Being seen to be green (again)

UK ministers are swapping gas-guzzling Jags for eco-friendly Toyotas. But is it all for show?

According to a story in today's Independent, ministers have followed the lead of Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez in ditching their flash rides for the somewhat more modest but much greener Toyota Prius. By combining electric and petrol engines, the Prius produces significantly less carbon dioxide per kilometre than other similar-sized cars.

'It's excellent', effused environment minister Elliot Morley. The cars will be symbolically driven at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in July, when climate change is on the agenda. Of course, the environmental impact of the eight cars so far delivered will be infintessimally small. But since nobody actually knows whether carbon emissions will cause substantial climate change in the future, symbolism is everything.

Driving an inferior car in order to show off your environmental awareness fits in very well with a culture, and a government, which emphasises responsible restraint in all things from the consumption of junk food to the handling of the economy. The fact that the purchase of these cars is almost certainly pointless is also perfectly in keeping with a government that thrives on empty gestures.

Ministers abandon Jaguars for a green and trendy Toyota, Independent (UK), 31 May 2005

Being seen to be green, by Rob Lyons

Can we have our cup back please?

Liverpool's astonishing turnaround in last night's Champions League final is only surpassed by the way the attitudes of politicians to football have changed since the last time Liverpool made the final.

That was back in 1985, when the match was played in the crumbling Heysel stadium in Brussels. A violent charge by Liverpool fans into a section of Juventus supporters resulted in 39 deaths as a wall collapsed and people were crushed. At the time there was already a media panic about football hooliganism, and after Heysel Margaret Thatcher was said to have wanted to ban football altogether. As it was, she forced England's Football Association to withdraw English teams from European competitions. The demonisation of football fans that followed led directly to the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at Sheffield's Hillsborough stadium four years later.

Now, no self-respecting politician can resist associating themselves with football success. 'Unbelievable. Incredible. Brilliant. The whole country is very proud of you', said Tony Blair in a message to the Liverpool team. Even the Turkish prime minister, whose country hosted the final, phoned up Blair to congratulate him.

Well, as a Liverpool fan, may I say on behalf of Reds supporters across the country, nay the world: please stop trying to bask in our glory! Proper football fans support their enemy's enemy. I can proudly say I was cheering on Bayern Munich when they played Man Utd in 1999. If Blair was a proper Newcastle fan, as he claims to be, he'd have been supporting Milan in the true parochial traditions of English football.

Victorious Reds return to England, BBC News, 26 May 2005

RIP Happy Hour

A group of Britain's biggest pub chains has decided to scrap 'happy hours' and other cheap drinks promotions, depriving us of the opportunity to get merry on the cheap. Cheers!

A spokesman for the British Beer and Pub Association, whose members run 32,000 pubs, told the BBC: 'There's been a lot of debate around binge drinking and antisocial behaviour, and happy hours have been highlighted as one of the reasons for this. That's why we decided to take this step.'

It's hardly a voluntary move, though. The drinks industry has been getting hammered by the government for some time now. It's all part of the drive to get us to 'drink responsibly' - which is something of an oxymoron. The whole point of drinking is to let go of our inhibitions and behave in a manner that might not be acceptable in other circumstances. The popular presentation of heavy drinking is of a vortex of uncontrolled lust and violence - the reality is that most people just have a good laugh, egg each other on to do daft things, and occasionally get laid.

Making drinks a bit more expensive is unlikely to have a major impact on the long-established British tradition of getting legless - it will just leave us with a bit less cash in our pockets the morning after. When will our po-faced, straight-laced politicians stop trying to run our lives and let us get on with the serious business of enjoying ourselves? Not so much 'happy hour' as 'oh, happy day'.

Pubs to scrap Happy Hour drinks, BBC News, 23 May 2005

A party in search of a story

Charles Kennedy believes the Lib Dems are a well-organised party with good policies, they just need a 'narrative'. Isn't he putting the cart before the horse?

In an interview in today's Guardian, the Lib Dem leader says: 'Whilst we had good and quite popular policies, like opposition to top-up fees and the war, there was perhaps a need for a more unified theme. We have got to find and fashion a narrative.' What he really means is, 'we have an organisation, now we need a reason to exist'.

This is a problem afflicting all the major political parties in Britain today. Political parties arose in different times as the expressions of conflicting social interests. The history of the Conservatives and Liberals can be traced back to battles over the royal succession in the late seventeenth century. The power and influence of each waxed and waned over the next 200 years over various issues, including electoral reform, free trade and Ireland - until the Liberals were comprehensively replaced by Labour in the early twentieth century.

