This week with Brian 17 to 24 October 2024

Further Afield the week according to Brian Quinn

This Week with Brian

Your Local Area

Including alien intelligence, big history, editors at risk, compelling falsehoods, colossal lies, burning or burying, a combative newsletter, opaque lobbying, neck and neck, political divorces, King Kim joins up, a new gaffer, an offside-facing garden, watching the water, reducing the rubbish, getting mindful, panda diplomacy, an unbelievable truth, illuminating the fleet, being average, a lonely mission and a smooth operator.

Click on the appropriate buttons to the right to see the local news from your area (updated every Thursday evening).

If there’s anything you’d like to see covered for your area or anything that you’d like to add to something that we’ve covered already, drop me a line at brian@pennypost.org.uk

Further afield

I don’t understand AI. This may be because no-one else does either. On Monday’s BBC R4’s Start the Week, Yuval Noah Harari suggested that it should be referred to as “alien” rather than “artificial intelligence” as it was predicated on a different, and non-biological, approach to life from our own. To ask the question as to when AI would overtake humans in terms of intelligence was, he suggested, missing the point. The two are different things. The question was more whether we would adapt to it, or it to us.

[more below]

• Traction

Harari’s books, including Sapiens and Homo Deus, present a compelling, erudite and generally depressing view of human activity; which is not to say that they aren’t true (whatever that means these days). Others, including the author of one comment I’ve received since writing this, disagree, feeling that he is spreading a dangerous and misleading creed of transhumanism which denies the role of morality, and by implication religion, and is which will incline society to tyranny. 

Agree with them or not, his views are part of the trend of “big history” which looks at wide patterns across the whole of human existence and far before that. This seeks to place us and our influence in a very general drift which avoids specific discussions of wars and empires, but which puts humans in general at the centre of the drift from hunter-gatherers to the rather different world we inhabit today.

AI, he and the other guests on the programme agreed, is here to stay. At this late stage in my life, I’m constantly haunted by whether I am in fact redundant. It appears perhaps not. One of the points made in the R4 programme was that the creation of news is still largely a human activity. What increasingly is not is the way that this is promoted. Stories that involve conflict, disaster or destruction are more likely to gain traction. Although various versions of the truth – and there is never only one version – might be written, the one that commands the greatest engagement will be the one most promoted.

The point here, which seems fundamental, is that AI is already effectively editing the content we receive on many platforms, not because it’s writing them – it doesn’t need to – but because it’s selecting the ones that get the most attention. This editorial role is more insidious than an authorial one. It’s also one that most of us have connived in for a decade or more by allowing our personal data to be mashed up and so create a compelling view of what we want the world to be like based on preferences we’ve expressed.

Facebook, X and all the rest of them are running businesses, not public services. Their views of the world are not necessarily those of their owners, but are increasingly those of the algorithms that determine what we want to see. Because these are clever, and because we in general want to have our opinions confirmed, this relationship has superficially much to recommend it. The view we have of the world thus seems right to us, largely because our own preferences have already been taken into account in order to show us what we ask to see.

It therefore seems it’s not the role of the writer which is at risk, but that of the editor. Conventionally, an editor would commission articles or select for prominence in any publication or website from a fairly small number of pieces. Now, anything you post on social media is effectively owned by the platform. The job of prioritising these to get the maximum result has at this scale always been beyond human capacity. AI, h0wever, is incapable of getting bored, tired or overwhelmed by an ever-growing in-tray.

Last year, The Conversation reported that Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, “is reportedly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to replace certain editorial roles.” The article argues that AI is currently “incapable of adequately fulfilling editorial roles because they’re highly unreliable when it comes to ensuring the factual accuracy and impartiality of information.” This comment on its own perhaps tells us all we need to know about the algorithm – and AI-run social-media networks.

What AI is good at, however (as well as doing a number of very beneficial tasks), is producing false information that has a ring of truth to it. The author goes on to cite several examples, including of a New York lawyer who submitted a brief in court that contained half a dozen judicial decisions that ChatGPT had made up. In other words, if you read something that doesn’t seem to be true, then it might be; but if you read something that makes sense then it might be rubbish. After re-reading this last sentence, excuse me for a moment while I go and put my head in a bucket of cold water…

• Recycling

West Berkshire Council (WBC) is currently running a consultation on its waste strategy. This has prompted a number of questions from us to the Council, many of which have been answered, which I consider in Across the area, below. This concerns what will be recycled, how often it will be collected, how rates can be increased and other matters on which WBC needs to decide before framing a policy. All of this is predicated on a basic assumption about the wisdom or desirability of recycling at all.

