The Cluster[bomb]

A cluster bomb is a munition in which the main bomb scatters numerous small land mines around the explosion site, to cause multiple subsequent casualties. Thus, a neologism that has recently crossed the Atlantic takes the concept and replaces the word bomb with a swear word, whose commonest secondary meanings are to harm irreparably and to put into a hopeless situation. And now the word has been invented, David Cameron has seen fit to give us a practical example of one.

The consensus of expert analysts is that Cameron’s referendum on EU membership was a tactical gambit to avoid losing votes to the official Conservative Party’s fellow-travellers in UKIP. Still a shabby thing, even if it had been done well, but against all precedent for referenda on major constitutional changes, it was drawn up to decide by a simple majority. The case for continuing in the EU was then presented as badly by the official campaign as the case for leaving was presented by their rivals, but at least the Leave campaign shrewdly targeted the prejudices of the mob whose fitness to hold the franchise is dubious, and won the referendum. So, there was the burst. Now, where have all the mines gone? Just like a real cluster bomb, we will be finding the last of them the hard way for years to come, but we can track a few already.

Although Parliament’s sovereignty was not conceded to the referendum in any formal way, and the result does not bind it to act, now the result is known, it would be political self-destruction for the Houses not to implement the choice they have asked the nation to make for them. The Leave contingent’s small majority include all of the violent and anti-social far-right groups, and a refusal to abide by the decision would turn over half the public bitterly against the government, and promote the far-right from a fringe of despised pariahs to leaders of the revolution, which would spell horrific bad times whether they won or lost in the end. So, on a crucially important issue, Cameron has thrown away Parliament’s  practical capacity to give leadership to Britain.

At the time of writing, Parliament has not yet had the chance to carry out its obligation to give formal notice of leaving the EU, and it remains to be seen what shape our relationship with Europe will take in coming years. It seems unlikely to be as good as we have had, however. Wisely, guarantees are already being put in place for the millions of EU nationals already settled in the UK, which will not only prevent the misery and social disruption that would come of their forced expulsion at the expiry of Britain’s notice, but also head off the risk of the tit-for-tat repatriation of millions of British emigrants to the EU. However, there is a choice of the “Norway” option, if it can be negotiated in time, where Britain continues to get the benefits of European access, at the continuing price of legal harmonisation and fiscal contributions, or the “World Trade Organisation” option, where we just lapse to being part of the Third World, so far as the rest of Europe are concerned. 

Before the referendum, the Brexiters were cocky about how desperately the EU would want to keep us, and how strong our negotiating position would be as result. However, our decades of intransigently demanding special treatment have in fact used up Europe’s goodwill, and now we have given them the opportunity to be rid of us, they are keen to make it happen as soon as possible.

The Leave campaign also robustly denied the forecasts of economic disaster flowing from Brexit as scaremongering and sneered at the idea of listening to experts. In a matter of days, though, the pound has crashed in value and global businesses are reconsidering their British commitments. The weakening pound may save some export related jobs from being lost altogether, but will still diminish the purchasing power of their wages. Many other jobs will simply be lost to economic contraction though. Even jobs that do not directly depend on EU exports or services will be affected by the reduction of EU related trade in the economy as a whole.

Racism in Britain is hardly a new problem - there have been four hundred years of private bullying and public rioting since Shakespeare felt the need to write the classic anti-racism play, The Merchant Of Venice, but the Brexit result was in part down to the votes of those who hoped to send all the foreigners back, and has emboldened them to become more aggressive and offensive in their hatred. The foreigners are not going to be sent back, of course, but that means still more public disillusionment with, and alienation from government. Those of us with liberal views may not want to see the racists prevail, but we have to admit that there are enough of them out there to be worth worrying about, and that they will now become angrier than they were, at another perceived betrayal. So we may expect many more harrowing and unpleasant tales of atrocities against European and Commonwealth immigrants - the typical racist not being interested enough to know the difference.

In choosing to leave the European Union, England has inadvertently made the case for the end of an older and closer union, too. Scotland knows it is too small a country to thrive in isolation, and is far prouder of its EU membership than its UK membership. Many English people seem not to understand the difference between union and empire, and bemoan rule from Brussels when the sovereign power has remained in London, and Europe has to dance to British tunes as much as any others. On the other hand, the “United” Kingdom has a more imperial flavour. In recent decades, a modicum of power has been restored to Edinburgh, but to a large extent Scotland is still ruled from London. While Scotland has supplied more than its share of senior Westminster politicians in recent years, they have been incidentally Scottish leaders of a Britain mainly consisting of English living in England. It now looks a serious possibility that Scotland will leave the UK to rejoin the EU. Soon, we may well have an even littler England than the Brexiters were hoping for.

Our cluster “bomb” has started a couple of other political fires that bode very ill for the well-being of British government and democracy. The Leave campaign was conducted with a good deal of gross dishonesty, inducing voters to vote Out on the basis of false facts and impossible promises. Faced with the challenge of delivering on their impossible promises, the leading Brexiters hastily stepped back. Another betrayal for the voters, who thought they knew who would be their new leaders, if Leave won. We are now doomed to another Maggie. The next PM will now be either May or Leadsom, and it won't matter a lot which one it is. Both are hardline right-wingers who begrudge human and workers’ rights and will use their power for repression and austerity to the people and asset-stripping and privatisation to the state. Of course, a terrible Tory PM wouldn’t matter a lot, if they were likely to soon lose a general election. However, the Brexit vote has inspired the Parliamentary Labour Party to spectacularly self-destruct. In Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party finally have the leader who can present inspirational alternatives to modern conservatism, and the moment was theirs to press home their advantage. Instead, disgruntled with not getting yet another greasy pole climbing apparatchik to carry their business on as usual, his parliamentarians have mostly deserted and betrayed him. This could end with Corbyn having all the moral authority to be the next PM, but no ministerial talent to form a government with, or it could end with an experienced but discredited Labour team led by a usurper into electoral wipeout. Just when we needed a change from the Tories most.

Looking further ahead, the big challenges of the coming decades will be global ones, which no country, however, proud and vain its patriots, will be able to solve unilaterally. International co-operation and adherence to world rules will be the only hope to salvage some of the good bits of our civilisation from the “green” problems that we have been building up for the last couple of centuries. Resource depletion, over-population, pollution and climate change are putting physical constraints on how much further we can take industrialism, and either we make controlled changes or uncontrolled changes will come upon us. Exiting the EU will not be a pass for Britain or England to go their own way, and if they try, in the long run, the road will be to disaster and nobody to help.

Staying in Rhythm

A couple of years ago, I posted a piece about my adoption of a variation of an Intermittent Fasting diet, with a promise to follow up on how it went long term. Two and three-quarter years in, I think I am ready to draw conclusions, so here we are.

I was introduced to the idea by a BBC Horizon documentary, that, amongst other related topics showed how it had been discovered that humans metabolise and respond to protein intake on a 48 hour cycle, with potentially harmful low or high levels of some hormones arising from keeping the body stuck in the first stage by daily protein feasts. The same programme also looked at the more inconclusive effects of Caloric Restriction, which was not a novel concept to me, but which I viewed with some scepticism. However, the section on protein metabolism was so clear, that I could no longer eat daily meat, knowing what I learned that evening.

After a day or two of consideration and comparison of the various IF strategies, particularly Alternate Day and 5:2, I settled on a usual regime of 4:3, having a low calorie vegetarian diet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, although not as extremely low as 5:2 and CR followers go, and eating more indulgently on Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekends and holidays. This, on the one hand, puts me in the vital second stage of the protein cycle three times a week, but on the other hand, never leaves me more than a day away from a good meal, which is psychologically easy to cope with.

In the early weeks, I lost over a stone, and from the greatly increased ease in bending, I think much of the loss was the internal abdominal fat that no doctor ever has a good word for. However, after about a year, my overall weight started to creep back towards its original level, which I presume is my natural equilibrium. Although the weight has now come back, it does not feel as if it has returned as undesirable internal fat. Another effect has been that when I return to eating daily full meals on holiday, my body now furiously lays down reserves, and my weight temporarily soars, before falling back over a few weeks of resumed 4:3.

Initially, I was rather troubled by hunger on my low-cal days, but I have found that in the long term my appetite has adjusted, and I no longer miss proper meals on the days I don't eat them, and need just a few snacks to remain satisfied from the previous day's food until evening, even if I sometimes need a little supper.

