Time to Go

Dead Man Walking

The general consensus seems to be that Iain Blair (I won't use an honorific that he seems so unworthy of) will continue to inspire diminishing confidence in the Metropolitan police.

As I've posted elsewhere I have more than a little sympathy for the Met on the specific issue of the health and safety prosecution; health and safety legislation and the defence of the realm against terrorism do not mix, period. Civil liberties must be balanced against the needs for terror legislation, health and safety is not worthy of the same consideration in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I have no such sympathy for Blair. Watching him over the last few days I've seen a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. When I hear him speak, I hear all the arrogance of his Labour masters, but when I look in his eyes and at his general demeanour I see a rabbit in the headlights, a man who knows he has blown it.

It has been truly appalling to hear Jacqui Smith's unsupported claims that Blair enjoys public support, while the best evidence available, the body elected to represent London has spoken otherwise. There's not much she could do I suspect, even if she was inclined to hang Blair out to dry. After all he is simply following Labour's new orthodoxy that acts of appalling mismanagement, far from being a a career limiting matters, should in fact offer job security under the mantra of the 'cleaning up your own mess' principle. It's understandable when you look at the fate of Smith's predecessors why she is so keen to endorse this line of thinking. Many heard the distinctive sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped when she was appointed to her current post and let's be honest, the best spin you can put on her tenure so far is encapsulated in the famous acronym SNAFU.

The most offensive aspect of Smith's piss-poor handling of the whole affair is her petulant whinging about those who call for his resignation. Time and type she, and her acolytes make the claim of 'playing politics' with the fight against terrorism. Blair's appointment was one of the political to the police's top job in recent years and her defence of him, against all decency, is even more politically motivated. If incompetency is no bar to high office in the Labour party of today, hypocrisy never has been. Most of Blair's opponents have had issues about his suitability for the job for a long time and for Smith to expect them to turn a blind eye to his latest misdeeds, simply because there is a tenuous link to terrorism, is frankly ridiculous.

The only redeeming feature is that Blair and Smith now are to a significant extent political Siamese Twins. Smith must be a very nervous woman. Blair can't really afford to make any more mistakes, but on his track record the next cock-up can't be far away. When it comes, Smith knows she will be receiving the dreaded message of 'full confidence' from the Prime Minster that announces to the world that the remaining span of her ministerial career can now be measured in days.

But back to Blair, a phrase often heard these days, albeit about a different Blair. It is perhaps for other offences that need to be taken into consideration that I would like to see the back of Blair, but there is in the whole de Menezes affair one solitary fact that should in of itself mark the end of his time at the top, the issue of his obstruction of the IPCC investigation. As reported in the Guardian:

Just after the shooting on July 22 2005, Sir Ian wrote to the home secretary saying he feared an independent investigation could jeopardise lives. His plea was rejected as the law required the IPCC to investigate any police shooting.

Source: The Guardian

So, there it is, a requirement in law that the IPCC investigate any police shooting and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police attempted to incite the Home Secretary of the time to break that law. I always thought that incitement of another to break the law was itself an offence, even if it isn't, it is a profoundly unethical thing to do. As for Blair's reasoning for asking for the law he is bound to uphold to be broken, does it sound even vaguely plausible?

Either way Blair is unfit to be part of the police service, let alone to lead it. Almost everyone seems to agree that he is damaged and at times like this we cannot afford to have a damaged top cop. With stories such as those about potential ECJ action likely to run and run the damage will continue as long as he remains in post. I might enjoy the discomfort it causes to the current government, Brown, who seems to be pulling a bit of a Macavity on the issue, apart, but this is two important to wish to see the open wound undressed.

For God's sake, go. A tritely decent man would have done so a long time ago, even a moderately self-aware one would have done so yesterday.

Lines of Thought

One of the hazards of working from home is that you do on occasion expose yourself to daytime TV. It's one of those things that does make me sceptical about the BBC's oft repeated claims to be the last bastion of 'quality' TV, but occasionally you do catch the odd gem.

So here, in tribute to Private Eye's Dumb Britain feature, is a snippet from today's Weakest Link:

Ann Robinson: What 'T' is a gland at the rear of the mouth, often removed in childhood.

Contestant: The Throat.

Source: The Weakest Link (8th November 2007)

Now I've encountered a few kids who I think would benefit from a thoatectomy, but...

Update, early hours: Yes, it is embarrassing to f*** up the title of a posting like this, OK? Most of my 'lines of thought' are polluted with 'lines of though', so maybe it wasn't such a bad title anyway.

