• Flashing lights

Anyone who does compare themselves to Jesus can expect a similar reaction today. One of the people who would, one might expect, come down most strongly on such blasphemous talk would be Donald Trump, who frequently refers to Christianity in glowing terms and is often photographed with bibles, in front of churches or talking to pastors.

The exact details of his faith, in so far as a non-believer is capable of telling the difference between the numerous sects and factions, seems a bit flexible but he can perhaps be described as being on the Charismatic and Non-denominational wing, with a big dose of Christian Nationalism thrown in. I doubt he takes the theology very seriously, seemingly being more interested in how he can use the association to thrust himself even further forward into the limelight.

Allowing himself to be portrayed as a modern Christ, laying his healing hand on a sick man, doesn’t really fit with any kind of conventional piety. However, it fits exactly with his narcissism. His excuse that he was meant to be portrayed as a doctor (which he isn’t either) is deluded. I’ve never seen a doctor with robes like that, nor with white light flashing out of the palm of his hand. This has also all got mixed up with his latest spat, this time with Pope Leo.

I’m starting to feel slightly sorry for Trump and wondering whether some of his recent behaviour suggests an imminent mental collapse. There seems to be less and less filtering going on, with the fulfilment of his wishes taking place pretty much in step with their contemplation. There’s no one who appears to be able to say “stop!”, or even “think!”.

• Not as confused

One of the many memorable scenes in This is Spinal Tap depicts an argument between David St Hubbins and the group’s hapless manager, Ian Faith, about a model of Stonehenge that was twelve times too small because of a feet/inches muddle. Ian Faith said that he was just doing what he was told to by the band’s splendidly thick guitarist, Nigel Tufnel. “But you’re not as confused as him,” St Hubbins interrupts. “It’s not your job to be as confused as Nigel.”

Trump appears quite confused about a lot of things at present, mainly the war with Iran. He seems like someone who’s slowly waking up from a nightmare to discover that it’s all actually happening but that it was all someone else’s fault. At least Jesus was, according to all those stories that were written about him by his fans, prepared to accept the consequences of his actions.

• NATO

Among the big enemies he’s identified are some of his erstwhile closest allies in Nato. This article in The Week quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying that the war might accomplish “what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up NATO” as PotUS is now thinking of pulling out of this “paper tiger”. If this happens, the Journal concludes, “it would be Europe’s fault.”

It goes on to cite several cases where European countries have been unhelpful, adding that they’re “playing into every Maga stereotype about a one-sided Western alliance.” There’s an argument that it is indeed one-sided, but this is something that European governments are now trying to fix. On the other side of the coin, they didn’t start this conflict and by many accounts were not even consulted about it.

It all has more than a whiff of Iraq in the Blair/Bush era but without any of the attempts to portray the enemy as a specific threat. Iran is, of course, a general threat to many of its neighbours, particularly Israel. However, now it’s become a specific one, most immediately because of blocking the Straits of Hormuz. Trump seems to see this as proof of the rectitude of his attack, even though this vital economic waterway was open before he pounced.

• Fakes

I was listening to Everything is Fake (and Nobody Cares) by Jamie Bartlett (and, it turned out, others) on BBC R4 this morning. The premise of what seems to have been the final programme in the series was the extent to which AI is defining the way we think and creating a series of nested realities. AI learns from the web, which is itself a miasma of conflicting and often untrue stories, so is it any wonder that the bots are doing likewise?

The latter part of the programme concluded with several interviews with experts, all of which perfectly expressed this problem. One of the themes was the destruction of trust in established institutions, which would act on us like a kind of mental auto-immune disease. People would then, the logic ran, become more easy to control and manipulate.

The thing was that two of the interviews were themselves entirely fake: “calibrated” by Bartlett “to sound reasonable to Radio Four listeners.” Everything, including the backstory of the interviewees, and the voices, was entirely AI-generated. They certainly fooled me (though, I was pleased to say, there was a couple of phrases in one of them that jarred at the time). He admitted this: many others don’t.

