Fifth Decade

To misquote George Orwell

All teams are equal, but some teams are more equal than others.

Specifically, I’m talking about penalties. Lewis Hamilton got a stop and go penalty for an overtaking manoevre that once completed left him not enough room to do anything but miss the chicane, yet Kimi Raikkonnen got nothing for having a piece of metal dangerously hanging off his car as it traversed France’s Formula One GP race track in Magny Cours at speeds of up to 300 kmh. The offending piece of metal eventually flew off the car and could have killed somebody if it had fallen off in a less convenient place. In past years, drivers have been black flagged for having bits of their car hanging off, or at the very least told to make repairs during a pit stop. Ferrari were once again allowed to flout the rules.

Why, why, why?

If Bernie separates F1 from the FIA, it won’t be a day too soon.

This week every other news item seems to be about some luminary, or thinks-he-is-a-luminary, exhibiting remarkable powers of denial over reality. Here are the shockers that most immediately come to mind:

Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe is clearly in denial about having been defeated in the recent elections. Not only has the result not been made public, it’s actually been made into a state secret! Having said that, the ruling Marxist Zanu-PF party are making preparations for a re-run. Except nobody knows if that is correct or not, since the results have not yet been released, two weeks after the election was held, and one week after the results should have been released.

Latest news is that 23 constituencies will have a recount (because the electorate got it wrong, obviously) despite there being a time limit of 48 hours in which to lodge a recount request, which can only be issued after the results have been released, which they still haven’t been! Naturally, one suspects these specific 23 recounts have been planned because within the last two weeks, Mugabe supporters have been busily establishing they are the constituencies which need the fewest votes to be re-written, and have managed to rewrite them by now.

Finally though, the leaders of the countries surrounding Zimbabwe seem to be considering ending their state of denial that anything needs to be done in Zimbabwe and are actually saying things that should have been said years ago.

South Africa

In South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, that well known advanced intellect who was busily claiming there was no crisis in the ANC leadership as he sped to defeat at the hands of his rather more charismatic colleague - yes I know that could be anyone so I’ll be more specific and say defeat at the hands of his colleague, Mr Zuma, for leadership of the ANC - has now been saying there is no crisis in Zimbabwe either (never mind the electoral irregularities, starvation, 100,000% annual inflation, 80% unemployment and general economic collapse that has pushed 3 million refugees into Zimbabwe’s neighbours’ lands).

Even more, Megabrain Mbeki has gone on record to say that it was in the law that Zimbabwe could hold a run-off election. Yes, Thabo, but first of all they have to release the results of the first one! How else do you know they need a run-off?

Monaco

Changing tack to look at someone who hasn’t exactly been caned in an election (just caned) is Max Mosley who has been busily protesting that he has done nothing wrong in procuring the services of five hookers for a five hour orgy of sado-masochistic concentration camp style German language corporal punishment and sex. Someone ought to give Mr Mosley an education in the ways of the world, the law, and morality.

Prostitution supports the drug industry, human trafficking, and other unsavoury and associated criminally connected pursuits, and the women involved seldom sign up to it as the long-awaited fulfillment of their childhood dreams. Yes, Max Mosley, you did do something wrong.

London

In the town of Max’s recent denouement, another nobody-cum-luminary, Alastair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK Finance Minister) who knows how to do what his boss says, is in denial about the strength of response of the UK Government to the sub-Prime crisis. He was on the BBC TV news on Saturday trying to pass the blame for the lack of response from the banks to the Bank of England’s recent 0.25% cut in interest rates. They have not all reduced the mortgage rates they charge borrowers.

Well, what did he expect? The ramifications of the sub-Prime crisis are far larger than can be fixed by a quarter point cut: the US Federal Reserve reduced rates by 3.0% and fed over $200 billion into the banking system across the board in exchange for (some of) the bad sub-Prime based collateral that is at the root of the problem. The UK Government just pledged a large portion of that sum to a single bank that would have otherwise have gone bankrupt.