Mind the Gap

Next sucker for punishment

Having got used to a lifetime of nuanced meanings of statements by political parties it is easy to become somewhat of a cynic.

I don't have the instinctive distrust that many natural Conservatives have of the Lib Dems.

True they do have their beard and sandal brigade, but to be honest I'm not sure they exist in any greater number than Bufton-Tufton hanging and flogging Tories. They have some ridiculous policies on taxation but they will never get to implement them so they don't scare me. They have a naievety on matters European that beggars belief, other than in the European Parliament where naievety gives way disingenuity but that is hardly a problem unique to the Lib Dems. Their "we like to talk positivly not just slag off the opposition unlike the other two sets of pricks" line is clearly internally hypocritical, but on the scale of political hypocrisies it is small beer. Their ability to sell wholy incompatible story lines in different local situations is annoying, but I guess there has to be some kind of edge to being small to the point of irrelavancy.

The real role for Lib Dems

Electorally, of course, they must fought as the 'NuLab Lite' they are, but for all that I value those times they make an occasional return to classically liberal, small state values. I've no idea how they square this with much of their stated policy objectives, but they do sometimes act as the Jiminy Cricket of the political establishment, sitting on the shoulder of those of our elected representitives, reminding them that just because the state, on occasion, can do does not automatically mean that by implication the state should do.

It is the espousal of these values, consistantly and unambiguously in recent years, by the Conservatives of David Cameron that has made me start to dabble with the idea of rejoining the party. I reject utterly the whining of some Lib Dems that it is some sort of marriage of convenience. To a modern conservative these values are as natural as breathing.

I'll admit that on occasion the Lib Dems do fall on the side of the angels first, but anyone who has listened to the likes of David Davies on ID cards cannot in their hearts truly believe that their opposition to most of the autoritarian claptrap that has emerged from the Labour government in the last decade is anything other than sincere and heartfelt. In fact, sensible Lib Dems should really be considering whether, in the very likely situation that the next general election results in a hung Parliament, their instinctive anti-Tory bile may leave them having to defend the indefensible.

It is then, to reciprocate the general spirit of the Lib Dem's attitude to Conservative pronouncements in this arena, that I comment on Nick Cleggs comments to the Guardian yesterday:

The Liberal Democrats today condemned the policy of holding children's DNA profiles "often without parental consent", as government figures showed almost 150,000 under-16s were on the national database.

The Lib Dem shadow home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, described the policy as "disturbing".

"Thousands of these children will have been found guilty of no crime, yet samples of their DNA will remain on file for life.

"The disturbing and illiberal policy of adding a child's most personal information to a massive government computer system, simply on the grounds of an accusation, must stop immediately.

Source: The Guardian

I take it therefore that Lib Dem policy is that it is perfectly fine to harvest the DNA of innocent adults then?

If You Don't Ask...

...you don't get.

Today is a great day in the Village marking, as it does the arrival of free wireless Internet access in the Base Camp. No more need I be subjected to the highly variable temperament of Shrek's occasionally evil twin brother who runs the Mother Ship, should I fancy blogging over aseveral pints of Guinness.

I'm chalking it up as a personal victory. I might have, erm...slightly exaggerated the number of regular Internet users at the competing hostelry to the manager here or rather forgotten to mention that most of them were the kitchen staff. Perhaps too, I might be somewhat more familiar with the provenance of some of the e-mail addresses of those suggesting the facility on the pub chain's corporate web site's feedback page than I really should be.

For all of that I feel I've done a valuable service in doing my bit to see that the good burghers of the Village are provided with such a service in an environment free from the Toxic One.

Up in Smoke

In need of an update

Bonfire night hasn't ever had the same appeal since my father bought a dodgy batch of fireworks that fell of the back of a lorry a few years ago. Once you've seen an oversized rocket doing a mid air U-turn a couple of seconds after lift off and somehow fitting through the narrowest of re-entry windows (in this case a patio door opened only to a ventilation setting) and explode in the family lounge nothing else will quite match the excitement.

It's that whiff of gunpowder and controlled danger that I've always liked and I desperately hope the health and safety zealots fail in their annual whining for yet more draconian restrictions. They don't seem to publicise the annual injury toll on TV news outlets anymore, which is probably a sign that the numbers are becoming fairly small and un-newsworthy, but if true that would not deflect the zero risk brigade from their crusade.

