[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers [...] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04

Years ago, long before Google came to the salvation of lazy football writers who couldn’t be bothered with microfiche searches, the term ‘unsupport’ was coined in the football magazine, When Saturday Comes.

It meant, as the name suggests, the exact opposite of supporting a team. You wished defeat on another team, hated that team with a passion. So, for example, in the last day of the Premiership season, many neutrals wanted Manchester City to win the title. This was not through any great love for the oil-rich upstarts in blue, but because they were unsupporting Manchester United. In the Premiership era, Manchester United are simultaneously the best supported and, at the same time, the most unsupported club in the land. Unsupporting is the football equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion: all the time United are successful, hatred of the side occurs as an equal and opposite reaction.

You can tell a lot about people by the team they hate. Take Manchester United unsupporters. They assume two forms. In the blue half of Manchester or on Merseyside, the Anyone But United (ABU) sentiment is an expression of bitter local rivalry. But throughout the rest of the country, ABU represents an increasing disenchantment with modern football. Manchester United is essentially a proxy for the gentrification and commercialisation of the game. When fans sing ‘Stand up if you hate Man U’, it’s not simply green-eyed envy of United’s success, it’s also a howl of protest against the corporate takeover of football. United embodies everything the traditionalists hate about the Premier League: the hype, the desecration of 3pm kick-offs, the relentless merchandising, the prawn-sandwich munching ‘plastic fans’, and the absentee foreign owners

The constant appearance of Manchester United and Chelsea at or near the top of the English Premier League have always seemed to me to be a good argument in favour of a salary cap in the NFL style: otherwise richer clubs will always be able to buy their way to a higher season finish than poorer teams.

On the other hand, the NFL could learn from the EPL with their promotion/relegation system (I say that in full knowledge that my beloved Vikings would have been relegated after the 2011 season if such a scheme was implemented). Of course, structurally the NFL and EPL have many differences preventing the adoption of the other sport’s practices, but as (I think) Gregg Easterbrook pointed out, Ohio State … sorry, The Ohio State University’s football team could have beaten both of Ohio’s professional teams for much of the last decade.

Anyone who claims to understand energy policy is either mad or subsidised. Last week I wrote that politics is seldom rational. It is more often based on intuition and tribal prejudice. This week we have a thundering example: the government’s new policy on nuclear energy.

Do not read on if you want a conclusion on this subject. For years I have read papers, books, surveys and news stories, and am little wiser. I trust to science and am ready to believe there is some great mathematician, some Fermat’s last theorem, who can write an equation showing where energy policy should turn. I have never met him.

The equation would start with the current market price of coal, gas, oil, nuclear and so-called “renewables”. That would give simple primacy to coal and gas. The equation would then factor in such variables as security of supply, which — being imponderable — can be argued from commercial interest and prejudice. Then it would have to take account of global warming and the virtue of lower carbon emissions. At this point the demons enter.

We must consider CO₂ reduction through substituting gas for coal, carbon capture, nuclear investment, biomass, wind, wave, solar and tidal generation. We must consider the application of fiscal policy to gas and petrol use, to energy efficiency and house insulation. Each has a quantity attached to it and each a fanatical lobby drooling for subsidies. As for achieving a remotely significant degree of global cooling, that requires world diplomacy — which has, as yet, proved wholly elusive.

Britain’s contribution to cooling can only be so infinitesimal as to be little more than gesture politics, yet it is a gesture that is massively expensive. Meeting the current EU renewables directive, largely from wind, would cost some £15bn a year, or £670 a household, and involve the spoliation of swaths of upland, countryside and coast. It is calculated to save a mere 0.2% of global emissions, with negligible impact on the Earth’s sea level.

By 1941, after the winter Blitz in which the Luftwaffe had relentlessly bombed the cities of Britain, the British people wanted to know that the RAF were ‘giving it back’ to the Germans. Later that year, as [Michael] Paris describes, Harry Watt directed his film Target for Tonight for the Crown Film Unit. Made with actual RAF personnel performing a script written by Watt, Target follows the story of a single raid on an imaginary railway yard and oil depot somewhere near a bend in the Rhine. The film sought to celebrate the quiet heroics of the RAF, which is shown to have the ability to mount a precision raid with great success. Audiences no doubt cheered to see the (models of the) target ablaze and to know — or, rather, believe — that the RAF was creating havoc in the enemy’s heartland.