I was left feeling unsettled. The deception by Auntie I can, given the context, forgive: it was a good point, well made. What was more difficult to cope with was the extent to which I had broadly accepted the authority of the spoken and recorded word, despite the bits that didn’t seem right; and how smoothly this flowed from what had gone before, and acted as confirmation of it.

The event I was driving to involved (at Newbury College) a group discussion about some of the skills that students needed to have before entering the workplace. My views were based on our having had a large number of work-experience students aged from fourteen to eighteen over the years.

• Two beefs

Two of my biggest beefs were that, without a lot of encouragement, none of them could make a simple telephone call to a stranger or write a few simple sentences on a subject they hadn’t already studied. We found both of these deficiencies shocking at first: now we accept them as the norm and so do what we can in the week we have with them to try to rectify these.

I also added a third, that of their often lacking the critical ability to test received information, the more so when it seems reasonable. I found myself pulling back from this as a criticism of the students – though not of people in general – as I had myself not twenty minutes before fallen into just this trap. I probably do much the same in other areas of what I write.

It matters little whether errors in coverage are caused by the sometimes malign influence of AI or by a general disinclination to ascribe credence to a point of view which differs from the one the writer happens to hold. Knowledge of the subject is often no particular help. There are many local issues about which I’ve written regularly and have as a result developed a fairly clear opinion as to what is going on.

This might, and probably should, make me more judicious when confronted with new information. I try to be fair and express other points of view, but often find I’m more likely to trust material that supports what I’ve already concluded. This probably makes me a bad journalist: it would certainly make me a very bad scientist. I’m a bit like a poker player playing for a large pot – the more money I’ve invested, the more likely I am to believe that I hold the winning hand.

• Already here

Another participant referred to AI as being variously a threat, a challenge and an opportunity. Others agreed. At that point, my unease returned. They seemed to be referring to it as if it were in some way distinct from the rest of the web: as if it were something that could consciously be accessed or shied away from in the same way as one can use, or avoid, a particular piece of software and so precisely control our level of exposure to it.

In fact, of course, it’s already everywhere, much as Covid was. It’s even on lunchtime Radio Four programmes – and if it can get there, even though it’s then exposed, then it can get anywhere. And it has…

• Dr Jab-jab

When writing about the pandemic, covering the roll-out of the vaccine was about the only aspect that could be classified as remotely good news. As the BBC reports, the current Inquiry appears to agree,  the Chair Baroness Hallett describing it as “an extraordinary feat”.

Two of the criticisms were that the lower take-up among some demographic and ethnic groups and the corrosive effects of misinformation could have been predicted and perhaps dealt with. Possibly: however, neither would have been quick or easy to fix. Both in their different ways resulted from a failure of trust in the government. Given that, it’s perhaps remarkable that the take-up was as high as it was.

I remember meeting my first real-life vaccine denier in a corner shop across the road from the jab-jab centre in Ludgershall. He was alternately muttering and shouting and waving his arms around a lot. “There go the lemmings!” he said several times. He then added something about having our brains taken over.

It struck me then, as it did several times since, that those who seemed most worried about having their minds controlled by Bill Gates or whoever were exactly the kind of people who would most benefit from the intervention. I didn’t mention this, though, as it was a small shop with quite a lot of breakable items on the shelves.

The report suggested that it would have been better were the pharmacies to have been involved at an early stage. I agree: most people probably trust their pharmacies more than their doctors for the simple reason that they visit them a lot more frequently. There’s a lot of excellence and expertise there which indeed should have be used earlier.

Much the same could have been said about involving local councils. West Berkshire (and, I’m sure, many other authorities) performed superbly once it was empowered to get more involved in the response. Several months were, however, wasted while the governed tried to get apps working and was coming up with an ever-more elaborate system of tiers and regulations, all of which were enforced in very different ways by different police forces.

