Today the sheep came up back on the hill.

Today the sheep came back up the hill. Farmer Andrew from over Burrington came up with his mum, his son Seth, and Drizzle the dog. I closed my gate so that the sheep did not have the option of getting lost among the bits and pieces on my land, and they closed the lane with their car. I went up the top of the path to the woods, and Andrew opened the gate to the Hill, the same 5-bar gate that Vegger famously jumped in his younger days.

Seth was 3 years old, but like many farmers' boys, he was very grounded and grown up. He went back down to the road with his dad to fetch the sheep.

Drizzle and I sat on the path and waited. He was on a proper bit of balin twine, organic, not the polypropylene stuff that has taken over. Like Seth, he was very confident and open, nuzzling under my arm, and leaning against me the way dogs do when they're with a friend. He wasn't any sheepdog breed that I recognised, and was in training. His boss dog had had an accident and lost a leg. The boss dog would have stayed put on the forest path to block it, but Drizzle would have wandered off after a bit. So I was proud to have a role.

Drizzle and I sat down and waited, looking at the trees. I noticed a very straight oak tree, maybe about thirty years old, that I had not noticed before. Drizzle was panting very fast indeed, but stopped panting as soon as he smelt the sheep coming.

They rattled up the hill, flowing up the path, like a Severn Bore on 120 legs. There is something exciting about a flock running. They looked good and healthy, all sporting a recent No 1 haircut, so they were feeling light and skippy. None of them tried for our forest path, but some did try to corral themselves in a corner of the fence, only going through the gate when they realised they were going to get left behind.

They are a cross between the Shetland sheep that were up here last year, and another Highland sheep that puts on more weight, I think from Teasca (Texa). They had come over from Burrington by car. Andrew sometimes drives them in the old way, on foot, but there is a problem with motorists who do not understand that the best thing to do if you find a road full of sheep is to turn your engine off, and enjoy the pageant of the countryside.

John Woolman liked sheep. They are not as stupid as people think. They are very smart at getting out of where they are supposed to be, but they do have a tendency to delegate authority to others, which can result in stupid behaviour. Just like us.

7/7 - Politicians defending the indefensible.

Five years on from the vicious, anti-human suicide bomb attacks on London.

How do we defend ourselves against these attacks? There are three ways:
1 Intelligence - finding out who is planning to attack us
2 Police -arresting would be attackers before they act
3 Financial action - freezing bank accounts of real terrorists. (Not done very well)

We do not defend ourselves by attacking Muslim countries, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Afghanistan fiasco is making things worse, not better, because it drives disaffected Muslim youth, in the UK and across the world, towards desperate action.

This is not just the  opinion of bleeding heart liberals. Sir David Omand held the the post of Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005, and he held that the wars would make terrorism worse, not better.

Today, the Guardian reports that Dr Robert Lambert, ex-head of the Muslim Contact Unit, a counter terrorism squad, saying that the war on terror made more terrorists.

Yet still poliiticians try to defend the indefensible, pretending that the Afghan adventure is somehow increasing our security, that the deaths of our soldiers are in a good cause. And still they turn away the obvious solution for success in Afghanistan - medicalise the opium crop.

Politicians are, by and large, intelligent people. How do they end up defending such irrational positions? Policy is a kind of machine that moves not by the rules of rationality, but of rationalisation - providing a line of quasi-plausible reasoning for an action that is based on irrational motives.

Borrowing - bad and good

George Osbore's potentially disastrous Emergency Budget was driven by fear that "the markets" would move in to destroy the UK economy because size of our debt. Our budget deficit (the amount we have to borrow each year) is indeed unacceptably large, but budget deficit is not the only measure of our economy. The most relevant measure is our risk of default, and on this we are placed towards the middle of the spectrum.

