• Faith

I find it really hard to understand why religious convictions, and all the stuff that go with them, are so compelling. Perhaps, like nationalism, they create a unity against life’s entropy, or help make sense of some of its particularly callous outcomes. I could go on in this vein for some time but won’t convince anyone who believes.

The religions which seem particularly problematic are the three main monotheistic ones, as they allow no pagan-style compromise of simply adding new gods to the pantheon in response to politcial or social change. If the Helleno-Roman model were still with us, Olympus would be a very crowded place. There’d be a god or goddesses for all kinds of things including VAR, hedges, planning applications, social influencers, nuclear disarmament, inclusivity, cats, solar panels, broadband and stamp collecting.

The three monotheistic gods – or are they the same god? – are, however, stuck in time. They issued their complex and often contradictory edits, directly or through their prophets or disciples. A depressing amount of time since has been spent by people trying to work out what they meant, to apply them to the real world and to harness these to a form of social control of which these men in their seminaries were particular beneficiaries.

Raymond Chandler described chess as being the greatest waste of human intelligence you can find outside an advertising agency. Neither of these occupations can, however, hold a candle to the casuistical and over-elaborate reflections of religious scholars.

• Greatness

That’s not to say that greatness was not created from these cultures, whether despite or because of the creeds.

Islam in the middle ages was a highly enlightened society, places such as Bagdhad and Al-Andalus being beacons of learning and enlightenment. Judaism, even in exile, kept alive a huge corpus of wisdom. The medieval cathedrals, the art of the renaissance and the music of the Baroque period are amongst the finest creations of humanity. Although there was much conflict, there were many examples of co-operation and tolerance between these faiths, such as in twelfth-century Sicily.

Any centralised and organised state, regardless of its raison d’être, is always likely to create great ideas, simply because being organised affords a measure of security for the thinkers. This doesn’t validate the basis on which the organisation exists.

• Problems

The essential problems with monotheism are, however, never far away.

First, you have one god who is, so we’re told, both benevolent and omnipotent, although even the most casual glance at the world shows that at least one of these cannot be true.

Second, you have a single and un-negotiable point of rectitude, beside which all other views must fail, despite the manifest examples of goodness with those of other persuasions might display.

Third, as mentioned above, you have a vast corpus of learned commentary which has tried to reconcile this massive paradoxes and which, due its sheer size, becomes hard to argue against.

These religions are like tired players at a poker game that’s lasted for thousands of years. The more chips you’ve bet, the less likely you are to throw in your hand, regardless of how bad the cards are.

No one’s pretending that the rulers in Iran are going to stop executing or shooting their citizens because of a sudden moment of ecumenical or humanistic awareness. They’re like old men with power everywhere. The big difference with Iran is, for the rest of us, that Trump has said he’s going to do something about it: “help is on its way”.

But what help? He’s said that the USA will take “very strong action” against Iran if it executes protesters. It doesn’t seem clear what this might involve. Iran has been on his shit-list for some time, because of oil, nuclear weapons and because it doesn’t give a damn about what Washington thinks about it.  The protestors he’s so keen to support and encourage are a means to an end.

The Americans will also remember the ghastly fiasco of Jimmy Carter’s attempted rescue mission in 1980, a cautionary tale if ever there was one.

• Facts

As worrying, in a less visceral way, is Trump’s attack on truth.

An email from Full Fact this week told me that Google had recently pulled more than £1m of funding from this highly respected organisation. “With AI-generated misinformation becoming ever more sophisticated and the Trump administration openly hostile to fact checkers,” the email continued, “Full Fact will continue to be a source of impartial, verified facts. We add to debate, we don’t restrict it. We promote more speech, not less.”

None the less, its future remains uncertain. According to The Guardian, Google’s money represents about a third of its funding.

The Guardian goes on to quote Full Fact’s CEO as saying that “We think Google’s decisions, and those of other big US tech companies, are influenced by the perceived need to please the current US administration, feeding a harmful new narrative that attacks factchecking and all it stands for. Verifiable facts matter and the big internet companies have responsibilities when it comes to curtailing the spread of harmful misinformation.”

Checking anything takes time. The main social-media platforms from which so many of us receive our information seem to have abandoned the idea. AI solutions are, we’re told, now being used; or else “community notes”. Rigorous examination of any prevailing orthodoxy is regarded as heresy. Perhaps Trump has more in common with Iran’s rulers than he’d like to admit.

