• Insertion

Donald Trump is, of course, the arch inserter. His pre-inauguration comments have, as we looked at last week, included suggesting annexing several of his neighbours as well as promising to end the war in Ukraine, doing everything he can to close down the “Green New Scam” and vetoing tolerance for transgenderism. 

As the President of the USA he has considerable powers of insertion into any debate. Indeed if he announces a press conference to say that he’s had an idea about nothing in particular there’ll be journalists queueing round the block.

As regards our domestic politics, he hasn’t yet come up with anything that might directly affect us, though that’s possibly only because the list of potential new US states is something he’s working through alphabetically, Canada, Greenland and Panama therefore appearing earlier in his list than does Scotland.

Nigel Farage has claimed that Reform can win the next election and the opinion polls at present don’t make this a completely insane suggestion. With Labour going through an awful post-honeymoon hangover and the Conservatives still unable to agree what they really believe and haunted by the awful legacy that Johnson, Truss and Sunak left, this is quite an easy trick to pull off.

His brief flirtation with Musk seems to have soured, Tommy Robinson not being worth dying in a ditch for. Farage is, like Trump, adept at inserting his own blend of populism into discussions about more or less anything. With over four million votes and only five seats, he also has a good case about the the problems of our electoral system. It’s not necessary to agree with a party’s views to make this point.

Elon Musk is inserting himself into, indeed is starting, so many debates at present that it’s impossible to know where to begin with him. It isn’t necessary to know too much about a subject to get a lot of likes on his platform: owning it helps. I don’t think the thin-skinned tweeter needs any more publicity from me.

Kemi Badenoch cuts rather a sad figure at present. She doesn’t yet seem to have found her aim or her targets, constantly shooting at the wrong ones and often missing them. She’s also still the prisoner of her party’s reputation. As the leader of the opposition, and a UK citizen, she should be the one with the most insertion potential of the four I’ve picked out and yet she seems to have the least. It’s not yet clear what the point of her is.

• Inquiries

One of Musk’s biggest beefs against Starmer is about the grooming gangs, the tweeter-in-chief accusing the PM of being “complicit in the rape of Britain.” Whether or not there needs to be another public inquiry, as Badenoch and Farage have called for, is a moot point. What isn’t is that several recommendations of Alexis Jay’s inquiry into child sexual abuse have yet to be implemented. Alexis Jay herself has said that “the time has passed for more inquiries.” Meanwhile, the suffering of the victims goes on, doubtless re-awakened by every reminder of scandal in the press and every admission that so far only partial action has been taken.

Some feel that sufficient new evidence and information has come to light to merit further investigation. The problem with investigations is that they take a lot of time, cost a lot of money and (as the Jay report has show) even then don’t produce any definite improvements. Worse still, while they’re going on the government can argue that further measures are “inappropriate” lest they “prejudice the inquiry.”

Moreover, the fact that an inquiry has been set up deals with any accusation that the government isn’t serious about the issue. As the duration of public inquiries is often longer than the life of a parliament, it’s therefore possible to carry this imprimatur into an election, still with nothing decided.

There’s also the question of what kind of information these will reveal. A glance at a list of current and past UK public inquiries shows that the most common subjects are those of health (including Covid), policing and national security. These are matters where there are very specific issues that need to be established and, as importantly, where there is no clear existing legal remedy.

The Post Office Inquiry, the only one that I’ve followed in any detail, was sui generis and involved a corporate moral and legal failure by a state monopoly that became unavoidable. The Grenfell Tower one was similarly unique in that it was looking, on a more fatal but no less complex scale, of professional and municipal mismanagement.

There are very specific lessons that can be learned from these which a police inquiry (which may never have happened with the Post Office) might not have been expected to reveal.

Child abuse and grooming are, however, surely already covered by existing legislation, or ought to be. To be holding an inquiry on them at all is thus perhaps to be holding one into the Police, who should be dealing with this. Is the problem therefore not that we don’t have enough public inquiries but that we aren’t funding the police properly, a matter I looked at in last week’s column?

• Fires

The stories of wildfires in California continue to build every day about entire communities being destroyed. Trump, who seems to have no particular love for this liberal state, has been more concerned with playing the blame card. So far, this is an evil that our part of the world has not been subject to.

