Mitt's runnning mate

As Mitt Romney’s shaky one-man road-show reeled in some reinforcement from Paul Ryan, Rupert Murdoch described the Republican presidential candidate’s choice of running mate as “almost perfect”, and the Democrats may gleefully agree.

Mr Ryan was presented in faintly farcical manner, billed as the “next President” by his bumbling boss, who then interrupted his speech to correct the cock-up, inadvertently painting it as a possibly more palatable option. When unhindered however, Ryan revealed the easy, affable intelligence apparently absent from his campaign colleague. Whether or not you can digest the doctrine, it is hard to knock Ryan’s delivery.

Regarded as the furthest to the right of Romney’s options, Paul Ryan, at 42, has already represented his home state of Wisconsin in Congress for seven terms. As chairman of the committee overseeing the federal budget, he has also authored an alternative to Barack Obama’s budget. His “Path to Prosperity” reads like chapters chopped from the conservative bible. The plan proposes slashing the soaring US debt more dramatically than the present administration would dare, radically reducing government spending, whilst cutting tax for top earners. A familiar story to that told on this side of the pond of course, but one yet to produce a happy ending.

The Republican guard will no doubt relish Paul Ryan’s robust plans, his insightful intellect and his considerable contrast to the gaffe-prone Governor Romney, and yet his selection of side-kick is not without its risks. Democrats will dine out on the perception that the “Path to Prosperity” may not perhaps be wide enough for everyone. Ryan’s mooted reform of Medicare, for example, has caused concern for the over 65s. Acting as a guarantee of medical services for ageing Americans, it’s the nearest they get to an NHS, and meddling with that may not sit well with the elderly of the electorate. In addition, despite being a fully paid-up member of the stimulus-sceptic society, Ryan has been forced to admit that he went cap in hand for the very funding he refused to support, having twice denied he did.

But these are just the early skirmishes, and with the cast now complete, the circus starts in earnest. President Obama, as incumbent in uncertain times, has a hard sell on his hands, and with Ryan in his corner, Romney now packs a more powerful punch in the policy department. Donations to the Republican campaign have reportedly rocketed in response to Ryan’s recruitment, so with both sides rolling up their sleeves, the fight is unlikely to be clean, and it certainly won’t be cheap.  

Parking a rover on a Martian mountain.

To great fanfare, a Nasa probe about the size of a small hatchback, has landed on the planet Mars, and will be shuffling about for the next couple of years looking for signs of life. I have had a similar experience in Holyhead.

Billions of years ago, so science insists, there was water present on the red planet, so this mission is to ascertain if there was anything around to drink it. Our heroic hatchback will therefore be on sightseeing and soil sampling detail, and like any self respecting tourist on a daytrip to Margate, the Curiosity Rover will send back copious holiday snaps, and spend a large part of its time digging.  

The journey to Mars is a bottom-numbing 570 million kilometres, but at least with unmanned space-flight you can cut out the toilet breaks. The final daring descent to the planet’s surface is the most critical phase, affectionately dubbed “seven minutes of terror”. As the radio signals take around 14 minutes to travel back to Earth, the good folk at Nasa had to wait, like agonised expectant parents, to see if Curiosity could touchdown in tact, or become a rather pricey jigsaw puzzle.

As it was, the number cruncher’s calculations were correct. The probe pierced the planet’s atmosphere at 13,000 mph before decelerating rapidly using a canny combination of parachute and retrorockets, which proved effective, but more expensive that my wife thumping an imaginary brake pedal with her size fives and screaming. The landing manoeuvre was then completed by the “Sky Crane” lowering the rover safely to the surface on nylon ropes.

The good news was greeted on the ground with gleeful delirium. For many, the mission was nearly ten years in the making, and the relief was palpable in an outpouring of emotion seldom seen in those with more letters after their names than in them, even American ones.  

But this is a modern mission by any means. Curiosity, like any gal about the galaxy, has her own Twitter feed, and when settled into her new surroundings, she tweeted: “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!”

Sadly, Gale has so far declined to comment.

Honouring Shafilea Ahmed.

“Feelings of sympathy and revulsion” should be set aside, the jury have been told, as they retire to consider their verdicts in the trial of Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed. The couple, of Pakistani origin, stand accused of murdering their 17 year old daughter, Shafilea, at the family home in Warrington in September 2003, in a row over her desire for a western lifestyle.

During the three month trial, the court heard details of how the teenager drank bleach on a family holiday to Pakistan, fearing she would be forced into an arranged marriage and denied a return to the UK. Having also listened to the testimony of  the couple’s younger daughter Alesha, who claims to have witnessed her parents forcing a plastic bag into Shafilea’s mouth to suffocate her, setting aside sympathy and revulsion may yet be the hardest task the jury have faced.