The Boy George is raising hysteria about the level of our borrowing, and succeeding in his plan because mainstream journalists are notoriously gullible. The problem is that there is a kernel of truth in his marshmallow of spin. It is not good to have an economy so shot through with debt. Borrowing means that future generations are obliged to pay to satisfy present needs. So it all depends on what the borrowing was for in the first place. The huge borrowing needed to finance the war against Nazism was necessary. The huge borrowing to avoid a general bank collapse in 2009 was also necessary.  However, Labour was wrong to borrow so heavily to finance the NHS in the closing years of their regime. Their motivations were good, to bring the UK up to a level of health spending comparable with other similar economies. But the comparable nations had achieved that position over many years, and Labour tried to do it in a few years.

Similarly, the national debt has built up over very many years, and Osborne is wrong to try to rectify it in a few years. He is doing major surgery on the economy. You only do major surgery if the patient's heart is up to it. The UK is not in good heart economically, and Mr Osborne's operation is likely to end up with an arrest on the table.

The other point about borrowing is that it is stupid to complain about debt, when you support the notion that it is right that banks should have a monopoly on the creation of money, and their method of money creation involves lending (creating debt) at compound interest.

The whole picture is irrational, based on the ideological mantra that says "Individual action Good, collective action Bad".  Borrowing is seen as OK if short term, by individual trader, even if used to help destroy a nation's economy, but not OK if long term, by a nation, even if it is used to help preserve and improve a nation's economy.

It is legitimate to borrow to invest. The Green New Deal is an excellent example. We need to decarbonise the economy, to secure our energy supply, and blunt the economic impact of Peak Oil. The way to do this is to create work in the fields of energy conservation and renewable energy, underpinned with a pan-European HVDC supergrid. This GND needs financing. I have argued elsewhere that the money for this could safely be created by the state, as grants or loans with zero or low interest. But even if we chickened out of these radical measures, it would still be OK for the state to borrow from the banks to finance the GND, because the physical outcome is so positive.


That's it. I gotta go to Cornwall now, to view the dancing in Bodmin.

AV is not PR, but is a stepping stone on the way to democracy

So the teachers are going to let the class have a little vote on AV next May.

AV is not PR, but we have to remember that we live in a backward country. PR is not on the agenda, but AV is. The stage is set, the press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared. AV is possible. If we get it, the monolithic, immovable Westminster system will have budged a tiny fraction. We can then start to push on towards AV+, which does bear some semblance of a democratic electoral system.

Not convinced? Then think on this: anyone campaigning against AV will be allying themselves with the Tories. Nuff said.

Office for Budget Responsibility projections do not add up.

Following on from yesterday's post here about the effect of Osbore's Emergency Budget on employment, the respectworthy Larry Elliot has a piece in today's Grauniad analysing the job prospects for UK plc. This is the essence:

The "politically independent" Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR)  aims to cut 601,000 evil public sector jobs in 5 years, but plans to see the good private sector create 2 million jobs in the same period.

This means that the Cleggeron Government is banking on creating 400,000 jobs per year.

How feasible is that?

In the 1990s, the Tories were able to add 143,000 jobs per year.

In the 13 Labour years, 2,500,000 jobs were created. 800,000 of them were in the demonic public sector, so only 1,700,000 were in the saintly private sector, which means that the private sector job creation rate was 131,000 per year. And that was in a time of the Big Brown Boom.


Larry looks for stimuli in the sectors of finance, housing, retail, business and personal spending, and finds all to be sadly lacking in promise.

The economic wind is thick with straws pointing to a second wave of recession, which The Boy George may have helped to bring it on by casting public sector workers into outer darkness. US consumer confidence is down nearly 10 pts in June. Europe, our main trading partner, is sucking its economic thumb.  The banks are looking like they may be demanding $5.8 trillion more money from the despised public sector.

In short, the "non-political" OBR estimates are nothing but a heap of dingoes' kidneys, a figure plucked from the air to cheer up the politicians.   They'll be lucky to get 100,000 jobs a year, 500,000 in 5 years, which is 100,000 less than the jobs they are about to annihilate with such relish.