There have also been the usual questions raised about the appropriateness of an annual celebration of Catholic burning from the usual suspects of political correctness as well as from more considered sources. I've got no particular views on Catholicism one way of the other, but I am inclined to believe that it is one area where perhaps we could include a little more diversity. A pub conversation last night covered some potential candidates to replace the historical Guido Fawkes, so I have now come up with my considered top 10. I've tried to stick to just a single victim from any given sphere or institution, otherwise I'd have just been able to cut and paste from a list of members of the current cabinet.

So here goes then…my top 10 for the bonfire kindled, of course with the entire print run (if that is sufficient) of The Independent, in effigy:

10 - Jonathan Davies
Davies is a fine rugby player in both codes of the codes, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both games. That said, the Welsh accent can be a beautiful thing, but his isn't. If some digibox offers a 'mute Davies commentary' feature I will be out to buy one in a second.

9 - Jose Manuel Barroso
I was tempted to include two people from the commission so that, in EU style, it would be possible to satisfy the sensitivities of those both in Brussels and Strasbourg. In my opinion the more common hate figures of the Eurosceptic movement, such as Santer and Delors at least had a degree of honesty of what their ultimate goal was, even if they were not so open about how they were achieving it. Some may say that Barroso is just the EU village idiot and unworthy of the accolade, but I'd love to see him go up in his Napoleonic bicorn hat.

8 - The Poison Dwarf
Ok, a bit parochial. Those outside the Village will just have to trust me when I say that never before in the field of pub bores has so little knowledge been expounded so long and inaccurately to so many.

7 - Kate Moss
OK, it wouldn't add much to the blaze, but the Kate Moss effigy is there as a symbolic representation of British Tabloid culture at its worst. The mention of her name in the broadcast media used to be a cue that all the serious news had come to an end and you could switch off and go and do something else, now it's likely to somewhere up in the top three stories at some point in any given week.

6 - Quentin Davies MP
We have far too large a legislature for a country of our size so the back benchers must take their share of the cuts as well as the cabinet. Not only would Davies' oily bulk make up for Moss, but as people at least since the days of Dante have known, there is a special circle in hell reserved for traitorous scum. I suspect there are still plenty of his newfound colleagues that would help me drag his heavy effigy to the top of the bonfire.

5 - Richard Corbett MEP
The smug grin that the deputy leader of the Labour MEPs has worn since his wish to have the desires of the British People extinguished seems to have been granted is truly revolting. The stupefying dishonesty of his attempts to justify the most politically dishonest act of my lifetime are offensive in the extreme. His fervent hope that the gradual stripping away of real democratic control from the general public will continue is reason enough to give him a portent of what generally happens when self selecting elites scorn the people, in seeing his effigy meet the same kind of sticky end that ultimately befell many of his political forebears.

4 - Robert Mugabe
It's a rare person who can unite a vast swathe of the political spectrum in universal loathing. There are others whose leadership has turned their country into a complete mess, but so often it can be attributed to an obsession with failed and discredited ideologies. With Mugabe I'm not sure I could even credit a plea of insanity; I believe he knows what he is doing is wrong and where he is leading his nation but these issues are small beer to him in comparison to his desire for unfettered power and wealth for his friends and himself.

3 - Lord "I'll never accept a peerage" Kinnock
Kinnock becomes the peer for the pyre on many counts. At least seeing the Kinnock effigy burn would be a more upbeat experience than some of the others where the frustration that in a civilised society we cannot really burn the person depicted would be a bit of dampener. Just as traditional bonfire festivities celebrate, to an extent, an event that never came to pass, so too would the roasting of this trough pig's effigy be a celebration that he never actually became Prime Minister.

2 - Sir Ian Blair
Had this particular Blair done a job that had inspired confidence in anybody outside left wing political circles then I would have been defending him to the hilt over the recent ridiculous Health and Safety conviction for the Met. In truth though he has being doing an important job badly for several years now with an astonishing disregard to the damage he is doing to the image of his forceservice.

1 - Gordon Brown
Well, it had to be, didn't it? If I'm only going to burn one member of the cabinet in effigy it has to be the top man. I understand he has another in his series of books on courage about to hit the shelves. It's the only way he will ever see his name on the cover of a book on that subject. Utterly worthless.

I know there are so many other worthy candidates but it's a start and we do have to consider our carbon footprint.

Idle Speculation

One of the bad things about being an insomniac is that occasionally your newsfeed reader beeps in the early hours and you roll over and read the article, intend to comment on it in the morning, but by the time you wake up and read the edited version the following day it has lost its potency.

