment about A levels should start by congratulating all those students who have just had their A level results on their hard work. Regardless of what one thinks about the system, getting through the exams does take a lot of effort, and getting an A grade does not happen without both ability and hard work. Any comments we make about the system should not be presented in a way which belittles what this year's students have done to earn the grades they have just been awarded. They deserve to be allowed to feel proud of their achievements. Nevertheless, failure by the government to act now so that improvements to the system can be made in good time for next year would be to betray next year's students, betray universities, and betray employers. There is a lot of debate about whether the increasing rates of passes and of high grades represents an improvement of performance or a drop in the difficulty of the exam, but that isn't actually the most important issue. The key po...

This morning on a TV newspaper review Kate Adie, who knows something about working in dangerous places, referred to a press story that Health and Safety rules were interfering in the humanitarian effort in Lebanon. She suggested that when it starts interfering in the ability to help people in need the "Health and Safety Culture" can become "Malevolent". As Kate Adie admitted, that was a strong word to use. There have been a lot of newspaper stories about or extreme applications Health and Safety legislation, but we have to balance this against the fact that where the laws work as they are supposed to and save lives in the process this is much less likely to be newsworthy. Nonetheless there are quite clearly some instances where the rules have been inappropriately applied. An extreme example was the legal action brought by the Health and Safety executive against the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, after two officers pursued a fleeing criminal onto a roof and...

The charge of threatening democracy in Britain is made too often by opponents of the party in power when they don't like what the government is doing. Certainly it has been made very frequently against Tony Blair. But as with the story of the boy who cried wolf, one of the main reasons we should be careful not to make the charge too frequently is the risk that people will not listen when it is true. I hope that justifiable concerns about what today's arrest of suspected terrorists and extreme measures against an apparent threat of mass aircraft bombings does not completely divert attention from the measures the government has just put forward about defence lawyers. The government has slipped out in August, when Blair himself and half the country is on holiday, the proposal that judges should be able to sack defence lawyers. Doubtless they hope that people will not realise how serious this is, and that anyone who speaks up against it will be assumed to be interested in defending...

"How to win every argument - the use and abuse of logic" by Madsen Pirie This is an updated version of a classic guide to logical thinking and how to spot mistaken arguments. We've all been in the situation where some smart-alec produces an argument, often as a joke, which everyone knows must be wrong but where nobody can quite see the mistake. More seriously, I suspect most of us have seen debates where one side appears to have much more evidence to support their case, until someone comes along who presents the other side of the argument so much better that everyone is convinced - at least until after the superior speaker has won the vote/verdict/board or council decision, by which time it is too late. Madsen Pirie's book is a masterly and very entertaining guide to the different tricks which people can use to make their argument sound much stronger than it really is, how to spot them, and what the holes in their logic are. He lists the logical fallacies which, by ac...

I know from experience that there are still honest politicians around in both the Conservative and Labour parties. There may even be some honest Liberal Democrats. But this book is depressingly successful at showing how many others have set out to deceive the voters and why respect for politics is at an all-time low. Oborne appears to have gone to considerable length to make only charges which he can substantiate - doubtless he would have been sued otherwise. His book starts with an instance where a politician told the truth and was represented as lying because of it. In 1994 William Waldegrave was asked whether it might ever be acceptable for a minister to say something untrue to the House of Commons, and he replied that in "exceptional circumstances" it might be. This was immediately portrayed as an example of tory sleaze, and various future Labour ministers who would have had to resign if they themselves were held to the standards they demanded, used Waldegrave's state...

“Whitehall’s last colonies” is the title of a report on the regions which was written by Professor Nick Bosanquet and two colleagues and published on Monday by the think tank “Reform.” It studies the difference in regional economic performance between, on the one hand, London and the surrounding areas, and on the other, what the report calls “challenged” regions such as the North East and North West of England. In London and the South East, economic activity, population, the number of new businesses and average income are rising. In Scotland, the North East, North West, and Northern Ireland, population is actually falling while economic activity, business starts, and income growth are all lagging behind. Bosanquet and his co-authors argue that regional differences are becoming more accentuated and that “certain regions are, in effect, becoming client areas dependent on state employment and state funding.” They believe there is a serious danger of a vicious circle in which outlying area...

I read economics at Bristol University between 1980 and 1983, was elected sabbatical treasurer of the union for 1983-4, and then did a Masters degree at the University of East Anglia. Consequently I managed to be involved in student politics during an exceptionally interesting period - and I am using the word 'interesting' in the same sense as the ancient Confucian curse, "May you live in interesting times." I started as a student shortly after the Federation of Conservative Students, FCS, was taken over by the hard right, and remained involved as a supporter of the moderate grouping within the organisation, almost up to the time the organisation was shut down by Norman Tebbit for being too right wing. Of course, the Conservative party was not the only one to have trouble with its youth and student wings - pretty well every mainstream party had difficulties of one sort or another. The Labour Party Young Socialists and National Organisation of Labour Students had probl...