[. . .]

According to a secret Cabinet report, which analysed aerial photographs in the summer of 1941, the RAF failed to get even one third of its bombs within five miles of its targets. The Strategic Air Offensive was published much to the chagrin of wartime RAF leaders such as Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris and generated intense and widespread controversy.

By the 1980s it was largely accepted that, before new navigational aids were introduced in 1942, the RAF offensive had been a complete failure. Although the moral debate about the rights and wrongs of ‘area’ or ‘indiscriminate’ bombing has continued ever since, there are no serious historians today who challenge the accuracy of the Webster-Frankland account. And so, in 1990, Paris was able to point out the gulf between what the RAF pretended had been happening and what, in reality, was going on.

Before the war started, the air force always claimed that the “bomber would always get through”. What they didn’t say was that it couldn’t be predicted where the bomber would get through to.

However, it must be remembered that even the US Air Force, which carried out daylight air raids against German targets in the latter half of the war, had an accuracy issue too:

Gladwell began with the story of Carl Norden — a Swiss engineer, born in 1880, domineering and narcissistic, “who had very strong feelings about alternating current” and much else. Norden became obsessed with finding a more precise ways to deliver bombs from aircraft — and invented the Norden Mark 15 Bomb Sights. Its promise: that a bomb could be dropped into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.

The US military was excited; in fact, Washington spent $1.5 billion in 1940 dollars rolling out the devices, buying 90,000 of them and training 50,000 bombardiers to use them. Yet when America was brought into world war two, “it turns out they were not the holy grail”. They could only hit a pickle barrel under perfect conditions — and life is rarely perfect, it proved. They were hard to use, broke down, could not function in cloud without direct line of sight of the target, and were inaccurate. Plus, Norden had hired German engineers — who gave Berlin the complete blueprint by 1938.

Is privacy being turned into a privilege that only the moneyed and the well-connected may enjoy? Two striking stories in the news last week suggest that it is.

In the first story, it was reported that activists and hacks are heaping further pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to improve the privacy settings on Facebook, so that they might update their statuses and post photos of their social shenanigans without having the world and its mother peering over their shoulders. In the second story, we were told that social workers, backed by much of the media, are calling on the prime minister to get rid of “red tape” so that they might more easily interfere in — I’m sorry, intervene in — so-called problem families. There are a lot of damaged families out there, the social workers hinted, and thus we need to rip up some of the rules governing when it is and isn’t okay to stick our snouts into their business.

That these two stories could appear in the same week, and not be considered contradictory, suggests we have a pretty screwed-up attitude to privacy today. Indeed, sometimes the very same members of the political and media classes who believe that their private lives must remain absolutely private will think it is perfectly logical that other people’s private lives — the lives of Them — should be thrown open to state snooping.

Scotland announced minimum pricing for alcohol this week, at 50p a unit; the price of the cheapest spirits will now rise by almost 50%. It will arrive in England soon, although possibly at the more timid rate of 40p per unit. It will only make a tiny difference, says the government, as it contemplates raising prices for a commodity almost all citizens enjoy (86% of the adult population drink alcohol), and at a time when prices are rising everywhere.

So why bother doing it? The government says it will save lives, even as it announces the speed limit on some motorways will be raised to 80mph, which will cost lives. I am not sure if the deaths created on the roads will be offset by the lives saved from gin, but it seems that more deaths on the roads are acceptable, but more deaths from alcohol are not. Do I smell snobbery? David Cameron says that alcohol “generates mayhem on our streets and spreads fear in our communities” — so I suppose I do.

Minimum pricing is a result of a national moral panic about alcohol, which follows on the trail of moral panics about tobacco and obesity, which are created by the tabloids and their beloved pictures of girls vomiting into gutters with their skirts hitched round their waists; there is a whole crocodile of moral panics, squeezing its way into Downing Street as more important issues are ignored.

[. . .]

Drinking is something that terrifies some but delights many. Drinkers can be ghastly, but so can politicians, and so can sober politicians. Minimum pricing comes from an ancient place – the desire for a neat society – and it expresses Cameron’s desire to appear to be doing something, while he does nothing elsewhere. Where one stands on minimum pricing depends entirely on whether you believe it is a person’s unalienable right to get shit-faced drunk at the market price, no matter what your income. When so many rights are threatened, who would dispute it?