In this article earlier this year, I looked at the claim that we have been living for decades under a colossal lie created by various industry groups which has convinced us that plastic recycling would at some point be possible even though this was known to be untrue. Orwell had something similar to say about this in Animal Farm when the pigs constantly promised that the work of building the windmill would produce almost limitless benefits.

As a result, society has become addicted to the stuff to an extent that it’s almost impossible to do without. As I’m not a chemist or a physicist, I can’t say if, were this fact more widely known back in the day, we’d have gone down a different and more sustainable track. What is certain is that we now produce about 10 times more of the stuff than we did in 1976.

We are where we are. Which is at a point where both public pressure and the sheer volume of plastic demands that we do something about it, despite the fact that there still seems to be no safe way of disposing of it. Questions are regularly asked about exactly what happens to all the waste many of us carefully sort. Not all the answers are encouraging.

One might feel that the only benefit of this fortnightly sifting is to demonstrate to us how much plastic we consume. Mind you, the feeling doesn’t last beyond the point where it’s collected or taken to the mini recycling centre, supermarket or wherever. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s the stuff that goes in the black bin that’s the worry. Not all of this is plastic, of course, but I suspect that a lot is. For councils, there are two main choices: burn it or bury it. Using landfill is now discouraged by Whitehall with incineration (creating power, some of which is used to make more plastic) now preferred. In 2022-23, about 49% was burned and about 7% buried, with the other 44% being recycled (in West Berkshire, the respective proportions are 43%, 4% and 53%). There were two incinerators in the UK in 1976; now there are over 50.

The problem seems to be, as this BBC article suggests, that incineration is just as bad for the environment as burning coal. It adds that “incinerators were described by the waste disposal industry as a green alternative to landfill“,  another piece of greenwashing on a colossal scale. Moreover, the situation may actually be worse, in that the government believes the assumption is still that the same proportions of food waste (which produces less harmful emission) and plastic are burned as in 2017, whereas now the former is more often recycled in other ways. If there’s any other method of dealing with plastic then I’ve not heard of it.

All in all, we seem to be caught in a massive trap. We can’t do without plastic but, despite fulsome promises over many decades, we have no safe way of dealing with it. Burying it and burning it both cause huge problems that are not immediately visible. Recycling seems also to be fraught with unintended consequences and downright lies.

And yet, we are being encouraged to recycle, as if this will solve the problem. The better we get at this, however, the easier it is for us to believe that we can safely consume more, and the less industry is motivated to find another solution.

Councils like West Berkshire are as much trapped in this as anyone else. They have to encourage recycling and have government targets to follow, and strategies that they’re obliged to adopt. In fairness to WBC, the point is made in the consultation that creating less waste and re-purposing what we have left over are both better than recycling.  

This consultation, and other similar ones elsewhere, skip over this issue because it’s beyond its power to influence. In fact, the way things are, it seems beyond anyone’s power. As discussed above, much of the information we now consume is created artificially. Much the same could be said about the materials used to make the devices on which we read them. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure which is the more dangerous.

• A water bill

A typically combative newsletter from Richard Murphy’s Funding the Future blog has just landed in the in-box. One of the articles was entitled “The madness of Kier Starmer”; however, the one that caught my eye was “Clive Lewis’ Private Members’ Bill to give us real choice over the future of our water”. Many PP readers in the Lambourn and Pang valleys in particular might be interested in any such developments. Mind you, solutions for this crisis (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) have been promised before. Will this be any different?

This is, Richard Murphy points out, a private members’ bill and has won its time in the sun by finishing fourth in the private members’ bills ballot, which means that “the bill is guaranteed debate time in parliament. His bill will have its second reading early in 2025.”

Such bills can only be tabled if they don’t propose a significant amount of government expenditure. This one doesn’t, but it does commit our leaders to set up an inquiry into the future of the management of the industry, or resource, or whatever exactly it is. Many will feel this is long overdue.

