• Necessary and sufficient

There’s a striking thing about dramatic events like wars, revolutions, coups and pandemics. Beforehand, they seem impossible: afterwards, they seem inevitable. Neither of these rather two-dimensional views in which the human mind seems to be stuck makes it any easier to predict them or explain why they took place.

For anything to happen, there need to be both necessary and sufficient conditions. Imagine a pan of potatoes bubbling on the stove. The water, the potatoes and the heat are all necessary for it to boil over: whether it does so depends on the amount or intensity of each of these conditions, as well as other factors like how tightly the lid is fixed on. A determined cook, dictator or whoever can keep a lid on a boiling pan for a long time.

In the case of Iran, the High Chef Maga-Potus of the Washington Grill & Diner had by the end of last week grown bored with the slow-cooking approach. He therefore added extra boiling water, threw in more potatoes, turned the heat up to eleven out of ten, took the lid off and stood back.

The results were immediate and, given the number of necessary and sufficient conditions, inevitable. Without his intervention, the pot could have continued to simmer for ages. The Iranians were doing a reasonably good job of keeping the lid on (much to the detriment, it would seem, of many of the inhabitants).

• High Chef Maga-Potus

I’m not done with this culinary image just yet…

In many ways, Trump has all the characteristics of the high-profile and high-maintenance chefs of legend, and sometimes reality. We can the tick the boxes of his being, like some of them, vain, rude, capricious, authoritarian, self-obsessed, bombastic and contemptuous of any who don’t share his world view. What’s less certain is whether he can actually cook.

The dramatic banquet he’s currently trying to concoct has a lot of explosive ingredients, not all of which are in his possession or control. All are actively dangerous in the wrong hands. The Iranians have threatened to knock up their own rival menu which involves “opening the gates of hell” or words to that effect.

Imagine, perhaps, a gala evening at a Heston Blumenthal restaurant at which his most hated rival is also preparing a very different meal in the same kitchen.

• The Washington Grill & Diner

In order to get the meal done, Maga-Potus had to borrow some ingredients from neighbours (whom he calls friends when he needs something from them).

The rather more conventional Blighty Restaurant round the corner – which has fallen on hard times and can barely rustle up enough food to feed its staff, never mind its customers – was one of his first calls. Could it lend him a couple of airbases?

Chef Starmer was doubtful. This had happened before, with Maga-Potus or his predecessors demanding immediate and unconditional support for elaborate projects, the real purpose of which had in each case been either unclear or deliberately misleading. The Afghan Trifle, the Libyan Soufflé and, in particular, the Iraqi Bombe Surprise were still fresh in his memory. His restaurant had provided a number of ingredients which it could ill-afford and loaned a lot of staff, some of whom had not returned.

To make matters worse, Maga-Potus had said only a few months before that these foreign personnel weren’t really necessary anyway: his team had done all the front-line cooking and the rest of them – the Blighty Restaurant, Chez Macron, the Mertzhaus, the Trattoria Meloni and others – were only really needed for the washing up, if that. And now the man was wanting some airbases – no way.

• Dietary change

As for why these gargantuan banquets were needed, the Washington Grill & Diner had generally said that the reason was dietary change. Even its previous owners admitted there was no changing these foreigners’ religion, but he wasn’t at all happy with the way they picked their chefs. This was perhaps not surprising as these people ate such barbaric and undemocratic food.

Hamburgers, pork chops, milk shakes and lots of freedom fries – that was the way forward. The idea was, once the Grill & Diner had sent its waiters in to destroy all the tagines and clay ovens, that the inhabitants would realise that they’d been eating in error. The field would then be open for American businesses to swoop in and sell them all they needed for a wholesome American democratic diet.

Chef Starmer sadly shook his head at the memory. It had never worked out like that. After massive efforts and huge expense, the invading chefs had finally pulled out, having completely failed to impose the hoped-for sense of unity on the local population. Many of the locals would still fight to the death about, say, whether dough should be stirred clockwise or anti-clockwise. Indeed, the only thing on which they could all now agree was how much they hated American food.

Worse still, a year or so after moving out, the Grill & Diner’s chefs realised that the deep-fat fryers and BBQs they’d so hopefully and expensively installed had either been sold or else melted down and turned into assault rifles: while the inhabitants had gone back to cooking and eating couscous, falafels, merguez and all the rest, just as if the US cooks hadn’t bothered to come over and show them the light at all. What ingratitude…

Many would feel that repeated failure merits a change of tack. Insanity is, after all, as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The Grill & Diner, however, is made of sterner stuff, particularly now Maga-Potus wields the big knife. So far as he was concerned, the alternative to milk shakes was either stroganov or chop suey – “buy shakes to be great, or buy the rest to be oppressed” was the message.