When we scheduled the release of The Wages of Sin Taxes for 15th May, we did not guess that it would be sandwiched between the announcement of a 50p minimum price for alcohol in Scotland (Monday) and a new campaign for sin taxes on food and soft drinks (today). Writing in the British Medical Journal, two academics have just called for price hikes on sugar-sweetened beverages and ‘junk food’ as a way of dealing with Britain’s alleged obesity epidemic.

Obesity rates, like drinking rates, have not actually risen for ten years, but the same decade saw the medical profession gain an uncanny grip on the nation’s political process and they are in no mood to relinquish it. Taking a break from hassling smokers and drinkers, the mandarins of public health have taken the ‘next logical step’ and moved on to the general population.

“Economists generally agree,” they write, “that government intervention, including taxation, is justified when the market fails to provide the optimum amount of a good for society’s wellbeing.” Even if this dubious statement were true, there has never been a time when the market offered more choice in what we eat than drink than today. And, contrary to popular belief, it is much cheaper for a family to subsist on fresh fruit and vegetables than it is to eat out at McDonalds three times a day. For the spokespeople of public health, the problem is not that there is a lack of options, but that we plebs are not choosing the right ones.

Defining junk food is notoriously difficult. As Rob Lyons explains in his excellent book Panic on a Plate, a portion of McDonalds fries contains a quarter of an adult’s recommended intake of Vitamin C, while middle class favourites like olive oil, parmesan and pasta are rather fattening. A tax on “sugar sweetened beverages” will presumably leave apple juice and smoothies untouched, despite the fact that fruit juices are often sweeter and more calorific than Coca-Cola.

This week began with news of a remarkable intelligence coup. It has ended in ignominy, and a reminder that the pathological leakiness of the American bureaucracy has consequences for counterterrorism.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the CIA foiled an audacious plot by Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack an aircraft using an upgraded version of the underwear bomb that failed three years ago. The AP had, apparently, shown great responsibility in delaying publication for days at the request of the White House.

Then, the story grew both muddier and more remarkable still. The would-be bomber was in fact a mole. He was a British national of Saudi Arabian origin, recruited by MI5 in Europe and later run, with Saudi Arabia, by MI6. This is a testament to the unimaginable courage of the agent in question, and the ingenuity of British intelligence.

But the emergence of this story, with a blow-by-blow account of operational detail, is the result of reckless, impetuous leaking that could cost lives and compromise operations in the future.

“Minimum alcohol pricing is a miserable, Victorian-era measure that explicitly targets the poor and the frugal, leaving the more expensive drinks of the middle classes untouched. It’s regressive and paternalistic, treating people as if they’re children to be nannied by the government.

“To make things worse, all signs suggest that the minimum price will be successively raised once it’s in place. This is what happened in the UK with alcohol and tobacco taxes, which are now among the highest in the world. It’s like boiling a frog – bring in a low minimum price that only affects the most marginalized part of society, the poor, and raise it gradually every year without people noticing.

“The reality is that Britain does not have a drink problem. The definition of “binge drinking” has been redefined so that a grown man drinking more than two pints of lager is considered to be “binging”. The number of diseases defined as “alcohol-related” has tripled in the last twenty-five years. In fact, we drink less than we did ten years ago, less than we did one hundred years ago, and far less than we did in the 19th Century. Hysteria about drinking alcohol is a red herring invented by the health lobby. Health fascism is back with a vengeance, and minimum alcohol pricing is just another brick in the wall.”

When it comes to building a comfortable bungalow, Jim Higgins has got the inside track.

The retired transport manager, 60, has one of the most unique houses in Britain… because it is built around a real railway carriage.

The property in Ashton, Cornwall, is a fully functioning house but bizarrely has the fully restored 130-year-old Great Western Railway car within its walls.

Mr Higgins, 64, originally from Buckinghamshire took over the property from his former father-law Charles Allen who was forced to build it around the railway carriage because bizarre planning regulations meant the train could not be moved.

Mr Higgins said: ‘The railway carriage was lived in by a local woman Elizabeth Richards from 1930.