Time. Now.

You might only just have heard of Operation Punnet, or might have assumed that the strawberry Police enforcement unit is rigorously checking the number of seeds on each strawberry, but the reality is far different and much more serious.

Operation Punnet, run jointly by North Wales Police with Conwy and Denbighshire County Council licensing teams and other agencies, saw a staggering 11 pubs in Ruthin, Denbigh and Llanfair DC ordered to close their doors for two days.
A further two pubs in Colwyn Bay and Abergele had their licences suspended for a week or more. All 13 boozers were caught out by Test purchasers, all girls aged 15 and 16, sent to try to buy alcoholic drinks in December and January, supervised by undercover police.
As punishment for serving them, the Central Hotel, on Station Road, Colwyn Bay, can’t sell alcohol for two weeks after staff were twice caught selling to the test purchasers.

Police say alcohol-related violent crime inside these premises dropped by 56% on average while measures to stop selling to underage drinkers were active, and incidents of alcohol-related violent crime in neighbouring streets in Rhyl also dipped by 11% during those three months, a statistic which translates to 27 fewer assaults and public order offences, compared with a similar period in the previous 12 months.

As a new ID scanner, which takes a photo of official documents like a driving license or passport, and flashes up the person’s picture on a computer screen is being pushed hard, the redoubtable Roly Schwarz, said: “We’ve found some people let into pubs have actually had their ID checked, and it shows they’re 17, so this will help door staff work out people’s ages quicker.”

Alcohol and teenagers don't mix. The evidence is overwhelming, from the additional strain on the NHS to the community effects of vandalism, assault, criminal damage and anti-social behaviour.  Pubs who serve it to youngsters without ensuring that they're the appropriate age ought to be closed - and fast.

Learning by degrees

The Guardian reports to day that Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco's director of corporate and legal affairs, says school-leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and that many also have "what you might call an attitude problem". She adds: "They don't seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping ... Some seem to think that the world owes them a living," adding "There are growing questions over various aspects of our exam system. There seems to be a fair amount of evidence now that [exams] are getting easier and failing to stretch people. The proportion of firsts and 2:1s has risen enormously so it's much rarer to get a 2:2 than a first. People who are clever today are achieving the grades of the very clever a couple of decades ago."

And in that final sentence, she betrays not only her lamentable grasp of education but also a total inability to understand what constitutes intellect.

It's likely that she has a point - of sorts. There are school leavers out there who fulfil all the criteria she lists but there are as many - if not far more - that don't, and the question is why she doesn't hire them.  But the final statement she makes is not only wrong, it is incredibly misleading.  Firsts are still hard to come by and what she so quaintly terms 'cleverness' has little do with gaining one. But the final evidence of her extreme paucity of understanding is her sweeping comment about the value of degrees.

Is she arguing that a needlework degree from John Moore's is worth less than a physics degree from Warwick? If she is, then she needs to look at the consultancies who hire graduates, and who have known for many years that degrees are judged firstly by subject and secondly by who awards them.  Anyone gaining a degree from a university in the Russell group is given priority at interviews.  Perhaps she needs to brush up on her research skills…

Flushed with success

The news that Gwynedd pubs and cafes are, rather ironically, 'queuing up' to take £500 from the council in return for letting the public use their toilets makes for interesting reading. Public toilets are a major issue in all the local areas, with none in Mostyn Champneys or Parc Llandudno, other than those provided by the businesses themselves.

But it's taken a long time for Gwynedd to catch up with New York, where a city-wide ordnance was enacted decades ago making all public buildings provide toilets for everyone.
Holiday towns and resorts need public toilets; and if those owned by the councils are too dangerous, dirty or simply unpleasant to use then coercing businesses into providing them for visitors seems the way to go.  Vandalism is the oft-quoted reason for the councils not providing them, but it's far less of a problem when people have to walk past security cameras to a toilet hidden away in the large department store - there's a reason why most stores have their toilets on the top floor.

But perhaps the other issue is why people vandalise toilets.  Homebase was forced to close off their toilets, because they were being wrecked on a weekly basis.  Some people might complain about the insidious introduction of cameras everywhere,  but it they do their job, then perhaps we need to put up with them.

Things that go bump

At least one hotel in the area holds a clairvoyant or spiritualist meeting on a regular basis. Now, both these 'disciplines' are interesting, not least because of those who most vociferously oppose them.

