Friday 5 March 2010

Caravan Touring and Wasting Time

In one way wasting time is a privilege which we should all occasionally exercise, although what might seem a waste of time to one person is valuable endeavour to another. I was checking out an e –bay entry for a seller of a caravan today and was advised that ‘time wasters’ would not be welcome. As I have difficulty in deciding what is a waste of time I promptly moved back to my inbox and deleted this impatient vendor once and for all.

My wife and I might ‘waste our time’ or spend it, by going off in our old caravan. Current value £300. Never shy of the controversial we would be prepared to go head to head with the devil incarnate of the anti-caravanning world, namely the national petrol head leader, Jeremy Clarkson. Why, because caravanning as has the potential to be a low impact leisure facility, it tends to cross seasonal boundaries, and it is democratic pastime: it’s said to be the national sport in Holland, now that is sad.

It is low impact because a touring caravan is not a permanent feature. Many of the locations where used are purely temporary, or at least, rather small and hidden, when compared with the vast aluminium cities of Porth Cawl or the east coast. It is flexible as to season as many of us choose to take our main breaks in early or late season or during the winter months, thus leaving room for the prisoners of the school holiday booking season free of us older types. Finally, it is democratic because our green and pleasant land becomes available to all, whether in a £300 van or in a gin palace on wheels. It is mainly a middle to working class pastime, although the touring caravan was invented by the upper class. Mr Toad of Wind in the Willows was recently cited by a spokesperson for the Caravan Club as a fictional example of an early enthusiast. It was also pointed out that he only went off the rails, and the road come to that, when he dumped his caravan (the horse drawn) in favour of the speed which could be achieved by the solo motor car i.e., when he joined the Clarkson Camp.

In addition to all these benefits it is a significant contribution to the rural economy. Large static sites are sometimes unfortunate eyesores, but not always, while touring sites can be very small, allowing a regular contribution to the income of a farm. In spite of these benefits there is a large body of snobs out there who would rather pay silly prices for the poor standards which often prevail in many of our hotels. We do not like hotels much anyway. They are usually too hot, the beds and bedding are unpredictable, and the regimentation of the breakfast slot is contradictory to our idea of leisure.

Of course last year’s rise in caravan and tent sales is reminiscent of the boom of the sixties. The bookings reported by both the Caravan Club and Camping and Caravan Club (we belong to the more flexible latter organisation as we occasionally use one of our many tents) will not last. As with the last boom, this will be ended by a series of bad summers. People who buy the dream need to acquire certain fortitude, and realise that leisure is not just about having relaxation provided but to a great extent working for it. I suppose to that extent it can become a sport when you travel light or the weather gets heavy.

The national speed limit for caravans and trailers is 60 mph on motorways and dual carriageways and 50 mph for the rest. This is safe for the caravan driver and provided he or she keeps an eye open for tail backs, should not inconvenience solo drivers any more than a heavy lorry. Granted, you will see caravans breaking all these rules, even using the outer lane of a motorway which is out of bounds to all trailers, but this is a question of enforcement in the same way as it is for those motorists getting away with the horrendous breaches of the Highway Code every day

Mr Clarkson’s real bug bear is his belief that caravans cause holiday traffic hold ups and he greeted with great glee the experiment on the M5 on the climb out of Bristol which confined caravans to the nearside lane. I have heard nothing of his views regarding the result of that research. This is not surprising as he, along with Jonathan Ross, is the cause of many a quick channel change when his presence spoils one of our favourite programmes. The research showed that most caravan drivers got into the nearside lane for the climb even before the prohibition came into effect and that the worst offenders were fully paid up members of the middle lane club and lorry divers who took up nearside and middle lanes while they seem locked together on conversation. Apparently the middle lane driver is seeking to overtake its stubborn competitor which sometimes seems to go on for 5 minutes.

Why caravanning is picked on by so many is something which deserves a PhD thesis. Motor Sport and luxury road legal sports cars with ridiculous top speeds are apparently perfectly acceptable. Likewise football and coarse fishing because thousands take part and so the disruption and pollution they cause is brushed away, usually at public cost . So before you join the Clarkson tirade brigade just examine your own motives and take a look around and put some toleration lenses in your specs. Failing that take a look at your own leisure footprint and impact before becoming an uninformed snob.

Tony’s Legacy: Will it be Blair or Bliar when the Jury Returns?

With the sun at last shining and a General Election required within the next few weeks the view from my room is far from bleak. This is in contrast to the future which awaits the Blair Legacy. Tony Blair was seen by many as the antidote to Thatcherism and a way in which politics could return to principles of social cohesion and fairness. Of course, that is where the dream began to unravel since it soon became obvious that the principles which were to govern were nothing to do with political philosophy, but more to do with the principles of rhetoric, marketing and spin. Anyone who knows anything about this unholy trio will know that they are for the most part strangers to such principles, sometimes reserving the greater disdain for the principle of truth. For those who spin webs the fate that awaits them is often self entanglement. Such is the case with the Iraq War and it is that which will cast a shadow over the few achievements, whatever you think they might be, of Blairite New Labour.

About six years ago I was holding forth in a book shop in Hay to another customer about the shortcomings of Prime Minister Blair, when a homely lady emerged from behind an adjoining stack and admitted with some emotion, ‘ I’m so ashamed. I voted for that man: I feel betrayed’. I greatly admired her courage for speaking out as I suspect it has taken many of us sometime to approach the public confessional.