There are those who know how Google caching works and how much confidence you can place upon it, but I am not amongst them so all I can offer is a straight cut and paste directly from the version of the BBC News Online story as it currently reads.

I'm sure that when I wake up tomorrow it will read somewhat differently, but I'll be commenting on the original. I can't comment on Powell to any great degree, he was before my time, but do I struggle to find anything in the 'immigration is not an issue of race' line that would have offended Hague, Howard or Thatcher. This is something that seems to have been a very sensible Tory mantra as far back as my active political memory extends. 'The Labour Party say he's black, we say he is British' was not a Cameron line, the party has being trying to deracialise these questions for a decade or more in the face of opposition from those parties who willingly play the race card for their own advancement, Labour and BNP alike.

It would be easy to have a go at the likes of Trevor Phillips, as close as he has been to the attitudes of the orthodox left in years gone by, but it is that background that makes what he says, for all his misunderstandings, so valuable.

Cameron hailed over immigration

The head of the new equality quango has heaped praise on David Cameron for his attempts to "deracialise" immigration.

Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, heralded the Tory leader's speech as a turning point in the immigration debate.

He said Mr Cameron had set himself apart from Tories such as Enoch Powell, famed for his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech on immigration.

Mr Cameron said immigration levels to the UK should be "substantially lower".

In his speech on Monday, the Conservative leader said immigration had to be considered alongside other pressures including people living longer, and more people choosing to live alone.

Speaking openly
Mr Phillips said: "For the first time in my adult life I heard a party leader clearly attempting to deracialise the issue of immigration and to treat it like any other question of political and economic management."

"And given that Mr Cameron is speaking against a background in which his party's policy inheritance is defined by Howard, Hague, Thatcher and Powell, this seems to me like a turning point in our national debate about immigration."

He said this was "one that will make it possible for us to speak openly and sensibly about the subject, which most of the country sees as the single-most important in politics".

However, Mr Phillips, previously head of the Commission on Racial Equality, which has been superseded by the EHRC, told a conference in Birmingham: "But Mr Cameron has a little way to go on this matter himself.

"He is asking the 21st Century question about immigration. But unfortunately, he is giving the 20th Century answer in proposing that all of these issues can be solved by capping numbers.

"Rather, we need to meet head on the challenges of rapid and diverse population growth.

"We need to find ways to capitalise on the injection of energy that new migrants bring and bolster our infrastructure and public services to cope with the new demands."

Border police
In his speech, Mr Cameron argued that economic migration from outside the European Union, should be subject to annual limits.

And people from new EU countries should be subject to controls on access to the labour market - as the government has done for Romania and Bulgaria.

Other pledges he made were to set up a border police force with powers to track down and remove illegal migrants and to raise the minimum age for spouses coming to Britain to 21, and ensure they can speak English.

He later told the BBC that it was probably wrong to have linked immigration and asylum together in the past.

He said that part of the attempts to cut economic migrants from outside the EU would involve making it a priority to get people "off benefits and into work".

Source: BBC News Online

The key point is in one observation Phillips makes "For the first time in my adult life I heard a party leader clearly attempting to deracialise the issue of immigration". OK, he may have had convenient deafness for a decade or more, but at least he acknowledges now that at least one party is headed by someone, in the genuinely modern political sense of the phrase really is 'colour blind'.

From a personal perspective it actually feels strange to have commented on this controversial subject six or seven times in the last couple of weeks, since as far as I'm concerned it is a non-issue, other than the fact that a few stories have hit the headlines. It is not the topic in of itself that concerns me, just the hysteria that surrounds it. I've never lived in a world where well adjusted, intelligent people harbour racist instincts. I find it hard to imagine the time when such people did and I am glad that it is not the era I am part of.

Perhaps now all but those in the most appalling terminal stages of leftism can sit down and talk about what is, to any intelligent mind, an issue we need a genuine consensus on.

Killjoy is Here

Seasons Curses on LibLab Alike

My plan to defy the latest edicts of the medical community by imbibing an allegedly unhealthy amount of red meat and red wine at the Base Camp have run aground thanks to the fact that it appears to be holding a Halloween theme night.

It's all rather annoying especially as my customary haggard appearance has not met the qualifying criteria for fancy dress and the associated free cocktail.