Clairvoyants are seen mainly as carnival entertainers; Gypsy Rose Jones or some such who, after having had their palm crossed with silver (or, more likely, a fiver or two) will spout meaningless twaddle about you and your future, hoping desperately you won't ask them why - if they can see any of the future at all - they didn't sell their shares in British Gas before the last slump so they wouldn't have to spend eternity talking rubbish to the terminally naive (assuming they didn't want a career in politics).  Those who claim to be able to see the future are also usually expert at seeing the past. The tabloids delight in plucking the hitherto unknown from their justified obscurity to claim foreknowledge of a dreadful event, as witness the papers immediately following the 9 / 11 terrorist atrocity.

Some of these people are markedly more dangerous, however, and label themselves 'prophets', formulating prognostications of doom and gloom which - because of the vague and enigmatic manner in which they're presented - can always be claimed later to refer to a specific event.  Which begs the question as to why they weren't a tad more specific in the first place. 

Curiously, given that their day jobs revolve around the unfathomable, unprovable and supernatural, church leaders are usually the first to condemn those who seek to suggest that the church doesn't have a monopoly on such goings-on. Some churches espouse faith healing - an even more dangerous variant on the Gypsy Rose product line - and their proponents merrily wheel out lines of 'witnesses' who willingly testify that they were healed through prayer or the 'touch', who can always be relied upon to quote a 'Doctor' or 'Doctors' who all swore that they'd never seen anything like it, leaving aside that if faith healing actually worked, doctors by now would be bored silly with tribes  of terminally ill patients leaping to their feet in the 'Faith' OR and dancing away into the twilight.

The biggest crime committed by the charlatans, however, is to breed an inherent mistrust and disbelief in the claimed powers. By using fakery, accomplices and observing subtle clues they can put on a good show, with bitter disillusion usually being the only fallout product, although in a society which worships the supernatural and which seeks to elevate the inexplicable to sainthood, the exacerbation of incipient serous mental illness can be a risk.

But the real problem is that it might all be possible.  Who knows?  Only the genuine clairvoyant, probably.

The mind of God

Monday morning isn't necessarily the best time to ponder the secrets of the universe.  In fact, it's probably not the best time to do very much, at least until the first couple of strong. black cups of coffee have doused the oesophagus.  But it is perhaps the best time to consider how little we  - as a species - really know about anything.

Take gravity, for instance.  ECPs (extremely clever people) have been trying for many years to come up with a theory to explain why the universe exists, and how. EMECPs (even more extremely clever people) have centred their thoughts on M-theory; M-theory can describe any of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000…and so on universes. Some physicists argue that this is evidence that there are multiple universes, but others think it just means the theory is untestable.

The list of what we don't know is almost infinitely long, and rather worryingly impacts significantly on our everyday lives. There are those - often avid devotees of "24" - who firmly believe that torturing suspects will comprehensively protect us from any and all attacks, despite clinical evidence from studies which proves fairly conclusively that prolonged physical torture acts on the body to flood the brain with stress hormones such as cortisol and the catecholamines, reducing the size of the hippocampus, which is important in retrieving long-term memories; the amygdala, which forms part of the fear network; and the frontal lobes. In addition, prolonged stress can also lead to the creation of false memories based on information and supposed facts presented by the interrogator.

Given that we know so little about almost everything, therefore, one has to ask why the media continues to bombard us with 'facts' which are nothing of the sort, and continually scare us into believing that just about everything causes cancer. 

Or more pertinently, why do we continue to buy newspapers?

..and throw away the key!

The Venables case is making the headlines, today, along with the NSPCC calling for more powers for social workers to see potentially abused children alone.  Locally, it's reported that ambulances were queuing like B list celebrities at the Oscars outside Glan Clwyd hospital yesterday, while a quote from 'Disgusted' (presumably of Acacia Avenue) bemoaned the situation with regard to a patient she'd brought over.

At first glance, these stories share nothing in common. But scratch the surface, and there are more common elements than initially - at least - meet the eye.

In a very real sense behind each of these events lies a trend;  a trend where society appears to be failing its most vulnerable. This is not a political issue, although the parties concerned will doubtless try to accuse each other of being in some way responsible for it, along with the demise of sterling, the state of the NHS and the lunar occultations of the Pleiades. 