But he’s clearly in denial about a quarter point cut being enough - the banks have to rebuild their reserves, and will be doing this in any way they can - a wider savings rate to mortgage rate differential, higher charges, more charges.

So, there we are, an unusually high tally of high-ups who need to do some mental press-ups to avoid having to wear hold-ups or hold dress-ups. Yes, it’s a giant cock up by the stuck up for the fucked-up.

I hope it’s a hiccough.

I was just reading an interesting story in MacFormat magazine about the NHS. They’ve spent a load of dosh (they can’t do anything without spending a load of dosh, apparently) on bringing themselves into the online age with a couple of applications - Choose and Book, and the even more expensive Electronic Patient Record system.

Anyway, they’ve spent £5,600,000,000 to be exact. That’s £5.6 billion. Plus £64.5 million on top. Like a kind of tip…

The story unfolds on Page 8 of the April issue of the mag “Safari users failed by NHS” and describes how NHS online schemes are unavailable to thousands of Mac users because the NHS systems only support Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw was queried in the House of Commons by the Conservative’s Stephen O’Brien about the £64.5 million Choose and Book appointments system and replied in a written answer using what can only be called Microsoft-speak:

Because of the number of browser versions available to internet users, priority has been given to certification of the application against the most popular browsers in the first instance.

Well, that is strange. I thought there was such a thing as Internet Standards? You know, rules like we have for driving - drive on the left, steering wheel on the right, accelerator on the right, clutch on the left and brake in the middle. Standards that when used mean that any manufacturer can build a car that works on the road, and that any driver can use without having to learn a new system.

On the internet there is a set standard, even a set of standards, and the best websites use what is known as “Standards compliant coding” which basically means they only have to design and code for one International Standard. It is then up to the browser writers to comply with those agreed standards. This saves a lot of money for developers.

I mean, why develop for many different systems when you could develop for just one global standard?

Ah, but that doesn’t help Microsoft sell their software does it, because when there are standards that anyone can use, there is no way to lock them in to having to buy Microsoft. Microsoft have a long history of sabotaging international standards, as we have just seen with the ISO voting process for Microsoft’s OOXML file format when there was already a perfectly adequate ISO standard with far wider acceptance in the Open Document Format (ODF).

That’s exactly what they have done with the internet. In order to force users to buy their Operating Systems they incorporated features into their browser that were sufficiently different to the agreed standards to make life difficult for those with different browsers. In fact, in many ways Internet Explorer does not read standards compliant websites awfully well at all - it’s a flawed browser on many levels, not least of which being security, something of a concern where our health records are concerned.

It’s the waste that gets me though. How on earth could the government spend £5.6 billion on any computer system at all? And then not have it fully working? That’s a lot of tax money. It’s a lot of free prescriptions. It’s a lot of patient beds, a lot of life-saving equipment. Oh, I forgot, it’s also a lot of profit for Microsoft and its supporters.

Well, at least we know what the NHS considers most important then.

It could only happen in 21st Century shambolic Britain.

For many, many years Terminal 5 at London Heathrow has been in one stage or another of being planned or being built. Just the process of building the place has taken over 5 years. So you’d have thought that every eventuality would have been planned for, every process would have been rehearsed many times, every member of staff would have been fully trained, and would know exactly what did what, where, and how.

It seems they didn’t.

BA might have been hoping people would be able to hum the Steve Miller Band song, “Fly like an Eagle”. Well, BA got the Eagle part right, but only because on the day it was more like that line from The Eagle’s “Hotel California “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave…”

It appears that British Airways caught “Iraq Expectancy Syndrome” ie, a concentration on everything up until the moment of truth, but very little focussed on consequences afterwards. Too much “Short Termism” perhaps? Basically, BA and BAA seem to have just assumed that everything would be fine on the day. BA even sent out a peppy email full of vim and hopefulness. It started:

“Five and a half years ago the building of our new home began in our most visionary project to date. Today we opened the doors. There is no more waiting… “

Err, really? According to the BBC News website things were not so rosy as BA predicted with delays of 3 hours or more for some, while less lucky people had to find hotel rooms as flights were missed or cancelled.