• No win, no fee

One way of establishing truth is through contested proceedings in court. Many organisations are finding a stratospheric increase in “no win, no fee” actions being brought against them, as discussed on a BBC R4 programme on 14 January (which I only caught the tail-end of).

The problem for the litigants, however, appears to be that this seemingly no-downside summary doesn’t cover court charges which can, if the case is unsuccessful, run into thousands of pounds.

Even if you win, the hidden extras can eat into your awards. Many of the Post Office victims – who for obvious reasons, had little money of their own – embarked upon this route to get compensation and even those who won lost about 80% of the awards in costs and legal fees.

You might ask, as do I, why it was necessary for them to go to court to get redress at all. This is surely the last resort and shows that all other aspects of the system are broken. Compensation for them is still a matter of dispute.

The BBC R4 programme was looking particularly at people who were using such legal routes to get repairs done to their social-rent homes. The question that I didn’t hear addressed was why this was felt to be the only way of accomplishing this. No sane person will engage in the uncertainties of litigation unless all other avenues have failed.

Who’s therefore to blame here – the lawyers for offering selective views of the outcomes, the tenants for expecting that their problems can be fixed by the legal system or the housing associations for allowing their client relationships to deteriorate to the extent that litigation seems the only recourse?

• Business rates

If there were no method of taxing businesses and one had to be found, no sane person would come up with the current system of business rates.

None the less, that’s what we’re stuck with. This has come to people’s attention again because recent revaluations have produced some massive increases for many retail businesses.

Regardless of how many manage to survive this – and not all will – the whole system needs reform. To tax a business on the basis of an arbitrary evaluation of the value of the property, rather than the profitability of the business itself, is insane.

One might as well tax domestic residents according to how much their house might be worth rather than on how much they earn – oh, hang on, I’ve just described council tax. That needs sorting out, too.

Business rates are more serious, though. For one thing, the sums involved can be vastly higher than what you pay at home. Also, it doesn’t confer any benefits at all, not even getting your businesses’ bins emptied.

Also, forget the idea that at last what you’re paying is benefitting people in your district. The retention rates vary but, to pick one example, West Berkshire Council only keeps about 15% of the business rates it collects. The rest ends up with the Treasury for redistribution to other areas. That seems fine until you reflect that a Commons committee in 2019 described this redistribution system as “broken”.

What we’re looking at here, therefore, is not a levy which particularly benefits the local area or is bases on any particular ability to pay, but a rather crude and partially regressive tax that is, through an archaic and capricious system, levied on people who run their own businesses.

This matter was considered at the meeting of the Wantage Chamber of Commerce earlier this week and which was addressed for the PCC Matthew Barber. You can read our account of it here. Many of the concerns expressed have a far wider application than just OX12.

• And finally…

• PotUS Trump still feels that Greenland must become part of the USA: Denmark disagrees. “Trump’s naked desire to take control of Greenland, his harsh ultimatums to Danish officials and increased trolling by the White House aides and outside allies are hardening opposition”, Politico claims. Trump’s position, as reported in USA Today, is that acquiring it by whatever means is “vital for national security.”

• Reform UK has scooped another defector form the Tories, Nadhim Zahawi who was Chancellor for about six weeks in 2022 and Chairman of the party for about three months in 2022-23 and who fell into disgrace as a result of breaching the ministerial code in early 2023.

His first press conference involved his insulting a journalist from The Telegraph. Sky News claims that Reform UK insiders have said they fear the high profile defection of Nadhim Zahawi to their party may “look like naked opportunism”. Reform? Naked opportunism? Surely not.

• On 15 January, another leading Tory, Robert Jenrick, left the party, on this occasion being pushed by the leader before he’d had time to jump. Who’s next?

• Artificial intelligence often gets a bad press. This article in Vox, quoted in The Week, claims that “people don’t hear enough about the benefits AI could bring, particularly in the field of scientific research” particularly by preventing people “drowning in data”. It has, the author claims, the ability to transform positively.

That may be true. Very similar claims were made when the internet was invented, if that’s the right word. Both can be both the best and worst of all of us – much like printing, gunpowder, writing and the wheel. The problem with AI is that it looks to some people like an existential threat. So too, perhaps, did the others.

• Still with The Week, the ability of Russians to accept a death toll of perhaps a quarter of a million people in Ukraine might seem staggering. However, the Kremlin has, according to The Observer, done a very good job at controlling the media and defining the conflict as “an existential war with the West”.

Dictators need a number of things, including yes-men, a controlled media and the capacity to engender fear. Above all, they need a clear external enemy. Yes again, I refer you to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four...