But Venables' crime, the call for social workers to be given the power to see vulnerable children away from their parents and the endless lines of waiting patients all beg the question of whether society can deal with the deranged, the dangerous and the desperate, without deploying resources far and away greater than any thus far deployed.

There are those whose answer to the likes of Venables, child molesters, rapists and parking wardens is "Lock 'em all up and throw away the key!", a somewhat impractical option, given that someone has to clean out the resultant mess left by decomposing bodies, or - less often heard - "Hang 'em all!", but such solutions themselves pose other questions. If we reintroduce the death penalty, can we be certain that no miscarriages of justice will occur?  These are difficult to remedy, once the victim is no more.

Imprisonment where 'Life means life'. the rallying call of the far right for aeons, it seems, also ignores the fact that resources for more prisons will be needed, and the health issues of a rapidly ageing prison population don't bear thinking about.  Besides which, it's also important to remember that we lock up a significantly higher percentage of our population than any other European country, which itself suggests that either our population behaves more badly or we simply have too many laws, any infractions of which can land you in pokey.

In fact, successive governments have been struggling, and mostly failing, to deal with the problem, even when they had the resources. In the days ahead, when resources will be stretched thin, perhaps it's time to start to think about what social issues we ought to prioritise as a society, and which we can afford to let slip. But given the increasingly interlinked nature of our society, perhaps we need to start asking our local Candidates how they would address the issue in not more than three sentences, and without using the phrases 'Lessons to be Learnt", "Maximisation of Resources" and anything else that fails to answer the question asked.

Social issues a`re difficult to resolve, and we're not as good at it as some of our European neighbours, but the impending election at least gives us the chance to ask them what they would do.  So long as we demand a straight, unequivocal, honest answer.  And good luck with that one.

The Devil or the Deep Blue Sea?

It's always an interesting week in politics, especially so when our hard-done by Lords and Masters (that's the MPs we're talking about) award themselves a massive pay rise, at the precise time when the entire public sector is being told there won't be any pay rises at all, millions face seeing their pensions devalued or removed and the opposition-bashing enters a more virulent phase.

It's currently fashionable to denigrate the Labour Party for its 'achievements', and - let's face it - by not reversing the Tories' initiatives in Education, Health and Welfare, they deserve criticism.  But before we all assume that it's time for a change (as we do, from time to time) it's worth pondering if we'd be any better off under the Tories.

This is, after all,  a party, one of whose biggest supporters is that bastion of democracy, Robert Mugabe, a party whom the Electoral Commission - no less - accused of interfering with the inquiry into Lord Ashchroft's  dodgy donations and a party led by a man who - it was revealed today - intends to spend some of his time raising money for the US Republican party, by hosting paid-for 'meets' with its biggest donors.

That last one is interesting, because it reveals that we'll almost certainly have even closer ties with the US under a Cameron-led government and it's also worth noting that the single biggest difference between the Labour and Tory parties in government over the past 20 years has been the distribution of wealth.  The Tories consider tax avoidance for the wealthy to be acceptable and see off-shore residence coupled with donations to their party as being desirable in the extreme.

But - in the last resort - you have to follow your conscience at the polls and ask yourself what sort of government do we really want?  The answer just might be to reform the voting system, as has been said on this blog many times before.

Happy Talk

Ask anyone in their fifties or sixties visiting Llandudno what their best memories of the place were and you can bet that Happy Valley will be mentioned. Happy Valley - a chunk of wooded hillside tucked into the NE corner of the Great Orme, thus protected from the prevailing wind, once hosted many of the typical seaside attractions we associate with holiday resorts in the UK. In the true sense of the word, it's unique - even now -  although time has erased some of the better features.

But the one thing which most remember Happy Valley for is the Theatre.  For many years - up until the 1960s, in fact - the legendary performer, Alex Munro, hosted a live show in the theatre which stood at the rear of the present cafe. In these days of pre-recorded entertainment, it's hard to imagine the effect of a group of singers and dancers giving their all on an outside stage for the entertainment of the holidaymakers, plus what little they could persuade the visitors to part with.  Even at the height of the season, it was tough going, as the vast majority of the visitors chose not to pay, and sat - instead - on the surrounding hillside, which forms a natural amphitheatre for the stage.

