CO2 Emissions By Airlines/European Trains

 General  No Responses »
Jan 052007
 

The Uk government this morning laid into the airline industry for being environmentally irresponsible. I don’t know whether this is fair or not (although I lean towards it being fair given how airlines campaign against air fuel taxes and other such things that might affect their bottom line), but there is something daft about how we all travel on our holidays using airplanes.

Of course they are very convenient and for some distant destinations there is no real alternative. But certainly for short-haul flights, it does seem rather peculiar that we insist on travelling by shoving an immense amount of weight upwards using fossil fuels when it would seem that it should be possible to travel along the ground far more efficiently (and with the possibility of using less environmentally damaging fuels).

The obvious alternative for short-haul flights is the train, so why don’t we ? Well, it is quite possibly convenience. For my own travels in Europe (rather limited) I have looked at the possibility of going via train, but ended up in the air for convenience. Not that air travel is that convenient, but it does seem so compared with train travel.

For instance, travelling from my home town to Pamplona in Spain involves 4 trains including a trip on the Paris metro. Hardly convenient when carrying large amounts of luggage! Changing trains in the same station is bad enough, but changing stations is a nightmare! Especially if you are worried about missing your connection.

Ideally it wouldn’t be necessary to change at all, but I can’t see being able to catch a direct train from my home town to Pamplona even if there was just one a week! However I think that train companies could invest in making more direct trains possible, or even ensuring that someone making a difficult transfer is guided on their way (imagine carrying a sign saying “Here For Guide to Station X”).

The train companies could also try a little harder for online information. Finding information on European train journeys is not always easy, and when you do you can often find that you can’t book online, or you have to book different legs of the journey in different places. Make it easier please!

More generally we need to consider ways of making our transport needs more environmentally friendly. Not just by punishing bad choices (taxing air travel), but by using the carrot as well … making train travel cheaper and easier. For longer journeys, why not try re-introduce airships ? At the very least these would be a good option for replacing air-freight … not quite as fast, but a good deal quicker than by sea. And as someone who has experience of tracking packages shipped internationally, I can say that the actual time in the air is usually a small percentage of the total travel time.

Honours For Cash ? Why Not ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 142006
 

We have a long running issue in the UK with honours allegedly being exchanged for cash contributions to certain political parties. This is hardly a new thing, and has been regularly repeated throughout history. And the original “Lords” certainly needed plenty of cash to maintain their position … it is rarely mentioned, but honours have been removed when a Lord lost too much money.

Personally I suspect that it has always been the case that if you were careful and ‘helpful’ to the party in power, it has always been possible to exchange your surplus cash for an honour.

So why not make it official ? Making honours something you can buy will stop all the backdoor deals that probably go on in exchange for honours.

Make someone who wants to sit in the House of Lords, pay up £5 million. Of that, £3 million goes either to the political party of their choice, or into the general tax funds; £1 million goes towards the cost of maintaining the Lords.

The final £1 million goes to a random person selected from the electoral register, gets a title, and must sit in the House of Lords. They could probably do with a salary as well (which is where the ‘maintenance’ comes in).

This kills two birds with one stone … takes the sleaze out of the honours system, and helps counter-balance the tendency of the Lords to be weighed down with establishment cronies. It tastes better to me than the idea of making the House of Lords just another house full of politicians … whilst the old Lords packed full of establishment cronies is a pretty bad thing, one thing that is good about it, is the relative freedom from party politics. And adding some good old common sense from the common people to keep the excesses of the politicians in check is worth trying.

English Racial Purity

 General  No Responses »
Dec 132006
 

You often find the far right making ridiculous claims about the virtues of the ‘anglo-saxon’ race and assuming that the modern English people share those virtues. They use this as a justification for being hostile to modern immigrants as though the English race is something special that needs protecting. It is curious that these people are so ignorant of the history of the English people given they are so proud of it.

Nothing wrong with being proud of being English and of being proud of English history … I’m both. But please lets put to rest this idea that we English have any kind of racial purity.

The name for these collected islands is “Britain” which originates from the original “Brython” being the Celtic name for these islands. For many centuries, the Celts had these misty isles to themselves, but then the Romans arrived and stayed for a while. Of course it was not only Romans who came but many people from all over Western Europe who had some reason or another to visit our islands. Then they left, except of course they did not really … at the very least they left many reminders of their visit, including not only Roman civilisation (which many of the Celts readily adopted and modified) but intermarriage is never as rare as people think.

We mistakenly believe that all the Celts up sticks and moved to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany once the Angles and Saxons started arriving, however that is very unlikely. Sure many Celts moved to those places, but most probably stayed right where they were and stayed peasants under different landlords.

