Tag Archives: Comment

This is as good as it’s going to get for Cameron – and he knows it

October 8, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Conservative conference, Conservative conference 2015, Conservatives, David Cameron, Main section, Opinion, Politics, Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, Top stories, UK newsdiana Stone

Dave is digging a big hole which he will fall into.

This article titled “This is as good as it’s going to get for Cameron – and he knows it” was written by Polly Toynbee, for The Guardian on Wednesday 7th October 2015 17.41 UTC

Things will never get better for David Cameron. That triumphal speech was his apex, the acme, the zenith of his career. How he gloried in that exit poll victory moment: “There was a moment when I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” This is as good as it gets.

Secretly he must wonder if he should quit right now in this ascendant, all-conquering moment. For his “national crusade” in a “turnaround decade” of “social reform” is a delusion, as his map marches the country in the opposite direction. Wherever he imagines the common ground or centre ground to be, he has no compass nor any intention of going there. The disconnect, the cognitive dissonance, between the words in his speech and his actions past and planned made for a dizzying acrobatic performance. Talk left, walk right. Listen to what he says, don’t look down at what he does.

Here was a reprise of “let the sun shine in” early Cameron, the hoodie-hugging, greenest ever, poverty-angst leader of what he again calls his “one nation, moderate, compassionate Conservative party”. He gives a stellar platform performance – but we now know to check the silver. None of his plans point to “great social reforms”. Next month’s spending review will reveal all we need to know about his true direction. Follow the money, not the words.

Cameron’s “all-out assault on poverty” was an all-out assault on reality too. Crocodile tears for the “scourge of poverty” and “the brick wall of opportunity” hardly tallies with monumental £12bn benefit cuts taking from the poorest. All week he has smiled and faced down facts in interviews challenging the £1,000 in tax credits taken from three million “hard-working” families. How calmly he asserts that higher wages will compensate, though he knows it barely covers a quarter of each household’s loss. Within hours the Resolution Foundation showed that on top of the extra 700,000 children in poverty the IFS predicts, this summer’s budget alone throws another 200,000 households into penury – all of them families in work. But Cameron never blenches.

Does language matter more than deeds in politics? Can clever words entirely obscure deeds? Initial reaction to his speech suggests it works, at first. Look at the wild talk of his moving on to the centre ground, his tanks on Labour lawns. But in the end reality bites. That’s why nothing will ever be better than this for Cameron. Voters will find Cameron’s “party of working people” is an illusion. “The NHS safe because of us” was just one of his boasts unwinding as he spoke.

What does he really believe? Is he an ideologue, a pragmatist or an opportunist? Unlike Margaret Thatcher, he’s no theorist with a battered copy of Hayek in his pocket. But his Tory generation inhaled from political infancy that unquestioning fixation that the state must wither, all forms of welfare be cut and public spending shrivel. By all his choices, we know Cameron is a fundamentalist – but how well his silver tongue disguises that from a nation unprepared for what his government has in store. A state at 35% of GDP is nowhere in his prospectus – and he will be gone before the country finds out what that really means.

In his early days, Cameron kept Harold Macmillan’s photo on his desk to signify his moderation, consensus and compassion. But he’s no Macmillan. That Tory prime minister’s contribution to the welfare state was 350,000 new council homes built every year. Cameron makes housing his flagship – but look at the difference. His legacy effectively ends social housing, though few will realise that’s what his “dramatic shift in housing policy” means. He promises to move “generation rent to generation buy” in new starter homes, but who exactly? Shelter says it’s only a few of the top third of earners.

His scheme gets private developers to build homes for sale, but only for those with a £100,000 deposit in London, £40,000 outside. These aren’t for the nurses, police and teachers who need them, let alone for the council house queues or the homeless. Average earners will be priced out in 58% of local authorities: Londoners need to be earning £70,000, or £50,000 earners elsewhere.

This reverses Macmillan’s era of social housing because to build them Cameron is abolishing affordable homes schemes, releasing developers from section 106 levies that paid for councils to build for cheaper homes. Add in his right to buy for housing association tenants and his forcing councils to sell off their vacant homes and that loses hundreds of thousands of social homes. His own Kensington and Chelsea will put 97% of council properties up for sale as they come vacant. No hope for most of the 5 million renters. “Security” is Cameron’s current watchword – “for families, for the country” – but there is no security for families forever on short private leases.