Happy Valley was given to the 'People of LLandudno' back in 1887 by the Mostyn family, and for many years was put to great use.  Although the years have taken their toll, the geophysical shape of the place, which provided such outstanding acoustics, remains, and it's clear that live shows there could not only be recreated, but might well prove extremely popular.   To do that, however, the existing land would have to be returned to the original 'tiered' form, to allow for some form of seating.

This is not an impossible aspiration;  CCBC has, in its wisdom, bulldozed the site, removed the old stage and tiering, and left it as a pale imitation of what it used to be, but this could all be recreated, and without vast expenditure.

Locally, interest in performance art has never been higher, with several groups of performers competing to attract visitors in Llandudno throughout the summer season, an excellent youth theatre, performing courses run by the local schools and the College and Llandudno's own town band.  What all this needs is the will to draw the strands together and surmount the not inconsiderable logistics involved in mounting a weekly or even daily show throughout the season.

On past experience, it's unlikely CCBC will be of any help,and might actually be quite active in hindering, so what's needed is someone with the time and the ability to start the ball rolling.  Any takers?

Risky stuff

Risk: the effect of uncertainty on objectives (whether positive or negative). Risk management: the identification, assessment, and prioritisation of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimise, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximise the realisation of opportunities.

And we wonder why people hate the phrases 'risk management', or 'risk assessment' and 'health and safety'.

And yet, the actual mechanics of risk assessment are known to every half-decent parent who ever takes their kids on a day out, or holiday, or watches them playing. What causes all the resentment is the way in which the small-minded implement legislation, and the sheer ignorance, both of what comprises 'risk' and of the legislation.

It's the 'risk' issue that the DFM loves to play with, of course, in their frequent articles about what can kill you, when they write in their singularly disingenuous way that eating carrots can double your chances of contracting toe cancer.  Which, if the original risk was 0.0001% means that the risk is now 0.0002% - or, in other words, indistinguishable from sheer chance.

Of course, many fear dying in a 'plane crash, although the odds of that having are so massive you'd have to fly in a 'plane every single day for 19000 years. But at least you'd get some frequent flyer miles.

The WHO collates risk stats, but it's a big job, and the last year for which we have complete figures is 2000.  Nevertheless, they make interesting reading. 

In that year the major causes of death in order were

      Tobacco (18.1 percent of total deaths)
   
      Poor diet and physical inactivity (16.6 percent)
   
      Alcohol consumption (3.5 percent)
   
      Microbial agents  (germs 'n stuff)
  
      Toxic agents (people drinking bleach and drain cleaner)

      Motor vehicle crashes
  
      Incidents involving firearms

      Sexual behaviours

     Illicit use of drugs

The interesting thing about all those factors is that they're a product of human activity. And it's important to remember that when we talk about climate change and its causes, we're talking about risk, and it's the risk that human activity may be causing it that worries the better scientists.

Important information

This blog (in common with others) has been receiving a number of comments which are racist, anti-semitic and unpleasant, often aimed at David Cameron and Gordon Brown.  For those comments not planted by robots, please note that we will refuse to publish anything which makes baseless allegations or libellous remarks, so it will easier if you simply stop wasting your time and posting them.

And so it continues (II)

Today, in the usually considered and understated tones of its sister paper, the DFM,  the Sunday Mail has a story about dog ownership, suggesting that the government is considering making people pass a test before they can own a dog.

In fact, not only is this an excellent idea, but it's worth considering whether it could be extended to parenthood. Perhaps it's about time that we restricted conception to those who are able to bring children up properly.

Yesterday we were inundated with EOTW (end of the world) warnings about torrential rain, 100 mph winds and the end of civilisation as we know it this weekend from a massive storm moving towards us destined to end all life on earth.  Turns out they were talking about London, which might get a strong breeze and an inch of rain. Of course, had it been Wales or Scotland getting battered, then we'd have been consigned to a footnote in the 'and finally' section of the BBC's news and weather.

