Famine looms ........'they' tell us!

Now that the Green balloon of exaggeration, misinformation and doctored statistics has been popped, it is now time to turn the bodkin in the direction of another bunch of misleading wowsers, the population doomsayers who predict that an explosion in world population means that we will not be able to feed ourselves. Armageddon faces our descendants, they warn us.

 

Except that it is all tosh.

 

If the world is facing a population problem it is one of ‘less’, not ‘more’.

 

In 60 years the Total Fertility Rate has fallen from 4.95 to 2.36. The rate needed for a stable population is 2.1. so the world is scarcely reproducing itself at all, never mind burgeoning to starvation levels.

 

Most worrying is population decline in the most developed and productive countries, with 24 of the 27 EU nations showing negative growth. The one group to which this does not apply is the elderly, so we have the threat of a shrinking workforce having to support a swelling army of retirees requiring expensive pension, social and health benefits.

 

Four of the largest economies fall into this category: China, the US, Russia and Japan. Major EU economies facing the same trend include Germany, France and Italy.

 

As to projections of future world population, the present trend is for growth to flat-line with the current total population rising from 7 billion to 10 billion by 2100 and then levelling-out.

 

As for starvation, ‘not anytime soon’ sums it up.

 

Most of the world’s land surface that is suitable for agriculture is not cultivated. And we massively over-produce and trash the surplus. About 30% of world food production is wasted; most of it never leaves the farms but is simply thrown away. British food waste alone would feed 30 million people who are now under-nourished. About 40% of fruit and vegetables grown in Britain ends up as compost where it was grown.

 

Supermarkets feature heavily in the rogues’ gallery.

 

They grossly overstock and then entice people to buy more than they need by all kinds of blandishment and tricks. They regularly shift stock around so that customers have to search for their regular purchases and in doing so may be tempted to make impulse buys of stuff that they don’t really need Then there’s bogof; not a bargain  if you only need one of the item.

 

The ‘sell by’, ‘best before’, ‘use by’, ‘display until’ labels are a scam. They are not there for customer safety; their purpose is to lead you to believe that the product is safe and to throw it away if the date is passed after purchase. Of course, they give the game away by shifting some of the old stock to the ‘reduced’ display.

 

British households join them on the naughty step; they overbuy by around 25%, and waste more than 20% of the food they buy.

 

Famine? Gluttony and obesity are more likely.

 

 

 

 

 

The USA: the state we're in!

Yesterday, Hillary regaled one and all with her 11 hour grilling by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The Committee Chairman, Trey Gowdy, is as Rottweiler as can be found in the House of Representatives and he has been preparing for months to grill Hillary on her role in the disaster.

 

A week or so prior to the date set for Hillary's testimony, another Congressman, Kevin McCarthy, totally undermined the Gowdy's plan by glibly announcing that the Select Committee was established as a partisan effort to attack Hillary. Why McCarthy did this is not known, but it totally blew his chances to win the coveted Speaker of the House job.

 

You may recall that this position is open because its present occupant, John Boehner suddenly resigned. McCarthy was a shoe in until he opened his mouth and in so doing gave Hillary all the ammunition she needed to credibly assert that the Committee was a Republican effort to discredit her and thereby diminish her chances of winning the presidential race.

 

Interestingly, McCarthy was said to have been popular among his peers because he allegedly kept a mistress. As a result, he was subject to being blackmailed whenever one of his peers needed the Speaker's support. Anyway, McCarthy is out. The extreme right in the House will shed no tears over him as he is considered far too moderate for their tastes. Indeed, most Congressmen are, even Paul Ryan who now looks like he will get the job.

 

Ryan is a Republican from Wisconsin who is a model politician. He is highly esteemed by one and all as an honest, dedicated, principled and family oriented man who happens to be very bright and somewhat of a whiz kid at numbers. He was Mitt Romney's running mate in the last election which did him no harm even though Romney lost.

 

Ryan was reluctant to accept the Speaker's position for two well-known reasons.

 

First, he is a dedicated family man and found it difficult to commit to spending his weekends and holidays in Washington whipping the Republican Congressmen into order when he could have been at home in Wisconsin with his family. The other reason was that he saw no future in the position given the intransigence of the extreme right wing Congressmen and their being largely responsible for forcing out Boehner.

 

Indeed, our right wing Congressmen have played hell with the American political system over the past eight or so years by steadfastly refusing to compromise. They delayed finance bills and increases in spending limits on several occasions and much to the disgruntlement of the President, the Democrats, civil servants and staff.

 

A deal was reached whereby the right wing would vote on whether they would endorse Ryan and if that vote was strong enough in his favor, Ryan would accept. It was and he did, but I am sure that is not the end of the story, although Ryan will most probably be our next Speaker of the House of Representatives.