I have seen it suggested that these kinds of restricted or partially restricted diets can be beneficial to immune system problems, such as allergies. I have no idea whether the continuing disappearance of my asthma since the time I started 4:3 IF is causally linked, or mere random co-incidence. It seems prudent to act on the assumption that it is causal, though, which is as powerful an incentive as any to carry on.

About a year into the diet, I had an opportunity to get a general blood test. My previous one had showed excessive cholesterol, and I was interested to see if my changed eating habits had helped to reduce it. I was pleased to see that, while my cholesterol level was still undesirably high, it had fallen out of the danger zone. That is still something that I need to keep watch over, but the first result was encouraging.

My long-term conclusion, therefore, is that 4:3 IF is delivering a healthier life for me, at no more downside than sometimes feeling a bit peckish. I would recommend it to anyone interested in maximising their own health, unless they already have ailments that are aggravated by an uneven food intake.

Whose Shops Are They Anyway?

I spend several thousand pounds a year at the Channel Island Co-Op, for the convenience of their shop locations and the few hundred pounds kickback in dividends. I also shop a little at Jersey's other chains, for different product selections, or because I happen to be nearby.

Therefore, as a customer and shareholder, I like to think that the management have their eyes open for opportunities to minimise prices and maximise dividends and range. And so, it gave me food for very mixed thoughts, when they recently announced a grand new plan to shift almost all of their procurement to the mainland Co-Operative group's new national distribution centre at Andover.

There would certainly be significant upsides to the Andover move, in terms of efficiency and profitability.(*1) However, closer analysis reveals that there also some serious downsides, and, moreover, downsides that either do or should matter a lot to the CI Co-Op's general membership.

The biggest practical advantage would be that dairy and provisions could be ordered from national stocks on a day-to-day basis. At present, the CI Co-Op outsources fresh goods procurement to local wholesalers, who buy in stock to order for the Co-Op shops according to pre-orders estimated a week in advance, and sell it on to them on arrival. This shifts jobs from the Co-Op to their suppliers, but still keeps them in-island. The flexibility and responsiveness of 36 hour lead times has to be a good thing in itself. The obvious difficulty, however, is that shelf lives will necessarily be poorer on goods bought from stock held at Andover before shipping, than on goods shipped direct from source and redistributed locally on the day of arrival. The other major drawback would be that the work now done locally by the workforces of CI wholesalers would be done by the Andover staff. It would still be the same amount of work, but the cost of it would be drained out of the local economy to England instead of recirculated by local workers. A neutral decision for the company in terms of cost management, but a strategic blunder for the community in terms of economics and social responsibility.

The logic of shifting stocks of long-life goods to England does not stack up at all.(*2) Fresh foods can only be handled with a just-in-time system; too soon and they perish before sale, too late and they have missed the opportunity to sell and once again perish. But it is different with long-life foods. The freight links cannot operate in all weathers, so it is essential to carry local buffer stocks sufficient to cover the longest foreseeable interruptions. The running costs of local storage may indeed be somewhat higher than a proportionate share in the running costs of the Andover base, but they are necessary costs, and trying to dodge them will doom the CI Co-Op to empty shops in windy weather. Moreover, once again, local costs are mostly recirculated, while UK costs are more money lost to our economy, that somebody has to export something to replenish.

Even if some added value can be gained by judiciously targeted use of Andover for specific products, the CI Co-Op's local warehousing and wholesale supply networks are essential to the stability of its supplies on the shelves. Beyond that, it is supposed to be a player in the Channel Islands' economies, not Andover's.

The rundown and disposal of the local warehouses would release a substantial capital windfall, that would look good in the accounts for the year they took place. They are an asset that can only be stripped once, though. Once the directors have taken their bonuses for that cash-rich year, the shareholders are just left with badly supplied shops to show for the divestment.

One final point, those of us who hold share accounts in the CI Co-Operative Society are not merely customers. We are the owners and employers. And do we want to be the sort of employers who throw hard-working long-term employees on the scrapheap in the pursuit of an irresponsible fast buck? I for one do not, and if there are some who do, I am glad they are not my friends. On the other hand, do we want to be the kind of employers who meekly tolerate the managers we employ taking reckless measures in the pursuit of their own financial benefit? No again, speaking for myself.

If you are CI Co-Op members, please make the effort to get to the forthcoming Special General Meeting, and stand up and be counted against the Board implementing this shameful betrayal of workers and customer alike in your names.

Email comments:

(*1)The significant upsides have only been stated not rigorously debated from the figures I look at it is going to cost the CI Coop more, the shelf life will be marginally less and the range in the Grande Marches will be reduced. As for the logistics they will be a nightmare for the shops, with small back stores, used to JIT in cages for all their goods. 

(*2)This is an issue which *originates* in Manchester/Andover not the Channel Islands and the fact that the UK Coop have built an infrastructure that is underutilised. It is no coincidence that in the UK Ice-cream World has closed its doors because the UK Coop has *just* taken all the ice-cream distribution in house - sound familiar. Andover is throwing everything at the CI Coop to persuade them to change over, how long before they realistically price I have no idea but by then it will be too late. 

The CI Coop has the 3 biggest outlets by sales in the whole of the Coop group, the UK Coop is far more used to dealing with and ranging for the normal smaller UK Coops.

Don't Be A Blockhead!

As internet social media draw more and more people into their reach, so the odds of them being put in touch with others, whom they would try to avoid in offline life, rise. Therefore, the major players very sensibly provide a Block function, so that their users can hide themselves from anyone who they suspect may attempt to harass them on line, or, worse still, track them down for committing physical violence in the real world. Risks identified, remedy provided, job done.

Nobody has to justify their use of a Block against a potential menace, and any procedure requiring them to do so would be a counter-productive deterrent that I could not support. However, with the right to use Blocks freely comes the moral responsibility to use them fairly and ethically. I fear there are so-called libertarians, libertines really, out there, who feel their rights to behave unfairly and immorally take precedence over any obligations to the rest of humanity, and there always have been, but they have to be written off as a lost cause, while I offer food for thought to the more conventionally decent of my readers.

If your social media involvement goes no further than using Facebook to swap gossip with your immediate friends and family, then you can control matters well enough by setting everything to Friends Only and taking care who those Friends are. However, once you start going to Facebook's Groups and Pages, or using Twitter, or Youtube comment threads , or that dying dinosaur of Noughties internet, MySpace, then you have gone public, and even if you have the technical facility to be a control freak to those internet users that immediately surrounds you, you have ventured out of your private zone and should behave appropriately to the virtual public place you have chosen to put yourself in.

And what does all that have to do with blocking, you may ask. Simply this: Internet forums and discussions run on the assumption that each and every participant in the thread can follow the development of a discussion entry by entry. This linearity is why we call them threads and not scatters! They are virtual representations of public meetings. However, it would soon reduce a discussion to chaos, if substantial numbers of its members could not see each others contributions. How is a participant supposed to make sense of a discussion, if, for a hypothetical example, the second and third commenters can't see each other, unknown to them, they do know the fifth commenter and seventh commenter can't see each other and they have been blocked by the fourth commenter and don't even know that they are there? The dynamics just become unworkable. Even so, there is a deplorable fad for capricious blocking spreading through Jersey's online political community amongst both left and right wingers.

Slamming the cyber-door in the face of a cyber-bully is fair enough, although such retreat cannot be credibly spun as victory. What is inexcusably rude to an entire group, though, is to refuse to interact with all in that group on an equal footing, save those one has already fallen out with outside of the group. And yet, we are starting to see a tactic emerging where certain people, unfortunately including a couple of my own friends, wilfully disrupt the functioning of discussion groups by blocking people who have made no attempt to be malicious. Blocking someone for expressing an opinion you do not share, but are too lazy to articulate your disagreement with, or because they do not feel safe enough themselves in the online environment to expose their offline identity or lifestyle, is both boorish behaviour and ineffectual politics.

Political discussion is all about the exchange and comparison of ideas. If you will only read what you already think, you will never learn anything new. Progress depends on considering one another's views and having the integrity to change minds when faced with better ways. Thus, the most important people to address and be addressed by are not your own comrades, but those on the other side to whichever your own may be. If, instead, you refuse to engage with them, whether from rudeness or spinelessness, then you are marginalising yourself as a participant in the political process, a mistake for an activist and a catastrophe for a candidate, and may as well get out of the game altogether.