Cameron is about to tell the party faithful that it's their 'Patriotic duty' to vote GB out of office.  In the past, when threatened, governments have looked for an outside cause or war to distract their critics. Perhaps Gordon should consider invading France? It could prove a popular move, as France is a nice size to accommodate all those asylum seekers who seem to like it over here, we'd get a nice holiday coast on the Med and we could use EuroDisney to offset the deficit.  Oh, wait;  Eurodisney is still £2bn in debt and made a loss of £50m last year.  Oh well, perhaps we should just invade London instead.  Then at least we could take over the BBC and get more balanced weather reports….

Hmmm....

A big congratulations to Cllr Chris Hughes who this year celebrates ten years of being chairman of the Friends of the Pier.  Just look what he's accomplished in this article, dated November 1999...

Ha!

New Scientist reports today that happiness isn't necessarily good for you. Psychologist Joe Forgas at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, suggests that happiness's negative effects all stem from a cheery mood's tendency to lull you into feeling secure. This makes you look inwards and behave both more selfishly and more carelessly.

To probe the effect of happiness on selfishness, Forgas and his colleague Hui Bing Tan put 45 students into good or bad moods by giving them positive or negative feedback on a "cognitive test" that they had taken. In fact the test was a fake and did not measure cognition, while the feedback bore no relation to their performance.

In related news, the mutilated bodies of two Australian psychologists were found inside a test centre, recently. They had been smothered with large numbers of test score sheets.  Police want to speak to a number of happy-looking students seen afterwards.

Once more unto the Beach, dear friends

The latest débâcle to appear from the WAG is the scandal of the unspent millions from the Communities First initiative, in which it was revealed that £140m had gone to partnerships, mainly to employ staff and run projects.  The WAG was also roundly criticised  for a lack of clarity and guidance from the Assembly Government.

The PAC committee stated: “Our conclusions are that, overall, the Communities First programme has not delivered good value for the significant amount of public money spent on it, and that this is largely because of weaknesses in the Welsh Government’s construction and management of the programme.”

Hmmm.  Well, there's probably more than a grain of truth there.  But without wishing to defend the frequently incompetent WAG it has to be said that giving out money is a fraught process, and asking civil servants to monitor the process and not expect them to spend most of the money on themselves reveals a worrying lack of awareness on the part of the politicos.

It's not that civil servants are dishonest as individuals.  It's simply that they work within a self-perpetuating system in which to gain your badge of honour you have to create a bigger administration team than your rivals.  What our WAG members fail to realise is that administration is not a means to accomplish something - it's the end result. You are judged by the size of the department in which you work, and thus the incentive to spend more on staff, offices, nice chairs and lots of paper clips is irresistible to the well-trained Mandarin.

But look at it this way: all those little local offices and people mean they have to eat somewhere, so the local chippy is probably doing quite well.

Bully, Bulli, Bello...

The attempt to paint our Gordon as a bully is rather odd.  After all, this isn't the first time there's been such allegations, and the last time they surfaced his numbers actually rose.

But what is a bully, exactly? The description given by the Oxford Dictionary is "a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker." so, in effect, it could apply to anyone who has subordinates.  The problem, of course, is in the perception of the 'bullied'; shouting at one person might simply have the same effect as water and ducks;  shouting at another might reduce them to a quivering wreck, so defining bullying isn't as simple as some people make out.  The curiously misguided lady who decided to stand up and say that her 'helpline' (why is it that word makes us wince?) had received calls from victims at the heart of government but won't release this information because it's confidential (but then why did she speak out at all?) seems strangely short on facts.

And it won't be lost on some that the dictionary definition of 'bully' can be applied equally well to any commander at war.

So it seems that it can be more the setting that determines if bullying is acceptable.  Bullying in the workplace is perhaps uncommon although bullying of staff by senior management  in schools has risen so dramatically that there are special services for staff who feel bullied.  A major part of this type of bullying seems to be the governmental obsession with ticking boxes and doing things exactly by the book in teaching - characteristics on which female staff seem to thrive, but which men often find difficult. Interestingly, there are signs that teaching is becoming an all female career, which raises serious questions about role models for impressionable young males. And questions about whether we want the young taught by what has become in recent years an emasculated profession, where spontaneity is dead, originality discouraged, innovation frowned upon and immense power given to head teachers, most of whom are now women, continue to rear their heads. 

