Dead whale-watching in Iceland

People now prefer to watch whales instead of eating them. But I ate whalemeat a long time ago, and the only whales I have ever seen were dead ones being hacked to pieces in Iceland. This all happened in 1966, when I spent a summer in Reykjavik as a trainee placed by AIESEC - an international organisation which arranges what would now be called ‘internships’ for economics students.

I flew out of Birmingham Airport (then called ‘Elmdon Airport’) on the day of the World Cup Final. The passengers crowded round a transistor radio in the departure lounge to hear the match. I spent the first week staying with an Icelandic family, where I ate quite a lot of fish. After that, I moved to lodgings with some other AISEC trainees in a house with a young landlady. I was based in a firm called ‘Kassagerdin’, which made boxes (mainly for fish) as well as printing all sorts of materials. I began working in the office, working on a complex accounting machine. But later, I had a far  better time on the workshop floor as a member of a three-man team operating a large machine which cut and printed cardboard boxes. The two other workers were the teenage son of the firm’s owner and a teacher working over the summer school break.

The AISEC committee in Iceland did an excellent job, and the group of trainees went on various trips to see the vast volcanic landscape of Thingvellir, the Arbaer Folk Museum, the waterfall Gullfoss, the Great Geysir, and Hveragerdi (where we saw bananas grown in greenhouses heated by hot thermal springs). I took a few days off on holiday to hitch-hike around the coast to Akureyri and from there to the Lake Myvatn. I was given lifts by many friendly and interesting Icelandic people. These included the driver of an articulated oil tanker. At one point on the journey, he turned off the road, and drove the truck along a track through the twisted rocks of a lava field until we came to a half-built bungalow. He unloaded some long planks he had stored along the side of the trailer, placed them next to the bungalow, and then returned to the main road. He was building this house himself, he explained, for his retirement. Later that day, I checked into a hotel in the village of Blonduos. I slept in the hotel annexe, built on the edge of a beach of black sand facing the Arctic Ocean.

Before all this, however, I paused in my journey at Hvalfjordur, just North of Reykjavik. In 1966, the road would around the head of the fjord - the location of a whaling station. From my memory, this comprised a jetty, a slipway and a large shed. The jetty had originally been built by the US Navy, and several Icelandic spectators pointed to the ‘secret American submarine base’ around the coast. Eventually, a small whaling boat approached the jetty with (I think) two whale carcasses slung on each side. The first carcass was winched to the slipway, and as it rose on the slope a mass of blood swelled out into the sea. Some young men, stripped to waist, climbed on the body of the whale and began hacking it to pieces with large long cleavers. In a short time, there was just bones, meat and entrails. There was also the smell - a smell so strong I remember it now almost 50 years later.

Also 50 years later, the Hvalur Whaling Company still operates in the same location, still catching fin whales and bringing them to a whale-abattoir in a fjord named after whales.

Five things they didn’t tell you about the 2015 British General Election

1. This is the second-most unpopular elected government since the beginning of universal suffrage. The Conservative Party won 331 seats in the House of Commons (51% of the 650 seats in the House) from only 36.8% of the vote. This is the second-lowest winning percentage since universal suffrage began at the General Election of 1929. Only Labour's 'victory' in 2005 with just over 35% of the vote is comparable. The other winner in 2015 from our grossly undemocratic election system was the SNP. This has 56 seats from only 4.7% of the vote. Compare that with UKIP, which won one seat from 12.6% of voters.

2. Scotland will have less influence in the UK than at any time since the Act of Union.
The claim by the SNP that they will give Scotland a voice at Westminster is a familiar combination of deceit and self-delusion. Scots have played an important part in all UK governments since the Act of Union. This rose to a peak in the most recent Labour Government, in which Scotsmen were, at various times, Prime Minister, Chancellor the Exchequer, Defence Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Secretary of State for Health. However, membership of a senior post in government, with few exceptions, requires membership of the House of Commons. Since the SNP has all but three of the Members of Parliament who represent Scotland, this will effectively eliminate the Scots from both Government and Opposition front benches. 