Free and open public discussion of political issues is the foundation of democracy. Attempting to exclude others from engaging is a threat to this foundation. Unless you genuinely believe that somebody will ruin your life, if you dare to let them communicate with you, and I fully realise that sometimes there really are such cases, then do not block fellow members of forums and discussion groups. It does far more harm than good to both the cause of politics in general and your reputation in the eyes of anyone who realises what you are doing.

How to Boost the Power of Your Vote

Despite the disappointment of the recent referendum on electoral reform in Jersey, where a poor selection of unsatisfactory options led to an inconclusive result, there remains an imperative to make overdue improvements. Thus, a proposal has been made to overhaul another aspect of Jersey elections.

Although the referendum failed in its purpose of giving The States a mandate for change, or even a mandate for no change, it did succeed in being a demonstration of transferable voting in Jersey. While such a system had never been used in an election for office here, the referendum offered first and second choice voting for the three options, so that, if there were no clear majority in the first count, as indeed happened, the third placed minority would drop out in the run-off count and their second choices added to the others. This had to produce a majority. Sure enough, it established that the Option A, which I personally preferred, was marginally less acceptable than the Option B to the overall voters, although commanding the largest minority of first choices, so B was the democratically chosen winner. At least the derisory turnout vitiated the referendum to the point that it could be ignored with clean consciences by The States. However the mechanism of the voting was vindicated.

One of the conundrums (the pedant in me thinks I want the word conundra, but my spellchecker doesn't!) of first-past-the-post voting is whether to pick one's honest choices or whether to attempt to game the system with tactical voting. If you fear that your preferred choice will not command enough other people's votes to succeed, but one you are strongly opposed to will, there is some sense in voting for a third candidate who is less desirable, but has a worthwhile prospect of victory. This may help to keep the wrong one out, but it fails to send a message of support and approval to your real choice, and tend to discourage future candidates from offering a similar manifesto.

By contrast, transferable votes mean ranking candidates, so that you can give your honest first choice your primary vote. If they fail, then whoever you ranked next receives your vote, and so on for however many rounds of run-offs it needs to obtain a final result. This delivers the most widely supported, or at least accepted candidates, without posing any pressure to understate the true level of support for the also-rans.

Rather than attempt to go into detail myself on this subject, I would recommend anyone interested to go to the excellent article my fellow Jersey blogger “Tony The Prof” has written at http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2013/12/every-vote-counts.html He says everything I would want to, and in better English than I can manage.

Anyway, variations of transferable voting systems have been widely used in many countries around the world for decades. The advent of cheap and easily used computers has taken the hard work out of the necessary “number crunching” that is the only real drawback, so there is no longer any sound argument against the introduction here, too. It would also facilitate the success of another large multiple constituency system based on the rejected Option A, which is probably the most urgent electoral change Jersey needs to revitalise the democratic legitimacy of its government. Even if this particular attempt to introduce it fails, (and despite the proposal's inherent merit, it is not unimaginable that The States will reject it simply to spite its proposer), it needs to be returned to again and again until it does prevail.

Bald Truth and Bare-faced Lies

The Bald Truth Jersey, as linked in my blog list, is a witty title for the blog of my friend and erstwhile political colleague, Trevor Pitman, who has a bare scalp and a passionate commitment to calling things how he sees them.

However, he has cross-branded the title to a Facebook group, run by one Steve Southers, whom I believe to be Trevor's brother-in-law, although I may be mistaken. The Facebook group does run links to Trevor's blog, but otherwise, it has evolved its own identity, and become a very different kettle of fish.

Any Facebook group can only be as good or bad as the people who bother to join it, but the group administrators can, and usually do, shape the group to some extent, by constraining the content the members post, and controlling who is allowed in the group. I have volunteered as co-admin for a couple of the groups I am in, myself, and have been surprised at how many ethical challenges arise.

The Bald Truth Facebook group was initially populated with Trevor's Friend list, and has attracted others with an interest in Jersey affairs, until the thousand-plus membership has made it the largest Jersey discussion group, that I know of. Unfortunately, as the membership has grown, the proportion of posts from members with profoundly counter-factual worldviews has also grown. The headline posts letting us into the secret that humans were genetically engineered from apes by extra-terrestrial visitors can be enjoyed as comedy in small doses and the resident climate change denier's obtuse failure to absorb the resident environmental expert's patient debunkings also has a comedic dimension, reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch where an inept swordsman continues to bark challenges sans limbs after a comprehensive hacking.

The glimpses of an alternative reality get worse, though. There is much evidence of conspiracy theories on the page. Trevor Pitman's own political career has been hampered by a closing of ranks against him, so I can see why he would be inclined to sympathise. The tone of Steve Southers' Facebook group, however, is an anything-goes credulity towards suggestions of sinister forces secretly manipulating the world to their own benefit. (I am old enough and worldly enough to realise that great wealth does carry power, and the private and informal relationships of the very wealthy and powerful do play in counterpoint to the overt and formal structures of law and government. I am also wise enough to know that key words like Illuminati flag a need to engage extreme scepticism at least, if not ignore altogether.)

What has become the most worrying feature of the group, though, is that in spite of its links to a serving legislator, it has begun promoting the dangerously false legal advice of the Freeman On The Land movement. This is a Canadian variation of a scam that has been circulating in the USA for some years, in which dishonest legal advisors sell misinformation to to laymen on how the law is not legitimately the law of the land, and they can repudiate their obligations by declaring their independence from it. Although, they often assert that the state does have massive counter-obligations in their own favour. All untrue, of course.

Were the FOTL (Please yourself whether you read that as Freemen On The Land or Fruitloops On The Loose!) links posted as genuine discussion points, in the way most things are in topical Facebook groups, then at least the more rational members of the group could attempt to steer the more vulnerable members away from taking an unhealthy interest. Alarmingly, Southers, in spite of presenting himself as a defender of free speech when he turns up on other discussion groups is prepared to protect FOTL posts with active steps to suppress dissent. 

Note Southers' minatory response to criticism of a link to a FOTL video

The offending comments were rephrased in a way less open to misinterpretation as a slur on fellow group members.

But, it seems that the problem must have been disrespecting FOTL because Southers answered that question with a ban.

Not that that saved the piece from further attack from one of the other group admins.

So, there is one admin on the group not prepared to go along with it. Even so, it must be cause for concern that a Facebook group riding the coat tails of a current Member of The States of Jersey is actively fomenting disregard for the law, and doing so under false pretences, too. You may disregard my opinion as that of a layman, although I seem to know more real law than the FOTL gurus. You may even feel that Sam Mezec's LLB is not a sufficiently lofty qualification to impress you. Never mind, if you have a few hours to devote to some heavy and slightly repetitive reading, Chief Justice Rooke, of the Canadian Province of Alberta, has written the definitive debunking of the FOTL and all related “Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Agreements”: http://canlii.ca/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html

I don't like to write blogs without points, so this one is coming to two. The first is that despite the links to Deputy Pitman, the actual Facebook group may promise Bald Truth, but abounds in Bare-Faced Lies, and should be viewed with caution and suspicion, if at all. The second point, incidentally arising, is that FOTL and other like OPCAs are utter buncombe beneath the mock-legal phraseology, and if they seem interesting, just remember that their facts are simply untrue, and don't be tempted to act on their advice.

Clothier? Think Twice

Many of my politically interested friends are pleased to see that this week The States Of Jersey finally approved, in principle, a referendum on the revised electoral system proposed by the Clothier Commission. There is certainly a strong case for replacing the current mish-mash of accidents of history with a modern and coherently designed process. Nevertheless, despite those around me telling me how good Clothier is in theory, I have yet to see any explanation that actually convinces me it is the right way forward.

The Clothier scheme successfully addresses the equality questions that so many hold against the current complex voting system. Neither voters in their representation, nor politicians in their mandates, have any kind of equality from parish to parish and office to office. Clothier would have a single rank of members, all from similarly-sized constituencies. Job done.

However, I feel Clothier has provided the right answer to the wrong question. In general, equality is a better principle than inequality, but I disagree that it should take priority over effectiveness of representation. Before they started chipping at the current system, I had fourteen representatives, the Constable, a Deputy and twelve Senators. In the urban districts, despite their whinging about getting less than their share, the multi-Deputy districts had sixteen or seventeen representatives, including up to four of their own local ones. So, apart from uncontested elections, we all got to vote for or against over a quarter of our little parliament. That is actually pretty strong democracy, that most of the world would envy, despite the awkward structure benefiting the kind of candidates, that people who read blogs like this would not want. Now, cuts in Senators bring our shares down a little, but I can still look forward to ten votes at the next election. Even so, that is still almost a quarter, a real say in the make-up of the States.