As some homes in Japan and elsewhere are built to withstand earthquakes, I was wondering what might be done to prevent fire damage. Clearly, both of these precautions only really apply to new-builds though there may well be retro-fits that can be done in the latter case: the kind of things that many wished had happened with Grenfell Tower.

Then I saw this clip on the BBC website about a couple whose home had survived because of the precautions they’d taken to protect it.

“Yeah, right” was my first reaction: great for those who can afford it when building a new home. How much would this add to the cost of a house, I asked myself as I typed the question into Google: 20% more?; 50%?

The first answer that came up surprised me and the experts amongst you can debate the matter. It appears from this (2018) article from Headwaters Economics that “wildfire-resistant construction cost 2% less” than typical building methods. Other opinions differ, OPB suggesting that two to thirteen percent could be added onto the build costs.

This investment makes more sense when set against the statement in the same article that homes that met wildfire codes were 40% less likely to be destroyed compared to older ones. This may well be something that insurance companies in California, which will have up to 10,000 properties to pay out on, will insist upon in future.

The last sentence sounds like a cynical remark but it isn’t intended as such. If a risk can be mitigated, it’s logical for the company covering the risk to encourage actions that will reduce it and, in the process, increase the policy-holder’s continual enjoyment of their asset. Every insurance claim is an admission that someone has at some point screwed up and few claimants’ experiences in settling the claim are either short or pleasant.

Aside from the old joke that an insurance company is an organisation that’s happy to rent you an umbrella as long as it can have it back when it starts raining, there’s also the story – I think from That’s Life back in the day – of the exchange between a claimant and their insurer about a house fire.

I’m sorry, the letter read, but we can’t settle this claim as the policy stated that you would take all steps to ensure that the premises would not suffer a fire. But I did, the claimant said. “Clearly not,” the insurers retorted, “as you had a fire.” Against this kind of logic the gods themselves battle in vain.

• Floods

My parents used to live in southern France and I remember seeing a forest fire on the other side of the valley which, at the age of eight, scared me half out of my young mind. The fact that many of these fires were allegedly started by shepherds to create better grazing for their flocks the following year somehow made the whole thing a bit easier to accept. Human perfidy is as old as the hills. The implacable ferocity of nature is a rather newer problem and one to which, better building standards aside, we have no answer to.

In this part of the world, particularly this part of the country, water is more of a problem than fire. There’s not much you can do if your house is built in the wrong place or right against a river that’s prone to flood.

As I write, I wonder how much the current housing crisis has been exacerbated by the number of homes that no one can borrow money on because the mortgage companies believe, rightly or wrongly, that it’s a flooding risk. Our own house on the River Lambourn, though it was built with this exact risk in mind, is certainly expensive to insure despite never having flooded due to extra foundations.

Many feel that one of the huge problems with current government housing plans is that insufficient attention has been paid to drainage issues. This is a historical problem. Just considering our own area of West Berkshire, virtually every major settlement is on or near a river.  

Indeed, it’s hard to think of any settlement of any size that isn’t on a river or the coast. To our ancestors, these were highways, aqueducts and sources of food. Current building policies tend towards encouraging development in areas adjacent to where substantial housing already exists.

In some cases, such as where there’s already adequate infrastructure, this makes sense. In others, such as where the flooding risk is likely to be increased, it doesn’t. Current housing targets, though necessary to address the shortage, are now steeper than ever.

One wonders how many homes that are built under the government’s 300,000 per year, however many actually are, will be inhabitable or saleable in twenty years’ time.

• And finally…

• I never knew that animals were political, but it seems that beavers are. The Guardian tells us that “Downing Street has blocked plans to release wild beavers in England because officials view it as a ‘Tory legacy’.” What an extraordinary idea. The animals are either good or bad for our riparian environment – good is my opinion – but to view them as a political issue is just baffling. Has the science changed by 180º because of a general election? For more on this, see the Marlborough Area Weekly News column.

• There was a headline on the BBC website today which appeared to read “Al Brad Pitt dupes woman out of €830,000 .” I assumed at first that Al was some neer-do-well cousin of Brad, trading off his relative’s celebrity. Then I realised it was an AI scam. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of those.

