Ingerland

4:32pm

You have to laugh at the sheer fantasy of it:

The Football Association has set England coach Fabio Capello the target of reaching at least the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup or Euro 2012. 

Maybe qualifying would be a more realistic target, eh, lads?

But fear not:

There are also plans to appoint a new performance director, who will work with Capello, not above him, Barwick, Under-21 boss Stuart Pearce and FA chairman Lord Triesman.

Phew. Where would the team be without a performance director?

UPDATE Fantastic comment below from Ross:

"The Football Association has set England coach Fabio Capello the target of reaching at least the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup or Euro 2012. "

Capello could achieve this easily but they should have added that they want him to do this 'whilst coaching England'.

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Is the BBC out of control? 

3:06pm

Via Centre Right, I've just seen this BBC advert:

Lord above. 
 
I know the BBC thinks of itself as being the ultimate arbiter of pretty much everything, with the divine right to act as it sees fit, but do the people behind this really think it appropriate to put out an ad with the specific purpose of frightening the bejesus out of the population and telling them who's boss? That in today's world, the BBC knows everything about you and will use that information?

Yes, of course databases exist. That's a big issue in its own right. But this is just plain sinister. And deliberately so.

Is the BBC out of control?

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How's Arabella's hunger strike going?

2:52pm

Got the munchies, yet, love?

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Gutting the legal system

1:19pm

Tim Worstall flags up just how ludicrous this story is. 

Here's the story:

A convicted drugs criminal has escaped an order to have up to £4.5 million of his assets confiscated because no legal aid barrister would take on the case.

More than 30 barristers from London, Leeds and Sheffield were approached to represent the offender, but refused because they felt the new fixed-rate legal aid fees of £175.25 per day does not justify the complex workload that would be involved.

And here's what it means:

[I]n their mad urge to gut the legal system (one of the things that only government can do and therefore must do) to save money to be spent on outreach workers (something that others than government can do and thus government need not do) they entirely screw themselves: for the lack of a few hundred pounds a day they lose the £1.5 million they were chasing.

Then there’s the funny leading to rage bit:

The offender, who has served a nine-month sentence for two drugs convictions, could not pay for the legal fees himself because his assets had been frozen.

Yup, you’re not allowed to use your own money to fund your own defense. Because the burden of proof is reversed here: they say it all came from drugs and it’s up to you to prove it isn’t. But since the assumptions is that it is indeed all drug money, you can’t use that to employ your own lawyers.

...And guess what children? They’re about to make it worse. The next stage of the law, currently being railroaded through Parliament, is that the confiscation of presumed to be drug related assets will take place upon arrest. Yes, really, upon arrest on drugs charges they will be able to take all of your money. So in the future you won’t even be able to use your own money to defend yourself on the criminal charges to do with drugs in the first place.

Now that’s really gutting the legal system, don’t you think? A deliberate method of negating your opportunity to employ a lawyer of your choice.

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More on Iran and Hillary

8:06am

Oliver Kamm links to (indeed, takes part in) a post on the Indie's Open House blog by Anthony Painter on Hillary Clinton's comments about Iran:

When asked on ABC News about what she would do if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, Hillary Clinton was explicit, “…we would be able to totally obliterate them and those people who run Iran need to know that.”

Forget the fact that the latest CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iran concludes that the Iranians have suspended their nuclear weapons programme.

Painter's post is woeful. Oliver rightly takes him to task for the basic error so many of his ilk make:

[T]he NIE's definition of what constituted Iran's nuclear programme was heavily circumscribed. In a footnote, the authors commented: 'For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.'

To draw conclusions about Iran's nuclear programme but explicitly leave out of the discussion Iran's uranium enrichment activities is some caveat. To refer to the enrichment facility at Natanz as "civil work" is question-begging. There is no need for that facility at Natanz or for the heavy-water plant at Arak - before a single reactor has come into service - if Iran's nuclear programme is intended for purely civil purposes. Other countries that have reactors, such as Sweden, don't seek the capability to enrich uranium, but buy fuel more cheaply on the open market.

But there's  a still more basic problem with his post. As Painter himself writes, the context of HRC's remark was this:

When asked on ABC News about what she would do if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, Hillary Clinton was explicit, “…we would be able to totally obliterate them and those people who run Iran need to know that.”