3. Rupert Murdoch will be rewarded. One of the fascinating features of the election campaign was the co-ordinated campaign by the Conservatives and the SNP to build up the SNP threat to the Labour Party. Each time David Cameron claimed that a minority Labour government would be controlled by the SNP, an SNP leader would state a new demand they would make of such a government. Both the Conservatives and the SNP received the enthusiastic support of, respectively, the English and Scottish editions of The Sun on the instructions of its American owner Rupert Murdoch. Both parties have invested a big efforts in wooing this evil old man, and he will expect a reward for his support. This will probably be approval for a takeover bid for Sky and the breakup of the BBC.

4. The Labour Party has popular policies but failed politically. The various policies announced by the Labour Party during the campaign (such as ending the tax-avoidance status of non-domiciles, controlling rents, restricting the use of zero-hours contracts and preventing further privatisation of the NHS) all proved to have majority support in the public opinion polls. But the Labour leadership failed to promote these policies over the lifetime of the preceding Parliament, and they therefore had limited impact at the election. Most important of all, the Labour Party failed to effectively challenge the claim that it had ‘bankrupted’ the UK economy by massively increasing the National Debt. The increase in this debt was a result of having to borrow money to avoid the bankruptcy of three of the world’s largest banks, as well as various building societies and smaller banks in 2008. None of the political parties had anticipated the recklessness of the management of so many financial institutions, and all would have acted in the same way as Gordon Brown’s Labour Government to protect the savings of British citizens. But the impression was given of panic and incompetence, rather like Black Wednesday in 1992, when the Conservative Government was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Labour failed to defend its actions in 2008, and has failed to do so since. This is a primary political failure, in the sense of being unable to make a case and persuade people to accept it.

5. In two years time, the Conservative Party will fall apart. A referendum will be held on membership of the European Union in 2017 after a supposed renegotiation of the terms of British membership. The Government has never stated what changes it aims to achieve, and any significant changes would in any case require the revision of the various inter-governmental treaties that determine the structure and functioning of the EU. Treaty-revision requires unanimous consent of all the countries in the EU, which is unlikely to be forthcoming since new treaties in some countries require formal constitutional change and/or a referendum . We can therefore assume that any renegotiation will be mainly cosmetic and unlikely to appease the majority of the Conservative Party which opposes membership of the Union. The following 2017 referendum campaign will in consequence involve rival sets of Conservative political leaders on opposite sides bitterly denouncing each other. This will be interesting to observe.

The horrors of planning No. 2: 'Housing Need'

You do not have to be exposed to the English planning system for long to realise that it exists primarily to designate acceptable sites for new housing. In my own area of South Worcestershire, the three district councils have prepared a draft local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ or ‘SWDP’), the bulk of which comprises long lists of potential housing sites in individual towns and villages, together with various justifications for their inclusion.

The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable. 

But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.

This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.

However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.

All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.

What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of  course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.

One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.

To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.

See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'

Coffee with cold milk in Telemark

I spent the Summer of 1967 on a traineeship with Norsk Hydro in Oslo. This was arranged with an international organisation called AIESEC, which at that time organised unpaid placements (they would now be called ‘internships’) with employers in different countries for students studying economics or commerce. My first AIESEC placement had been in the previous year with a small printing company in Reykjavik, where all the employees knew each other by sight. Norsk Hydro was a very different enterprise. It was the largest industrial enterprise in Norway, involved in mining and metal-processing, chemicals and fertilisers, and oil. I was based in its headquarters, and supervised by a kindly man called Mr Falkenberg. I stayed at first in the University student village, and later in a room in the Eastern suburbs. I visited the Viking ship museum, the Munch museum and the Holmenkollen ski jump. I swam in lakes and walked through the woods that surrounded Oslo. I also spent a lot of time strolling round the City centre, and was surprised to find that its citizens enjoyed eating in open-air cafes and drinking excellent coffee. Neither of these activities were common in England at that time.