 

If the Republicans maintain their power in the House in 2016, he will probably be legislating under Hillary Clinton as POTUS.

 

 

We shall see as there is many a slip between cup and lip.

 

Refugees: where is the Church Militant?

My text for the day is ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’, inspired by the 84 bishops who have called upon the Prime Minister to admit not 20,000 refugees over the next five years but 50,000, with 20,000 over the next 2 years.

 

Here is what they wrote.

 

"We believe such is this country's great tradition of sanctuary and generosity of spirit that we could feasibly resettle at least 10,000 people a year for the next two years, rising to a minimum of 50,000 in total over the five year period you foresaw in your announcement. Such a number would bring us into line with comparable commitments made by other countries. It would be a meaningful and substantial response to the scale of human suffering we see daily."

 

The bishops made no mention of the plight of their co-religionists or any proposal to help them preferentially.

 

And yet Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. Over 100,000 Christians are  killed every year because of  their faith. Over 200 million Christians are denied fundamental human rights  Of the 100-200 million Christians at risk, the majority are  in Muslim-dominated countries. Of the world's three largest religions Christians are the most  persecuted with 80% of all acts of religious discrimination being directed at them.

 

We may be witnessing the biggest ‘ethnic cleansing’ since the Holocaust, as ancient Christian communities disappear from Islamic countries. The worst offenders are  Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

 

The work of Father Nour al Qusmusa, an Iraqi priest living in Jordan,  may be an example of what brave and dedicated clerics can achieve.

 

He went straight to the top and got agreement from King Abdullah to streamline the asylum process for Iraqi refugees. Caritas, the Catholic charity provides food and shelter. To date Father Nour has assisted 2,200 Christians to gain asylum in Jordan, although most want to emigrate to the UK, the US or Australia.

 

Compared with Father Nour’s resources, the assets of the Church of England are massive. It has property, money and manpower. It could shelter countless refugees in its redundant churches alone. But as they say in Suffolk ‘Talk’s cheap but money buys fat pigs! And don’t bother with the squatters in Calais. It transpires that they are overwhelmingly able-bodied young men who have never been in any danger – ‘economic’ migrants, not refugees at all.

 

So the big question for Their Graces is ‘What are you going to do about it? Apart from pontificate, that is.

 

 

‘Only nostalgic vandals would bring back grammar schools’.

A woman called Jemima Lewis wrote  a piece for the Telegraph with this heading.

 

I didn’t read it for two reasons.

 

The first is that the title says it all; it would be exactly what you would expect from the left-wing chattering classes who actually know little of what they pontificate.

 

The second is that nothing about her is in the public domain. Her biographic details are zero. But there is one certainty; she was not even born when grammar schools were abolished 50 years ago at the behest of a public school educated toff, Anthony Crosland, and it is possible that even her mother was just a tiny tot.

 

There was no educational case. It was simply a piece of  social engineering by the left to keep the lower orders in their place. After all, where would the future Labour voters come from if those clever kids from the council estates morphed into middle class?

 

So it must be a fair observation that this lady does not know what she is talking about.

 

I was a grammar school oik, as we were probably called by the public schools in the county, Stowe and Eton.(The Stowe boys’ uniform was an obligatory trilby hat and hacking jacket; one of its most famous pupils was David Niven – and more recently Richard Branson and Harry’s ex, Chelsy. Ours was  black and red blazer and cap, very non-U).

 

It was an ancient foundation dating back to 1423. The original building, small and in Norman architectural style, is still extant, in Buckingham town centre.  At least we had more pedigree than Stowe (founded in the 1920s).

 

Apart from tradition, was the school as good as today’s polemicists about grammars crack them up to be?

 

The school was very small by today’s standards; about 180 pupils over six forms, roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Therefore the small staff had to teach at every level from first form to University entrance. But comparisons of performance are scarcely possible because there were no grades in the GCE; you either passed or failed, and failures were pretty rare.

 

The basic qualification for entering a profession was usually 5 O levels and 3 A levels, presumably as benchmarks that you were sufficiently intelligent and educated to pass the professional exams. University entrance was mostly by competitive examination.

 

So how did we get on?

 

My recollection is that just about everyone in the 6th Form went to university, to one of the military academies, or into one of the learned professions via articles.

 

People like Ms Lewis make the quite extraordinary claim that the 11-plus exam favoured middleclass kids because their parents could afford extra tuition and so grammar schools favoured the bourgeoisie  and so are mostly middleclass institutions, leaving the less privileged to be kept in their place at the local ‘bog-standard’ comprehensive . This does not seem to fit with the claim that they turn working class kids into toffs. And the 11-plus was a test of intelligence, not of educational standard.