Almost every modern democracy has problems with the funding of political parties. Neither state nor private funding appears to guarantee that there is no risk of corruption - in some countries such as France, America, Italy and now Britain there have been problems with private funding of political parties, in other countries such as Germany there have been problems with misuse of the taxpayer's money provided for politics. By the standards of most modern democracies, the level of political corruption in Britain is fairly low, though we have never been so spotlessly clean that we could afford complacency on the subject. Insofar as there is less political corruption in this country than some others, the main reason is probably the limits on campaign spending which ensure that fighting an election is not as ridiculously expensive as it can be in some other nations. But the arrest of Lord Levy, and the guilty plea by Lib/Dem donor Michael Brown, have probably been the last straw which ...

We already knew that Cumbria would be the trial region for the switchover to Digital TV. Now we learn that Whitehaven and the surrounding villages - basically the northern half of Copeland - will be the first part of Cumbria to be affected. There is an old joke that "nothing should ever be done for the first time." Even if it produces benefits in the long term, I am concerned that the authorities do not seem to have thought through or addressed some of the human cost which may come with this switchover, particularly in the area where it happens first. It has been rumoured that one of the reasons Cumbria had been chosen to be the first area for digital switchover is that there are only 6 MPs in the county so it won't bring the government down if it all goes wrong. I hope that the council and the TV authorities will work together to organise an effective publicity campaign, which needs to start soon, alerting everyone to the steps they need to take to ensure their televisio...

A few weeks ago the media made something of a fuss about the fact that the discredited Deputy Prime Minister would be left "in charge" while the Prime Minister went on holiday. John Prescott actually does take over this week, yet this fuss has died down to a surprising degree. Of course, part of the reason for this is that the media know perfectly well that Tony Blair doesn't trust John Prescott to run the country, and he won't really be doing so. Ministers have been left in charge of their own departments - any minor issues affecting more than one department might well go to the Deputy PM but if anything important comes up we all know they'll be on the phone to Tony before you can say "Middle East Crisis." Does anyone imagine for 20 seconds that Prescott has been or will be allowed anywhere near Britain's response, such as it is, to the war which has broken out in the Lebanon? Mind you, if he had been responsible for dealing with the Middle East cri...

Norman Lamont once famously described the then Prime Minister as being “In office but not in power.” This week Tony Blair in turn moved closer to the situation where, while still in Number 10, he is less and less in sole control of the government’s destiny. The arrest of Lord Levy has clearly done immense harm to the Prime Minister – and the stage whispers from some Blairites complaining about the police action have made things worse rather than better. But Lord Levy’s trip to the police station, damaging though it was, is not the most powerful indicator in the past few days demonstrating the decay of the Prime Minister’s authority. On issues where Blair clearly has the agreement of his colleagues, particularly Gordon Brown, he is occasionally capable of pushing for brave or reforming decisions to be made. A rare example, and one that I personally welcome, is the fact that civil nuclear power appears to be included in the government’s energy strategy. But where, as so often, the Labour...

After months of waiting, the government has finally published its review of Britain’s future energy needs. Alistair Darling presented the new policy in the House of Commons yesterday. This has been universally presented as the government coming down on the side of nuclear power, and the hints, nudges and winks have now been replaced by a statement that “The government has concluded that new nuclear power stations could make a significant contribution to meeting our energy policy goals.” Note that word “could”. Watching Alistair Darling’s speech I was struck, not by how much was said, but by how little. Some 24 centuries ago, an Egyptian ruler who was disappointed by the small size of a vaunted reinforcement from his Spartan allies, is supposed to have commented “Parturient montes, nascitur ridiculus mus.” Or “Behold, the mountain has laboured, and has given birth to a ridiculous mouse.” To call this energy review Blair’s “ridiculus mus” would be overstating the case, but it contains m...

For the third time in three years a bunch of evil, sick and deluded extremists have murdered large numbers of innocent people, regardless of age, gender, colour or creed, by planting a wave of bombs on commuter trains. Nobody has claimed responsibility and as yet there is no proof of who is behind the barbaric murders of at least 183 people yesterday on trains around Bombay. The Indian security services suspect that the bombs may have been an attempt to derail peace talks with Kashmiri separatists. If the bombs were intended to worsen relations between India and Pakistan, it appears likely that they will fail: President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has strongly condemned the latest attacks, and a statement released by the Pakistani foreign ministry called them a "despicable act of terrorism." "Terrorism is the bane of our times and it must be condemned, rejected and countered effectively and comprehensively," the statement said. In my opinion anyone who disagrees wi...

