Terror in Manchester

As I write, it is being reported that Jeremy Corbyn has blamed the recent terrorist attack in Manchester on the foreign policy of the present government.  I will not comment further, as I am not sure what exactly Mr Corbyn has in mind.

Almost exactly four years, I wrote this comment on my blog:

While I do not condone the murder of the soldier, I utterly condemn British involvement in illegal wars.

I was not at all surprised when the Manchester bomber was revealed to have been Libyan.  David Cameron as Prime Minister ordered the bombing of Libya, and Theresa May served in his government in a senior capacity.

Britain bombed Libya, and killed innocent people.  A Libyan man detonated a bomb in Manchester, and killed innocent people.  How hard is it to perceive a logical process at work here?

The British authorities are responding to the terror attack with typical uselessness.  The police are busy arresting people who may or may not be involved, but for every arrest they make, they probably miss at least one potential future suicide bomber.

MI5 have been reported as saying that they have five hundred active investigations, and I cannot help but wonder how likely any one of them is to be successful.  After all, they completely failed to prevent the Manchester terror attack, despite warning signs.

Putting troops on the streets is close to pointless, as the list of places where the next suicide bomber might strike is extensive.

There are two sensible reactions to what happened in Manchester.  The first is to accept that Britain should stop making war on other countries.  The likelihood of such a war being visited upon Britain in the guise of terror attacks is too great.

The second is to recognise that a lot of violent crime is linked to drug use.  It has not yet been reported that the Manchester suicide bomber was ever a drug user, but I would be surprised if he had never taken any illegal drugs.

It is unlikely that any government in this country will ever achieve a significant reduction in violent crime unless it first gets tough on illegal drugs.

As I write, we are approaching a general election, in which I plan not to vote.

Related previous posts include:

Terror in Westminster

Here the words of a killer - and learn

Commuting in a metropolitan society

Why is it that many people seem not to want answers to reasonable questions?

About ten years ago, I was reading the editorial column of a magazine, which boasted of its new premises in central London.  I think it was the very next month that the editorial column complained about the problems of commuting into London, and invited readers to contact them with solutions.

I emailed a solution, which was not acknowledged.  So far as I am aware, it was not published in the magazine.  Presumably therefore my proposed solution did not appeal to them.

Quite simply, my solution was that people should live and work in the same place, thereby eliminating the need to commute to work.  If you locate your business in central London, then you should aim to recruit people who already live in London.  If you want to employ people who live in Essex, then maybe you should locate your business in Colchester.

We seem to be living in a society which is increasingly metropolitan, by which I mean that it appears to be increasingly the case that jobs are concentrated in cities and large towns.  Consider some facts.

There has been a decline in rural employment in the past fifty years or so, resulting in part from increased mechanisation of farm work.  The number of people employed at deep coal mines has fallen from roughly  500,000 sixty years ago to precisely zero today, and most of the deep coal mines were located in villages, although a few were located close to towns.

There has also been a substantial decline in high street banking.  The result is that jobs are lost in small towns, and there has been a roughly corresponding rise in the use of call centres, which tend to be located in either cities or the larger towns.

In other words, it appears that if you want a job then you benefit from living in a city or a larger town.  One consequence of this is overcrowding in cities, and another is that people who live outside of the cities find it hard to avoid commuting to work – sometimes very long distances.  For example it was reported many years ago that Doncaster had become a popular commuter town for people working in London.

Next time you find yourself stuck in gridlocked traffic on the way to work, reflect that maybe it would make sense for the government to look for ways whereby more jobs can be located in villages and small towns.

Related previous posts include:
Railways need better management

Liberal Democrat membership at record level

As I write, the United Kingdom is preparing for a general election in early June.  It is not looking good for UKIP, which is contesting only 377 out of 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom.  It is also not looking good for the Labour Party, which is currently receiving very poor press coverage.

Things do appear to be looking up for the Liberal Democrats, however.  Among other things they have recently announced that their membership has for the first time ever surpassed 100,000.

What I find curious about this is that this was supposed to be their original membership figure.

The Liberal Democrats were formed in 1988 through the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party.  The SDP had in excess of 50,000 members at the time of the merger.  The Liberal Party membership is not known as the party never had a central membership register.   It had the appearance of a larger party, however.  It had more MPs than the SDP, and a lot more councillors.

There was a widespread belief among supporters of the merger that the new party would start with a membership in excess of 100,000.  For example I remember that the leading figure in the pro-merger movement in the SDP predicted that ninety percent of SDP members would join the new party.

So far as I am aware, the Liberal Democrats have for most of their existence numbered around 70,000, and their membership has been as low as around 40,000.  In other words, this party was born in hubris.  The people who predicted a starting membership of 100,000 were making a truly arrogant assumption.

In a sense I can see why they did this.  Confidence can be an impressive quality.

What actually happened was that the newly formed Social and Liberal Democrats – to give them their full name – found itself struggling to achieve the electoral support they had expected, and it was not until October 1990 that they achieved their first gain in a parliamentary by-election.

During its first year of existence, the party spent profligately, and ended up in severe financial difficulties.  I wonder that anyone saw fit to vote for them at this time.  After all, a party which cannot be trusted with its own finances can hardly be trusted with national government.

I find efficiency to be far more attractive than arrogance, and that is one of many reasons why I do not support the Liberal Democrats.

Related previous posts include:
Theresa May's election gamble
The aftermath of the general election 

Micro-life for students

A house of multiple occupation, or HMO, is a house where several people live together as either tenants or lodgers.  Where the landlord also resides in the house, then the paying residents are termed lodgers; otherwise they are tenants.  The paying residents each have a room to themselves, and share communal rooms such as the kitchen, bathroom, and maybe a lounge.

Tenants have more legal rights than lodgers, who have almost no legal rights worth speaking of.

Two recent news items concern such dwellings.  The first is about a young student who was lodging in London, and caught her landlord entering her room without permission.  The comments are divided as to whether or not the landlord was acting legally.

The other is about the impact which HMOs tend to have upon the surrounding area and its other residents.  This quote from a man in Leeds is worth noting:

HMOs started to crop up in the Nineties when universities expanded as the Labour government pumped money in. No one gave any thought to where these students would live.

So too is this quote from a lawyer:

We just don’t have enough houses. HMOs are a response to the fact that lots and lots of people have nowhere to live.

I have lived as a lodger myself, and it would be easy for me to argue for strict laws protecting the welfare of lodgers, but then I reflect that it is not always easy to have a stranger living in your home.  Surely the best solution would be for the government to make it easier for people to have somewhere to live without having to lodge in someone else’s home.

The last Labour government made clear its ambition to have fifty percent of all school leavers go to university, but failed to provide an adequate explanation as to why this ambition was desirable.  One of its many consequences was to inflate the demand for housing near to universities- and yet this Labour government won three consecutive general elections.

Maybe it would make sense for people to stop voting for politicians who have illogical obsessions, and instead vote for politicians who have a sensible housing policy.

Related previous posts include:
Micro-life
Do we need universities?