Part of my traineeship involved a tour round the various industrial sites in Southern Norway that were operated by Norsk Hydro. Mr Falkenberg drove, and we stayed in hostels owned by the company. One of the places we visited was Rjukan in Telemark, located in a deep-sided valley. In the Second World War, Norsk Hydro had been taken over by the German company IG Farben, and had produced heavy water, important in the production of nuclear weapons. Norwegian commandos destroyed this facility in 1943.

After we left Rjukan, Mr Falkenberg steered the car along a heavily-potholed mountain road, which eventually led to a rather alpine-looking hotel. We stopped for coffee and a cake. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. After we left, Mr Falkenberg expressed his disgust with the hotel’s owners, who had been notorious collaborators with the German forces. The local authority took its revenge by refusing to repair the road leading to the hotel. What made matters even worse for Mr Falkenberg was the way the hotel served its coffee: “No cream with it”, he said, “not even warm milk - just cold milk”. Ever since then, I have associated coffee served with cold milk as fit only for Nazi collaborators.

Mr Putin takes off his shirt.

In the old days, before television and the Internet, dictators made themselves known to their subject populations by displaying posters and erecting statues. The most extreme example of this form of display was Rafael Trujillo, who ran the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Posters and statues of the dictator were mass-produced, while his name even appeared on car number-plates. The capital city, the highest mountain in the country and many streets and buildings were renamed after him. Even churches were required to have signs saying "Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra" (God in heaven, Trujillo on earth). Needless to say, Trujillo ruled by mass-murder and intimidation, and ensured that most of the wealth of the country was controlled by his family and cronies.

Nowadays, the main visual images of dictators are provided by television, the press and the Internet. But the visual image of the dictator remains a clue to what he intends to say about his country. Rafael Trujillo always appeared wearing the most expensive suits - intended to signify that his regime had brought greater prosperity to his country. Fidel Castro was usually seen in army fatigues, to indicate that his regime was a product of revolution and was still in a state of revolutionary struggle against the USA. Vladimir Putin is different: he is often shown stripped to the waist in various athletic pursuits. Stripping to the waist is of course not practicable for much of the year in Russia, and so there are alternative winter depictions of Mr Putin playing ice hockey, skiing or shooting a rifle in the snow. All these images are intended to display macho strength, and support his political programme of restoring Russian power after the national humiliation suffered with the collapse of the USSR.

In this respect, Vladimir Putin resembles Benito Mussolini who could be seen on newsreels stripping off his shirt to join with Italian peasants gathering the harvest. There was the same muscular male body with a surprising absence of chest-hair. Mussolini thereby (like Putin) sought to project an image of strength to a country in which there was a sense of weakness and humiliation. Macho politics went beyond visual display: for Mussolini, it meant authoritarian rule shading into gangsterism. As with Putin’s regime, political enemies were murdered, the resources of the state were sequestered among family and cronies, and there was a particular dislike of homosexuality. Gay men were depicted as the very antithesis of masculine strength - a sign of the weak, feminine, degenerate liberalism of the democratic states.

The problem with macho rulers is that taking off your shirt is sometimes not enough to demonstrate your strength - it is much more effective to invade a weak neighbour. For Mussolini, it was Ethiopia (which bordered Italian-controlled Eritrea) in 1936, followed by intervention in the Spanish Civil War in the same year, the invasion of Albania in 1939, allying with Germany against France in 1940, and then invading Greece in 1941. The outcomes of these wars was catastrophic, for the locals and ultimately for Italy. The Italians used mustard gas in Ethiopia and killed over a quarter of a million people. Entry into the Second World War in 1940 resulted in Italy being the scene of fighting for two years and over 450,000 Italians killed.

Putin has been more politically adept than Mussolini, seeking to build alliances with other authoritarian nationalist regimes and politicians such as Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France (which has received a ‘loan’ of 9 million euros from Russia). Putin’s authoritarian nationalism is also much-admired by the leadership of the UKIP in Britain.