The current rise of the Liberal Democrats is due to disaffection with the other two parties - but none has a clear and dynamic social base to work from. As a result, parties are groping around for a sense of purpose.

Still, if the Lib Dems are looking for a good story, there are plenty on offer. 'Great Expectations' might work in an ironic way for a party that was told by its then leader to 'prepare for government' in the 1980s, but hasn't even come close to power at Westminster since. 'The Go-Between' would suggest the height of Lib Dem expectations today, as coalition partners in a hung parliament - a role they're playing with typical mediocrity in Scotland already.

But they'll be keen to play down rumours of Charles Kennedy's vices - so nobody should suggest 'Whisky Galore!'.

Kennedy prepares for the next step, Guardian, 20 May 2005

Snapshot of a sick-minded society

London mayor Ken Livingstone and the Metropolitan Police have alerted the public to perverts taking photos of children in public places. Is this a 'thought crime'?

The concerns of the mayor and the police relate to the development of digital cameras and camera phones. According to Livingstone, if someone was discreetly snapping children in the park or on the street in the past, the authorities could be alerted when the films were submitted for processing. But now, such pictures can simply be downloaded to a computer and printed out at home. Apparently, there are 12 people awaiting trial for incidents last summer. Now the Met will use undercover operations and state-of-the-art technology to trap alleged paedophiles in the act.

The question is: what harm has been caused? It is, of course, wrong for children to be forced into sexual situations, or for parents to be harassed by some weirdo taking pictures of their kids in the park. But if someone photographs another person secretly in a public place, in what sense are they injured? These fears seem as irrational as the Native American idea that having your photo taken steals a part of your soul.

Even if people can be identified as taking these photos, it is unlikely that there will be anything illegal about the photos themselves. Courts could impose a sexual interpretation upon the pictures. By these counts, it's not what someone does that matters, it's not even what they think they are doing. It's what the courts think they are thinking that will count. If convictions follow, the question will be: who's got the sick mind? More to the point, what purpose is served by adding to the long list of parental fears?

Paedophile warning in London's parks, This is London, 17 May 2005

A toxic celeb campaign

Forget Celebrity Love Island - what about the toxic celebs starring in "I'm A Celebrity, Get It Out of Me"?

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Cooperative Bank have launched a chemicals awareness-raising campaign under that very title. They tested the blood of such stellar luminaries as former Page 3 girl Melinda Messenger and comedian David Baddiel, to demonstrate that dangerous manmade chemicals are all around us, and in our blood. They found anywhere between 10 and 30 'dangerous' chemicals in the blood samples taken, including banned pesticides, PCBs from electrical equipment, and flame-retardants found in furniture.

Former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies said, 'Everyday products in the home and the office contain hazardous man-made chemicals that harm wildlife, build up in our bodies and can interfere with our children's development.'

In reality, the findings of these tests are a measure of the ability of modern equipment to detect infintessimally small amounts of a substance in our bodies. Even if these substances were harmful, and their effects are invariably overstated, the quantities involved are so small that even cyanide would be harmless.

It is clear that these stars have never heard the old adage, 'the dose makes the poison'. But then, since when did celebs allow the fact that they don't know very much stand in the way of a profile-raising campaign?

I'm a celebrity, get it out of me!, WWF (UK), 16 May 2005

Risk, cancer and manmade chemicals, by Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold

A general rant about The West Wing

With the advent of DVD rental services online (I'm with Amazon but there are plenty to choose from), I've found that watching big chunky American TV is much better in big chunks. So in the last six weeks or so, I've watched two seasons of The West Wing.

The great thing is never having to wait for stories to unfold - you can watch them through to their conclusion in a couple of hours. You also get very caught up in the characters and their situation.

The frightening thing about The West Wing is that American policy seems to get decided by half-a-dozen people in the White House who have no contact with the real world, although they are all very bright, and highly driven. Frightening, because if that is true in fictional America, it's seems even truer of real-life Britain, where the Downing Street policy unit is made up of very bright, highly driven individuals sitting around, thinking up the future of the country. And all too frequently coming up with spirit-crushingly bad ideas in the process.

This leads to the horrible conclusion that the future of the country and any kind of progressive reform is in the hands of a bunch of middle-class Ivy Leaguers, who are all smart-arses with ironic humour but preppily geeky, too. The characters are, beneath the sarcasm, just so utterly full of themselves its appalling. And we are treated to all of their liberal prejudices (please: environmentalists are NOT left-wing - they're the most conservative people on the planet).