Honour killings are hidden crimes by nature, statistics are therefore challenging to collate and likely to depict a picture that falls short of the true scale. However, in March of this year the issue was the subject of a Panorama investigation by the BBC, revealing that a national helpline for “honour” related domestic violence receives 500 calls per month. In addition, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, in a survey of UK police forces, found the number of honour crimes to be 2,823 per year, which is almost eight a day.

Before being taken to Pakistan on a one way ticket, Shafilea Ahmed approached Warrington Borough Council for emergency housing. Her application suggests her father Iftikhar was all too adept at setting “feelings of sympathy” aside, going beyond a simple cry for help into a catalogue of alleged abuse. She mentioned her not-unfounded fears of an arranged marriage, “regular incidents of violence” from the age of 15, and having been prevented from attending college and her part time job. Depicting a build up of violent treatment at the hands of her parents, the 17 year old had clearly felt that the involvement of the police and social services would be enough to secure her safety. Instead, she disappeared in September 2003, her body discovered on the banks of the River Kent in Cumbria in February of 2004.   

Did authorities with the power to intervene suffer inertia to avoid a charge of racial intolerance? Did they lack the legal teeth to react as robustly as the situation demanded? When lives are taken within our borders through a sense of honour that does not belong, our collective honour rests on these questions being asked and answered. In order for the judicial system to be beyond reproach, society’s representatives in the jury must indeed endeavour to transcend sympathy and revulsion, as Mr Justice Roderick Evans indicates. If however, as a wider community, we ever cease to be so stirred then we will have failed Shafilea Ahmed for a second time.

Britain's well-being unbuttoned.

Anne Frank wrote that “we all live with the objective of being happy,” and to gauge how we are getting on, this week the Office for National Statistics revealed the results of our first national wellbeing survey. Launched towards the end of 2010, this was David Cameron’s happiness index, a drive to discern our success more from the size of our smiles than our surplus shekels. To recap, then, as now, we had none.

The Prime Minister said; “It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing.” The ONS budget for harnessing the happy stats is £2 million a year, and it aspires towards a better appreciation of what actually makes us happy, in order to make that illusive reality easier to reach for. “Improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times,” Mr Cameron concluded.

Greeted by Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Michael Dughner as “a statement of the bleeding-obvious”, the survey found our most satisfied souls to be teenagers and the elderly, residents of Orkney and Shetland and married home-owners in steady employment. Greater minds than mine will no doubt deal with the more delicate deductions, but it appears that avoiding the rat race is as much a worthy way to wellbeing as winning it. By and large, those questioned were happier in work than unemployed, and yet the more satisfied sections of society were revealed as those least likely to have a full-time job. Home-owners were generally more content than their counterparts in rented accommodation, and yet teenagers were amongst the happiest overall, but the least likely to have a mortgage. Interestingly, black people taking part in the survey considered themselves less content than those questioned from Indian origin.

Although looking beyond the pursuit of profit is no doubt a noble cause, how exactly these findings filter into government policy may be as difficult to discern as the key to contentment itself. HHkkkHowever, Mr Cameron can take comfort from the fact that he is not alone in striving to broaden the basis for defining success. Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a similar report, in 2009, seeking to crack “the cult of the market”, and feature national wellbeing in GDP figures. And we all know what happened to him.

In all, the Office for National Statistics present a predictably mixed picture, pointing to conclusions many might be forgiven for thinking self-evident. Perhaps it’s your attitude to your lot, not whether you have a lot, or not, that sets the scale of your smile.

Oops, need troops!

From the country that brought you the Millennium Dome, please welcome, London 2012. A fortnight away from an event planned over seven years, we find a security personnel shortfall of about 3000 staff. The MoD, already providing 13,500 helping hands, now need up to 17,000, many of whom will be servicemen and women returning home from Afghanistan to find their holiday plans postponed.

G4S, the company with the lucrative security contract for the Games, have others too. The world’s largest private security firm also manage immigration detention centres, conduct deportations, empty cash machines, read meters, and have been bidding to take over large tranches of police operations.

Although the current kerfuffle is on Coalition time, the company won the contract on Labour’s watch. In response, Shadow Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said that G4S should really have been monitored “day by day”, to be certain they were as good as their word. Why, is the office staffed entirely by four-year-olds? I monitor my son’s hot chocolate making activities, but if he was a veteran of several foreign conflicts I would hope that only minimal supervision would be necessary.