What, in contrast would I have to look forward to on the first election day after an implementation of Clothier? Possibly, one single seat to vote on, and in my particular locality, if it were contested at all, there would still be only one potential winner. Thus, as an avid follower of politics and current affairs, I would find myself denied any significant power to contribute to the success of those I would like to see in government.

All around Jersey, others like me would find the same disengagement foisted upon them. Each district would put forward its popular local bigwig, with or without the bother of seeing off a no-hoper or two, and except in a handful of less predictable town seats, effective democracy would be wiped out. That prospect saddens and scares me.

A “Yes” vote for Clothier would certainly blast the present political establishment, but it would be a suicide bomb that takes our own hopes for better democracy with it. Don't do it!

One Moron, One Vote

I think it was Winston Churchill who pointed out that democracy was a bad system, but everything else that has been tried was even worse. I grew up indoctrinated with the orthodoxy that democracy was, on the contrary, a very good thing. However, living and learning do little to substantiate that opinion, and each passing year deepens my suspicion that the great man was right.

For small groups and trivial questions, simple majority voting is more than adequate. As the voters rise into thousands and millions, though, the scale brings practical problems to all but the most sparing use of general popular votes. Moreover, as the questions become more complex and arcane, the validity of the general lay voters' judgement necessarily declines. Thus, we have to resort to representative democracy, where the nominally empowered voters elect, according to context, a committee, council, board or parliament comprised of those who the voters trust most to study the complex questions they lack the time, if not the capacity to research, and vote appropriately on their behalf. Well, that is what they need to do to make it work, anyway.

Regular readers will have noticed a mundane tendency of this blog to pay more attention to real world outcomes than the beauty of theories. So, the reality is, many voters, especially political voters, do not ask themselves whether they trust their representatives to judge well on their behalf, but instead vote for either the most famous candidate or the one from their loyalty group, without the least attempt to assess their capabilities to make the well-informed and thought-through decisions they are unable to make for themselves.

Equality of rights is a fine and good principle, that I am proud to uphold. Even so, equality of ability is an absurd fancy, so a presumption of it is an unsound basis for anything. The compromise lies in the concept of fairness. Unfortunately, fairness is an inherently subjective matter in a way that equality is not. We all know what honestly seems fair to each of us, but our individual ideas of fairness vary and even conflict. Yet another matter where consensus is probably the best thing, for all the reflexive difficulty in fairly determining it.

One way to resolve the conflict between equal rights to vote and unequal ability to use that vote is to weight the voting, so that those likely to have better judgement count for more. I do not know why political thinkers generally shy away from considering this. The only writer I personally know to have explored it was the mid-20^th Century novelist Neville Shute.

Shute once wrote a dystopic fantasy of what Britain and the Commonwealth might have been like in the 1980s, projecting from a time of writing in the early1950s, called “In The Wet”. His premise, reflecting his personal circumstances as the proprietor of an aircraft factory under the Attlee government, was that the UK was a hotbed of creativity and engineering talent dragged down by an electoral system favouring talentless union placemen, while the entrepreneurial spirits had all baled out for colonies with go-ahead leadership, as Shute himself did in real life. In the book, the extra votes went for having a degree or equivalent, working abroad then coming back, being a clergyman, raising a family to adulthood without divorce and a few other indications of being a solid citizen. Shute's vision, rightly or wrongly, was that this would lead to a sharp increase in the quality of candidates being elected.

Sixty or more years on from when Shute flew his kite, the electoral process is a hot topic in the Bailiwick of Jersey. The current electoral districts are gerrymandered to restrict the representation of urban voters to way below pro rata, and the urban voters do their own part to justify their under-representation, by mostly abstaining from voting for the few Members they do get. Despite this manifest apathy, the minority, who do care, have long clamoured for reform.

2013 actually saw a referendum on electoral reform, but the questions were fudged to make a three-way choice between a fine reform, a botch to make matters worse, or leaving things be. Of course, people will be people and the botch narrowly won, fortunately with too small a turn-out to provide any sort of mandate for implementing it. However, one interpretation that could be put on such a result is that the democratic will of the people of Jersey is for an unequal distribution of voting power. This is where Shute's additional vote scheme comes in. With updated and locally appropriate criteria, only politicians rash enough to suggest that anyone of superior judgement would be prejudiced against them could object.

While the principle is not unreasonable, the devil would be in the detail of how the additional votes were assigned. Could we trust the States of Jersey to give the extra power to the wisest voters, or would they settle for something similar to gerrymandered boundaries, maybe one extra for a bank clerk, two for an officer, three for lawyer or accountant and none for a teacher because they are often left-wingers? I fear the latter would be the reality.

If it could be done honestly, it could be a way of improving Jersey politics, by playing on the vanity of the current establishment, to lead them to empower those who they think would support them but don't. Moreover, it would accord with the local cultural expectation, that politics should be for the middle classes. Although I would not back it myself, except as the other choice to a truly awful option, it is at least a different approach to stopping Jersey democracy from being considered an oxymoron, so I offer it as food for thought.

A Trinity For Unity?

With a year to Jersey's next election, the politically interested are once again turning their mind to the island's remarkable lack of formal political parties.

Eight years ago, the 2005 election saw a surge of interest in party politics. The Centre Party, who were actually staunchly right-wing, but just not of the Establishment, soon vanished, while the Jersey Democratic Alliance nearly settled into becoming a permanent institution, taking several years to fade away after an unsustainably vigorous start. The Establishment politicians, for their part, did not see the need to set up a formal party to promote their own side, but they made it clear that there was a considerable amount of teamwork between those who intended to be working together when elected or re-elected.

Several more years of drifting in the same direction have kept those who are content with it from wanting to be any more politically active than they were. However, those, who are are discontented with various aspects of Jersey's current government, are beginning to feel the lack of formal vehicles to express their grievances and, one day, possibly implement solutions.

To topple, or even constrain, the established clique of ethically challenged cynics will require all who are not positively with them to unite against them. Saying that much is facile, but the first challenge is in how to unite them in a manner that is both flexible enough to accommodate internal dissensions without schism, and strong enough to maintain a cohesive direction. The Jersey Democratic Alliance was initially founded with the intention to be a very broad group, hence the name of Alliance. However, the centre-right element soon found themselves uncomfortable with the dominance of more left-wing thinkers, by both work rate and intellectual power, and baled out. The centre-left element bled away more slowly over the next five years, and, since the left-wing remainder became, in effect, the Jersey Labour Party, it has done nothing, if it even continues to exist at all. If practical lessons can be learned and applied from the JDA experience, though, then it was not all in vain.

To form a party, there has to be a nucleus of people agreed on a series of policies that they either desire, or at least assent to for the sake of their colleagues' desires, and motivated to pursue them. They can then recruit the uncommittedly sympathetic as rank-and-file members, and market the policies to the relatively apolitical general public as something worth voting for, come election time. Now, it seems to me that there are more than one tenable set of policies that could be pursued, according to taste and conscience. Therefore, there should be different nuclei of supporters around the different visions. The consequence of that, in turn, is a multi-party system.

A multi-party system, though, does not in itself unite the opposition, so much as formalise its divisions. Thus, to actually achieve anything, the parties must form coalitions to implement the overlaps on their policy lists, which will probably be quite substantial. Many things that should be either done or undone remain good or bad in capitalist, social democratic and socialist societies alike, and the parties can agree to do that much together. In a simple two-party system, cross-party agreements do not happen as often as they should, as tactical gaming tends to displace political integrity, but, with four-plus parties, dirty players can just get frozen out and marginalised.

If Jersey is to succeed in achieving the degree of political health most comparable jurisdictions enjoy, we need more than a party. We need a diversity of parties, and we need formal inter-party structures in turn. I envisage something like this as the way forward:

Four to six smallish parties, perhaps representing left, centre-left, centre-right and right on the traditional socio-economic continuum, and maybe green and libertarian taking other priorities, would make the basis. Most people, who would be activists at all, could find something for them amongst that selection.

Pairs or trios of parties with substantially overlapping aims would then have coalition agreements to work together on these shared aims and co-operate electorally. Certainly there is scope and even need for such a coalition between a leftist party and any centre-left and green party that may also form, and other parties will probably want to make similar connections.