In other words, she wasn't saying the US would obliterate Iran, point. She was saying it would do so in response to a nuclear attack on Israel. Deterrence. 

But if Painter is right, and the entire notion of Iran having nuclear weapons is nonsense, then it won't be launching any nuclear attack on anyone. And so there'll be no US response.

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Idiots and paint

12:26pm

I've just seen the weirdest thing. I was buying some paint in the DIY shop when, out of nowhere, bright yellow paint started flying across the aisle. I was lucky: it hit my fingers, jeans and shoes but nothing else. Those near to the epicentre, as it were, were not so lucky: some people were covered from head to toe in paint.

It seems that some moron was trying to prize open the paint container (heaven knows why) and it slipped in his hand, crashing to the ground and covering everything near it. It's no wonder we share so much DNA with apes.

I've no idea what the poor people covered in paint will do. Forget about their clothes, which are ruined. How will they even get home?

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Out foxed

9:07am

BTW I couldn't agree more with Fraser:

Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. 

...The Tories badly need to hammer home this narrative – what I have called the “reign of error”. It’s happening to Greenspan in America already. Osborne is doing a fine job, but we need all the Shadow Cabinet rubbishing Brown’s record every chance they get, with the effortless and fluency which Fox managed today.

The contrast was overwhelming: tired, bumbling, patently false Brown - he clearly thinks the voters are a bunch of ungrateful idiots for daring to attack his government; and articulate, fresh and convincing Fox.

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They're doomed. Doomed.

8:41am

Sorry I've not been able to post since Friday. 

Albeit unintentionally, I've had to look at the election results with some distance. To state the obvious: it's an unmitigated disaster for Labour. Worse, it's not Labour per se which has been clobbered: it's Gordon Brown.

Those of us who long argued that, pace Meghnad Desai, Brown was put on the earth to show how good Tony Blair was, can say 'I told you so'. But that doesn't get anyone very far. What's striking now is that the evidence is clear, overwhelming even. Brown is unelectable, and so long as Labour sticks with him it is finished. Over. Buried. 

As for the idea that he needs to change: purrrrrlease. Brown can't change. He hasn't morphed into a different Brown as PM: he is exactly what he has always been: incompetent, over-rated and barely fit for office. There's no scope for change. There's just Brown, with all the defects inherent in that. I watched him on Marr and Boulton yesterday and it was car crash TV. The all-new smiley humble changed Brown is, if anything, even worse then the original robotic Brown, given how unconvincing and false the act is. My wife, who is far from parti pris in these things, said she was physically unable to carry on watching, so weird was the spectacle.

And yet for all that the key Labour figures realise their problem, they appear unwilling to act, leaving the incompetent waste of space in office and, in so doing, actively contributing to their own forthcoming fate. 

Do they want to lose? If you were presented with clear evidence that pursuing a certain course would bring disaster, would you not take immediate action to change course? You might not know what would be the best new course to take, but you'd be damn sure to try to work out an alternative. But no: this lot just rally round and plough on. What a shower.

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Our wonderful NHS

4:01pm

I'm sitting with my wife at the doctor's surgery. Her appointment was for 3 10. It's now 4, with no sign that she's anywhere near being seen.

The whole point of this post is that this casual contempt with which patients are treated is not remotely out of the ordinary. No one blinks an eyelid at an hour's delay; the receptionist certainly doesn't even think it worth mentioning, let alone apologising.

Let it be said again - it can never be said too often: the NHS is not merely grotesquely inefficient and the most ridiculous anachronism. It is also fundamentally immoral. Were we to have gone to my usual, private, GP, we'd have been treated not as a burden on the smooth running of the practice but as a customer who needs and deserves to be treated with respect. The time has long since come when everyone should be given the power of the purse string, and the NHS rebalanced to give power not to the doctor but the patient.

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I haven't a clue

3:55pm

A couple of people have asked me why I haven't given my forecast for the elections today: will it be Boris or Ken?

I am not in a pollster's office. I do not have any special access to opinion polling. I'm typing this in my study in Finchley. I am sitting with a (lovely) view of my garden. I've been out for a nice lunch with friends. Now I'm home again. 

How on earth do I have any special insight into what the result will be? 

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