Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2009

British military establishment facing cuts under next government?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:36

It would be too glib of me to suggest that the Ministry’s preferred way to respond to the Conservative opposition’s call “to cut MoD costs by 25%” would be to abandon the Royal Navy (or ground the Royal Air Force), but it’s hard to imagine them voluntarily cutting their own numbers:

Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox is expected to tell the party’s conference: “Some things will have to change and believe me, they will.”

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said Mr Fox had asked for savings in bureaucracy – the MoD has 85,000 civil servants.

The Tories have pledged to cut overall Whitehall budgets by a third.

In his speech to party members in Manchester, Dr Fox will accuse Labour of having creating “a black hole” in defence budgets, which are affecting the war in Afghanistan and threatening to create an “on-going defence crisis for years to come”.

Of course, there’s nothing new about the administrative “tail” of the armed forces growing . . . C. Northcote Parkinson documented the phenomenon (PDF) back in 1955:

The accompanying table is derived from Admiralty statistics for 1914 and 1928. The criticism voiced at the time centered on the comparison between the sharp fall in numbers of those available for fighting and the sharp rise in those available only for administration, the creation, it was said, of “a magnificent Navy on land.” But that
comparison is not to the present purpose. What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914 had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the Washington Naval Agreement of that year. Yet in these circumstances we had a 78.45 percent increase in Admiralty officials over a period of fourteen years; an average increase of 5.6 percent a year on the earlier total. In fact, as we shall see, the rate of increase was not as regular as that. All we have to consider, at this stage, is the percentage rise over a given period.

Parkinson_Admiralty_Statistics

September 26, 2009

British libraries now afraid to lend scissors to patrons

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:13

The staff at the Holborn Library in London are apparently very worried about the risk of being attacked by library patrons, so they won’t even lend scissors:

Lorna Watts, 26, a self-employed dressmaker, was turned down at Holborn Library in central London.

She said: “It’s ridiculous — public libraries are supposed to be supportive of small businesses.”

A spokeswoman for Camden Council, which runs the library, has apologised and said it would investigate the incident.

Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: “I asked why I couldn’t borrow a pair of scissors and she said, ‘they are sharp, you might stab me’.

“I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again — because she said I could hit her over the head with it!”

The way Britain has been going, I’m surprised they didn’t hit Ms. Watts with an ASBO for the implied threat here: “It’s absurd — there are plenty of heavy books I could have hit her with if I wanted to.”

September 25, 2009

You like paintball? You’ll love this . . .

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 18:24

Armourgeddon:

Armourgeddon

Tank Battles
New Special Price: £80 per head, per package

The Commander’s Challenge (3 man crew): Take it in turns to negotiate the tricky tank course set in a World War II bombing range. Then engage in all-out armoured warfare with your 40mm paintball cannon against your opponent. Who will drive? Who will aim? Who will load the breach? YOU OF COURSE!

Yes, I know they’re not really tanks. But outside of former military types and anoraks like us, who does? Certainly not the media . . .

H/T to Jess Brisbane for the link.

Every army has their fair share of REMFs

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Over at Castle Argghhh!, Bill remembers the distasteful creatures known as REMFs:

In my war, we coined a term to describe the guy who lived in Saigon in an air-conditioned trailer with access to clean water that didn’t smell or taste like bleach, who worked in an area where the greatest danger was spilling a drink at Happy Hour, who took PX breaks four times a day to see if his new TEAC stereo system had arrived, who exchanged his boots for new ones whenever his spitshine was scuffed, who spent his days tweaking his Efficiency Reports to achieve maximum promotability, who had starch lines *sewn* into his jungle fatigues to nullify the effects of the humidity, who may have once heard a mortar explode a couple of miles away — and bitched about how tough it was being in Vietnam.

The term was REMF. Rear Echelon Mother-F*cker.

REMFs are present in all branches of all militaries — they aren’t common, but they make themselves obnoxious in ways that are impossible to ignore.

This kind of creature exist in every army, including (as Michael Yon can confirm) the British army.