 

There may have been middleclass parents of my generation of pupils, but none to my knowledge. My classmate Tom, who went up to Oxford, was the son of the manager of the local Boots the Chemist and played golf, so perhaps he qualified. Waggers, who went to Cranwell, was the son of a small entrepreneur with a workshop that turned our bits and pieces for Electrolux, and there was a sprinkling of tenant farmers’ offspring.

 

The remainder came from working class backgrounds - farm labourers, navvies, bricklayers, the squire’s gamekeeper. Their homes were generally council houses or tied cottages.

 

Grammar schools could not guarantee success. But they did provide a certain equality of opportunity.

 

 

The smoke and mirrors referendum............

Now could be a good time for making some investments with Joe Coral or Mr. Ladbroke on the result of the Great Referendum. The odds on the Leavers must be shortening quickly after the publication of the leaders of the two teams.

 

The rogues gallery behind the ‘Stayers’ front-bench are Blair, Mandelson, Danny Alexander, and John Major, but they are not the team as such. For the ‘stayers’, first up is Jeremy Corbyn. He should be good for a few million votes – for the Leavers.

 

Then there’s Wee Eck himself. Well, we know his game. He reckons that if England votes for ’out’ and the mendicant member of the UK, Scotland, votes for ‘in’, independence will be virtually a forgone conclusion.

 

Next is Ken Clarke. Yes, he’s still alive.

 

Then Damien Green (who he?).

 

And finally there is Stuart Rose, the ex-head honcho at Marks & Sparks. And he was first to set out the stall for the ‘in’ crowd.     We now know that their main thrust will be the ’fear factor’; leaving will be a leap into the unknown. Like 1975, then. He says that Brexit would risk our prosperity, threaten our safety and reduce our influence in the world.

 

Really? Those countries that are not in the EU trade pretty successfully with it; non-members Switzerland and Norway are the two most prosperous countries in Europe, sixth and ninth in the World GDP PPP league table. Yet Britain has run a balance of trade deficit with the EU since day one; outside the EU the UK will be able to negotiate its own trade pacts with both Europe and the rest of the world, which it can’t do as a member. It will also be £10 billion per year better-off when we no longer have to pay our dues to Brussels – which have doubled in the last 7 years, never mind the additional transfer payments that will rocket when the semi-third world Balkans countries join the party.

 

In any case, the EU is now a low- or no-growth economy. It once accounted for 30% of world GDP. Not anymore. The share has now fallen to17%; the action is now in China, Asia, South America, and the Commonwealth.

 

As for security he’s ‘avin a larf! Only Britain and France have credible forces, and in any case security is not a matter for Brussels (yet). This is down to NATO. The defence spending by the UK is the highest of any EU member as a percentage of GDP, twice that of every country except France.

 

The ‘diminished world influence’ ploy has no legs. Outside the EU, Britain could join the WTO as a full member; have its own seat at the table on such international issues as climate change and pursue UK interests internationally without having to follow the Brussels line,

 

What His Lordship does not explain is whither ‘ever closer union’ is headed. If Hollande is to be taken at his word during his lively discussion with Farage it is towards a completely federal Europe (and, of course, the end of the nation-state; does he sincerely believe that the Eastern Europeans, having only recently thrown off the shackles of Moscow, will allow Brussels  to put them back on? ).

 

On immigration, he is on the record as wanting more Eastern Europeans to come here to work long hours for minimum wages.

 

The choice facing voters is not between the status quo and a leap in the dark, although the Stayers will insist that it is, using the  ‘fear factor’ to persuade them play safe. In reality, it is a choice between Britain being once more a self-governing nation-state and a satrap of a European federal superstate.

 

 

In the opposite corner we have –inevitably – Nigel Farage. He is accompanied by Nigel Lawson, the former Channel 4 boss Luke Johnson, and the admirable Kate Hoey, one of the few remaining members of the Commons who is a principled conviction politician of integrity.

 

 

But whichever side comes out on top, we can be certain that over the next few months we shall have to endure a cacophony of misinformation, doublespeak, prevarication, propaganda and porkies.

 

 

All smoke and mirrors!

 

 

 

 

The ins-and-outs of 'In or Out'......

At this time everything is going their way for the ‘We want our country back’ persuasion. Suddenly there is a new agenda as the EU begins to implode.

 

Until very recently ‘immigration’ was not a word to be uttered in smart circles, worse than  breaking wind.

 

Now the polls tell us that it is by far the issue of greatest concern to voters.

 

This happily coincides with the complete and utter chaos, disorganisation, and directionless ‘leadership’ from Brussels in relation to the immigration crisis. At the same time the Eurocrats are telling us that no, we will not be allowed to decide who comes to the UK and who cannot; that although we are fortunately a non-member of the Schengen pantomime nevertheless the ‘free movement of peoples’ (.e. benefits spongers) is Holy Writ and can never be changed.