Then he started to get really pissed off (or pissed, as he would say) when the neighbouring chefs were reluctant to help him.

• Not Winston

Back in the day, Winston ran the Blighty Restaurant. It was then still a force to be reckoned with, particularly for its seafood, though it was in the early 1940s suffering from serious shortage of basic provisions.

In vain did Chef Winston implore the Grill & Diner not only to send over more food and equipment but also to smite the efforts of the Hitlerhaus (as it was then known) to dominate the world’s culinary offerings? These were met with deaf ears until the Miso-Sushi assault on the Pearl Harbour Grill & Diner.

Odd, therefore, that Maga-Potus should have compared Chef Starmer to Chef Winston. Perhaps, as he often seems to be, he’s confused by the fumes that rise from the pot that he’s stirring. The accusation rather runs the other way round.

For whatever reason, Chef Starmer then changed his mind, a bit. This hasn’t mollified Maga-Potus at all: “send me the coriander now or be forever cursed,” he replied.

• A monopoly of truth

Whatever Chef Maga-Potus does is designed partly for consumption at the Grill & Diner. “Eat more pork chops, buy more shakes, demand more burgers” is the message. The problem is that a lot of the foreign customers on whom this message has been forced aren’t coming back for more.

For reasons of geography, climate, tradition and culture, what we eat is hard to change. The Grill & Diner believes it serves the best menu in the whole wide world. The Iranian authorities believe that, as regards its own people, it does too. Both are wrong.

The reality is that most people will eat what they can, and when they can, in order to stay alive. Chefs come and go, with their grandiose plans. Throughout all of this, we just keep eating what we can obtain, or grow; and – if we’re wise – what we can sustain.

Maga-Potus and others have their time in the limelight. However we’re all, for better or for worse, now too deeply rooted in our own traditions to change just because someone from the other side of the world tells us to.

There’s no monopoly of truth as regards geo-politics, food or anything else. We all have to make our own calls. Maga-Potus is currently making a call for an entire region. We shall see how his banquet develops and whether it proves to be more satisfying than those the Washington Grill & Diner has previously forced us to consume.

• One UXB (of many)

An unexploded WW1 bomb was unearthed during building work in Hungerford last week, leading to road closures and culminating in a controlled explosion in a nearby field. What a piece of ordinance from that conflict was doing there at all is a question that will probably never be answered.

It seems that about one a week, though mostly from WW2, are re-discovered and dealt with in England. That’s nothing. This Wikipedia page paints a harrowing picture of the global nature of this problem, which causes serious pollution as well as horrific injuries. The most seriously affected country is Egypt, about 22% of which is believed to be contaminated in this way.

Just looking at landmines, the UN estimates that there over 100 million of these in about seventy countries. The National Library of Medicine claimed (admittedly back in 1997, though I doubt the situation’s improved) that an estimated 250,000 people were living with injuries caused by mines.

In the same year, the Ottawa Treaty was drafted (it was ratified two years later) which seems to have made some progress in dealing with this hideous legacy which respects no frontiers, ceasefires or peace treaties. Not every country pays too much attention to such international agreements, however. There are, for example, reckoned to be something like 2m landmines and other booby traps in Ukraine, mainly laid or dropped by the Russians.

• Dirty business

Channel 4′ s recent hard hitting docu-drama Dirty Business will have confirmed what most of us know, and many of us have experienced first hand, about the failure to protect our rivers from sewage pollution and the devastating consequence for both wildlife and people. Marlborough-based Action for the River Kennet has been highlighting this issue for more than twenty years. 

A statement from ARK pointed out that Windrush Against Sewage Pollution’s rigorous analysis of illegal sewage discharges, showcased in Dirty Business, ranks the Pang as the most “victimised” river in Thames Water’s region – and there are quite a few to choose from – with the worst offending works being at Hampstead Norreys.

“On the SAC-protected River Lambourn,” ARK’s statement continues, “where the works at East Shefford have been upgraded, illegal spills have still occurred. WASP’s analysis raises some serious questions about the sewage treatment standards.”

Nor does the Kennet get a clean bill of health, being ranked tenth in terms of rivers suffering most from illegal spills. To pick one example, the works at Kingsclere discharged into the Kingsclere Brook illegally on 165 occasions between 2020 and 2025. Most people who’d committed 165 crimes in five years would be locked up – and that’s just one sewage works. WASP estimated that TW’s charge sheet for this period contains a staggering 8,499 separate incidents.

“The programme highlighted the fact that our rivers aren’t safe for recreation and would not reliably meet bathing-water standards because of the concentration of E.Coli and Total Coliforms present.

“Communities including Aldbourne and Stanford Dingley still paddle through sewage on a daily basis in winter and the impacts are not recorded in any figures. We need rapid investment in sewage treatment that is fit for purpose combined with strong regulation.”