All parties would benefit from also having an association of Jersey political parties, strictly concerned with the general promotion and support of party politics, and neutral as to what its constituent parties' politics may be. This could be used to both make general recruitment drives to encourage the public to work for their political beliefs, whatever they may be, and as a lobby group, to discourage The States from further measures to restrict the formation and growth of political parties.

The detailed picture of what emerges would have to depend on how many people actually care enough about what policies. There is a threshold of 20 signatories required under Jersey Law to found a party in the first place, and, given our firmly entrenched tradition of political apathy, some of the parties that could have been might not find them.

Anyway, I see the way to mount an effective challenge to the Establishment clique as not a simple unity of opposition, but a trinity of such left-wingers as there are in Jersey in one party, non-socialist liberals like myself in another, and a formal joint project of the two parties to organise a coalition in pursuit of the two parties shared objectives.

Rebranding Anarchy

Once upon a time, when the world was much emptier of people than it is now, the few humans that did live in it formed little tribal groups. To this day, on the very margins of Earth's habitable space, a minute fraction of humanity still live in the old way, even if their traditional opportunism means saying Yes to Industrial Man's steel knives and machine-woven cotton clothes. In some places, the tribes are firmly egalitarian, to the point of lynching megalomaniacs, while others adopt an authoritarian order, so it is no longer possible to be sure what the natural order of human nature might have been: Perhaps just to do things differently from the next tribe for the sake of difference. A nomad's life in a wilderness needs no government, however, little though governments laying claim to the nomads' wildernesses may like it.

The apparent freedom of the tribal nomad may appeal to a contemporary urban wage-slave. Nevertheless, those who once lived, or still live, the life tend to find a great deal of constraint on their freedom in practice. They may contentedly accept the strict, inflexibly rule-bound social codes of tribal life as the way things ought to be, but the shadow darkening the edges of all their lives is that of food insecurity. Failure to find or catch enough to eat means immediate misery and immanent extinction, so all their lives must revolve around sourcing the next meal.

Planting crops was a massive game-changer. Suddenly, by taking possession of the land and tending it, a sufficiency and even surplus of food freed at least some of the people, some of the time, for the myriad of other activities that make civilised life so much more satisfying for those who live it. However, to make it worth the farmers' while to feed the rest, they needed reciprocal benefits, at least indirectly, such as protection and craftsman-made goods. It was more practical and reliable to actively organise this new social order than to gamble on spontaneous emergence. And so, hierarchical government evolved to fill the niche.

For thousands of years, the existence of governments has served most of their people well most of the time. Of course, there are countless examples of corrupt or incompetent governments visiting disaster upon their unfortunate citizens, instead. That may be so, but, on reflection, it is plain that the problems are with the corruption and incompetence, not the intrinsic existence of government.

Anyone who fancies themself a realist would endorse the old proverb, that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Thus, some are discontented, and some of them in turn come to believe the remedy to their grievances would be to abolish any government. Therefore, the extreme position for any rebel, egalitarian or other shade of left-winger has always been anarchy. Anarchy may sound attractive, no state to boss you around and tax your money, but pragmatists don't usually fancy the consequences of the power vacuum, unless they themselves feel equipped to become one of the robber barons filling it.

While civilisation is dependent on government, there is a very broad range of tenable opinions as to how much governments should do to deliver civilisation's benefits to their citizens. There is also an equally broad range of opinions on what the reciprocal relationship of the citizen towards the state should be. Moreover, amongst those who are much bigger on feeling than thinking, the same person's opinions on the two may not even be compatible.

Those of us, who have had the benefit of growing up in a secure and prosperous civilised country, develop a sense of entitlement to the liberties civilisation and wealth make possible. A tribal goatherd will usually accept his destiny as the way his life was always going to be, and the only thing it could be, while anyone in a position to be reading this will have their brain washed with the idea that they could have been anything they wanted to be, and, if it didn't happen, they couldn't have tried hard enough. This individualistic and self-directed view of life naturally impinges on how we feel about our reciprocal duties towards the state that nurtures us. So, often the self-made take the background for their own struggle to succeed for granted, and overlook the importance of the physical and social infrastructure that enabled them to achieve.

A worse consequence of denying the contribution of humanity in general to one's own successes, is that it leads one to correspondingly overestimate the contribution the unsuccessful make to their own misfortune. Instead of the able seeing a duty to help arrange the world so that the less able have opportunities to contribute to the satisfaction of themselves and others, the relatively successful sometimes fall into an attitude that their good fortune proves they must deserve it, and so the unfortunate must deserve to be unfortunate, too. Sure enough, some indeed do get the lives they deserve, but I would challenge the generality of the rule.

However, if you have made the error of not reckoning the common goods you built our life on, and judge others' efforts purely by what they get to show for them, you can convince yourself that not only do you never need any help, but anyone who does, cannot deserve to get it, and least of all at your expense. This then provides a moral framework to call for a descent into anarchy, so that the clever and the strong may be relieved of the duty to support the stupid and the weak as their fellow humans. This brand of anarchism is rather unattractive to people of integrity, when spelled out, so, it has become fashionable to pass it off as libertarianism, instead.

Really, libertarianism is as much a triage to spare government or society the trouble of unnecessary intervention, as it is an assertion of the right of an individual to be as free in how they choose to live, as can be accommodated by the reciprocal freedom of others. However, once you distort the morality with the idea that needing help forfeits the right to it, it simply becomes a shallow rebranding of an exceptionally vicious and degenerate variety of anarchism, for a generation raised to distrust the old tag.

Let us lay this nonsense to rest. Humankind's heritage and destiny has been and will always be to be a social animal. An occasional castaway may have to go feral, and, more commonly and dangerously, some go feral in the midst of human society, from flaws in the brain denying them the crucial part of human nature that links the individual into their group. But in the main, all of our busy life is just expansion and refinement of life in a troop of monkeys. Doing your fair share, one way or another, does not make you a victim of a confidence trick; it is not only your moral duty, but your biological purpose. It is how we function, as a species. The confidence trick is the one that tells you to abjure your humanity and go your own way with no more than a parting sneer for those you owed. The “Libertarian” anarchists pitch their corrupting manipulations shrewdly, but look through the emotive style to the harsh, inhuman, even sub-simian substance, and reject it. It would make a lesser human of you, should you swallow the bait.

I don't Like iOS7

When Apple's newest update,
By name of ios5
Came out, it was quite marvelous, 
The Apple comp'ny thrived.

And later came the next one.
 - ios6.1 
Another great achievement,
Complicated, but still fun.

But then alas, a failure,
The seventh i.o.s
It's really rather crappy,
An awful little pest.

The apps are flat,
No borders.
A part of the home screen.
It's really rather simple,
And looks too flat and clean.

I'd write complaints to apple,
But i don't like to be mean
But i must say, it's not their best
Too sci-fi and pristine.

I'm really quite offended 
By this patronising fail.
It makes me want to unupdate,
Lie on the floor and wail.

It's much more fit for babies,
Than 9-10 years plus.
I fear, dear Apple - for you
That there'll be a massive fuss.

All will be complaining,
Of these weird facilities. 
I really think that better
Could be made by chimpanzees!

Okay, i'll stop complaining.
Yes, i don't like this update
But Apple, in a pre-warning,
Make the next one really great!!!

by Libby Rotherham

Option A, In Depth

for longer than I can personally remember, Jersey has been beset by a widespread concern that the machinery of government does not function quite so well for us as we could expect, from the examples of how it functions elsewhere. Thus, we have had, in recent years, the Clothier fiasco and now the Bailhache Commission, looking to make much-needed improvements.

A decade ago, the public's leading grumble was inefficiency: All those members putting their 2d-worth into everything, slowing down the pace and sometimes even forcing the cancellation of rash schemes. However, we weren't careful enough in what we wished for. Now we have Ministerial government and the Troy Rule, concentrating power at the expense of diminishing control, and leaving a majority of Members on the back-benches, constitutionally barred from the work they actually sought to do. Meanwhile, they continue to be derided for perceived inefficiency.

The focus of concern has moved on, though, to the question of how we end up with the politicians we do, anyway. And so, we have had the Bailhache Commission. They have given us four options, none altogether satisfactory, and passed the buck back to the voting public for the next stage, although the final decision will not be ours.

