Blogs are like buses.

This blog is intended to be a repository of my organised and considered thought. Consequently a month has gone by without my posting a thing. Between the festive season and the jetlag I haven’t really gotten my head above water. However it is now time to tidy up, wash the glitter off my face and get back to it.

As I sit by the fire, finishing the Christmas whisky and wondering what the new day might bring, there is a chance for reflection. Firstly, I regret not hearing any carols anywhere; I didn’t go to a carol service, but I like passing them in the street or listening to them from behind the front door (with the lights in the house off). I just didn’t hear any songs this time around. My mother and I sang ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ and the beautiful ‘Coventry Carol’ on the way back from the pub on Christmas Eve. It is for others to judge our performance. I played a few favourites on my mandolin, but I’m not ready for public performance. Maybe next year.

I am glad I was away for the last few months. I don’t do left-wing revolt and I was vexed by the student riots. The idea that you can have a massively expanded student population and pay little for it is ridiculous. People who want university to be cheap, free or grant assisted should campaign for a return to smaller numbers rather than urinating on Churchill or trying to mug Camilla Parker-Bowles in front of her defenceless husband. Meanwhile the alternatives to uni have become far more attractive. You are also less likely to study Applied Marxism on a one year vocational course. The real issue, the removal of the block grant, was obscured. I wonder if the extraordinary facility for studying Old Norse at Leeds will now have to be funded by charitable donations? We don’t have a culture of institutional funding through donation as they do in the States.

Guess there is going to be more unrest this year, and people are gearing up for the uproar over what might be the practical abolition of the NHS as we know it. The continual blurring of the public and private sector always looks to me like having the potential for being the worst of both worlds. And my concern is that old people are going to suffer the most because they are in many cases the least able to fight their corner. But bankrupting the nation by overspending is no answer. The money always has to come from the taxpayer, and it is a matter of how that money is managed. Presumably the consultant class will transfer itself to the new committees, or whatever they are going to be called, and suck up some budget, whilst portioning up the rest. Probably a good time to see if BUPA have got a sale on.

This year, while the cuts bite and the row rages, the failing EU economies will be forced to pay for the overall failure of EU economic policy. Nobody, apart from fusty conservatives, ever gets angry about the EU. Most people seem to view it as an inevitability. However, the same wrongheaded thinking that led to the Credit Crunch has led to massive economic instability in Europe. We, although not part of the Euro, have to pay for it as well. People are prepared to go out on the street to demonstrate in favour of public services. The same people usually support or accept the EU. But if Ireland’s economy is stretched out to snapping point by ‘tough love’ from the central bank combined with an inability to rescue itself by devaluation, how will Ireland pay for hospitals and schools?

There was an amazing story on the BBC website today. A gang of Green Activists have been in court over an attempted attack on a power station at Radcliffe-on-Sea. The big story is that the undercover policeman has turned on his handlers. He is wracked by guilt, and wants to testify in favour of the  activists. What is extraordinary, other than the coppers’ identification with the protesters, is the opinion of the  judge. The offenders were treated as if society considers ecological activism somehow more morally defensible than other reasons for protest, and the individuals were lauded for their responsible attitude towards the threat of CO2. The reduction of fines that the judge authorised made the whole thing laughable. How is it that an unproved hypothesis warrants moral superiority? But I recall similar statements made about the moral authority of Green Activists by a judge, and also with regard to protestors at the EDO complex outside Brighton. A justification for ‘Direct Action’, the motto of thugs.