I'm sure most Cumbrians, and everyone else with a local cottage hospital which has been under threat, were very pleased to hear Patricia Hewitt's announcement of a fund with £750 million to support community hospitals. It certainly sounded as though the message that more support for these hospitals is needed was getting through to the government and that action is being taken. Alas, like many of New Labour's announcements, there is less to this than meets the eye. The problem is that this new fund is purely for CAPITAL projects - e.g. one-off spending such as building new wards, purchase of major new items of equipment, etc. The funding shortfalls which are threatening our Community hospitals are in CURRENT expenditure - ongoing costs like wages, gas water & electricity bills, rates, and so on. There may and probably will be some instances where investment such as putting decent insulation into, or replacing, old buildings may reduce their running costs. But local heath...

Yesterday is the first anniversary of the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Like many people I took two minute’s of silence to remember the innocent people who were murdered a year ago. It is right that we should commemorate their deaths and the work of all the people, both from the emergency services and passers by who helped, who ensured that the death toll was not much higher. I do not for a moment criticise the formal ceremonies which took place yesterday. But perhaps the most important commemoration of all was that that the tube yesterday morning was as busy as usual. It is inevitable that people should feed some fear of becoming victims of another such attack. It is right that we should redouble our vigilance and look at how to minimise the risks. I think it was wrong of the government to refuse the calls for a public inquiry into whether anything could have been done better. But it is also important to put the risks of terrorism into their proper context relative to the other risk...

According to yesterday’s FT, “Gordon Brown will on Tuesday embark on a new drive to streamline Britain's cumbersome planning rules, seeking to speed up the time planners take to allow companies to develop land.” The article is headed “Brown in drive to streamline planning” – and apparently he will publish another piece of work by the UK’s leading advocate of putting concrete all over the South of England, economist Kate Barker. The cynical may assume from the fact that this is coming from Gordon Brown rather than the nominally responsible minister, Ruth Kelly, that this is just part of the Brown for PM campaign. If only I thought this were true – in fact the Treasury was the main driving force behind much of the pro-development pressure which came from the government while Prescott was in charge. But you have to ask, have these people learned absolutely nothing from the past few years ? Cut and paste the minister’s names and dates and this could easily be one of the press releases ...

After a week of fairly disappointing results on the sports field, including England's exit from the World Cup at the hands of Portugal, a country which is one of our oldest allies, many British spirits wer probably lifted by Andy Murray's superb performance at Wimbledon yesterday. It will be interesting to see how many of the politicians who were trying to climb on the England bandwagon now try to clamber onto Andy Murray's instead. Anyone who doesn't do tennis jargon should skip ahead two paragraphs for the translation, but for anyone who does follow tennis and was still drowning their sorrows after the England result, here is a recap of Murray's straight sets win against Roddick. I can't ever recall seeing a British tennis player take apart one of the best players in the world as comprehensively as Murray demolished Roddick yesterday. His victory in straight sets came against one of the most formidable servers in the history of tennis, and Roddick was not play...

I was pleased to learn this week that at least some farmers in Cumbria have had their Single Farm Payment money within the past fortnight. But why did it take so long ? Obviously it is very good news that the rural payments agency are belatedly pulling their finger out and the money is finally arriving. However, relief at the fact that this dire problem is at last being addressed should not blind us to the fact that it is disgracefully late. It should have been paid late last year. When other parts of the EU es ran into similar problems and their farmers were forced to scream for help, at least some member countries managed to pay the money by January. In Britain, for the first two months of this year, farming minister Lord Bach promised categorically that the money would be paid by the end of March. So the fact that it money was finally handed over in the latter part of June does not really constitute grounds for congratulation. It’s not as if the inland revenue and all the other peop...

David Cameron’s tactic for addressing some of the problems facing society by using persuasion is interesting, not least because can be used in opposition rather than just in government. Over the past couple of decades, whenever it is suggested that there is a problem, we have far too often moved straight to proposing new laws about them. Media panic about rottweilers and pit bull terriers - pass the dangerous dogs act. We observe some marginal health risk from beef on the bone – so the government bans it. Smoking is a filthy habit which damages people’s health – so more and more laws are brought in to restrict it, to such an extent that we are rapidly approaching the situation where smoking is more tightly restricted than many “soft” drugs. It goes on. We pass laws designed to restrict terrorists – then find that they can be used to arrest an octogenarian refugee from nazi germany who shouts “nonsense” at the Foreign Secretary or convict a peace protester who turns out to be too near p...