The Commission have, inexplicably, demanded that any reform of electoral process be yoked to an arbitrary reduction in the size of the House. This is hugely problematical: Already, Ministers and Assistant Ministers are unable to oversee their Departments with anything like the thoroughness of the traditional Committees that they replaced. Reducing the number of Members, with a pro-rata decrease in Assistant Ministers, will only aggravate that problem. A 42 member States will soon find themselves torn between three problems. The Executive can keep power at the expense of control, as all the decisions pile up on a reduced number of desks, or they can abandon the Troy Rule, and its theoretical check on executive excess, to bring enough politicians back into government to keep the workload down, at risk of idealogical dilution, or they can urgently add a seat or even two per constituency, to make a 48 or 54 member House that can sustain a 25 or 28 member executive within the Troy Rule.

All that should not really have been part of the question, but as it has been wrongly made so, we must take it into account.

I deliberately wrote that we have been offered four options, despite there being only three on the ballot paper. There is a fair groundswell of support for “Option D”, the implicit fourth choice of abstention, whether passively by boycotting the poll, or actively by spoiling the paper. In favour of this choice, it does send the message that none of the others met people's hopes. On the other hand, it is open to being spun as a sign of indifference, and, if it is the dominant response, the States are likely to regard it as carte blanche  to please themselves.

Worse still is Option C, to positively endorse remaining with the system that is failing us. No doubt it would be a relief to sitting States Members to know that their seats will still be there, should they want re-election, but it would completely fail to deal with the inequalities of votes and mandates that discredit the States in the eyes of so many electors.

Yet even Option C looks good in comparison with Option B. The new constituencies can be considered when I look at Option A, but the glaring feature of Option B is the increased emphasis on the role of Constables in the States. I know of no other place in the world where free places in parliament are automatically given to local municipal mayors, as Constables would be described elsewhere. If we had the best government on Earth, then we would have a case for taking pride in this being part of our winning recipe. However, the starting point for the whole reform issue is that our government is conspicuously failing to measure up to its peers at present. So, what might we be doing wrong here? One of the most obvious things is clogging up a quarter of the places in the legislature with people with a primary duty to another level of administration, to the detriment of their work for both. The claimed justification that they are there specifically to represent those other levels is misguided, to say the least. Nowhere else does it, and nowhere else has a problem with local government arising from not doing it. I do not believe that there is something uniquely feeble about Jersey's parishes, that would make them wither, were they to gain their Constables' undivided attention. Option B would aggravate the problem, by reducing only the number of Members without split commitments.

A further drawback of the Constables' continuing membership of the States is, that the community standing and knowledge of the municipal administration that go to make a good Constable do not necessarily go together with the outlook on larger issues that a voter might wish for in his States representative. For example, in the UK, with its clear and unmuddled separation of tiers, it is not uncommon for the Liberal Democrats to be a town's party of choice for the local council, despite sending another party's candidate to Westminster.

Finally, my reverse tour up the ballot paper stops at Option A. As I noted above, the reduction of numbers to 42 is a mistake that will be regretted, should we choose to go down this road. However, the six-constituencies for all members elected on similar mandates is a massive improvement. I liked having 12 Senators I could vote for, but their numbers are being cut anyway, so the possibility of voting on over a quarter of the places in the States has already been lost to us. The big multi-member constituencies maintain a large fraction of the choice, though, and would improve matters by removing “rotten boroughs” that send Members, be they Deputies or Constables, to the House on so few votes that their credibility forever suffers scornful comparison with those there by the choice of thousands. These are the issues the Electoral Reform Commission was established to address, and Option A is, by and large, a remedy.

Despite the unwise cut in numbers, option A is the only one to bring us up to the expectations of a modern Western democracy, and we need to send the message to the States by going out and voting for it. We shall just have to hope then, that the States then implement the voters' choice, but exercise some discretion about the reductions, which they well might, considering the cliché about turkeys and Christmas that perennially haunts the subject.

Option A, in a nutshell

Despite the superficial fairness, the even-handed offering of retention of Constables or both Constables and Senators as alternatives could be interpreted by voters as implying that they, too, would be equally acceptable outcomes.

There are strong grounds for endorsing Option A, the six multi-Deputy constituencies without Constables. Only the first option delivers a House in which all Members are specifically elected to do the job by a comparable electorate and all voters have a fair and equal say in choosing their Members.

The second option provides only 30 Members unencumbered by the running of a parish, while the part-timers would hold equal power from fewer, and in some cases far fewer, votes; one of principal flaws of the status quo that the reform should be addressing.

Even choosing to stay with the present unsatisfactory system after all would be better than Option B, although it would be a sad waste of an opportunity to both make a real improvement and close the subject for the long term.

Full version of Blue Coupe/Stray review

Review of Opera House Gig 2/2/13 written for JEP, but published by them in an abridged form. Therefore, here is the full version for anyone who agrees Stray earned their share of the writeup:
,br /> Last Saturday, The Opera House played host to not just one, but two exceptionally fine hard rock bands. Although, sadly, the venue was half-empty, the sparse audience were delighted with their evening's entertainment.

First on were the current incarnation of 1970s heavy metal pioneers Stray. Original guitarist Del Bromham has added the front man's skills of fine tenor vocals and engaging Cockney banter over his long career, and served up his rhythmically precise and melodically fluent playing with great panache, while the younger drummer and newly-recruited bass player provided appropriately powerful accompaniment. They played both recent material and old songs from the original line-up's heyday. They are not in decline. Perhaps the strongest song of their whole set was one of the newer ones, a dark lament on the execution of shell-shocked soldiers in World War I.

By the interval, many of the audience felt they had already had their money's worth. However, more was to come. Blue Coupe swaggered on stage with the confidence befitting their backgrounds as international stars with Blue Oyster Cult and Alice Cooper, and launched into a rousing version of the latter's ”I'm Eighteen”. Blue Coupe are a slightly different recipe to their support act, in that they are more about the songs than the way they play them, but these veterans still bring their repertoire alive with the raw energy of a high-school band. The vitality of the Bouchard brothers and the charisma of bassist Dennis Dunaway guaranteed sparkling performances of many of the highlights of their respective back catalogues; BOC's thunderous “Godzilla”, haunting “Astronomy” and roof-raising “Don't Fear the Reaper”, Alice's storming “Under My Wheels” and climactic “School's Out” and many more beside.

Having brought a sizeable fraction of the audience to their feet, by the end of the main set, the band needed little pleading to return for a lengthy encore of bluesier songs, such as “Roadhouse Blues” and “Spoonful” featuring Jersey's own harmonica star Giles Robson as a guest.

All in all, it was a fine evening's music for a modest ticket price, and the many rock fans who left so many seats unbought can now give themselves a good kicking.

Tune Back Into the Rhythm of Life

I have been brought up with an awareness of, and interest in nutrition. However, the more one tries to learn, the more contradictions and paradoxes one gets faced with.

The most fundamental starting point is that not eating enough kills in weeks, and not drinking enough in days. We all have an instinctive sense of this, that keeps us alive, but that instinct can sometimes also lead us astray.

In fact, for the large fraction of the Western World that is enjoying an abundance of food in our time, the threat to health comes more from surfeit than lack. Although we mostly avoid the harm that comes from simple insufficiency of food, many people, including a lot who should know better, eat imbalanced diets that skimp on some key nutrients while overloading their metabolisms with more than they can cope with of others, and ever more of us eat imbalanced diets on such an epic scale that we break our health in the long term. The consequences of excess kill about 200 times more slowly than those of famine, but kill they do, and millions of years of potential life are going unlived as a result.

Given that we all know eating is good, and it is not transparently inconsequent logic to deduce that eating more must therefore be better, why it does not turn out that way in real life is a mystery to laymen and a challenge to scientists. The crudest measure of overeating is obesity. Being a simple thing to grasp, much money can be made from encouraging the insecure to fret about this, and there is an undeniable correlation between obesity and ill-health. However, scientific research shows that it is not a simple causal relationship: The minority of fat people, who keep their muscles fit beneath the blubber, have the same mortality rate as the lean and fit, and rather better than the merely weedy, according to the epidemiologists. Other studies have made it plain that where the fat lies is more of an indicator of problems than how much there is of it. Be it cause or, more likely, co-consequence, substantial abdominal fat goes hand-in-hand with the excessive levels of various chemicals in the blood that wreak the real damage, unseen and unfelt; whereas subcutaneous fat is a far greater menace to vanity than to health.

Chemicals in the blood, wreaking unseen and unfelt damage. There, I think, I have reached the crux of the matter; how we harm ourselves with our food without triggering any protective instincts. Only in our time have medical scientists worked out the significance of some of the many ingredients to be found in our blood, and they are still unrolling the story – below I shall come to explain how this article was sparked by learning of some current research. Everything every cell in the body needs to consume or dispose of must get into the bloodstream, but there are lower and upper limits to what is useful and harmful.