I'm not a great fan of Halloween and am pretty sure I never was. Part of it is the plethora of tat that flies off supermarket shelves and all over otherwise pleasant dispensaries of alcoholic beverages, but it is the importation of trick-or-treating that I like least. I'll be honest and say I'm not that good with kids at the best of times, and Halloween is not the best of times to encounter kids. Let's be honest, very few sensible parents let their offspring wander door to door and so most of the nice ones in decent costumes are usually packed off to themed parties instead leaving the scumbags of the future to wander round and piss off the adult world clad in torn up bin liners.

It's the moral aspect that truly worries me. What kind of message are we sending to our children? No, I don't give a flying fig about the occult overtones of the festivities. The message that worries me is that reward, often in the form of cash can be gained simply by the application of veiled threats.

Are we really trying to breed a generation of new employees for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs?

Ah well, at least it's an opportunity to take kick a man who deserves it when he is down.

Incompetence Central

Exercising Tiny Minds

For the past week there have been almost daily stories of the government backing down on policies announced just days earlier, using dodgy figures to mask the failures of their existing ones, or the wholesale adoption of Conservative material to fill the gaping void in their own vision.

It's really hard to pick which one has been the most humiliating for Brown and his team. I suspect that many would opt for the admission over the statistics on migrant workers, though my favourite was the climb down over plans to claw back surpluses in school bank accounts.

I delighted to see much of the embarrassment falling on the narrow, in terms of personal courage, shoulders of Brown having being skewered effectively on the issue at PMQs by Cameron. Moreover it demonstrates once again the type of ludicrous thinking that still permeates government. In the private sector the once common practice of punishing departments that have spent their money wisely and run a surplus by cutting their budget in the following year is now universally treated as a joke. Who knows what improvements we could see in the value obtained for we taxpayer's money when one day, and it could be still some time away, similar inanities are swept away in the public sector.

Cameron's most widely reported jibe at the Prime Minister was the "…what makes you think you know better how to spend the money?" line. I'm sure that Brown does think he knows better, as his well known arrogance would allow no other thought to pass his mind. The history of the centralisation of government spending decisions though tells a very different story.

As it happens, the other reason I liked this particular story is that I do have quite an interest in education. In no small part this is because it is the family trade. I'm the black sheep, the only one of my immediate family not to work, or have worked, in the state education sector.

My father was the headmaster of a large comprehensive school before he retired and had one story that illustrates well what happens with excessive centralisation of spending power in education.

Many years ago some bright spark in local government came up with what on the surface of it seemed to be a pretty sensible idea. Centralise the purchasing power of all the schools in the county for most day-to-day needs, and this combined negotiating power and the simple economies of scale could bring enormous cost savings. It makes sense put that simply and indeed in the private sector such effective use of a central purchasing function can, if well managed, deliver good value. This though was local government, which should have set alarm bells ringing, but nonetheless an organisation was born along with an edict that it was obligatory for all schools to use its services.

I won't name the organisation as I think it was mercifully and quietly strangled before the growth of the Internet so facts are hard to check, but I can remember its logo proudly stamped on every exercise book I used while I was going through school and on every pencil and every textbook.

The remainder of the story could be filled in by anyone who has seen what happens with any one of hundreds of similar initiatives. The organisation needed a bureaucracy and not a lightweight efficient one, but a big one with suitable levels of political oversight for pompous councillors and jobs for their offspring and doubtlessly a nice office too.

The result was inevitable. I think it was at a meeting in London that dad went into the WH Smiths at Kings Cross and picked up a single simple exercise book, functionally identical to those that he had to buy from the central purchasing organisation. This being before the widespread use of barcodes the price sticker made the point quite starkly, with the purchasing power of a whole county's schools resulting in a price half as much again as that single over the counter purchase in a London railway terminus.

It turned out to be in no way an isolated example.

The point is for me that, until the public sector can achieve the efficiency levels that can be achieved in the private, very similar schemes that sound good in theory will continue fail to deliver. It seems to be in the nature of government that centralising failure tends to compound, not mitigate that failure. Until Brown has a coherent answer to this as well as understanding that not targets, but the way those targets are set are part of the problem, no, he does not know better.

Just not Cricket!

Barnstaple's Super-Sub

There is a long and relatively honorable tradition of 'ringers' in the lower divisions of Rugby Union in this country.

Quite often an first team player coming back from injury will get back match fitness down in the thirds, even quite small teams will often have a peripatetic antipodean who are often found paying work by some stalwart of the club or another, and there is a bit of a tradition of giving people who are just passing through a game if they want one.