 

 

Neither can we decide whether, when and to whom we can pay welfare money. (Of course, there has been no progress on the free movement of services, another EU shibboleth; this would be of benefit to Britain but not to the cosy cartels in Germany where services are closed-shops rather like the Guilds of old).

 

It is abundantly plain that this is all unsustainable and irretrievably doomed by ‘events’ dear boy, events!’.

 

But the EU panjandrums can’t give way without the whole rickety structure beginning to collapse.

 

And the economic arguments for staying, as peddled by the consortium of vested interests represented by the big boys’ club, the CBI, has more holes than a tramp’s vest.

 

The plain truth is that the Eurozone economy is a drag. The growth of GDP in the UK in the last five years has been more than double that of the EU. Incomes have risen at a faster rate than consumer spending. The current account deficit has fallen by nearly half. Productivity has risen at a record rate.

 

Across Europe economic performance has ranged from dire to disastrous. And yet when faced with an economic problem the nomenklatura could not even solve a crisis in the tiny economy of Greece; their interventions turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

 

Then there is the propaganda put about by the CBI that exit would mean the loss of the Eurozone market.

 

Pull the other one.

 

Britain has run a balance of trade deficit ever since 1975, and a large proportion of those so-called exports to the EU are in fact registered as EU imports when in fact they are simply using Rotterdam and Antwerp as entrepot for other destinations. Lately, there has been encouraging growth from net trade surplus, no thanks to Europe.

 

And are we seriously being led to believe that the Europeans would give up all that valuable trade with Britain out of pique?

 

But the EU would ensure peace in our time, would it not? That was the prime motivation, to so entwine Germany and France that they would no longer have a major war twice every century.

 

Well, that didn’t work. When they stuck their noses into the Ukraine, they provoked a Russian reaction that is now flowing over the Middle East and elsewhere. There is no telling as to where it will all end, but it is certain to be in tears.

 

 

Our leaders seem to be at a loss about what Putin is up to. The explanation is simple. His foray into Syria is designed to push up the price of oil as a counter to the EU’s economic warfare against his regime through sanctions aided and abetted by  Russia’s oil-producing rivals such as Saudi Arabia.

 

So if the EU cannot offer Britain security, border control and economic benefits what is left, besides such meddling as voting rights of convicts and suppression of e-cigarettes?

 

Brussels will have to get used to the inescapable fact that it is ‘my way or the highway’; unless the EU reverts to what was sold to the Brits in 1975 , a common market, it will last an even shorter time than that other totalitarian monster, the Soviet Union.

 

‘And what became of it at last? Quoth Little Peterkin.

‘Why, that I cannot tell’ said he,

But ‘twas a famous victory!’

 

For Brexit?

 

 

Where are Corbyn's 'poor'?

It would seem that no politician of the left can open his mouth without uttering the word ‘poverty’ as if our cities were in the grip of Dickensian dirt, disease, debauchery and deprivation (which may be the situation in Holloway after decades of Corbynite misrule but uncommon elsewhere).

 

However, there are international  benchmarks for poverty, so it may be worth running the rule over them to judge the real extent of poverty in the UK.

 

First up is malnutrition, showing severe underweight with a BMI of less than 16 (normal is 18.5 to 25). As you squeeze past the bulging buttocks of the mother with the obese 5-year old in the supermarket, have a peep in her shopping trolley. TV dinners, crisps, the inevitable six-pack; you may be forgiven for feeling that the problem in the UK is the exact opposite.

 

Then there is lack of access to clean water within a 30 minute round trip. In genuinely poor communities, fetching water takes up a large part of a woman’s day. No problem here although the prevalence of BO might suggest otherwise.

 

Next is lack of sanitation, with no access to a toilet of any kind (I once took a party of World Bank suits to inspect a pit latrine in a squatter  camp. They never came again!).

 

The fourth criterion is access to health care. In the case of women this means no treatment for serious illness, no antenatal care or care at birth of a child. For men, it means no treatment even for serious illness. Hardly NHS! Now here’s a funny thing. Smoking is reckoned to be the cause of 150,000 deaths annually. The heaviest smokers are in the lowest social classes. The average male manual worker who smokes will spend over £50 a week on cigarettes. There’s poverty for you!

 

Lack of shelter is a major problem in poor communities, ranging from people who don’t know where they are going to sleep that night to more than four people sharing a room or a house with no flooring.

 

Lack of education is another major indicator, but this does not mean the idlers and thickos who leave school at 16 with a reading age of six; it means never having been to school or being completely illiterate.

 

The final and least critical is lack of information; that is; no access to the media or the telephone. In the UK, the problem is more likely to be information overkill, with large parts of the populace almost permanently engrossed in an IPad or whatever.

 

The broad-brush criterion for poverty is an income of less than $1.35 a day. The UK  has a benefits cap of more than £60 a day.

 

So where are ‘your  poor, your huddled masses longing for a freebie’?