September 24, 2009

Biggest Anglo-Saxon treasure find since Sutton Hoo

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:22

Amateur “metal detectorist” Terry Herbert is the discoverer of an Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard in a field in Staffordshire:

The collection contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.

Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum’s Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: “This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.

“(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.”

A great exploit for Mr. Herbert, although the report makes what appear to be conflicting statements: “It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown”, but also “BBC correspondent Nick Higham said the hoard would be valued by the British Museum and the money passed on to Mr Herbert and the landowner”.

I hope that the latter part is true, because if it isn’t, it will only encourage future treasure finders to conceal their discoveries in hopes of selling it off on the black market, likely destroying the historical and archaeological value of the site in the process.

September 22, 2009

Over-broad laws can be useful to silence critics

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Richard Dawkins contrasts the scientific way of resolving disputes with the British libel laws:

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world. Litigants are coming to England from another country to sue people who live in a third country over a book that was published in a fourth country – the excuse being that a handful of books were sold here too. A nice little round-the-world jaunt for lawyers it may be, but sensible or liberal it is not. Nor is it just.

Of course there must be redress if you are maliciously attacked in a way that damages you. But if such a law is cast too wide it has disastrous consequences on the public interest, not least in the area of science and medicine where the stakes are high, profits and reputations are guarded jealously, and the vulnerable need to be protected from unproven or fraudulent claims for cures, whether by “alternative” therapists or big pharmaceuticals.

H/T to Chris Taylor Chris Myrick for the link.

September 17, 2009

Another example of public funding misdirected

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

Following up from a post the other day, here’s another example of public money being used to create something, but the public (who funded the development through their taxes) not being allowed to use the result for free:

Wikileaks is hosting a copy of the “all 1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information” for the UK.

One odd thing about Britain is that databases produced at public expense — maps of the country, lists of postal codes, transcripts of Parliamentary debate and so on — do not belong to the public. In order to use this data, you have to pay gigantic licensing fees to the government, who accordingly threatens to sue people who use them without permission.

September 16, 2009

Latest brain fart from the British government

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:54

Cory Doctorow sent a Twitter message yesterday, linking to the OpenRightsGroup.org petition page:

The freedom for each and everyone of us to express our views on the internet is under threat like never before. The UK government is now considering laws that would allow individuals to be cut off from the internet. They say the reason is to protect the economic prosperity of the creative industries.

Our coalition comprises organisations, charities and people who believe disconnection from the internet would mean that people like us would be unable to engage in banking, socialising, campaigning, home admin and many other activities that are increasingly moving online. Worse, disconnection would restrict our long standing right of freedom of expression just at the time when we all need to be able to critique and engage more than ever.

If Lord Mandelson’s plan becomes law, disconnection may start for copyright infringement, with no guarantee it would not be extended for other things.

You don’t have to have much imagination to come up with lots of ways this little policy initiative could go pear-shaped very quickly. Pear-shaped, that is, for the poor folks caught up in the legal machinery. ASBOs were a terrible notion — and appear to be worse in practice than anyone thought when they were first introduced, but they’ll pale into insignificance if this horrible idea gets accepted by the government.

September 14, 2009

The RAF sets a record, but not a good one

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

The RAF‘s most expensive aircraft had just made its first flight:

The Nimrod MRA4 programme was initiated back in 1996 by TV presenter, one-time director of BAE Systems and former New Statesman theatre critic Michael Portillo, who was defence minister at the time. Under the original deal, BAE Systems would be paid a “fixed price” of £2.2bn to rebuild, rearm and upgrade the RAF’s fleet of 21 Nimrod MR2s, the last De Havilland Comet airframes left flying in the world, to the point where they would effectively be new aircraft. This would have meant a cost of just over £100m per plane. The project was then known as “Nimrod 2000”, rather optimistically as it turned out.