The article cites two paragraphs from Clive Lewis explaining the background to and intention of the bill, which are worth quoting in full:

“This bill establishes a blueprint for democratic practice: for creating an open conversation about the state of our water and its future management – particularly in respect of the deep climate adaptation required – drawing on all expertise and ideas available to us, and which leaves no rock unturned in examining the root causes of the current failure so mistakes are not repeated. This bill does not presume a particular end point, and aims to push the public debate beyond simplistic and unhelpful narratives of privatisation vs nationalisation.

“This bill puts the conversation about the future management of water where it should be – in the hands of parliament and the public. This is a conversation that must take place in broad daylight, not behind the closed doors of boardrooms, or through opaque industry lobbying. Water belongs to all of us, so how it is managed is a question of economic democracy. This should not be difficult for any government to grasp.”

 • And finally…

• The US election seems set, once again, to be a close affair with the two candidates almost neck and neck in the small number of states where the contest really matters (most of the others being more or less shoo-ins for one party or the other). If Trump loses again, the world is, with a mixture of horror and fascination, bracing itself for another round of legal tantrums. If he wins, his opponents can at least comfort themselves with the fact that he won’t be able to run again.

• Our condolences to the family and friends of former SNP Leader Alex Salmond, who died unexpectedly in Macedonia last week. Politically, it brings an end to the tetchy Salmond and Sturgeon fish-pie rivalry that has largely dominated politics north of the border for the last few years. It also removes a dynamic and effective operator from the independence movement, so further reducing the chances of a vote happening any time soon.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think this would be a colossal distraction from vastly more important problems. As Brexit has shown, the problems of a political divorce can take years to resolve. Scotland and England are more tightly wedded together than the UK and the EU ever were. Any attempt to separate them would benefit no-one except consultants and lawyers – and, let’s face it, they don’t need any more work than they’re getting already.

North Korea is a country that continues to fascinate, appal and confuse in roughly equal measure. King Kim III has demonstrated a Trumpian ability to discombobulate everyone at a moment’s notice. His latest plan, according to Ukrainian intelligence, is to supply 3,000 troops for Putin’s current great patriotic war. If true, this suggests that the Russian Big Man is not finding it easy to recruit enough troops; mercenaries, conscription and prisoners having previously been tried, each of which caused problems. One thing’s for sure, these soldiers would be well used to taking orders.

• A German managing the England men’s football team? A few eyebrows have been raised by the appointment of Thomas Tuchel to what is perhaps the country’s most difficult job, the office of Home Secretary aside. Mind you, the Lionesses appointed a Dutch manager and look what happened. I only know the man as a sometimes ice-cold and sometimes hyper-emotional gaffer at Chelsea, not the most normal place to work (both managers who won the club the Champions League, including Tuchel, were unceremoniously sacked within months). This seemed like a job for our Hamburg correspondent, whose thoughts on the matter you can read here.

• Every profession has its jargon, but most of the time it’s restricted to the users. Publishers and designers, for instance, use terms like “running heads”, “distributor” and “kerning” all the time, but this doesn’t normally bump up against clients. In some industries, however, jargon does. Amongst those that constantly irritate me are garages’ obsession with “offside” and “nearside” to describe the side of the car, when left and right (or is it right and left?) are far better. I’ll never be able to remember which is which, like port and starboard.

The last time I queried this usage while having a tyre fixed, I was told that “it all depends which way you’re looking at the car.” I held up a hand. “That’s my left hand,” I replied, “regardless of where you’re standing.” I was told that it was different for cars, but I couldn’t see why. Isn’t the side of a car an absolute rather than a perceptual matter? Not even the craziest estate agent would describe a house as “benefiting from an offside-facing garden”. Or maybe they would…

Across the area

• Water scrutiny

West Berkshire Council’s Scrutiny Commission meeting on 17 October has a distinctly watery theme. The three main agenda items are summarised as follows:

  • To present the investigation into the flooding across West Berkshire during the early part of 2024 in accordance with section 19 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010.
  • To provide details of the impact of the flooding over the period January to June 2024, the lessons identified following the debrief process, and an outline programme of activities in relation to these recommendations in readiness for winter 2024/2025.
  • To understand how Thames Water is upgrading its water supply and foul water networks to support planned development and prevent pollution incidents in West Berkshire, and how the Environment Agency is holding Thames Water to account.