You can add your voice to the call for clean water now on this page on the Rivers Trust website.

• And finally…

• A couple of weeks ago, I suggested three reasons why the money that our country seems (on paper) to earn less than it needs to spend: and to extent that’s running out of control. I’m very grateful for a neighbour, and a wiser and better informed person than me, for pointing out a fourth. These are consequences of what might be termed capitalist diseases like obesity and coronary problems that are the result of the cornucopia of convenient blessings that we were told that processed foods would confer on us.

• It seems incredible and awful that the Russian “special military operation” against Ukraine, which some thought would be over very quickly, has already lasted almost as long as did WW1. Putin’s agenda appearing to be the reconstitution of the USSR, there seems little that can be accomplished by negotiation for as long as he remains in power.

• Many of us want to reduce our carbon footprint: how to do so given the pressures that apply on us is harder. One radical suggestion from The Conversation would, it’s claimed, halve the contribution of airlines to this problem – scrap business and first class accommodation. If this were enacted overnight, however, it would surely serve to increase fares for everyone else as these are, by some estimates, five times as profitable as economy seats.

Increasing the general price of flying to encourage travel by other methods is something which a number of people, including airlines, would not accept. How powerful are the collective lobbies for cheap flights and good profits from them? Very. So, perhaps, this plan needs to be filed under “a good idea, but…”.

• Politics and sport are increasingly difficult to separate. The forthcoming World Cup in North America could feature a USA v Iran game. One of the USA’s former adversaries, Iraq, is currently in a spot of bother as, according to The Guardian, the country’s airspace will remain closed for “at least four weeks” as a result of the Iran conflict, which would leave around 40% of the squad unable to travel to the play-offs in Mexico.

• The T20 Cricket World Cup has reached the semi-final stage. In the first match, New Zealand produced an astonishing batting display to defeat serial chokers South Africa (they’ll play India, who beat England by seven runs in a far less one-sided contest). Finn Allen’s 33-ball century for the Kiwis was a record for the T20 World Cup, but amazingly not for T20s. Who’s in the gold and silver medal positions? Players from India or Australia, surely? Not a bit of it. 29 balls was all it took Muhammad Fahad to notch a ton for Turkey v Bulgaria in 2025; while Sahil Chauhan of Estonia, of all places, took two fewer to reach the same milestone against Cyprus in 2024.

I never knew any of these countries even played cricket. Great that they do. When the largely incomprehensible sports that High Chef Maga-Potus’s country plays involve record-breaking from the likes of Estonia and Turkey I might pay attention to them – but not before…

Across the area

• A money meeting

West Berkshire Council’s budget was passed last week at the Full Council meeting: you can click here to see the agenda and a recording of the event. WBC’s own summary of the meeting can be read here.

This was notably less tetchy and fractious than the Executive meeting on 12 February. Doubtless the members realised that this was it – the moment had come when the decision had to be taken and political posturing and point-scoring was rather beside the point.

It’s also true that the dire financial situation had eliminated most of the choices that the Council might in previous years have been able to make. This was a survival budget. The only choice was one that many businesses are familiar with when times are tough: does it cut to the bone or borrow to trade its way out of trouble? The current administration has, correctly in my view, chosen the latter route.

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s easier to cut things like libraries, community transport and youth clubs than it is to restore them. By their nature, most of these cuts would affect those least able to deal with them. As the Finance portfolio holder Iain Cottingham said, “I have no intention of being known as the ‘milk snatcher’ of West Berkshire.  We will not be the agents of austerity for central government.”

It’s true that this will add to the Council’s borrowing, the exceptional financial support bail-out which WBC has agreed being a loan, not a grant. The government seems to feel that EFS is something it prefers to seeing a raft of Section 114 bankruptcies.

However, if in a few years’ time these same councils are being rendered insolvent by the repayment costs then not much will have been achieved. These costs may in the future perhaps be written off – after all, it looks like the SEND ones will be – in which case it makes sense to take the support now.

In any case, the EFS was really the only show in town. Without the £50m, it’s highly unlikely that the Council would have been able to set a balanced budget at all.

Life goes on in other ways as well as with non-statutory services. The budget announced £171m of investment over the next four years. This will be funded in a variety of ways, including loans, reserves, CIL, S106 and external funding.

(Confusingly and for reasons I don’t understand, CIL and S106 are regarded as “external funding”: this makes no sense to me as these sums can only be spent by WBC and must be spent on infrastructure. It’s true that these originally came from developers external to the Council. However, by that logic council tax receipts and business rates are external as well.)

On the subject of council tax, to nobody’s surprise this will once again rise by 4.99%, the effective maximum, with 2% of this ring-fenced for social care. As for business rates, the system here remains  as regressive, anachronistic, confused and dysfunctional as ever but this is beyond WBC’s power to fix.