The concept that the ‘anglo-saxons’ were a single people is similarly mistaken … they were Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (at least … we do not know for sure that there were not others as the Romano-Celts had tried hiring mercenaries from wherever they could find them and many of those stayed). Although the three named tribes were probably pretty close, they were still distinct people.

Then of course we had the Vikings, raiding, raping, and eventually settling. And then the Normans (of course being Vikings who had settled in Normandy) turned up and threw the Anglo-Saxon royalty out on their ear.

Then far more recently we had a world empire (by far the largest the world has ever seen) where we had people from all over the world visiting, staying, and intermingling.

These are just the big waves of immigration. Many smaller waves of immigration have happened throughout our history. Almost everybody in England will probably have a mixture of Celtic, Anglo, Saxon, and Viking blood with a small pinch from almost anywhere.

Channel 4 recently had a TV programme about DNA testing of a random sample of English people to test what their ancestry was … and the results indicated that most had very mixed backgrounds. Not really much of a surprise given our history.

The idea that the English have any kind of racial purity is ridiculous and that is a good thing. We should celebrate that we are a mongrel race, because that is what we are and if we have any kind of greatness it is because it is what we are. It is our mixture of backgrounds, and influences from all over the world that has given us greatness.

So if anything modern immigration is a good thing because it gives the English people more of what made us great.

Prostitution And The Ipswich Serial Killer

 General  No Responses »
Dec 132006
 

There is currently what appears to be a serial killer on the loose (hopefully that is out of date before I finish writing this) in the Ipswich area targeting prostitutes. Why prostitutes ? Who knows what goes through the mind of a deranged killer, but one possibility is that prostitutes are relatively easy targets.

Frankly the current laws on prostitution in the UK are creating this situation. Whilst prostitution is not in itself illegal (something that many do not realise), the UK does seem to go out of the way to make prostitution as dangerous as possible. Because brothels are illegal, prostitutes are driven onto the streets (except of course for illegal brothels where women or men are kept as sex slaves); because soliciting for trade is illegal prostitutes have to keep their activities relatively discreet making some measure of safety by formalising things more difficult.

The moral minority who want to get rid of prostitution should realise that the attempt to get rid of prostitution by legal sanction is a complete failure. Whilst there are still women desperate enough to do almost anything to get money … frequently to feed a drug habit, prostitution will survive no matter how dangerous it becomes. And using the law to make a serial killer’s job easier is less moral than prostitution itself.

Ideally brothels should be legalised and sited in locations of existing late night activity … where nightclubs are located. Prostitutes should be encouraged to form worker’s co-operatives to run these brothels and the brothels should be inspected regularly. Not only would this make it far more difficult for a serial killer to prey on prostitutes, but would allow additional services for prostitutes … drug rehabilitation publicity and help for example. Legal brothels would also make it far easier to crack down on the kind of places that keep sex slaves … itself something that is well worth making a few sacrifices to stop.

I would far rather live next door to a brothel than make women work the streets and allow sex slavery to continue, and no I don’t visit prostitutes.

At the very least it is time for a brothel in Ipswich whilst this serial killer is still free … asking prostitutes to stop working for a while is not practical unless we are going to take care of their addiction to drugs at the same time!

Slavery

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 272006
 

The UK prime minister has just released a ‘statement of regret’ for Britain’s participation in the slave trade which is fair enough … after all slavery was and continues to be a crime against humanity. Some are calling for him to go further and issue a full apology and hand out reparations, which is where things get a little tricky.

The history of slavery is a little more complicated than just excessively greedy British merchants sailing to Africa, seizing millions of Africans and dragging them across the Atlantic to live and die in atrocious conditions. For a start, many of those merchants bought their slaves from native slave traders who had been in business for many years already.

In Africa it was common for African tribes or nations to enslave prisoners of war (a common practice in many other parts of the world) and sell those slaves on to slave traders who would them take them East or later West for resale. As many if not more slaves were sold East to Arab slave traders as were sold West to European slave traders.

In addition, the pirates of North Africa had their own slave trade by seizing Europeans from sea or land and selling them into slavery in their own markets. Whilst not of the same scale as the outgoing trade from Africa, it still counts as a crime against humanity for each of the estimated 1.5 million victims. Including a number of US citizens … the Barbary Pirate attacks on US ships was the chief reason why the US Navy was started.

In fact slavery or similar states (serfdom, enforced contractual slavery, etc) has been so widespread that there are very few parts of the world that did not have slavery at some point in the past, and probably very few of us who do not have slaves as ancestors.

So when we talk of reparations for the crime of slavery, who should pay ? And who should be paid ? It is not an easy question to answer. Of course Britain is included amongst the group of debtors, but do we get credit for the amount of efforts Britain made to abolish the slave trade ? And what about the other slave traders … other Europeans, Arabs, and Africans ?

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