I do have some sympathy though for the Newton Abbey second XV in their game against Barnstaple last weekend. According to scrum.com they got a bit of a surprise at the sight of the visitors' stand in flanker, none other than All Black Jerry Collins freshly returned from Rugby World Cup chokingduties.

The last week has brought mixed Rugby Union news. It was fantastic to hear that Steve Thompson, formerly of Northampton and England is to return to playing the game, while Stuart Abbott who was starting to show a lot of promise in an England shirt has had to call time on his career prematurely through injury. It's far from certain what level Thompson may be able to compete at, returning to the playing side of the game after retiring with serious neck problems, but nonetheless I'm sure most Rugby enthusiasts will be delighted to see someone who was so pivotal in England's development leading up to RWC victory in 2003 being able to play again. To come back from such kind of health issues, having to return a large insurance payout as well, says volumes for the character and the passion the sport engenders, much as Jonah Lomu's valiant effort to get back into an All Black shirt did.

The repercussions of England's against all odds appearance in another World Cup final have also brought mixed blessings. The general feeling remains good, and it's certain that their performance has inspired, but some of the back stabbing over the coaching role has been deeply unedifying. It sounds like there is genuine need for a debate if the jist of the stories is even half true, but it should be a debate conducted behind closed doors, and not in assorted newspaper columns and books by the players and hangers on. Probably the biggest culprit has been Dayglo. Dallaglio is who I've always been pretty much behind, despite his mixed reception in much of the rugby community, but I really think it's time for him to retire from the international game with his head held high.

The best story of the week though for me has been this from the International Herald Tribune, on Rugby in the Arab World.

Rugby, [Syrian player, Mohammed Jarkou] said, perfectly fit his desire for a bruising fight and an exhausting workout.

Their friend Hani Al Hafez, a sometime college student and coach of the nascent Syrian youth rugby league, said he became addicted to the sport almost immediately when he first tried it in 2005.

"Rugby appeals to Syrian youth because while the game is played, it changes into a kind of battle, with hitting and holding. Then a few moments after the game, enemies become friends again," Jarkou said.

Source: International Herald Tribune

It's a great portrait of how a sport adapts itself and weaves itself into local cultures as it spreads in the world.

Who knows, perhaps if they could manage to apply some of the attitudes expressed by Al Hafez to a game against an Israeli team perhaps we might actually start to get somewhere.

We've Got the Message

A little of what you fancy...

I'm sure the red tops will be fighting back against Heather Mills' allegations of being hounded them in the morning, but the daily diet of harassment that has got my goat today is yet another in the seeming daily frontal attacks on our lifestyles by the medical establishment.

In this case the crack troops deployed are those of the World Cancer Research Fund, and their report on the impact of lifestyle choices on cancer risk. As reported by BBC Radio news we were told we should ideally cut out almost all red meat, all alcohol and bacon, eggs and other processed meats; to be fair, as is often the case the TV coverage and the BBC News website coverage is a little more moderate and closer to the spirit of the report. Still the drip drip of regurgitation of pretty similar research on matters such is this at best irritating and at worse has the same feeling of an organised cavalry charge to spur government into interference that presaged the smoking legislation.

Typical too is he fact the report has not gone far enough for the the Taliban elements of the medical profession. Choosing as ever to treat we infidels as five year olds they demand that 'moderation' be replaced by 'abstinence' and make calls to undefined 'government action'.

To these fundamentalists I would say there are many things that can shorten our time on this earth, such as a close encounter with the four foot length of scaffolding pole that got left in my flat after some building work.

To the moderates all I would say is fine, we get it, we're grown ups and we'll make our choices. Nobody is disputing your findings but repetition of the same messages achieves little. We could reduce road fatalites to zero by reducing the speed limit to the same round figure, we could reduce crime to pretty much zero by fully rolling out the type of police state that seems to be the wet dream of many a Labour Home Secretary, and yes, we could extend our lifespans by living the kind of sterile, joyless existance that you seem obsessed with.

We could, but we won't. Life is about more than maximising its duration and minimising its risks. Is the greatest happiness to be found in a long life of modern puritaism, or a shorter one, possibly with an uncomfortable end, enjoying all life has to offer? For me, to misuse a common phrase, in matters of taste there can be no question.

Anyway, the Base Camp is offering a fine concoction of pidgeon breast and chorizo, and I think it's time to go and avail myself of a large portion, to be washed down with some merlot, purely for its anti-oxidant properties of course.