Sugars are one of the best known levels to need controlling. Without energy to live by, we are not viable organisms, but overfeeding individual cells can have dire consequences for the body as a whole. Perhaps one of the best-known of our hormones, insulin, regulates blood sugar, as one of the most important of its multiple functions, but constantly sending vast quantities of sugars from our guts to our blood can overwhelm the insulin process with at least two dire potential consequences: syndrome X, where persistently elevated insulin levels create resistance to all its metabolic effects throughout the body, with similar results to premature aging, and type 2 diabetes, where the body's ability to produce enough insulin simply burns out, with much the same effect as syndrome X and more besides, including life-threatening harm to circulation and brain function amongst other symptoms.

Cholesterol levels are another that most people know are a risk area. I myself am under doctor's advice to restrict saturated fat intake, after a couple of poor results for Low-Density Cholesterol level tests. Letting LD cholesterol get out of hand leads to the surplus precipitating out in blood vessels, until a stroke or heart attack cuts you off in your prime. An even more dismal prospect than eating less cheese and sausage!

Much more recently than the discovery of insulin, scientists have begun to investigate the role of a related hormone to insulin itself, to which they have given the distinctly uncatchy name of insulin-like growth factor 1, or IGF-1 for short. The root of this article is in a BBC2 Horizon programme, which included some coverage of research into the causes and effects of varying IGF-1 levels. It seems that adult humans metabolise digested proteins over a two day cycle, with a corresponding rise and fall in IGF-1 levels, and differing responses to rising and falling levels. In particular, according to the research featured in the programme, falling IGF-1 levels are the cue for the body's healing and immunity processes. Another question that the same programme gave some attention to was the very controversial idea of Caloric Restriction as a healthy approach to eating.

For some years I have been aware that some study has been done on comparing laboratory animals on varying degrees of restricted diet with others allowed to feed ad lib. These studies invariably achieve substantial longevity gains for the half-starved subjects. Curiously, though, humans who eat limited diets, from either poverty or spiritually motivated asceticism, do not often seem to live especially long lives. However, some of the best life expectancy statistics do come from places with a cultural tradition of eating nutritious but energy-poor staples, so there may be something in it. When reading of the latest research on Caloric Restriction, I always suspected that the likely mechanism was that reduced energy availability enforced more rest on the test creatures. However, the IGF-1 research, in which the low blood levels a day or more after a rich, high-protein high energy meal has been fully metabolised were linked to a boost in immune function and healing processes, while the high levels immediately after suppressed it, offers a realistic explanation for how animals kept permanently in the second phase could gain a benefit over those recklessly keeping themselves in the first phase.

A further mechanism I have read of even more recently, is controlled by another hormone, once again optimised by a two-day eating cycle.

The third strand to the BBC programme I was discussing, looked at some scientific research on a diet scheme called Intermittent Fasting. I must admit that I had not heard of this before. However, it struck me as one of the most important ideas I have ever encountered; a practical combination of the advice to eat well that I grew up with and all the advice to restrain and restrict my eating that I have been bombarded by ever since.

Intermittent Fasting does not seem to be as new idea to the world as it is to me personally, but it is still fairly cutting edge, with no clear mainstream. Even so, at least some of the variants are the work of serious medical scientists, rather than the “alternative” charlatans inevitably drawn to anything involving dieting. Perhaps the lack of a single plan for all to follow is part of the message; adaptation to personal requirements is better than rigid dogma.

The two front-running versions appear to be a strict alternate day regime, of eating all you have the appetite for one day, then eating a hardline calorie restrictor's 600cal the next, and a slightly more relaxed 5:2 regime of five days' eating freely, then two of CR. Since starting to draft this article, I have seen a piece in one of my wife's women's magazines by the nationally famous nutritionist Patrick Holford in which he tries to incorporate the recent interest in IF into his established Glycaemic Load based approach. Holford does not take on board the key points about cycles and low-protein days, though, which is at least a difference of opinion to the likes of Dr Mosley and Prof Longo, and probably simply missing the point of the new findings. Anyway, for what it is worth, Holford's take on it advises 800cal fast days with protein meals and maintaining even blood sugar by constant snacking. I am unconvinced, as it is uspposed to be about re-establishing the natural ebb and flow of levels, but he is the expert and I the layman,so take my doubts with a pinch of salt.(Remembering, of course, that too much salt is also a major health hazard!)

If there is no Official Version yet, though, those of us with the competence and confidence to take responsibility for our own nutrition can pick our own path. I have an active job in cold conditions and used to maintain a steady weight on about 25,000cal/wk, rather more than most of my few readers are likely to need. Thus, I have devised a personally tailored version of 1000cal and low-protein, i.e. no meat, cheese or cereal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and all I can eat on the other days. After 20 weeks, I am a stone lighter. Moreover, I am as strong as I was, and seem to have only lost the internal body fat that made bending over a little uncomfortable in recent years, and, worse, correlates with medical problems like the aforesaid high cholesterol. Soon, I intend to go for a check-up and shall post results in a follow-up article, on how the critical blood measurements are looking now.

As well as yielding palpable physical benefit, Intermittent Fasting turns out to be psychologically much easier than literal dieting, in which the restrictions are made each and every day. On fast days, you start still satisfied from the preceding feast day, and by the end of the day, when you may be getting hungry, especially in the early weeks of the regime, you still have only to wait until morning for more feasting. Moreover, your body does acclimatise fairly rapidly. 20 weeks in, it is beginning to feel normal and natural not to eat heavily every day.

I would recommend adoption of Intermittent Fasting to most people, on the strength of what I have learned and my first-hand experimentation. However, this is about taking responsibility for optimising your own health. If you have any eating or metabolic related medical condition whatsoever, then get your doctor's expert advice on how quickly and intensively you can safely adopt IF. (If at all; it may be too late for you already, should Type 2 Diabetes have taken its grip on you.) I have done it unsupervised, as I was sure of my general good health and background knowledge , but I do not care to encourage others in different circumstances to take greater risks than there were for myself.

140,000? I Don't Believe It!

This week saw the shallowest piece of journalistic sensationalism in Jersey for years. The Jersey Evening Post ran a front page headline that the local population was officially expected to rise to 140,000. (a 45% increase on current levels, for any non-local readers) Shocking, indeed, but then a few moments of reading on makes it clear that the figure is actually a prediction of what another 70 years like the last 10 would lead to.

The shocking thing then moves from being the vast figure to the absurd incompetence of the government statisticians, who thought this worth calculating and officially reporting. The last time in history that European civilisation went 80 years without any major social, economic or climatic upheaval must have been the 13th Century. The last 60 years have been a time of especially rapid changes. However, transformative changes are essentially short term processes. Any statistics about their effects will follow either peaked curves or S curves ramping up or down to a new level. The new levels are determined by the completion of the process, though, and it is a meaningless folly, that a professional statistician ought to be above, to calculate as if a change can continue beyond its own completion.

So much for the principle. What of the substance, that I can greet the report with a sneer for its writers instead of horror at its conclusions? The first question is, of course, where would half as many people again live? This is probably the most widely cited objection to the report's validity, but actually the weakest. With a little compromising of living standards, we could at least house 140,000 mainly in existing stock, (so long as sea levels rise slowly enough to replace coastal settlements with developments on high ground) and certainly with three generations to adapt. Singletons living alone in small flats is a very recent norm, and it would not go against the grain of human nature to return to long-proven practices of grown children staying at home, or sharing with fellow bachelors or spinsters. We could easily occupy our existing housing at much higher density than we now do, and in a worsening economy, will likely find motivation to do so. Increasing the load on other infrastructure is more problematical, though. To maintain the current standard of medical care for a population unlikely to be substantially healthier, especially since the 20th Century's hard-won knowledge about nutrition is being sidelined into a subject for crackpots, will require a much larger hospital for a start. Then there is the re-engineering of the drainage system to dispose of half as much foul sewage again. Some commentators worry about the capacity of our roads to handle that kind of increase in traffic, but I think there are more global reasons why we are already most of the way through the Age of the Car, and in even 20 years time bikes and buses will have reclaimed the streets. And so for all the infrastructure; between enlargements at the upgrades that another 70 years will inevitably require, and more intensive use, we can be ready for so many people by the time we have them. If we have them, which I very much doubt.