Social mobility, he said, is the lowest in the developed world. But the answer is “equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome”. That’s an old Conservative trope, conveniently denying any need for redistribution. How reasonable equal opportunity sounds: few want some soviet equaliser regardless of merit or effort. Eloquent in acknowledging some start far behind, he promises “everyone having the same shot”, but what’s missing is any recognition that there’s no fair shot for those start out too poor to live the same lives as their school mates. Education is the answer, he says, but he must know how few who start school without a decent home or income ever catch up with the rest. Behind the golden upbeat tones, he relies on people not knowing the facts that belie his words.

In Manchester we saw a leader sitting atop a smouldering volcano. The fires of the Euro referendum were quietly heating up under every power contender’s speech, their words carefully calibrated to let them jump for in or out, depending which way the party leans. And all the signs are of a party heading for Brexit. Cameron walked the tightrope in his speech, neither ready to “take what we’ve got and put up with it” nor “just walk away from the whole thing”. As a rehearsal for the battle to come, he was testing the ground, but up against Theresa May’s Powellite case for leaving the EU so as to bar immigration, the Cameron line feels perilously wobbly. He called the referendum, but he may not be able to hold back the molten tide he has unleashed.

For all his talk of loving every part of the nation, his legacy may be a disunited kingdom – politically more angrily divided than any time since Thatcher ignited the 1980s. This emollient speech will be forgotten if his epitaph names him as the man who took us out of Europe and thus lost Scotland and broke the Northern Ireland peace accord. He will not just have shrunk the state and left a dwindled public realm, but he will have lost the realm itself. He may look back on this speech as his finest hour – and a political lesson in how fine words never in the end disguise political deeds.

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Is there life on Mars? We’re finally starting to wonder again

October 2, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Mars, Nasa, Opinion, Science, Seth Shostak, Spacediana Stone

Yes please, lets hope so even if its just the odd microbe 🙂

This article titled “Is there life on Mars? We’re finally starting to wonder again” was written by Seth Shostak, for theguardian.com on Friday 2nd October 2015 11.41 UTC

The most interesting thing we wonder about Mars is this: does it house Martians? This week, some highly technical research touted during a Nasa press conference has given hope for an answer.

Mars is arguably more seductive than Mata Hari. For early astronomers, it was the only planet on which they could see surface features. More out of hope than reason, they compared these features to the topography of Earth. The two worlds were evidently similar, and few scientists doubted that the red planet was carpeted in biology.

In the 1970s, it became possible to send spacecraft to the surface of Mars, and Nasa enthusiastically did so. Two highly sophisticated, life-seeking landers were sent to the red planet in what was known as the Viking mission. The smart money wagered that these rocket-borne biology labs, once landed, would open their electronic eyes and behold Martians. The celebrated American scientist Carl Sagan had ventured: “Large organisms, possibly detectable by the Viking lander cameras, are not only possible on Mars; they may be favoured.”

What the cameras actually saw was a desiccated landscape of rock and sand. Nothing changed and nothing moved, save for windblown dust. There were no clear signs of life – even microbial life.

Their experiments done, the Viking landers slowly died in the bitter cold of Mars, and centuries of optimistic speculation died with them. The red planet was apparently a dead planet.

Water on Mars — ‘Scientists reported that the recurrent slope lineae were caused by briny, liquid water staining the dry sand.’ Photograph: Demotix Live News/Corbis

However, that disappointing verdict may be wrong. For decades, evidence has mounted that the environment of Mars used to be far more temperate than now. Its atmosphere was thicker, temperatures were warmer, and rivers, lakes and an ocean dotted its landscapes. Life could have sprung up and flourished.

The significance of Nasa’s press conference this week is that the descendants of any ancient life could still be at home on the planet, and within easy reach of a new generation of landers.

The agency presented news about dark streaks that appear on the walls of some Martian craters and cliffs during warm weather, known as recurrent slope lineae. Scientists reported that they were caused by briny, liquid water staining the dry sand. It’s reasonable to think that much of the water comes from aquifers, extensive underground reservoirs that huddle just below Mars’s dry surface.

Of course, this water would be useful for human expeditions to the red planet. But the truly revolutionary thing is that the lineae are signposts telling us where we should search for Martian natives. All we need do is land a robotic craft near one of these features, scoop up the salty mud, put it under a microscope, and check for anything that wiggles. Voila: life in space.

Indeed, this is such an appealing idea that it may sway Nasa’s approach to searching for life on Mars. After Viking, the space agency concluded that a hunt for biology in only a few places was expensive and inconclusive. It was misled by the fact that on Earth you can find life everywhere.

Consequently, Nasa shifted gears and began searching for habitats, such as the beds of ancient lakes, where it might find the fossil remains of life that is long gone. By looking for extinct rather than extant life, it could sample all of Martian geologic history.