In their email, BA said “At Terminal 5 everything has been streamlined and designed to make your journey through the terminal calm and relaxed. And this morning we saw all the planning fall into place.”

Actually what we saw was everything falling apart.

Reports on BBC News say the problems mounted up for a number of reasons, all of which come down to bad planning, bad preparation, and poor or insufficient training. A typically British mess.

The BBC reported that the bottleneck was due to what BA referred to as the new “state-of-the-art baggage system” which broke down due to insufficient resources such as the computer system not being able to cope with the number of bags being carried. Because staff couldn’t get to their workplaces in time, bags mounted up at the end of the conveyor belts which were supposed to deliver bags to planes; this stopped the conveyors working, and then the check in couldn’t add any new bags to the “flow” and so everything stopped.

Some people even sat on their planes for three hours on the tarmac waiting for their baggage to be loaded, only to see it being returned to the terminal because the computers told the baggage handlers their stationary plane had already departed.

This was in complete contrast to BA’s earlier boast that “The next time you fly in to, or on from Terminal 5, you’ll experience for yourself how all the planning and careful design has fallen into place.”

Rather than falling into place, things were falling apart. One passenger in a wheelchair was stuck on a flight arriving into T5 from Glasgow for more than an hour - and then when he was transported to the terminal he realised he could not get up the kerb. Now that’s just ridiculous. Forgetting about wheelchairs in this age of Disability Awareness? That’s sloppy, if not careless.

So why was there all this chaos? Simple things, apparently. Some workers couldn’t get into their allocated car parks (insufficient systems testing); they got lost on the way to their places of work (lack of practice and poor preparation and signage); and some couldn’t get through security (poor systems testing again). And then of course there were the computer systems that fell over when things got difficult because presumably the programmers had not planned for what happens when things go wrong. Iraq Expectation Syndrome again.

In the end, 34 flights were cancelled, hundreds if not thousands of passengers inconvenienced, Britain made to look a laughing stock. Just because people no longer think things all the way through because they are more focussed on saving money/maximising profits than they are on getting the job done effectively.

Just like any other day at Heathrow then?

Apparently, some of Barack Obama’s long standing financial backers have some rather strange connections with a Middle East businessman. Now, it may all be nothing to do with Mr Obama himself, but he has reportedly written letters on behalf of one of these people to gain favour with officialdom and been in receipt of land, loans and a favour or two.

So, if Obama wasn’t acting against the law himself, was he greedy, ill-advised, naive, stupid, or just inexperienced? There certainly seems to be some very strange goings on going on. As someone trained in spotting potential money laundering, the arrangement between the backer and the source of funds is typical of those we are encouraged to look into in the world of finance.

What I find strange is that when googling for “Obama mistake” one of the best sources of information is not a US newspaper, but a UK one, The Times.

Why is the US press giving Obama such a soft ride? It reminds me of the soft ride George W Bush got in the run up to his second term of office, and we all know now that was a mistake: if the press had asked more searching questions and acted as journalists, rather than as a political support machine maybe the US and the world would not have gotten into so much of a mess over the last 4 years.

I mean, who has gained from the invasion of Iraq? The only Western establishments that have benefitted have been the oil companies with the high oil prices giving them massive new profits, and companies like Dick Cheney’s old firm Haliburton who gained millions from new Army contracts for support services.