Iain Cottingham’s reasons for the council-tax rise could describe the Council’s problems as a whole: the main problems are “the increase in social-care costs and the inadequacy of central-government funding.” These have been known for some time and this meeting served to confirm them.

• A proposed partnership

In many ways, the most interesting item on the agenda was an amendment proposed by Adrian Abbs (Ind). This called for a partnership with parish councils about the provision of non-statutory services. The inevitably slightly polarised debate, the fraught financial backdrop and a number of perhaps over-specific suggestions obscured the possibilities of this suggestion.

The key point is that increases in parish councils’ precepts (the funding they request for the parent authority) are not capped in the way that council tax is. It’s also true that over the last few years there has been a steady downward devolution of non-statutory services and assets, with parishes either being asked to fund things, ranging from dog bins to extra library hours ,themselves, or buy them from WBC. The problem is that this is tends to happen gradually and piecemeal and sometimes just after parishes have set their budgets.

One of the many points made against the motion as it stood was that it was wrong for the Council to shift the tax burden in this way. If this were done as matter of obligation – ie if WBC said to the parishes “you’re all going to increase your precepts by 50% and give the extra, and any surplus reserves, to us” – then I’d agree.

However, a genuine discussion of the reality that more and more of WBC’s outgoings are being spent on social care and children’s services leaving less and less for anything else would be useful. If these non-statutory services are to be retained, someone will have to pay for them.

As regards the implication that the tax burden might be shifted without consultation, that also seems incorrect. Parish and town councils are in many ways more responsive to local needs than is WBC, although it’s true that they are often not used to dealing with such matters nor of consulting with residents to this extent. However, the pandemic showed that these are resourceful, responsive and responsible organisations.

A case could be made that a particular parish needed to raise its precept by whatever in order to provide, or pay WBC to provide, certain services that WBC could no longer afford, or could do so only with difficulty.

Each parish council could then make its recommendations to the population, invite comments and then decide. To pick one example, Lambourn recently did exactly this when WBC proposed that it could buy more hours of library time.

The variety of size is a problem. Parishes in West Berkshire range from the towns of Hungerford, Thatcham and Newbury which have several paid staff and General Power of Competence to a handful of parishes so tiny that they don’t request precepts at all and have only one meeting a year.

Some of the smaller ones may need to group together, perhaps with a larger parish at the centre. Something of this nature has happened in the Downlands area with regard to the pop-up library. There’s also cross-parish financial co-operation in several areas on matters like the purchase of speed indicator devices.

Just as the government believes there are too many unitary authorities and that many are too small, the same could be said for parishes. If the Ridgeway merger goes ahead there’ll be close to 220 parishes across the new district.

I’m not suggesting that these be forcibly amalgamated, any more than they should be forced to raise precepts or hand over reserves. However, encouraging more financial co-operation between neighbours would be one way of smoothing out the problems of economies of scale from which many currently suffer.

Finally, there’s the matter of public engagement. Governments of all political colours pay lip-service to the idea of devolved powers and local decision-making and bemoan the lack of respect for and involvement in the political process. A situation where more money were raised locally would have the immediate and inevitable effect of making these bodies more significant: which would, in turn, encourage more people to get involved in their work.

I don’t deny that there would be problems. However there are clearly problems brewing up with the way things operate now. Even though the motion as it stood was roundly defeated last week, it has at least been aired. Perhaps a few seeds may have been planted which will bear fruit in the future.

• The case for Ridgeway

As mentioned last week, West Berkshire (WBC), the Vale and South Oxfordshire have put out statements making the case for the proposed amalgamation of the three authorities as a new Ridgeway unitary (single-tier) authority. This is in response to the government’s local government reorganisation which (rightly) wants to abolish the two-tier system that currently prevails in Oxfordshire, though not in Berkshire.

WBC, although already a unitary, has got involved in this process because it sees this union as being in its best interests (other views exist). It would also satisfy another government objective, that all unitary authorities have a population of at least about 500,000. WBC is currently about 170,000 and the three together (assuming the current boundaries are retained) would be about 470,000.

There are currently three proposals: the two-unitary with the above-mentioned Ridgeway and the rest of of the Oxfordshire councils combining to form a second unitary; the three-unitary, which is as this but with an enlarged Oxford City Council remaining separate; and a single unitary council for the whole of Oxfordshire, which would leave WBC unchanged. The first is favoured by all the districts except Oxford City and WBC; the second by Oxford City; and the third by Oxfordshire CC.

The above-mentioned statement looks at how certain key services would be changed and provided (or, as the municipal language puts it, reimagined and delivered). The assumption that runs through all of these is that Ridgeway would small enough to be responsive but large enough to be efficient.

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