Nasa fans call that approach “methodical”. But critics call it “too conservative”, and it’s now possible that the lineae story will prompt a reappraisal of this longstanding philosophy.

The lineae are like Xs on a treasure map, obvious places to look for life, and begging to be explored. And if Nasa doesn’t wish to send robots to these tantalising spots, some other organisation may.

Finding life in hidden reservoirs beneath the crimson sands of Mars would be revelatory. If the biochemistry of these microbes was the same as ours, we would suspect that rocks from long ago carried their ancestors to Earth. And that would mean – deep in our DNA – that we are Martians.

But if not, if we find life that’s unrelated to ours, then we’ll know of two worlds that have spawned biology – and will confront the unavoidable fact that the universe is teeming with living things.

Mars water

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Trident is useless. That’s why we must debate its renewal

September 28, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Defence policy, Labour, Labour conference, Labour conference 2015, Military, Nuclear weapons, Opinion, Politics, Richard Norton-Taylor, Trident, UK newsdiana Stone

I used to have nightmares about nuclear war. Being just able as a child of 6 to remember the Cuba missile crisis, my attitude too nukes has always been why on earth would you?

I have different nightmares now…

This article titled “Trident is useless. That’s why we must debate its renewal” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for theguardian.com on Monday 28th September 2015 15.48 UTC

It might be perfectly understandable why Labour party delegates decided to bottle out of a conference debate on Trident, Britain’s most powerful, most expensive, most irrelevant and most useless weapon. Yet the attempt to suppress debate on the utility of Britain’s nuclear arsenal is undemocratic. And a discussion is needed, desperately.

“The question of Trident renewal becomes a symbol for Britain in the world, for patriotism, or for enlightened foreign policy,” says Michael Clarke, director general of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank. He adds: “The one thing that politicians don’t address when they talk about Britain’s nuclear weapons is how they do, or don’t, actually figure in practical defence policy for the next 10 or 20 years. It is really very depressing.”

In his memoirs, Tony Blair said of Trident: “The expense is huge and the utility … non-existent in terms of military use.” He said he could clearly see the force of the “common sense and practical argument” against Trident, but in the end he thought that giving it up would be “too big a downgrading of our status as a nation”.

It is about symbols and sacred cows. The arguments are not simply ones of left versus right. In Brighton on Sunday, unions who are pro-Trident on employment grounds voted against a debate (though their skilled workforce could readily switch to building submarines or warships that are not armed with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles).

Crispin Blunt, the Tory chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, says: “It is no longer sensible to put aside the money [for Trident] for the size of nation we are. At what point is it no longer value for money for the UK? In my judgment we have reached that point.”

Max Hastings, a historian and respected commentator on military affairs, chastised the government in yesterday’s Sunday Times, accusing it of “indefensibly” ruling out of the debate on the forthcoming strategic defence and security review (SDSR) “the huge commitment to replace Trident”. (Hastings added that the navy’s new aircraft carriers might have provided jobs for Scottish shipyards but were “less relevant to Britain’s security needs than is the Great Pyramid”.)

“When you are short of money, you should put everything in the melting pot,” says Major General Patrick Cordingley, former commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats. He argues that Trident should not be ringfenced and the costs should be weighed up against new ships, planes, tanks and infantry. The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, made clear in a keynote speech to RUSI last week that the SDSR would, as he put it, “certainly be confirming the importance of a nuclear deterrent”. Yet he also made plain that no agreement had been reached on such urgent problems as the shortfall in the number and capabilities of RAF strike aircraft and skilled navy personnel. According to the latest MoD figures, the navy is short of 620 specialists, including submarine engineers who would be needed for Trident.

Costs of US F-35B Lightning II fighter jets planned for the carriers have soared and numbers have been drastically scaled back. The RAF is having to rely on 30-year-old Tornados against Isis fighters because its newest strike aircraft, the Typhoon, is not yet equipped with Brimstone missiles, the most accurate weapon in the RAF’s armoury.

Ministers say that Trident, estimated to cost £100bn over a 30-year lifespan, will be needed as merely as an insurance policy in an “uncertain” world. Yet would a similar argument ever be used for hospitals, or for any civil, as opposed to military, contingency?

Trident is supposed to be a deterrent: the point is, it is there so it would never be used. Yet its credibility depends on whether a rational British prime minister would ever take an independent decision to order Trident submarine commanders to launch a nuclear weapon. That belongs to the realm of fantasy.