The cost? Osama bin Laden is still at large in Afghanistan/Pakistan where he has been since before the invasion of Iraq; the Iranian President, Ahmed I’m-a-dinner-jacket, can drive from Baghdad airport and walk in the streets outside the high security Green Zone that Georgie’s boys are helicoptered into and out of on PR visits to US bases and other places in Iraq; President Hugo Chavez has enough money from huge oil prices to throw his weight around in Latin America, threaten Colombia and fund the FARC and who knows what else, Americans around the world are pretty much disliked everywhere they go (at least they report to feeling very unwelcome in most countries they visit - and I mean Western countries here); the US dollar continues to fall; inflation is rising, causing interest rates to rise which causes house prices to come crashing down and bring the sub-Prime scandal into the harsh light of day.

So, the US press needs to ask more questions before they adopt a favourite (he certainly does that Big Speech well, doesn’t he?) as they seem to have done here. Obama might be the sound-bite kid, but it’s supposed to be a free press not the PR department for Corporate America. Real journalism seems to have become marginalised, subsumed by corporate greed.

And that can’t be good for anyone.

Whoever broke this story certainly threw a real problem at Senator John McCain.

For Republicans, close association with lobbyists is normal business. In fact, that’s how Republicans do business. Just so long as the relationship isn’t too close with an individual (close association with a specific lobbying company is OK), isn’t too often, or too personal. In this case, the relationship (platonic or not) has been with a particular lobbyist, and even worse than that, with a pretty blonde lobbyist he seems to have spent rather a lot of time with.

I’m sure a lot of GOP members are relieved that at least it’s a change from the many homosexual scandals various Republicans have been involved with in the recent past. At least, they may be saying, if there is anything going on here, it isn’t what they charmingly refer to as “deviancy”.

The crux of this problem is it’s double edged nature. It’s negative for McCain if anyone thinks there was some funny business with this lady, and it’s negative because it brings into perspective just how much time politicians and lobbyists spend together. It’s even negative for people who believe it’s OK for politicians to be wined and dined, and to go on flights and trips with lobbyists - because they normally disguise such behaviour by not spending so much time with any one individual lobbyist, and this smacks of favouritism. Personally I think McCain is too honourable, but what influence do I have?

So, which camp is most likely to have got this story going? That’s the sixty four thousand dollar question. Obama is most against the close ties Washington politicians have with lobbyists - or so he says. Huckabee probably thinks some hanky panky went on and wants to air such rumours before McCain reaches an unassailable lead, which he shortly will. Clinton probably wouldn’t mind McCain attacking Obama, but is unlikely to want to draw attention to relationships with lobbyists or bring back memories of how her husband ended his Presidency.

So, my money’s on this story originating in the Obama camp. It hits all of his opponents at once, gets in the first shot against his probable main opponent, and does him no harm at all. In fact, it even releases, by transferring attention, some of the pressure on him for his wife’s gaffe when she said she was proud of her country “for the first time” just recently - something Americans seem to take rather badly.

If I were McCain, I’d be counter-punching Obama, but he’d better do it quick or the mud will stick. He’s spent so much time lately trying to prove how much of a conservative he really is, he seems to have taken his eye off the ball.

As for Hillary, she’d better get her website reorganised, the two main words that crop up on the first two pages are “Submit” followed by “Contribute” whereas Obama’s site cries out “Change,” “Believe” and “One Million People” which makes it a lot more powerful. McCain’s is more like Hillary’s, proclaiming “Ready to Lead” which is perhaps too subtle for most folks, sounds like he wants to be given something, rather than to give something.

No wonder Obama is hoovering up the youth vote. And by that, I mean all those under 50… the internet generation. His opponents are both looking rather out of touch, if you ask me. I still don’t think he will make the best President, but I do believe he is running the best campaign right now.

Only time will tell what happens next.

So, they’re going to Nationalise the failed Building Society come Bank, Northern Rock. Bad decision. Should have let it go bust. Why? Because of what Biology teaches us.

Evolution. Survival of the fittest. Those who take risks, or are unable to compete effectively and independently, die out. Those that do not take dangerous risks, those who are stronger survive. So it is with companies as it is with animals, plants, and other life-forms.