There are two excellent dance schools in Whitehaven. One of them, the Cowper School of Dance, put on a wonderful display called “Hot Shoes” last weekend for the Whitehaven Lions. There were a large number of acts involving every age group from very small children, including my son and daughter, to adults. In the past dancing was largely a mixed activity: sadly it is one of a many activities which no longer seem to have much support from boys. My son was one of only three boys, all very small, who took part last weekend. Perhaps this is partly a matter of parental support: when parents were invited to the dress rehearsal for “Hot Shoes” I only saw about half a dozen other fathers who were there (compared with scores of mums.) It’s only fair to qualify this comment by saying it was not reflected in the audience at the actual performances – there were plenty of dads and other male relatives at these, including the Sunday afternoon which partly clashed with the England v Ecuador match. In ...

And on the subject of Scotland and England ... Not long ago Scotland had some legitimate grievances against England. For example, it was a bad mistake to impose the Poll Tax on Scotland before it was introduced in England. But for the past eight years the boot has been on the other foot. It was totally outrageous for Scots MPs to impose top-up tuition fees on English students when the Scottish parliament had voted not to impose any equivalent top-up on their own constituents. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and the Scottish Affairs committee of the House of Commons, including Labour and even Scottish Nationalist MPs, are starting to recognise this. The present system is an unhappy half-way house between a centralised nation and a proper federal system, and is increasingly unsustainable. A few years ago, in the Northern Irish context, it was suggested that the principle of "equal citizenship" should apply between the different parts of the UK, and the present set up does not ac...

Can’t let the world cup go by without at least one supportive mention of England. I was originally going to combine it with a rare word of praise for Gordon Brown – but am no longer sure he fully deserves the praise I was originally going to give him. I have family connections with all five of the major components of the British isles, and would usually describe myself as British rather than English. My parents and grandparents have lived in England for three generations, so it would look silly to make a big thing of my Scots ancestors, but this doesn’t mean that I’m not proud of them or have no interest in that side of the family history. My ancestors on both the direct male line and the direct female line were Scots. So when, a couple of decades ago, Scotland made it into the world cup finals and England didn’t, supporting Scotland was an automatic reaction which required not a moment’s thought. Furthermore, while there may have been some, I didn’t know a single English football supp...

Am I the only person who is astonished that, just a few days after the Home Secretary himself described the department which he runs as not being fit for purpose, we offered the services of that department to Liberia, agreeing to take on one of their most difficult potential prisoners ? Last week Britain made the offer to Liberia that, if their former dictator Charles Taylor is convicted by the international tribunal where he is currently facing war crimes charges, we will provide a jail cell for him. African countries are nervous about jailing this man because they think he might be able to bribe someone to let him escape. I would not object to Britain offering to provide a jail cell for him if I was fully confident that we had sorted out our problems with the detention, appropriate relase, and tracking of convicted criminals. But do we really have complete confidence that we have our own difficulties sorted out? And if not, should we think twice about claiming to be able to deal wi...

Massive problems have been caused to many farmers in the rural areas of Cumbria, and much of the rest of the country, by delays in handing out the money to which they are entitled under the "Single Farm Payment" system. This replaces previous European Union farm support arrangements, and is managed by national governments rather than the European Commission. The over-complex system introduced by Margaret Beckett while she was farm minister has been a fiasco and even demonstrated that our own government is as capable of disastrous mismanagement as Brussels is. This week the BBC and the News and Star have been repeating extraordinary allegations of misconduct by staff at the Rural Payments Agency, which is responsible for paying the money. There is as yet no proof that this has anything to do with the delays in paying the farmers their money, but if there is any truth in the allegations it sounds as though staff have found something more interesting to pass the time than their...

This is Carers week. Clive Arnold, who has a regular blog on the Cumbria Newspaper "News and Star" site, has posted some very important points about the work done by those who care for family members and the help they are entitled to expect. I think this country owes a huge debt to carers. As Clive rightly points out, if they didn't spend an enormous amount of time and effort caring for their loved ones, the state would have to do it at incredible expense. Carers come in all shapes and sizes. In my own family several people devoted huge amounts of love, care and effort to looking after their parents or older siblings, sometimes up to the verge of their own old age or into it. Until I moved my office to Whitehaven a few days ago, I used to sit opposite a colleague down south who in addition to a full-time job was a registered carer for his disabled adult son. I could not avoid overhearing some of his telephone battles with petty officials in the fight to get decent support...

The vast majority of people in public life in Britain are honest, decent people who have stood for office at least partly to help other people or promote something they believe in. Most of us would be financially considerably better off if we devoted the time and money we spend on politics to other things. That applies to people of all mainstream political parties – Conservative, Labour, Lib/Dem, Scots & Welsh Nationalists, and Greens – and to most though not all of the fringe parties. Unfortunately the conduct of a minority of people in all political parties has convinced large sections of the public that no politicians can be trusted, and this in turn has had two damaging effects. The first is that maligning the integrity of your political opponents has become a routine part of politics. Sadly, nobody should stand for election to public office in the present climate unless you are prepared to cope with the possibility that at some stage you will be falsely accused of corruption. ...