The 140,000 prediction ignores all sorts of constraints that any realistic forecasting and contingency planning must allow for. The world of 2082 is necessarily going to differ from ours in many ways. Despite the inclination of some to disbelieve the signs as a macho exhibition of mind over matter, global warming, from the smoke we are making to live our lives as we do now, will have changed the world, and for the worse for many people, even if we cannot yet see which unlucky numbers will come up on the dice. The present baby boom of many poor third-world countries will have grown old and be dying off in another 70 years, and it is improbable that they will themselves raise enough healthy children through decades of failing harvests to maintain the exponential growth with another baby boom of their own.

The capping of global population, by inescapably finite food supply, will then break the current growth-driven model of globalised capitalism, if it has not already been politically dismantled for its social failings. Thus, any local economy that is based in the short-term on servicing contemporary global capitalism must face a very different future, be it failure or profound change, as the present just will not last for 70 more years. This is the real rub. I simply do not believe that Jersey will be able to provide livings to 140,000 people in 70 years time. It could not do so now, and it is improbable that what we euphemistically like to call the Finance Industry will be able to operate on anything like its present scale in even 20 more years.

Without work, many residents will be unable to stay, and so the population will fall. A collapsed post-Finance economy may become a cheap place to do business and attract some re-immigration, but the great boom of recent decades will not come again, and Jersey will never support a tenth of a million permanent residents.

Time and Money Well Spent?

The widespread perceptions of inappropriate self-indulgence that are attaching to Sir Philip Bailhache's “fact-finding” foreign visits have deflected attention from a more fundamental reason why these trips are a poor use of public money.

For all that Sir Philip claims to be receiving very useful briefings, his status as a visiting official must inevitably skew the picture that is presented to him to the point of uselessness as a practical guide for ourselves. It is an ancient and worldwide tradition to show only the best and most glorious when hosting high-status guests, and hide not only the rubbish, but even the mundane nitty-gritty.

Let us imagine that the Dependencies Sir Philip are “researching” decide to send reciprocal visitors to examine how our own parliamentary system is working, in due course: Who would see them and what would they tell them? No doubt there would be a dinner with the Council of Ministers and another with the Jurats, and maybe even visits to a few carefully chosen Constables, but it would be a safe bet that nobody with any track record for favouring reform would be allowed anywhere near them.

That being so, why does anybody expect VIP visits to be anything but a poor gauge of an island's political health, compared with a few hours judicious internet browsing?

Jersey needs an Independent Electoral Commission

The impending States of Jersey debate on setting up an Electoral Commission must not be dismissed as arcane self-obsession by the rest of us.

The present situation, in which abstentions consistently top the polls, cannot be claimed as a healthy or successful democracy. Thus, we need to develop a political scene that does command widespread public confidence. To do so, we need to improve the process, to offer the hope that public engagement will influence outcomes for the better. And, the hardcore under the foundations must be that we choose very carefully whom we entrust the improvement to.

While the Clothier Commission's proposals were not entirely to my personal taste, and the hatchet job the States did on them still less so, I can only admit it was a convincingly authoritative body to make those proposals. We must have another such Commission this time.

Unfortunately, some of the latest ideas being floated for the make-up of the Commission would rob it of that convincing authority from the outset. I can see a weak argument for including States Members, on the grounds that they are elected and paid to show leadership and make decisions on political matters. However, every last one of them has too much of a vested interest in the results to be at all credible. Only a completely independent Commission could be considered trustworthy. As a matter of principle, serving and prospective politicians must be ineligible to serve on it.

Moving beyond the abstract principle, any States Members tempted to vote against keeping the Electoral Commission independent has to beware of the complication that the Member keenest to get onto the Commission is the turkey who actually wants to vote for Christmas. Any Deputy faced with the risk of opening the way to a potential Chairman with a pre-existing desire to cull their numbers is going to be making their choice under the burden of a massive conflict of interest, even if the Senators and Constables can honestly follow their consciences on principle.

So, this vote will matter to us all. We must pay close attention to how our representatives vote.

A Real Party Here At Last?

Press release

A group of Jersey residents are planning to set up a Jersey branch of Lib Dems Abroad. A new States is in place. We recognise that Jersey needs policies that face up to the scale of the economic, environmental and social challenges facing the island. To help to draw up these policies, Lib Dems Abroad in Jersey can look at the work of the UK Liberal Democrat party and can consider how far they apply in a local context. We feel that their strong emphasis on local community issues alongside an outward looking international agenda fits well with the best of Jersey traditions.
While we endorse open debate and fairly placed criticism we do not collectively associate with the views of any particular Lib Dem MP or spokesperson on matters affecting Jersey.. However a grouping of people, proud of traditional Jersey values, who wish to see them continue to flourish in the best interests of all Jersey people, not just in finance, can help to promote positive new policies here.
An initial meeting has been planned for 5.30 pm on Wednesday, December 7th at Hautlieu School to form a committee and receive ideas from everyone interested in the proposal. Later there will be a vote on a constitution for the Jersey branch, using a draft provided by Lib. Dems Abroad.
We are supported by two candidates in the recent Senatorial elections, Rose Colley and Mark Forskitt, both of whom have served as Lib Dem councillors in the UK in the past.
We hope to involve both young and not so young. Maureen Lakeman, studying the International Bacclaureate at Hautlieu, has already attended two Lib Dem conferences in UK. Ed Le Quesne was a member of the SDP and then joined the Lib Dems when it first formed and through the Amos Group of Christians Together in Jersey has long taken a close interest in local affairs.
If you can’t attend the initial meeting, please register your interest by e-mailing one of us. It is not necessary to be a member of the Lib Dems to attend.
Maureen Lakeman Maureenlakeman@hotmail.com 07797 920606
Ed Le Quesne edleq@jerseymail.co.uk 730131
November 2011
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Bad Echoes From A Bad Thing

The big story where I live, in Jersey, this month, has been the horrific mass murder of a couple of Polish families on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. To inflict on anyone the fear and then agony of a knife attack is a great wrong, and to give them many extra years of empty death, when they should still have been in the fullness of life, is by far the greatest wrong of all, and even more so when stealing almost the whole life expectancy of a small child. Multiply that by six and it is enough to shock even so smug a place as Jersey.

In fact, many people are so shocked that they are blurting out quite intemperate comments. While I would hate to be misunderstood as condoning such repugnant wickedness, I feel that I cannot agree with altogether everything that is being said by some of those who share my outrage at the crime, and my sadness for the victims.

While subsequent news releases imply that the sole survivor of the incident was indeed the aggressor, there was no indication in the first few, that the wounded man had not heroically fought for his life in self-defence and won. And yet complete strangers were already pouring their hate on this potentially innocent man, without waiting to find out whether he deserved it or not. This time nobody is having to eat their words, but it might behove them to consider the age-old procedure of evidence first, judgement afterwards in future.

Another ill-considered reaction the atrocity has provoked is calls for the return of the death penalty. Two cases alone are enough show why that one is best left in the history books: Compare the horrible story of Timothy Evans, who was framed for the murder of his beloved wife, only for his landlord to be unmasked as a serial killer some time after poor Evans ended his days dangling from a gallows, with the Guildford Four, who were framed for a terrorist bombing outrage; the judge bemoaned that he could no longer sentence them to hang, but when the real culprits were caught some years later, they were released to pick up the broken threads of their lives. In both these instances, the juries were under a duty to only convict if they found the accused's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and both times they were subsequently shown to have been wrong, but at the cost of only one innocent life. Never again, I say.

But it is not only the public who have overreacted: The States of Jersey Police Force have really gone overboard in making a large and expensive fuss. Although the consequences of a knife being used were so much more evil and horrible, the crime was essentially a simple domestic fight getting exceptionally far out of control. From a policing point of view there is no more complexity than had the killer struck with an empty hand, although, of course, that would have been a far less serious crime. They had the suspect under guard in the hospital, so what were all the closed roads and armed patrols about? Just grandstanding, and probably milking the overtime into the bargain. Visible activity, plus fomenting public insecurity has to help with getting police budget increases passed, too.

And one last grumble has to be aimed at the washed-up ex-politician who spouted off about how he thought that it was all about the terrible pressure Jersey life imposes on ordinary people. I don't buy the paper he was interviewed by, and the second-hand summaries I have seen of his opinions may not have been quite accurate, but he has had conspicuous mental health problems for some years now, and they don't seem to be getting any better. Time he discreetly withdrew to deal with his demons in private.