In the wild, if you make a mistake, you are punished for it. If stock market listed companies make a mistake they are also punished. So why are banks different?

Northern Rock started out as a Building Society. Its members decided, for a small windfall shareout of the reserves kept by for safety’s sake, to become a listed company, and received large numbers of shares for free. The board shared in the spoils with share option schemes that kept them taking risks in order to maximise profits - but therein lies the rub: there was only an incentive to take risks, there was little incentive to play it safe.

For years they took a risky approach to lending, and had run foul of the Trading Standards Office many times for playing fast and loose with their lending policies and business practices. They liked lending to iffy borrowers because of the higher nominal margins available to them. Everything was done to maximise profits - but that’s something a lot of companies can be accused of. The difference, and the decision to Nationalise Northern Rock by turning it into British Rock only reinforces this view, is that Banks will be bailed out by HM Government. I’d be surprised if the EU were not very cross at this idea though.

When non-banking companies lose enough money, they go bust or are taken over. They are not rescued by the government (except perhaps in France). This keeps executives in those companies in check, they do not take the highest risks, they look after their reserves, they do not gamble the company on the premise that the government will bail them out if everything turns sour.

This is good for those companies, good for the government, and good for the taxpayer.

So why are Banks any different? Well, their supporters (who often want to keep on making millions every year from the high and government underwritten risks they take) say that banks underpin the whole economy, that letting a single bank go will crash the system.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Anyway, the Northern Rock is not a pure bank along the lines of one of the main Clearing Banks, which are rather more important to the economy.

Northern Rock only underpins a few thousand mortgages and savings accounts. There are dozens of these small banks, and one less will make very little difference. After all, Building Societies have been merging for years without affecting the economy unduly. Many other lenders would gladly have taken over many of the NR’s mortgages, even the savings accounts, so customers would have been mostly unaffected. Except for their free shares which might become worth what they paid for them - nothing. But surely, isn’t that the risk they took when they voted to become shareholders?

Greed. It’s the undoing of so many. Beware of it in your own life: it has sharp teeth. Except if you are a bank, of course.

US Elections

Senator Barack Obama: Aimed as much at Hillary Clinton as it is against George W Bush, Obama keeps on calling for a change in Washington. He wants to get rid of the people who are already there and bring in new blood to replace them. Err, Senator Obama, that big round Senatey thing you go to work in every day, isn’t that in Washington? So doesn’t that mean you? And by the way, how about a different speech now and then - I keep on hearing you say the same things over and over again…

Senator Hillary Clinton: All the world knows you stuck by your husband Hillary, and that’s laudable, but did you have to cold shoulder him quite so publicly when he was trying to congratulate you after your speech on Super Tuesday? He tried so very hard too… Go on, give him a hug!

IT

Bill Gates: Speaking as the owner of a company that dominates the world in many areas, not least of which being the 90% of office productivity software, 85% of Operating Systems, “The world needs an alternative to Google.” Google’s corporate motto is “Do no evil”. What does that say about Microsoft?

Tom Robertson (Microsoft’s general manager for corporate standards) talking about supporters of the Open Source ISO standard ODF file format: “Frankly some of the opposition is very commercially based”. Really? And Microsoft’s pushing of its own, non Open Source, proprietary OOXML format owned by a single monopolistic corporation isn’t commercial, then? Ahhh, Diddums…. is da likkle baby crying den?

Imagine your local authority stopping collecting rubbish because the landfill was full. This isn’t some nightmare scenario, in many parts of the country it’s a matter of a dozen or two months away, while in Naples in Italy it’s actually happening right now .

Due to mismanagement and “brushing the dirt under the carpet” so to speak, Naples’ landfill sites are now full and the local authority have stopped collecting it. One hundred thousand tonnes of rubbish lie in the streets, rotting or burning as concerned citizens take things into their own hands.