He has also exploited the resentments of Russians living in countries outside Russia after the breakup of the USSR, as well as exploiting the various nationalist rivalries in neighbouring states. So far, this has included the invasion by Russian forces of two multi-ethnic parts of  Georgia in 2008 (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), the occupation and annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine in the same year. In each case, the disputed area was one with multiple ethnicities, often living side-by-side or in adjacent communities. Russian intervention has involved alliances with local nationalists and criminal gangs, supported by various groups of irregular military tourists. The outcomes have been the usual forced expulsions that are the product of nationalism, and the stripping of local resources. In Georgia, a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians were driven out of Abkhazia and a further 30,000 from South Ossetia. These areas remain some of the poorest places in Europe and have a grim future - totally dependent economically on sparse Russian handouts.

The outcome of the Russian war against Ukraine is difficult to foresee, as indeed is the future of Vladimir Putin himself. He must hope for a better end than Mussolini, who was last seen hanging upside-down from a lamppost in Milan - without his shirt. 

The ring-doughnut of unvisited places

In this country, my wife and I travel to two sorts of places. There are those we can get to and back easily in a day, and those sufficiently far away to require one or more overnight stays. The ones we can visit in a day form a sort of circle around our house in West Worcestershire. The limits of this circle to the North are Birmingham and Solihull, where we visit family. Any further North requires a trip up the grim M6 through the Black Country, and is therefore avoided. The limit to the East is Oxford, which we can reach by (a very slow) train. To the South, our limits for a day-trip are Gloucester and the pleasant market-town of Cirencester, while to the West we go over the Welsh border as far as Llandrindod Wells and Welshpool.

Places which require an overnight stay such as London or Devon are of course about a 100 or more miles away. But between the circle of day-trips and the wider area of overnight-stays is a ring-doughnut-shaped area that we never usually visit. These are places just too far to travel to and from with pleasure in a day, but too close to justify booking and paying for a hotel. In our case, this ring-doughnut of unvisited places includes many locations with much to offer - places like Wiltshire, the Thames Valley below Oxford, Derbyshire, and inland mid-Wales.

Anyway, my wife and I decided that the time has come to visit places within the ring-doughnut, and last weekend we headed for a two-night stay in Lacock, about 75 miles from our home. Lacock is a very picturesque village owned by the National Trust - so picturesque in fact that (together with Lacock Abbey) it has been used as a setting for about 50 films and television programmes. The day we arrived, there was shooting for Downton Abbey just along the street from our hotel. The square in front of the parish church was arranged to look like a country market-place in the 1920s, with cows, sheep and pigs, local extras in hats and long coats, and a vintage van. Most of the shooting seemed to involve standing around, with very brief intervals of action. I wonder how many minutes of television time resulted from the two days of filming.

Our inn in Lacock was the Sign of the Angel - a wooden-frame building said to date from the 1400s. There are low beams, huge fireplaces and creaky wooden stairs. The floors on the ground-floor had stone flags - those in the bedrooms on the first floor pitched in all directions. The inn too has been a filmset - for one of the Harry Potter stories. We ate excellent meals (and especially breakfasts) at the Sign of the Angel, and slept well in one of the inn’s five bedrooms. On the Saturday, we visited Lacock Abbey and the Fox-Talbot museum of photography (named after one of the main inventors of photography who lived in the Abbey). We also took a train to Bath.

We discovered that one of the joys of holidaying in the ring-doughnut of unvisited places is that we are in no hurry to drive there and back. So on the way, we stopped at Stow-in-the-Wold, saw Lechlade and visited Avebury - a village enclosed in a vast prehistoric stone circle and embankment. On the way back, we stopped at Newark Park. This is a much-expanded Elizabethan hunting lodge on the top of the Cotswold Edge, overlooking the wide Severn Valley. This is probably the only British stately home to be restored by a gay American ex-servicemen.

