Morts Musings

It was all over the news yesterday; President Obama has said he will attend the Copenhagen Climate Change summit next month, and the announcement has, not surprisingly, been hailed as a positive move by the media in general.

As always though the devil is well and truly in the details. We certainly need the US, along with China, to sign up to any deal that is reached for it to actually have any meaning; without the participation of the world’s two most polluting nations any climate change agreement that is reached is just so much hot air, as we saw with Kyoto.
As of yet China’s president, Hu Jintao, hasn’t made any committment one way or the other as to whether he’ll attend Copenhagen, so even with Obama’s attendance at this stage there are no guarentees that anything substantive or meaningful will come out of Copenhagen. Still, at least one of the big two polluters appears to be prepared to start taking action, undoubtedly a step forward in the battle to mitigate the impact of climate change before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, although Obama seems genuinely committed to taking action on the issue, how much he’ll be able to achieve is another question entirely. Generally Americans are far less concerned about the threat of climate change than he is. Currently the US has a Climate Bill in front of Congress, which aims for a 20% reduction in US CO₂ emissions by 2020. However it’s taking 2005 as it’s base level, whereas Europe and many other countrys are setting their reduction targets based on 1990 emisson levels. Even then it’s looking like Obama’s going to have to reduce his preposed target from 20% in order to get the necessary support to pass the bill through Congress; hence why he’ll only be pledging a 17% cut, by 2020, when he attends Copenhagen.
It also has to be noted that currently he’s only planning to attend the summit for one day, before heading off to Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize, and won’t be returning to Copenhagen for the crucial final days of the summit, when any agreement will be hammered out.

Overall it has to be seen as a positive step, that a US President is finally engaging in the fight to tackle the effects of Climate Change, but it also has to be remembered that he ultimately serves his electorate, and so, even if Obama is on-board with the struggle to reduce the effects of climate change it’s quite clear that his hands will, to an extent, be tied until he’s able to convince more of the US population that climate change is everybody’s problem!

Apparently, the iconic British brand, M&S, has opened a branch in Marbella. Presumably the aim is to be able to provide British ex-pats, & tourists, with all their familiar home comforts, & on the face of it that might not be such a bad basis for opening a store. After all Brits make up about a quarter of all foreign tourists to visit Spain.

However, I really have to wonder about the timing of the move. Ok, it looks like the economic slump may be coming to an end but even so it seems to me like quite a risky move. In the fairness M&S have said that opening the store is a “toe in the water”, to test the Spanish market, but is now really the time for such experiments? On one hand, the recent low prices in the Spanish property market have to be a good reason to make such a move now, you would think it’s certainly got to decrease the start up costs, and if Spanish property does start regaining its value, as some are suggesting is the case, then picking a store up now may even be a shrewd investment!
Still, if M&S’s target audience for the new store is Brits abroad, (it seems like a fair guess) then the timing starts to look a little more questionable to me. Britain’s slow recovery from recession means that many Brits are still going to be watching the pennies and avoiding foreign holidays, a factor likely to be exacerbated by the current poor Pound:Euro exchange rate, & reflected by the 15% drop in British visitors which Spain has experienced over the past year. What makes the move stranger is that this isn’t the first time that M&S have opened stores in Spain, the previous venture ended in the sale of the nine stores when they failed to make a profit. Still, the thinkers at M&S have no doubt considered all of this, and are presumably willing to accept a loss in the short term.

I suppose a big question is whether they’ll extend their recent move to stock non-M&S branded goods to the new store? Are we to be treated to M&S Marbella car hire? lol

I saw this piece in the Telegraph and thought it was such an innovative idea that it deserved a mention. It’s clear as the internet, and general tech, revolution continues that mobile phones are set to play an increasingly important part in peoples lives. The net is alive with talk about increased mobile access, and it seems these days that most big companies & organisations either have a mobile site or are furiously trying to get one up and running, lest they loose out to more forward thinking competitors.

''Press 2 if the dog ate your homework...'' Yes, now mobile phones can even provide pay-as-you-go English lessons!

However the move to offer English lessons, via mobile phone, to a whole nation has to get cudos for its originality & ambition, and it’s just what the Bangladeshi organisation BBC Janala aims to do. By getting the Bangladeshi Govt on board, as well as the country’s six major mobile networks, BBC Janala has been able to offer hundreds of 3 minute English lessons for only 4p each; Very cheap you might think, and probably not too expensive even by Bangladeshi standards, although one must bear in mind that the average Bangladeshi has to live on less than £2 a day.

The initiative is particularly significant because, while English remains a major international language of business, over the last few decades the quality of English teaching in the country has dropped noticably, which, along with the school systems high drop out rate, has lead to lower English fluency overall.
It would certainly appear that the service is being well received so far; it’s about two weeks since it launched and already it’s had over half a million calls, as well as ~1000 people signing up to the web site each day! So far things seem to be running smoothly, the only potential problem with the scheme that I can think of is people with pay as you go phones running out of credit half way through a lesson!

Coming as it does during a period when many of the world’s major economies are still crawling their ways out of recession there have been question marks about how successful the 2009 Dubai Airshow would be in terms of generating sales for it’s exhibitors.

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Govt reject the advice of experts when they fail to come to the conclusion’s which the Govt would like them to, but to me the sacking of Dr Nutt, chair of the Govt’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, last weekend, when he had the termerity to give an expert opinion which contradicts the Govts uninformed, but official, line, sums up the hubris & utter arrogance which have been hallmarks of both the Brown and Blair govts.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.