At the moment, the UK is only just beginning to talk about doing something and has no real policy on refuse disposal: it’s just transported somewhere else so it can pile up out of view in a landfill site in the middle of the countryside. Shakespeare’s “Green and Sceptred Isle” dumps more household waste into landfill than any other EU state. That’s more than 27 million tons of waste hidden in this way each year - 7 million more than any other EU country. Germany, which has a population 25% bigger than the UK, puts just 10m tons into rubbish tips each year - 63% LESS than the UK.

An area of 109 square miles of the UK countryside is now landfill and landfill space could run out in just nine years time. If nothing is done very soon, 2016 will see the biggest pile of rubbish on British streets since the 1970s. A pile that would never stop growing.

The problem isn’t just one of how to deal with the waste that is collected. Britain also produces more waste per head of population than many of its European neighbours, with an average of 592 Kg per person per year, above the EU average of 577 Kg.

The UK also lags behind in the amount of waste recycled, with an average figure of 18%, half the EU average of 36.4%. Only Greece and Portugal recycle a smaller proportion of their rubbish than does the UK - but then they create about 33% less waste in total to start with and are in the Top 5 least waste-producing EU Nations.

You might say that the British have the worst waste disposal strategy of any EU country. You might think that someone would have cottoned on to the fact that something needs to be done. Well yes, but the first ones to do something were the, err, oft maligned EU…

EU laws commit Britain to reducing the waste the country creates, to recycle more, and to bury less in landfill sites. Greenhouse gases emitted by these creeping eyesores that stink and sweat as they feed vermin and bacteria on our rotting throwaways add up to 3% of UK total emissions.

And as I said, they stink.

So, what are British politicians doing about it? Gordon’s goodies have decreed that it should be possible for local councils to charge per bag collected, rather than as part of the overall local council tax bill. Cameron’s crazies are against it, mostly because they didn’t think of it first, one suspects, and anyway, they are against everything that comes from the Labour Party these days, even the good ideas such as the ‘Pay as you throw‘ call for waste disposal.

British local councils are begining to tackle the problem, many of them because their landfill areas will be full long before the year 2016. So let’s have a look at a typical one, one that is doing better than many others, and compare it with a town of similar size in a country that manages to have NO landfill sites at all.

First off, look at the example of Basel in Switzerland. In 1993 the city collected over 65,000 tonnes of household waste. The next year, after the law introducing charging per bag was introduced, the rubbish collection city wide added up to barely 40,000 tonnes, a reduction of 38%. Nearly every year since then has resulted in a further reduction in waste.

What happens is that people become very annoyed at any items in shops with needless packaging - and let’s face it, most consumer related items do have way too much packaging. Even if you don’t agree with per bag collection charges, you probably dislike superfluous cardboard, plastic and foam inserts as much as the next person: it’s such a faff to have to dispose of.

Now the Tories complain that charging per bag will lead to more fly tipping, which is probably true. When the city of Basel introduced it, public bins suddenly became much fuller, bags of rubbish were left in strange places, some out of the way places did become eyesores. But an overnight 40% drop in rubbish collection must leave a lot of money in the refuse collection budget to tidy up such messes.

Most people are law abiding and do comply though. For those who are not, the Swiss decided to introduce a “garbage police” who can search through rubbish for personal details such as envelopes, letters, anything that can identify the individual household that filled the unauthorised bag. You would be surprised at what people throw away. These people are then taken to court and fined.

So, what’s happening in the UK? Peterborough has about the same population as the Swiss town described above, and is actually good at recycling - for the UK. Defra have produced a table of how well different parts of the UK are doing on waste and recycling. It makes for interesting reading (HTML, XLS).