In fairness to G4S, the initial government estimate of 10,000 security staff needed for the Games, was revised up last year to around 23,500. However, every time the goal posts moved, the match fee increased. The Telegraph report leaked Home Office documents revealing the fee for G4S staff management went from £7.3 million to £60 million. With all that cash in the till, why not sub-contract? Industry insiders say the staffing shortfall could have been easily met by London agencies alone. Instead, it seems that students, some of questionable suitability, were being shipped in on £8.50 per hour as a supplement, and without sufficient success. As incompetency is more contagious than the common cold, it should also be no surprise to learn that no penalty clause was included for failure to deliver on the £284 million contract.

One might expect future G4S bids to be subject to increased scrutiny on the back of this understaffing oversight, but such is not always the way in Westminster. If the Olympics prove an unparalleled paragon of sporting success, and a commercial combustion engine to aid our ailing economy, then the G4S fiasco will be a forgotten footnote. But that is an “if” as big as the fee they will no doubt fail to forfeit.  

Welcome to Britain, bring brollies.

There was a hill rising up above the Cornish town I was born in. The locals said if you couldn’t see the top of it, that meant it was raining, and if you could, it soon would be. I dare say its whereabouts have been well and truly shrouded for weeks now, as the West Country is awash with, in some places, a month’s rainfall in 24 hours, little respite after the wettest June since 1860.

At the time of writing, 149 flood alerts have been put in place, 13 flood warnings, three of them severe, and the Olympic torch relay has been halted. Presumably they feared it might go out, and it’s harder to light than a wet fag in a thunderstorm.

One wonders if the torch now regrets selecting the UK as its destination of choice for a little summer saunter. It started out being lit by the sun, in Athens, surrounded by dozens of statuesque looking types in togas. It will complete its sodden sojourn in Stratford, surrounded by pale people in anoraks.

As if the imminent risk of drowning was not enough to trouble the travelling Olympians on their way to London 2012, it now seems our roads system requires a little TLC; truck loads of cash. Londoners have only just reacquainted themselves with the myriad joys of the Hammersmith flyover, after its £10 million MOT, and now the M4 has had to be closed, because it’s cracked. The offending fissure was found in the Boston Manor viaduct, meaning the main route into London from Heathrow is out of action between Junctions 1 and 2. The British Olympic Committee have had one successful bid already, maybe the next should be for spare bridges on ebay. Curing the cracks will apparently take five days, less if they just cover them with woodchip wallpaper.

After a semi-sodden Silverstone, a demi-drenched Diamond Jubilee and the usual wash outs at Wimbledon, it is perplexing that we even plan any non-precipitation proof parties at all. I would favour the erection of a giant awning, from Hastings to Holyhead, under which we retreat, as one, from the first shower of spring to the final soaking in September. As the government are found of telling us, Britain is open for business, but best bring a brolly, and maybe a bridge.

Diamond cut: Bob-a-Job no more.

It turns out that diamonds are not forever. In the wake of the rate-rigging revelations Barclays Chairman Marcus Agius fell nobly upon his sword. Two days later, Chief Executive Bob Diamond has toppled too, but needed no small nudging. Already due to be lightly grilled by the Treasury Committee on Wednesday, the heat on Mr Diamond was increasing daily, to an extent that he felt it was “damaging the franchise”.

Chancellor George Osborne said it was the right decision, hinting at a sea-change to a “culture of responsibility in British banking”. Central to that should be the impending parliamentary review into banking practices, announced yesterday by the Prime Minister.

With labour leaning more towards a full public inquiry however, Ed Miliband feels that Britain won’t buy “politicians investigating bankers”. After assorted scandals and self-service on both sides, some may indeed struggle to assess which have cost us more and helped us less. By contrast, David Cameron concludes that a parliamentary inquiry is “the right approach”, as it should be swifter to establish. The theory goes that resulting recommendations, if accepted, could seamlessly slip into the Financial Services Bill. Wonder who’ll end up paying that one.

 Political posturing aside, the focus should be product not process. Surely the success of this inquiry swings on not needing another one next time. I concur in part with the TUC’s Brendan Barber, that it’s not “the number of heads that roll, but whether it leads to the root and branch reforms…”

 For manipulating the inter-bank lending rate, Barclays were fined £290 million and the boss lost his bonus. It’s a sizeable slap to the Rolex adorned wrist, but is it a sufficient deterrent for the Masters of the Universe? Mr Diamond, a former boss of Barclays’ investment arm, said; “I am sorry that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values.” Some may suspect the exact opposite is true, that it’s the casino culture created in some sectors that encourages actions consistent with a complete lack of values.

Diamond has been cut, but whether he was just grazed, or polished up and knighted is more symbolic than seismic. If you divorce retail banking from its riskier relation, cross-contamination could conceivably be controlled. Otherwise, without robust regulation, the great and the good of Westminster and the City will have their backs mutually scratched and patted, but rarely put up, to protect from rocking the boat. It’s time to set a new course.