Across the area

• Enforcement issues

West Berkshire Council has recently been granted an extension to the high-court injunction it obtained regarding the unauthorised traveller’ site at Aldermaston. The aim is that it will provide enough time to establish how many families are actually on the site, current estimates ranging from one to twenty. This will run out later this month: then what?

It’s been suggested to me that as a retrospective planning application has been lodged, as long as this covers all the work that’s been done on the site, this will have the effect of pausing any legal challenges while the planning system takes over – and we all know how slow that is. Perhaps I’m being very stupid, but if that is and was always going to be the case, what was the point of issuing the stop notices and the injunctions in the first place?

There have long been concerns that WBC has for a long time not been able to allocate enough travellers’ sites. This has led to unauthorised developments which have then been granted retrospectively – a kind of development by self-selection rather than by policy and which asks the question as to whether WBC is in this regard really a plan-led authority. 

It’s also not clear to me (though I’ve asked WBC) whether the total number of identified pitches – those allocated in the plan plus those that have subsequently been granted retrospectively – has now reached the number that the Council is required to provide. If it has, then presumably any future speculative applications should surely fail.

Returning to the question of enforcement, there’s also and issue in Enborne where a retrospective application has been lodged for a site which is processing and burning waste, which is probably in breach of any number of regulations. Here again it appears that the lengthy planning process will need to be followed before anything can be stopped. In both cases, the Council appears to feel that its hands are tied.

These are just two examples. Between them they involve an unauthorised encampment at the gates of a major nuclear weapons facility, a direct challenge to the integrity (and perhaps to the very purpose) of the DEPZ emergency zone, stop notices which have been completely ignored, high-court injunctions which have been partly ignored and, in Enborne, worrying cases of potential air and water pollution.

If these don’t constitute reasons for immediate and firm enforcement then it’s very hard to see what would.

Many residents, including this one, are pretty confused by all this. It may well that WBC is doing all that it can with a system that’s in many ways loaded against it and, perhaps, against common sense. It’s also possible that it’s being a tad over-cautious in how it’s interpreting its responsibilities. In either case, there would seem to be something fairly serious with the laws that underpin the system which planning authorities have to operate.

• Four green lights

The government has recently introduced traffic-light ratings to show how well local highways authorities are managing road maintenance based on, according to this page on Gov.uk, three areas:

• the current condition of local roads;
• how much each local highway authority is spending on maintaining its local roads;
• how effectively each local highway authority follows best practice in highways maintenance – for example by using technologies to fix and prevent potholes more efficiently.

West Berkshire has scored “green”, the top ranking, in all three areas and therefore gets a green ranking over all, one of only a handful of authorities that have accomplished this. You can red a full statement from the Council here.

“This demonstrates to residents that we are not only improving the highways but also spending residents’ money wisely,” portfolio holder Stuart Gourley told me on 15 January. “We do get grants from central government for these purposes but are also funding some of these improvements and repairs ourselves.”

As for the other authorities in the area, Oxfordshire is amber overall (with its rankings in the three areas being amber, green and amber); Wiltshire is green (green, amber and green); Hampshire is green (green, amber and amber); and Swindon is amber (amber, amber and amber).

I’ll leave it there for now – if I type “amber” once more I think my brain will fuse…

• Chris Boulton

Many tributes have been written following the announcement of the recent death of Chris Boulton, the CEO of Greenham Trust. The Trust had this to say in its most recent newsletter:

“Following the passing of our Chief Executive, Chris Boulton, Greenham Trust and Chris’s family would like to thank everyone for their kind messages of support and condolences.

“Chris meant so much to so many people from all walks of life and he will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

“There will be a private family funeral. A celebration of Chris’s life will be held at a later date and details will be shared in due course.

“For more information please follow the link to our website here.”

• Council finances

Following West Berkshire Council’s statement on 19 December regarding the government’s funding settlement, I understand that WBC is still “working through the details to understand its full implications” and I shall be hoping to speak to the Leqader Jeff Brooks about this soon. The initial response, however, was not positive:

“The Revenue Support Grant, a key source of Government funding, will fall sharply from £27 million to £16 million in just two years – almost halving in a short space of time. By 2029, the Council’s core spending power will be £191 million. With inflation at 3%, the cost of essential services such as adult and children’s social care, waste services and debt repayments would consume almost all of this.”

Another matter that I’m trying to resolve is why Reading West and Mid Berkshire MP Olivia Bailey came up with a view of the settlement which was diametrically opposed to WBC’s. Several emails to her office have yet to produce a response.

News from your local councils