Tony Blair chose to play fast and loose with some fairly basic principles and institutions, including the Rule of Law, Cabinet Government, Collective Responsibility, Parliamentary accountability and International Law. Some of these featured in his own end of the Constitution Show that dreary Thursday morning of 29th January when he appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry. Outside the gathered crowd carried posters referring to him as ‘Bliar’, a point missed by the commentator I saw doing his bit to camera outside the building, while those with tickets filed in, in some cases in search of some explanation as to why their loved ones had died.

Before his appearance the case was forming in my mind that here was a man, whilst he endeavoured to be a ‘nice sort of guy’, was rather adrift in a sea of troubles unable to find neither guiding light nor sound anchorages to see him through. The book title which kept coming into my head on that dreary Thursday as I saw his robust debating technique gather momentum was that of ‘He knew he was Right.’ Of course Trollope’s character was far from being right and in Mr Blair‘s case he probably did sincerely believe that there were WMD’s beyond doubt. His problem now, like any scientist in the laboratory or lawyer in a court, is that we are now watching the process of seeing whether the facts on which it was based can be proved.

The justification he gave the Chilcot inquiry would seem to be no more than his assertion that he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he believed this beyond reasonable doubt. This would not be enough for a jury to convict without a bundle of proved facts and inferences, the evidence, which removes all doubt from the mind of the jury: just one reasonable doubt should prevent a juror from finding guilt. It would seem however that Mr Blair is asserting that war was justified beyond his own doubt, period.

Whether or not the evidence was there to justify his certainty is what Chilcot should decide upon but in the meantime Mr Blair’s case presents several problems, some of his own making. If we run the clock back to Sunday 12th December 2009 he appeared in an interview with Fern Brittan. His expressed conviction at Chilcot as to the existence of WMD’s appears to have been undermined by his earlier frankness with Fern Brittan
I paraphrase the interview thus:
"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?"
Blair replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]",
Adding, "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.".... "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathize with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision." Guardian 12/12/09
No wonder the search for the number one justification, the existence of WMD’s, had been such a scruffy affair with allegations of alleged plagiarism, sexing up of documentation, and a bogus 45 minute deployment time. Oh, and by the way, since the Detroit bomber was charged in the US, we now know, if we are to believe the Federal charge sheet, that WMD’s can been hidden in undergarments. If only the UN inspectors had known that when they were trying to do their job.

I must confess that I forced myself to watch the Fern Brittan interview as I had not yet had breakfast and I didn’t want to be put off my grapefruit by an apologist’s master class. My self denial was however rewarded, not only by the admission of the backup reason for going to war but also by his claim that when making decisions on matters of life and death, like War, his faith didn’t appear to come into it. Oh dear I thought, so what is the point of your Christianity? O.K., perhaps George Bush would seem to have been informed rather badly in these matters but in his case I suspect it was possibly a matter of deficient critical reading skills. But in Tony’s case I remain somewhat puzzled as to why he bothered to go in for the interview given that the programme’s brief is within the BBC’s religious/ ethical Sunday morning slot. As a sometime Anglican and now a Catholic, can we really believe that his faith was irrelevant?

By the time he was questioned at Chilcot about the interview it seemed he still hadn’t realised that he was in a hole and that the time for digging had long since passed. Not a bit of it. What on earth was all that business about having had a great deal of experience in giving interviews but he hadn’t been prepared for Fern? Was his rather fumbled comment an admission that he had inadvertently revealed something he would have rather left out? He defended himself by saying that he had not used the phrase ‘regime change’. Of course he hadn’t: it was superfluous. He had said that even without WMD’s it would have been right to remove Saddam. Was it any wonder that some MP s who had relied on his assurances from the dispatch box were now feeling somewhat peeved.

In effect this all combines to show that in the absence of WMD’s he would not have been able to convince Parliament, not least because International Law does not allow one nation to go into another’s territory to remove a nasty person other than by way of self defence. In the absence a legal authority it is no more than an illegal act of war. This was probably why the international lawyers at the Foreign Office were also somewhat peeved when Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Cabinet was preferred to theirs. It was pointed out by one of them when before Chilcot, that the Attorney General was not a practitioner of international law.

This is clearly the weak spot in the Blair justification. Witness the crumbling of Alistair Campbell when asked by Andrew Marr ( BBC 1: Sunday 7th February), that if Chilcot fails to find unequivocal evidence to support Blair’s assertions from the dispatch box, the conclusion will have to be that the Prime Minister mislead Parliament. At this the ex-Cabinet Office hard case broke down and, breathing somewhat heavily, made a halting reference to the vilification of an honourable man. None of the debate away from the placards in the street had struck me as that, so this must have touched a nerve. Was the alliance with Bush, the dislike of Saddam’s ghastly psychopathic oil -rich regime and all the hype, so powerful that it swept Blair and his henchmen along on a self made wave of enthusiasm into an unjustifiable and illegal war?

The evidence of Clare Short on the 2nd February seems to support this theory. Unlike Blair’s performance the abiding impression was that here was a witness who had nothing to fear from Chilcot because all she had to do was tell the uncomplicated truth. It would seem that from Tony’s performance to date, the truth is anything but uncomplicated. Like Thatcher before him, he adopted a presidential role whereby he chose to exclude his colleagues from the decision making process to the point where he now tells us it was all on his shoulders. He apparently had no friend to turn to and not even his faith could help him with the decision. In a system which professes a convention of cabinet collective responsibility, constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy this need not have happened. Having for some reason felt that his shoulders alone were broad enough, it is on his own head that it now shall be. The time for vilification has passed: the word ‘pity’ comes to mind but doesn't quite make the journey.