Thank God for the Republican lawyer, Ashley, so that there's somebody to argue with them. In an episode I've just watched, she makes the point that 'the more laws governments make, the more people's freedoms are taken away'. Shame Republicans seem also to be war-mongering conservatives whose main concern is to defend big business, or I might get to like them. And shame that the people in Downing Street don't sometimes thing "Hey, why don't we just leave things the way they are long enough for people on the ground to figure out how to make them work better."

Just when the worthiness of the White House staff is about to make me puke, I stop myself. These people think America is an idea worth defending. We British gave up on the national idea decades ago. In real-life, anti-Americanism is, of course, most prevalent in America. But it's nice to see some people who still think there's a big idea that's worth defending. America is a deeply flawed big idea, but since it usually gets attacked for all the wrong reasons, this aspect of the show which grates on me the most may also be one of its strengths.

A 'fat tax' in Motown

Could Detroit's hunger for revenue set a precedent for taxing fast food?

The city's mayor, Kwame Kirkpatrick, is considering adding a two per cent tax to food bought from fast-food joints. Detroit is $300million in debt and its capacity to raise money by other means is severely limited. Kirkpatrick insists that the move is primarily to balance the books, but there's no doubt that penalising people for eating 'junk' food is an easy thing to sell at the moment. Detroit was named America's fattest city in 2004 by Men's Health magazine, and there are plenty of people involved in public health who would like to see such a tax implemented. Not many salads get labelled as fast food - this is a 'fat tax' in all but name.

Yet, as recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed, the problem of obesity has been greatly overstated. A tax on fast food is unlikely to have much effect on public health. But the biggest problem with this plan is that it effectively targets those who make the 'wrong choices'. If you want to sit down in a restaurant that has waiter service, you're unlikely to be penalised for choosing chips. But if you like fast food, a particularly popular choice for those on low incomes, you'll be hit in the pocket.

This particular initiative may be of little practical consequence, but it sets an unwelcome precedent for the state to influence what you eat.

Detroit ponders fast-food tax for extra cash, USA Today, 8 May 2005

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

Listeners to BBC Radio 4's You and Yours have been voting for their favourite invention of the past 200 years. Their choice is a sad indictment of attitudes to technology today.

They voted for the bicycle, steering past such giants as the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, and the transistor. Even the two media involved in the vote (the radio and the internet) were roundly ignored. The bicycle won because of its simplicity, universality and environmental-friendliness.

As a cyclist, I find my bike very handy - but only as a pisspoor substitute for a proper transport system. The internal combustion engine, by contrast, has provided billions of people with the opportunity to travel long distances quickly and cheaply - and is the predominant means of moving goods, too. Has there ever been a society transformed by cycling? Hardly.

This is the problem. The spirit of our age is not to try to conquer natural barriers but to tip-toe across the surface of the planet, causing as little offence to nature as possible. It was bad enough when bicycles and wind-up radios were touted as pragmatic solutions for the developing world, when people there want so much more. For people in wealthy countries to show such enthusiasm for the bicycle shows how much backward ideas are being pedalled today.

Bicycle chosen as best invention, BBC News, 5 May 2005

When TINA means Tony

When Margaret Thatcher said 'There Is No Alternative', she could have been giving a prescient description of the current election campaign.

Tony Blair has started to receive widespread endorsement from the UK media. But has backing ever been given with such little enthusiasm? When Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee suggested to disaffected Labour voters that they begrudgingly vote for Blair while holding their noses, even promising to send clothes pegs to any readers requiring them, it seems she could have been speaking to the entire political class.

The Times (London) today suggests voting Labour, but hopes that Blair will have a much-reduced majority. The Economist's front page summed it up perfectly: 'There is no alternative (alas).'

The problem is that the political terrain is so narrow that on all the major issues the differences between the parties are administrative rather than political. All the parties supported the war on Iraq (although the Lib Dems would have preferred the UN's thumbs-up first); all the parties want to limit immigration, they simply disagree about how; all agree that major public services will continue to run pretty much as they do now. The refusal to turn the closure of MG Rover into a 'political football' was utterly symptomatic.

Given the choice between three mediocre platforms, it is no surprise that the movers and shakers of British society have despondently decided 'better the devil you know'. Let's hope Toynbee has a good supply of clothes pegs.

There is no alternative (alas), The Economist, 28 April 2005