Of course, perhaps Gordon's own schooling has left him wanting revenge. Now, there's a thought…

And finally

In a break from our more serious issues, we’ll be bringing you a car designer who’s crossed Toyota with Quasimodo and come up with The Hatchback of Notre Dame.  We had hoped also to have been bringing you Arthur the Human Chameleon, but this afternoon he crawled across a tartan rug and died of exhaustion.

 The House of Commons was sealed off on Friday after police chased an escaped lunatic through the front door during Prime Minister’s question time. A spokesman at Scotland Yard said "It was like looking for a needle in a haystack."    

West Mercia police announced last night that they wish to interview a man wearing high heels and frilly knickers, but the Chief Constable said they must wear their normal uniforms.

The search for the man who terrorises nudist camps with a bacon slicer goes on. Inspector Lemuel Jones had a tip-off this morning, but hopes to be back on duty tomorrow.

Finally, it was revealed in a government survey published today that the Prime Minister is doing the work of two men. Laurel and Hardy.

Snow, snow, thick thick Snow

It's little surprise that so many folk are ready to listen to the climate sceptics, uninformed, uneducated and deceptively-agenda-ridden as so many are.  While the Jet stream sits enjoying its break in the Med, we continue to shiver and watch our central heating costs spiral under repeated blankets of snow and nights of hard frost.

But the climate is complicated.  Really, really complicated, and the disciplines involved in its study are hard: fluid dynamics, Physics, Chemistry, Meteorology, Engineering - the science of Climatology involves all and more of these.  So when the sceptic sticks its head above the snow-covered parapet and squawks 'Wot global warming?'  you can be pretty sure their maths and intellect are both restricted to double figures.

 New Scientist - one of the more respected scientific journals - has a piece about this today. It's long, but written in lay terminology, and it's worth reading. Essentially, it talks about the chemistry of the atmosphere and what can be learnt from volcanic eruptions.  Specifically, Sulphur Dioxide - which has a cooling effect on the world's atmosphere.  The climate is changing - that's beyond doubt - but we're only just starting to understand why and how.

Many a slip

Along with many others, no doubt, the Winter Olympics has been compulsory viewing in the Carneades' household over the past week. The Winter Olympics is notable for the immense levels of skill required.  Just sliding without falling on ice is tricky, yet the top contestants fly into the air and rotate so rapidly their features become a blur.  It's been while since we've had anyone to equal the likes of John Curry, Robin Cousins or Torvill and Dean, but Cousins' erudite, analytical commentary is still an integral part of the Olympic figure skating competition for BBC viewers.  And it contrasts sharply with the incredibly stupid, vacuous, inept and repetitious, mixed metaphor commentary we sometimes get on snowboarding, or the Luge, for example.  Comments like 'That's a world class start!' or 'They're calling him the next Klammer / Bergman / [insert name here]' reveal the lamentable inadequacy of so many sport commentators, as they grope for phrases so well worn they wouldn't sell on ebay. 

When you can see what's happening for yourself, the last thing you need is some has-been or never-even-been-there telling you what's taking place before your very eyes, or adding their own brand of hysterical bigotry.   If they want to do that, they should commentate on snooker - except the egregious Virgo has that style sewn up.

Cousins' - like Snooker's Davies - knows the sport inside out and explains what's happening in detail.  His eye for precision and minutiae is extraordinary, and his expert accompaniment, in partnership with the delightful Sue Barker, make watching those events in which they're involved a real joy.  Great pity the Beeb doesn't have more of these people.

To be or not

As the announcement setting the date for the general election draws ever nearer, the spades are out, and entrenched positions are being dug at a rate of knots.

Politics is the UK is a strange business. The dreadful system of voting we have in place ensures the two-party system’s survival, and it’s only because Gordon Brown is starting to feel the heat that he’s talking about discussing a reform.  But views on Brown, Blair, Thatcher and Major are polarised, with many placing Thatcher at the top of their ‘to loathe’ list and many equally regarding Blair as a warmongering liar.

A local Aberconwy Tory observed the other day that ‘I reckon Mrs Thatcher will go down as a great Prime Minister’ which, if nothing else, proves how short memories can be.  So it’s often worth stepping back and looking at what different PMs have left as a legacy to the UK.