Of the three, the last (which looks forward) is likely to be both more complex and more speculative than the first two (which look backwards). We’ll examine what was discussed next week.

• Waste management

West Berkshire Council has recently launched a consultation on its waste strategy, prompted by the expiry of the old strategy and new government legislation. You can click here for more information and to take part in the consultation, which closes on Sunday 6 November.

As we mentioned last week, this is an important consultation because it will inform decisions about the one aspect of WBC’s work with which every resident comes into weekly contact. As mentioned above, it’s also a symptom of a far larger international paradox which is beyond the power of WBC to solve.

Following a discussion with a senior representative from WBC recently, I offered a few thoughts in last week’s column. Since then I’ve posed some more questions and have had answers to most of them. However, an answer tends to produce two more questions (which the officers haven’t had time to respond to) so I’ll restrict my comments here to matters that have had a definite response. Hopefully, this will be of use to anyone who’s yet to complete the consultation (which I urge you to do).

Three-weekly black-bin collections

This is one of the more eye-catching options and is inspired by the reasonable idea (though it isn’t expressed quite so directly) that if you want to reduce demand for a service then you reduce its frequency. The point here is that WBC feels that more items currently in the black bin, particularly food, could be recycled.

The example of Bracknell was offered. Further enquiries have revealed that the district’s recycling rate increased from about 43% to about 56% in the year after three-weekly collections were introduced in 2021, though have since fallen back slightly to 54.5% in 2022-23.

Other counties have three-weekly black-bin collections. There are not a huge number of these in England, but it is apparently “standard practice” in Wales (which has one of the best recycling rates in the world). Councils that do this include the afore-mentioned Bracknell, East Devon, Somerset, Bury and Warwick. I’m not aware of any breakdown in society in those places as a result.

General recycling performance

West Berkshire is currently in a respectable 68th spot in national recycling rates and WBC “hopes to jump up when the 23/24 data is released by DEFRA (normally around Christmas). We believe in continuous improvement and regularly review the services provided in other council areas to see what we can do better. Our recent introduction of kerbside batteries and coffee pods collections are examples of this.”

Lack of space

I asked what message WBC had for a family living in a cramped space where all the waste needs to be kept indoors until it’s collected, and which lacks the time or the space to perform all the recycling separation that’s increasingly being asked of it?

“Residents in communal dwellings share larger bins outside their property and collections from these properties are done more frequently than for kerbside properties. We understand that for a few households, storage space for bins may be a challenge. Our message to such families is to do what they can within their available space. Every bit helps, and we encourage them to make the best possible use of our kerbside collection services, as well as the mini recycling centres and larger household waste recycling centres in their area.

“We have information on the Council’s website that can help householders to reduce their waste generation.”

Recycling soft plastics

I suggested that allegations have been made (see here and also here) that soft plastic left at supermarkets etc may not be being being dealt with responsibly. Does WBC have any influence over this at all, or any facts it can share? If WBC is going to collect soft plastic in the future, can residents be sure that this will be dealt with properly?

Under the UK government’s current Simpler Recycling proposals, we will have to collect soft plastics by March 2027. We will work with our contractor to ensure the Council can comply with emerging government requirements in a timely manner.”

Participation

WBC said that the last participation survey (forgot to ask when this was) suggested that “78% of households take part in at least one of our kerbside recycling services. This shows that the majority of residents are good recyclers. We hope to continue working with the remaining householders and encourage them to participate in available recycling options.”

• Getting mindful

West Berkshire Council and Greenham Trust have, a statement from the Council says, “once again collaborated to launch a new fund to help support voluntary and community sector organisations working to enhance mental health and wellbeing across West Berkshire.

“A total of £90,000 has been ring-fenced for the ‘Let’s Get Mindful’ (LGM) funding scheme and will be allocated to projects on a rolling basis as applications are approved. The LGM fund is to enable not-for-profit groups to implement meaningful and impactful projects that support people with mental health challenges. The fund also ensures that organisations have access to financial resources to expand their work, offer additional support, purchase necessary equipment, or launch new initiatives.”