As time went by it became clear that the price was not fixed, and that “2000” wasn’t a good name for the project at all: it was re-dubbed Nimrod MRA4. BAE Systems has just announced that the first flight of a production-standard MRA4 took place last week, though the aircraft is not yet ready for handing over to the RAF — that will probably take place next year. Then there will be more delay before the type can be declared operationally capable.

Meanwhile the MoD now estimates the programme’s overall price tag as £3.6bn, an increase of more than two-thirds. In fact the situation is much worse than this, as the number of planes has had to be slashed to prevent even worse cost overruns. The RAF will now receive just 9 aircraft rather than 21.

As a result the cost per plane has actually quadrupled: each MRA4 will now have cost the taxpayers a cool £400m, better than $660m at current rates.

On a pure economic level, this is quite a price increase, but it’s typical of military equipment contracts: the very small number of items means that there are no economies of scale to be reaped, and all the design, test, and administration costs must be recouped over a much shorter production run. It still looks very bad . . . unless you happen to be in opposition right now, in which case it’s a great campaign talking point.

September 13, 2009

Pond fish now protected from boy’s toy boat

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: — Nicholas @ 20:12

If you guessed from the headline that this was another little tale from Britain’s burgeoning “Nanny State”, you’re quite correct:

Security guards ban boy, 9, from sailing toy boat on pond because it ‘frightens the fish’

Security guards reduced a nine-year-old boy to tears after banning him from sailing his toy boat on a pond because it ‘frightens the fish’.
Noah Bailey was distraught after staff at Chiswick Business Park, in west London, stopped him playing with his model of the German battleship Bismarck.

His grandfather Paul Fabricius, 57, said that when they went to complain about the draconian rule the guard refused to tell him the name of the manager for ‘security reasons’.

So the fish are being protected from model ships run by nine-year-olds, but you can’t complain because the names and contact information of the “authorities” must be concealed from the public. Don’t you feel safer now?

September 10, 2009

British army gets some new kit

Filed under: Britain, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

In what the British government is announcing as a boost for British industry, the PBI are getting some new equipment:

  • Thermal sights will be provided for rifles, marksman’s weapons and light machineguns. These can be used to detect hidden enemies and bombs while on patrol, and function even in total darkness – when the regular light-amplifying night vision gear now in use doesn’t work. This stuff is already in use by some units, and is considered good by our sources.
  • New Lightweight Day Sights will be provided, replacing the SUSAT* sights which came in when the SA80 weapons were introduced during the 1980s. SUSAT was very popular in its day (unlike the SA80s, which were only sorted out twenty years later in a German factory), but according to our sources the new sights are much better, offering improved field of view and a clearer picture. “A gleaming bit of kit,” we’re told.
  • The new thermal scopes, in a popular bit of good sense, have open Close Quarter Battle Sights mounted on top of them. This means that a soldier in a close-up gunfight doesn’t need to peer through a scope as he shoots, and lose track of what’s happening around him. This gets the thumbs up as well.

It’s typical in situations like this — regardless of the country involved — for the politicians to view any military spending as being primarily to serve political ends, rather than military ones. This often means choosing a less capable piece of equipment if it can be produced in a key state/province/constituency even if it costs more than a competing product. Unusually, this doesn’t appear to have been the case this time:

Overall, then, most of the gear is necessary and popular. Refreshingly, the MoD seems also to be breaking with tradition and simply purchasing stuff from the firms best able to supply it rather than trying to use the buy to subsidise UK industry. Despite minister Quentin Davies’ assertion at DSEi that the FIST cash will “support the British defence industrial base”, actually it seems that at least half the money will go to overseas firms.

The grenade fire-control gadgets and the commanders’ target-marking binos (two of the most expensive systems) are to come from Switzerland, for example. Swiss provider Vectronix say they’ll be making 92 million francs on the deal, about £53m — more than a third of the total spend, and that’s without allowing for prime contractor Thales’ cut off the top. The new day-sights, another pricy piece of kit, will come from Canada and the periscopes from Israel. The only substantial UK buy is the thermal sights, from Qioptiq.