Margaret Thatcher's "principles of capitalism are under question," wailed Maurice Saatchi, the man who gave us the "Labour isn't working" slogan in 1979 – before his heroine tripled unemployment. A Billy Elliot version of history has made Thatcher a "boo-word in British politics", London's mayor Boris Johnson bleats. If only young people knew, insist the irreconcilable Tory diehards, what a basket-case Britain was in the 1970s – an "offshore banana republic", a land of perpetual power cuts, strikes and unburied bodies – they would understand why ­millions had to lose their jobs, industries and communities had to be destroyed and billions had to be handed over to the wealthy. Britain in the 70s, the high Tory Simon Heffer wrote last week, felt like the Soviet bloc, where men with "bad teeth and ill-fitting suits" (union leaders) called the shots in public life.

You'd never guess from all this fevered snobbery and retrospective catastrophism that average economic growth in Britain in the dismal 1970s, at 2.4% a year, was almost exactly the same as in the sunny Thatcherite 1980s – though a good deal more fairly distributed – and significantly higher than in the free-market boom years of the last two decades. Nor would you imagine that there was far greater equality and social mobility than after Thatcher got to work. Or that, while industrial conflict was often sharp in the 1970s, there was nothing to match the violence of the riots and industrial confrontations of Thatcher's Britain.

Tony Blair was unique;  the most electable politician in years, was how Frank Fields describes him, but what did he actually achieve? The Labour government from 1997 produced the longest period of sustained low inflation since the 60s,  introduced the National Minimum Wage, cut overall crime by 32 per cent, got young people achieving some of the best ever results at 14, 16, and 18, has added 85,000 more nurses, 32,000 more doctors, and brought back matrons to hospital wards.He also oversaw the raising of  child benefit up 26 per cent since 1997, brought in the £200 winter fuel payment to pensioners & up to £300 for over-80s and added 36,000 more teachers in England and 274,000 more support staff and teaching assistants. You can also include the dreadful child tax credit system, the cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before the industrial revolution, free TV licences for over-75s, free off peak local bus travel for over-60s, free eye test for over 60s and free entry to national museums and galleries.

But there’s also the incredibly worrying PFI scheme, the imposition of more managers than doctors in the NHS and more.  In terms of Northern Ireland, however, his input might have resolved a dangerous situation but most folks over here don’t worry about that too much.

Sadly, what he will be most remembered for is the war, most critics having conveniently forgotten Thatcher’s escapade.  However, so long as we have the two party system and the first-past-the-post voting process, we’ll have polarisation of views, centred on which Prime Minister did the best  The truth is that all Prime ministers want power, and with that power they often forget just how the normal folk in this great country of ours live. Perhaps we need to elect a benign dictator of no fixed political persuasion, endow them with ultimate power for one year, then take a vote at the end of the year to decide if they’re worth keeping sacking or shooting.  Maybe then we’d get someone we deserved. Or maybe we already have.

The big bang

With echoes eerily reminiscent of an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the Daily Post tells us today that "Peace protesters, including activists from North Wales, yesterday blockaded a nuclear weapons site where warheads for Trident submarines are made."

In the '60s the CND was a force to be reckoned with, but it seems their rhetoric hasn't changed much to adapt to the modern world. Brian Larkin, from Trident Ploughshares which helped organise the protest said:

“This comes at a time when even major political parties are questioning the logic of spending up to £97 billion on useless weapons. Although the Government now seems to have delayed the next phase of Trident replacement until after the general election, the ongoing construction of facilities at the AWE for the design, development and manufacture of new nuclear warheads is illegal and immoral and will only lead to further proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

Nuclear weapons are interesting things. They're probably the only weapons which cost as much as they do, are fiendishly complex to manufacture, design and test, and which everyone desperately hopes will never be used. But useless?

In an age where the boundaries between the goodies and the baddies are no longer clear-cut or identifiable, when countries filled with people who have not only made it pretty clear that they hate anything Western and will happily die in the process of taking a few Westerners down with them are slowly acquiring the technology that will enable them to build their own nuclear weapons and when there's never been a time when nuclear material has been less clearly accounted for, then it might be argued that it's probably sensible to ensure we're at least on something of a level playing field.

At some point in the future someone, somewhere will detonate a nuclear weapon on their enemies. Of that we can be certain.  Why?  Because in the entire history of the human race, there's never been a weapon devised that wasn't eventually used.  The countries that have their own weapons at least have the capacity to make the aggressors stop and think.  And that may be all we can hope for.