• Prince William was recently clocked in a bar with some Aston Villa fans, discussing the team that they all support. At least he’s been consistent about this: the hapless David Cameron had a brain fade back in 2015 (OK, so not breaking news) when he appeared to get the Villa mixed up with West Ham. Easy mistake if you’re just looking at the claret (as in the Bullingdon Club) and blue (as in the Conservative party) that both teams have as their home strip. Sorry to keep on giving smoothie Dave a hard time but I’m still pissed off about Brexit…

Across the area

• Reorganisations

Just about every council in the country is in a state of heightened anxiety, feverish speculation or excited opportunism at the possible implications of the government’s proposed reorganisations. This will also in some areas include mayoral authorities being set up, the idea seemingly being that these elected supremos will be able to make swift and certain decisions on matters which, the government hopes, will be more to its liking than those made under the existing structures.

Reorganisation is likely to come in every corner of the country, the main drift being to create more unitary (single-tier) authorities with the proviso that the new ones have a population of at least 500,000. In the case of Oxfordshire, this is likely to mean that the existing districts like the Vale of White Horse will be too small to make the cut on their own so will need to join forces with others. One could also go the other way and have the whole county as one authority, as Wiltshire is.

This would leave the problem of the city of Oxford which has long ruled itself but which wouldn’t be large enough either. Given its history and influence, the city might regard itself as a special case. Angela Rayner, who almost uniquely among senior politicians didn’t attend the university there, may not agree.

Similar issues are being looked at up and down the country: who will merge with whom; which structure is best suited to this area; what mayoral authority is likely to be created. There will also be political considerations, with parties that traditionally win in certain areas keen not to have their chances of doing so diminished in future. Council leaders will also be looking at their legacies: if, they might reflect, I am to be the last chief of this authority before it turns into something else, how shall I be remembered?

Many authorities face a number of options. If West Berkshire is forced to super-size itself, where might it turn? History would suggest re-creating the old Berkshire County Council: in some ways logical as the six Berkshire unitaries already share some services.

West Berkshire residents may, however, feel they have more in common with the rural districts of the Vale and South Oxfordshire to the north than they do with Reading, Maidenhead and Slough to the east.

Another option is to team up with Swindon. This might, or might not, help with matters such as housing allocations as Swindon and its environs may be able to absorb more homes than West Berkshire can.

All this horse-trading, wheeling, dealing and discussion is taking place against the continued backdrop of not only work needing to continue as usual but also the increasingly parlous state of local-government finances in general. Business as usual may be hard: how can one create a local plan or a five-year strategy if you don’t know if your authority will be around in even a few years’ time?

As for the finances, many districts may be worrying that money they’ve set aside for their own projects will be scooped up to help plug the yearning defects in social-care and SEN costs (which districts in two-tier councils aren’t responsible for).

Indeed, the whole feverish game of mergers and acquisitions is taking place in the bizarre circumstances of most of the participants being virtually bankrupt. I don’t know whether this is the intention, but as a method of introducing a fresh level of uncertainty into an already uncertain situation the re-organisation and devolution proposals could hardly be bettered.

Then there are the planned mayoral authorities. Could there be, for instance, one for the Thames Valley covering perhaps Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Swindon? Residents with long memories will recall Robert Maxwell’s ill-fated plans to create a new football team, Thames Valley Royals, by merging Oxford United and Reading.

That didn’t fly: but perhaps a new mayoral authority would accomplish a unification in an administrative rather than a sporting way. For this (and other reasons), it’s just as well Maxwell is no longer with us, as he’d doubtless want to run as mayor. In these strange times, he’d probably win.

• The fire precept

Royal Berkshire Fire Authority (RBFA) is consulting Berkshire residents and staff on Council Tax funding for the next financial year.

RBFA is committed to delivering value for money across the services provided to local residents. However, due to significant budgetary pressure as outlined in this letter, to maintain the current level of service RBFA is proposing a £5 increase for 2025/26, based on a Band D precept, to £86.31.

You can take part in the consultation by completing this short online survey by noon on 31 January 2025.

• A look back at 2024

We’ve covered a great many stories relevant to the Penny Post area in 2024 in this column and in our eight regional news sections. Some have been mentioned more than once for the simple reason that they take time to go away (and in some cases still haven’t). Just before Christmas, we summarised in each of these the main things that we’d covered over the year. It turned out to be quite a long list.

Unlike almost every publication, we don’t produce an annual each year with a glossy hardback cover and a £15.99 price tag. Instead, we’ve gathered all of these summaries, for the whole Penny Post area and the eight sub-areas into which we divide this up, in a separate post. Click here to see it.

Please email brian@pennypost.org.uk if there’s anything you feel should be included in these.