Peterborough City Council (pop. 163,300) collected 89,277 tonnes total household waste in 2005/06 of which 31,717 tonnes was recycled, one of the highest rates in the UK. Practically all of the not-recycled waste collected ended up in landfill sites, but available landfill space in Peterborough is due to run out by about 2010. Besides these two methods of waste handling, just a bare 17 tonnes was incinerated, and none of the energy released from this burning was reclaimed. These figures are not uncommon across the UK.

The EU Landfill Directive has set decreasing annual landfill targets for local authorities and will impose fines of £150 for each tonne of waste that is landfilled above those limits plus its share of a £500,000 daily fine imposed by the EU if the nation collectively exceeds its total target.

“Peterborough must drastically reduce the waste it sends to landfill to meet EU targets. Landfill should be 24,000 tonnes less than today by 2013 and 40,000 tonnes less than today by 2020…. Around a third of all councils in England operate alternate weekly collections as they are proven to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill by increasing recycling.”
- Peterborough City Council

This can’t be too healthy in my opinion. Basel takes an alternative tack and collects normal household rubbish twice a week. The majority of this is then incinerated with the energy released being used to heat thousands of homes and provide other energy in the town.

Peterborough are moving towards incineration as a means of disposal, although they call it euphemistically an “Energy Resource Recovery Facility” which is described thus:

“An Energy Resource Recovery Facility combusts mixed waste and recovers energy by making steam. This can be used directly for heat as well as to generate electricity. Materials are also recovered: metals for recycling are removed at the end of the process, and the leftover ash can be used as a raw material, for example in road making.”
- Peterborough City Council

Incineration must be a hot topic in the UK politically, but I don’t know why. In Basel the plant has been operating for years without environmental problems, and actually turning waste into heat and energy is a pretty well received process locally, in an area in which the Green party has real, elected power.

I am not saying that the Swiss example should be followed to the letter, but I am saying that there are others in the world who are solving the problem of waste effectively. You should ask your local authority what they are doing on this issue. And next time you’re out shopping, why not consider how much packaging the product has. All things being equal, buy the product with less waste.

If you don’t like the idea of making a fuss or doing anything positive, just look at the streets of Naples and remember that’s the future for the UK if nothing is done. The rats in the street won’t then be the politicians at election time, it’ll be real rats, scampering across your town, your estate, your neighbourhood, and into your kids’ playgrounds and dens.

Do you really want that?

South America is a place the US clearly took its eyes off since 911, and look at what has happened since.

Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (another Gaddafi if ever there was one, worse than Fidel Castro who at least had the interests of his people at heart) and now of course, all the troubles in Bolivia started by Evo Morales. Not content with Nationalising most of anything that made money, such as the oil industry which is was developing Bolivia’s Natural Gas reserves, Morales has now pushed a vote through to change the Constitution so that universal pensions can be given to the over 65s.

Now most people would ask why Bolivia doesn’t already have pensions for the over 65s, after all, most democracies do. But Bolivia is a pretty poor place overall, and like so many South American countries power is concentrated in the hands of just a few rich families who, let’s be frank, don’t think anyone else should get a look in.

So, Morales has pretty good reasons for feeling aggrieved, but what is worrying is twofold. First of all, he seems to be very much under the influence of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, not really the best thing in itself. But secondly, his manipulation of democracy is rather a bad example and shows a total disregard for the system.

So, what bad deed did he do? Only blocked members of the opposition from entering the Parliament buildings when the vote on the Constitution took place, so that his wished for changes could go through! He even admitted later that without the mob rule he could never have got the Constitution changed. Of course not: how will giving money away that has not been planned for benefit the country over the long term?

Imagine blocking Parliament in London so only members of the Liberal Party could vote. They might have a point that this gave them a fairer opportunity to represent the views of the millions of people who voted for them - usually in second place of course. They might even say they could then change the system to one of  Proportional Representation so the permanent two party system could be broken up for good. But they couldn’t say they made the change democratically.  And nor can Morales.

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how laudable your aims are, how good your goal is. It matters how you reach it, because it is the journey, not the destination, that defines the future.