Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Scotland on Sunday reports that the Scottish Executive is considering extending road tax to cyclists. Bizarrely an 'Action Plan' commissioned by the SNP led administration, which aspires to ensure 10% of journeys in Scotland are made by bike, suggests that their owners should make an annual contribution to road maintenance. The Green Party, which operates a 'confidence and supply' alliance with nationalists in Scotland, and supports Salmond's separatist ambitions, has already expressed its dismay. Road tax is increasingly viewed as a means by which to encourage more environmentally friendly forms of travel. Scotland might be an exception, but in the rest of the UK agricultural vehicles are exempt from road tax, yet form a regular presence on public roads. I would suggest that they exact more wear and tear and exasperate other road users more frequently than cyclists.

I approached Thaler and Sunstein’s modish book ‘Nudge’ with trepidation. I nearly chose not to continue past the odious epithet ‘choice architect’ which appeared in its opening pages. And it would be misleading to imply that I didn’t almost chew through the insides of my face on a couple of occasions when the co-authors’ references to themselves in the third person became too frequent to bear. Yet, my oceanic reserves of irritability aside, I found the work to be animated by a well argued, worthwhile premise and its central thesis was, I acknowledge, communicated clearly. The book does impart to its readers a curse which endures months after the volume itself has been consigned to the bookshelf. I’d be surprised if anyone has yet managed to read it without finding themselves impelled to identify and categorise any number of ‘nudges’ which suddenly manifest themselves in various political and commercial situations. My suspicion, in this regard, has been substantiated by Rob Greenl...

If there were no Democratic Unionist Party to rebut and ridicule where would Northern Ireland blogs find material? Actually, given the extra space the Dupes absence might create, in which proper local and national politics could flourish, I’m sure we’d do alright. Fewer instances of nutterdom to discuss would allow more space for serious, reasoned debate. Still, it’s rather futile pondering the counterfactual. The DUP will be with us for the foreseeable future. At the tail end of last week, Jeffrey Donaldson decided the best way to defend the Act of Settlement was to invoke some turn of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholic propaganda. This week begins with his party employing a cross community mechanism in order to protect its infamous Environment Minister from the censure of the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is an absurd situation that a topic as universal as climate change should be subject to a cross community vote. And it demonstrates how ineffective are the mechanisms by ...

If you didn’t laugh you would cry! Sammy Wilson has admitted that he wasn’t ‘mad keen’ to take on the Environment Minister’s brief in the first instance, only took the job because Peter Robinson urged him to do so and had a slender grasp of what it would involve! Setting aside Sammy’s Vicky Pollard diction, imagine handing anyone an important executive post on the back of such lack of commitment and self-declared ignorance! If an employee in Burger King were to express similar sentiments there would be questions asked about their position! I apologise for excessive exclamation mark usage, but honestly!

Part of the rationale for constructing a third runway at Heathrow, an airport transparently unsuited to that type of expansion, is an ambition to enhance its reputation as an ‘international hub’. Several of these eerie, parallel worlds exist throughout Europe and include Amsterdam and Frankfurt. I spent a few hours in the latter during the summer, hopping between Lufthansa flights in order to get to and from Russia. It is a horrendous place to spend time, negotiating multiple security checks and eating plasticky German bratwurst. There is little sense that the visitor is on planet Earth, never mind in Germany. He spends a trance like hour or two in the chill of too efficient air conditioning, impatient to be spirited away to his ultimate destination. Such is the future which the government seeks to encourage at Heathrow. Outside the narrow confines of the aviation industry, ‘hub’ status yields limited benefits. It isn’t an especially difficult decision for the Conservatives to ...

Writing on the Guardian politics’ blog today, Toby Helm implies a degree of nervousness on the part of Tory academics who propound the communitarian vision of conservatism which provides such an attractive alternative to Labour’s statist ethos. His contention is that in differentiating Conservative policy on the financial crash from the massive programme of borrowing which Gordon Brown believes is necessary to restimulate the economy, a perception has arisen that David Cameron is reneging on the vision of social responsibility which has paved the way for a Conservative revival. Perhaps sensitive to such criticism, Cameron has reiterated his commitment to the principles which his new conservatism promises. His New Year message states, “…far from dropping our green agenda because of the recession, we will this year step up the pace because leadership on the environment will help create the jobs, wealth and opportunity Britain needs. Far from dropping our commitment to make British p...

An interesting little spat has been drawn to my attention, between Roy Beggs Junior and Sammy Wilson, the Environment Minister . Beggs has fastened on Wilson’s confused answer to a question about sewage treatment in Larne Lough, which seems to expose both the minister’s flimsy grasp of his brief and a glaring gap in his knowledge of the geography of his adopted constituency. “Sammy Wilson often boasts about how he can carry out several jobs at the same time. Well the fact that he cannot tell one end of Larne Lough from another tells me that he cannot. The lack of basic local knowledge which he displays is astounding.”

Sammy Wilson, he’s a jovial chap isn’t he? The East Antrim MP shows the ‘human side’ of the DUP. He’s less known for bigoted outbursts or fanatical evangelism than for wisecracks and sunbathing in the nip. Indeed Wilson’s views on climate change are rather entertaining. They might raise a few chuckles accompanied by a glass or two of red and a selection of cocktail snacks, were it not for the small, significant detail that Sammy is the minister charged with protecting and managing Northern Ireland’s environment. Sammy, you see, is something of a conspiracy theorist. He does not believe that there is a meaningful scientific consensus that man is influencing climate change. In fact he believes that the notion that CO2 emissions are damaging the environment is an almighty swizz which a handful of scientists and an army of green fanatics have employed to browbeat governments into instigating ‘anti business’ policies. So if we accept Sammy’s analysis, almost the entire developed worl...

If any further evidence were needed to demonstrate why it is necessary to maintain a strong alternative unionist voice to the DUP, the party itself has been providing it over the last week or so. In addition to Iris Robinson’s remarks about homosexuality, we learn that Mervyn Storey , an inveterate proponent of young-Earth creationism will replace Sammy Wilson as chair of the Assembly Education Committee. And as noted below, Sammy himself has found a suitable role in the DUP’s Alliance against Science, becoming Environment Minister. Sammy is a clown, with the red nose to prove it, but it is not funny having a clown in charge of Northern Ireland’s environment. He has wasted no time outlining his understanding (or lack of it) of the issue of green house gases contributing to climate change. "I am not convinced and I don't think that there is any firm evidence to show that all of that climate change is due to CO2 emissions." Which as a literal statement may be true, b...