The horrors of planning No. 1: sustainable development

Before I became a parish councillor, I knew little about the world of town and country planning. In the last few years, I have struggled to make good this deficit - essential since the work of planners can protect what we value or, at worst, can result in ghastly edifices which assault the eye, the demolition of pleasant streets or the obliteration of precious countryside. I found that planning, like all professions, has its own language and assumptions. These are rarely questioned by practitioners and little understood by the rest of us. One such term is ‘sustainable development’. In the non-planning world, this has a reasonably clear meaning, inspired by the United Nations report of 1987 Our Common Future (often called the ‘Brundtland Report’). This defined ‘sustainable development’ to mean “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Sustainable development is the stated objective of the key planning document in England: the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This begins by quoting the definition in the Brundtland Report, while the forward by the then Minister of Planning states that “The purpose of planning is to help achieve sustainable development”. In addition, paragraph 14 states that:

“At the heart of the National Planning Policy Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan-making and decision-taking.”

The rest of the NPPF instructs local planning authorities (and planning inspectors in cases of appeals against refusal of planning permission) in how to implement ‘sustainable development’. However, in a remarkable verbal conjuring trick, it narrows the concept to the point of disappearance. So paragraph 14 continues by advising that:

“local planning authorities should positively seek opportunities to meet the development needs of their area; Local Plans should meet objectively assessed needs, with sufficient flexibility to adapt to rapid change, unless: any adverse impacts of doing so would significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits, when assessed against the policies in this Framework taken as a whole; or specific policies in this Framework indicate development should be restricted.”

So development (not even ‘sustainable development’ by this stage) will be approved unless there is significant and demonstrable reasons for not proceeding. By paragraph 47, any constraints on housing development are removed:

 “To boost significantly the supply of housing, local planning authorities should: use their evidence base to ensure that their Local Plan meets the full, objectively assessed needs for market and affordable housing in the housing market area, as far as is consistent with the policies set out in this Framework, including identifying key sites which are critical to the delivery of the housing strategy over the plan period; identify and update annually a supply of specific deliverable sites sufficient to provide five years worth of housing against their housing requirements with an additional buffer of 5%...”

A footnote defines the mysterious term ‘deliverable sites’ as ones that are:
    ”available now, offer a suitable location for development now, and be achievable with a realistic prospect that housing will be delivered on the site within five years and in particular that development of the site is viable”.

This commitment to what for practical purposes is unlimited development is bad news for rural villages that would prefer to remain villages. Paragraph 55 clarifies what ‘sustainable development’ means in this case:

 “To promote sustainable development in rural areas, housing should be located where it will enhance or maintain the vitality of rural communities. For example, where there are groups of smaller settlements, development in one village may support services in a village nearby. Local planning authorities should avoid new isolated homes in the countryside unless there are special circumstances such as: the essential need for a rural worker to live permanently at or near their place of work in the countryside; or where such development would represent the optimal viable use of a heritage asset or would be appropriate enabling development to secure the future of heritage assets; or where the development would re-use redundant or disused buildings and lead to an enhancement to the immediate setting; or the exceptional quality or innovative nature of the design of the dwelling.”

So a development is defined by the NPPF as ‘sustainable’ in a rural area if it is on the edge of a village, which will apparently ‘enhance the ‘vitality of rural communities’. I have heard councillors and planning officers using this very definition to propose that a large new housing estate is indeed ‘sustainable’ because it is on the edge of a reasonably-sized village.

I live in a rural parish with about 1400 residents. We are fortunate in having a primary school and high school, a shop and post office, a garage, some trading estates, a large sports centre and even a local radio station. So far, ‘sustainable development’ has meant building 51 houses on good farming land, with permission for another 14 on an old orchard. This process is being repeated in villages all over England, and the result will be to substantially reduce the farmland needed to feed current and future generations. The NPPF is therefore a thoroughly dishonest document, which adopts the fashionable terminology of ‘sustainability’ to justify what in reality is uncontrolled and destructive development.