September 8, 2009

What’s in a name?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education — Nicholas @ 09:17

For most people, certain names pick up associations that have to do with the first person you encountered who bore that name. You may view all “Garys” with mild apprehension, while you’re automatically well-disposed to “Michaels”. “Kathy” or “Chelsea” may remind you of an unpleasant classmate from grade school, while “Tina” or “Pauline” may be viewed in advance as good people, all based on your early experiences.

Teachers in Britain have their little list of names, too:

As teachers eye the register on the first day back at school this September, they’ll be nervously keeping a sharp look-out for certain names which “strike fear into the nation’s tutors”.

The list of those likely to make mischief includes young ‘uns dubbed Aliesha, Brooke, Brooklyn, Casey, Chelsea, Connor, Crystal, Demi, Jack, Jake, Jessica, Kyle, and (pay attention at the back there El Reg’s Executive Vice President, Global Sales), Liam.

This roster of foreboding comes courtesy of Bounty.com, which polled 3,000 blackboard botherers to determine just which names spell trouble. Doubtless there are those among you who have a lad called Jake who’s an absolute angel, but that makes no difference to tremulous teachers, because they’ve already got him marked down as a wrong ‘un as soon as they clock his ID.

John Snow and the start of modern epidemiology

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Another “on this date” entry for you: in 1854, John Snow persuaded the local authorities in a London borough to remove the handle from a water pump at the centre of a cholera outbreak. The move was successful, and the death rate dropped immediately. Randy Alfred has the story:

BroadSt_cholera_map

Physician John Snow convinces a London local council to remove the handle from a pump in Soho. A deadly cholera epidemic in the neighborhood comes to an end immediately, though perhaps serendipitously. Snow maps the outbreak to prove his point . . . and launches modern epidemiology.

The Soho neighborhood was not then filled with galleries, clubs, restaurants and other fine urban diversions. Some of it was an unsanitary slum where centuries-old cesspits sat chockablock with the wells that provided drinking water to a crowded populace.

Asiatic cholera had stricken Britain in successive waves since 1831. Snow, an obstetrician who pioneered the use of anesthesia in Britain, published On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1849. His hypothesis (and supporting data) held that the scourge was caused by sewage pollution in drinking water and “always commences with disturbances of the functions of the alimentary canal.”

September 4, 2009

Yesterday, the wine. Today, it’s the candy label.

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

After yesterday’s indecent-in-Alabama wine label, today’s outrage is a German candy wrapper that has raised someone’s ire in Britain. Here’s the Telegraph report:

Obscene_candy_wrapper

Simon Simpkins, a father of two, said he was shocked at the “pornographic” poses when he bought the sour candy for his children Benjamin and Ofelia.

Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorks, told The Sun: “The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.

“The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.”

H/T to Christian T. for the link. Roger Henry quickly commented:

I can understand why his wife became distressed and had to sit down in the car-park. Probably overcome with hysterics after watching her husband make an absolute public prat of himself.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

September 2, 2009

Canadian troops acting badly . . . in WW2

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, WW2 — Nicholas @ 13:02

Jon sent me an interesting anecdote from The Telegraph. According to this (as far as I know uncorroborated) story, the Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain during the Second World War were far from being boy scouts:

Apparently the manoeuvres had got completely out of hand and some of the people living in the Forest Hill and Shotover areas of the county and adjoining Wheatley were being terrorised by tanks, driven utterly without care and thought through the area.

They ploughed up gardens, ruined hedges and flattened walls and carefully cultivated vegetable plots. Concrete pavements were smashed and local roads were apparently chewed up like ploughed fields.

One woman out for a walk with her children was terrorised by a madman in a tank and had her pram damaged.

Stories of the causes of this irresponsibility abounded and the memory of that awful Sunday lived on for years.

The Canadians had the dubious distinction of having inflicted more damage and fear on the civilian population that the Germans!

I’d not be surprised to hear that there’d been some incidents, but I hadn’t heard of anything of quite this magnitude. Has anyone else heard about it before?

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