News from your local councils

Most of the councils in the area we cover are single-tier with one municipal authority. The arrangements in Oxfordshire are different, with a County Council which is sub-divided into six district councils, of which the Vale of White Horse is one. In these two-tier authorities, the county and district have different responsibilities. In all cases, parish and town councils provide the first and most immediately accessible tier of local government.

West Berkshire Council

Click here to see the latest Residents’ News Bulletin from West Berkshire Council.

Click here for details of all current consultations being run by West Berkshire Council.

Click here to sign up to all or any of the wide range of newsletters produced by West Berkshire Council.

Click here for the latest news from West Berkshire Council.

Vale of White Horse Council

Click here for details of all current consultations being run by the Vale Council.

Click here for latest news from the Vale Council.

Click here for the South and Vale Business Support Newsletter archive (newsletters are generally produced each week).

Click here to sign up to any of the newsletters produced by the Vale’s parent authority, Oxfordshire County Council.

Wiltshire Council

Click here for details of all current consultations being run by Wiltshire Council.

Click here for the latest news from Wiltshire Council.

Swindon Council

Click here for details of all current consultations being run by Swindon Council.

Click here for the latest news from Swindon Council.

Parish and town councils

• Please see the News from your local council section in the respective weekly news columns (these also contain a wide range of other news stories and information on activities, events and local appeals and campaigns): Hungerford areaLambourn Valley; Marlborough area; Newbury area; Thatcham area; Compton and Downlands; Burghfield area; Wantage area

• Other news

• West Berkshire Council is inviting residents to nominate individuals and groups for its Community Champion Awards 2024, nominations for which close on Monday 11 November. Read more here.

• West Berkshire Council wants to ensure that people who are eligible for pension credit and winter fuel allowance know how to claim their entitlement: see more here.

• West Berkshire council has refreshed its customer charter which sets out how, when using council services, it will interact with you and value your opinion to ensure it “delivers great customer service, value for money and puts you at the heart of everything we do”.

• West Berkshire Council has introduced kerbside collections for household batteries: more details here.

Click here for more on West Berkshire’s Annual Public Health report for 2024.

The animals of the week are a couple of pandas. I’ve always thought they were crazy, stupid creatures: with the digestive system of a carnivore but a diet almost exclusively of bamboo leaves and shoots, is it any surprise that they’re endangered? None the less, they have for years been the pin-up beasts for a number of conservation charities and the arrival of a panda at a new zoo, or the birth of a baby, is greeted with the same fascination normally reserved for the doings of A-list celebrities. Here’s a clip of a couple of them finding their way around the zoo in Washington DC as a result of some “panda diplomacy” which had resulted in their being returned from China to the USA.

• A number of good causes have received valuable support recently: see the various news area sections (links above) for further details. 

The quiz, the sketch and the song

• And so, to the song of the week. I don’t know what song might better capture the 1980’s idea of smooth pop better than Smooth Operator by Sade. Brings the age right back…

• Which brings us to the Comedy Moment of the Week. I know I’ve done this before but the description of the Illumination of the Fleet at Spithead in 1937 by Lt-Commander Woodrooffe is a perfect example of how badly wrong things can go when someone who is very drunk is given sole charge of a live broadcast.

• And we have a new section which I shall term Unbelievable Fact of the Week. This has been gleaned from Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Most Interesting Book in the World, described as “a miscellany of things too strange to be true, yet somehow are.” To kick this off, I learn on page 10 that 20% of British teenagers think Winston Churchill is a fictional character.

• And so finally to the Quiz Question of the Week. This week’s question is: The Europa Clipper spacecraft has recently left on a cold and lonely mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons 1.8 billion miles away. When will it get there? Last week’s question was: What is the average age of a person in the UK? The answer is 40 years and eight months: so, if you were born in January 1984 then you’re normal; otherwise, you’re not. Globally, the average age is 30 years and six months, making March 1994 the benchmark. This proves, if nothing else, that the UK has an ageing population (which we knew).

For weekly news sections for Hungerford areaLambourn Valley; Marlborough area; Newbury area; Thatcham area; Compton and Downlands; Burghfield area; Wantage area  please click on the appropriate link.

Brian Quinn
Author: Brian Quinn

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Covering: Newbury, Thatcham, Hungerford, Marlborough, Wantage, Lambourn, Compton, Swindon & Theale