At least there was, of course, complete agreement in Downing Street as to what the regulations were and a firm understanding that everyone would obey these to the letter…

• And finally…

• The BBC has announced that it will cut between 1,800 and 2,000 jobs – almost one in ten – in an attempt to tackle “significant financial pressures.” The interim Director General has “not ruled out axing entire channels or services.” Fox News, Sky and others will be delighted at that.

• And darting back to AI, this article in The Week (edited down – perhaps by bots, perhaps not – from a longer one in The Guardian) looks at how driverless cars are being given serious testing on the streets of London, a city which presents far greater challenges than do many of the gridded layouts found in cities in the USA.

• The Guardian reports that “a critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.”

• Good news from Hungary with Victor Orban’s crushing reverse in the recent election (to his credit, he seems at least to have accepted this without screaming and biting). His replacement, Péter Magyar, is less opposed to the EU and its allies, though still a nationalist. Despite the optimism,  The Conversation suggests that “defeating Orbán will be a long-term project. While several centrist politicians around the world have successfully unseated governing far-right populists in recent years, fewer have been successful in keeping them at bay long-term.”

• So the Champions League will have one team each from what are currently the four big divisions, Italy’s having badly faded away in recent times. Arsenal will play Atletico Madrid while Bayern will play holders Paris St Germain in a repeat of the 2020 final. Very well done to Bayern for knocking out Real. My heart says Atletico, who have suffered three heartbreaking last-minute defeats in their three finals: my head says PSG. Given my form in such things, that probably means Arsenal and Bayern to battle for the trophy on 30 May…

Across the area

• Vibrant villages

Back in 2010, David Cameron briefly spoke, apparently with passion, about an idea he called the big society. This was as I recall an attempt to redefine the relationship between people and the state and to recognise that services would not always be provided from government but might need to come from elsewhere, including through volunteers and local groups.

Several people, including me, scoffed at it. I think we were wrong to. Developed properly, it could have provided a useful way of addressing these issues, not to say a philosophical construct for understanding them. As it was, the idea was allowed to wither away. By an irony, within a few years the savage austerity measures of that government speeded the arrival of exactly the set of circumstances which would have made the big society such a useful idea.

It seems to me that something similar is happening with another high-level project in West Berkshire.

In 2023, partly as a reaction to the unpopular plan to concentrate a much newer development in NE Thatcham, the idea of “vibrant villages” was coined. At its basic level it involved spreading development more evenly across the district with the aim not only of providing housing of the right kind but also helping villages become, or remain, vibrant, sustainable and viable. Taken further, the idea could have encompassed issues ranging from community transport to mental health.

“Vibrant villages” was an exceptionally good slogan. It was brief, positive and could encompass as much or as little as people wished. It even alliterated. It would have been a superb way of pulling together a lot of different projects which all shared this general aspiration. It could have involved other organisations as well as WBC: certainly the parish councils but also specialist organisations like CCB and the Volunteer Centre and local charities and grant funders.

I say “would have” and “could have” because it’s suddenly struck me that I’ve not heard the phrase used at all these last three years. One might, perhaps, infer from this that this was because all the problems that affected rural communities have disappeared. They haven’t: indeed, many have got worse.

This seems odd. There are only three towns in West Berkshire (Newbury, Thatcham and Hungerford) so, by that definition, everywhere else is a village. Certainly every community north of the main A4/M4 corridor could not be described in any other way. If there has been progress on this then it certainly hasn’t been presented under this banner.

There’s no portfolio holder with this explicit responsibility and so far as I can see no dedicated officer. Without these, it’s impossible to believe it’s regarded as a priority.  Individual progress might have been made but mainly as a result of something else, such as an NDP, a change to the library service or a locally-initiated housing needs survey rather than as part of a wider aspiration to create and foster…well, vibrant villages. The slogan says it all. And yet it seems to have been dropped.

One of the many problems the planning system has is that the default local response to almost every development is one of opposition. WBC could help encourage engagement between parish councils and small developers, together with bodies like the CCB, to explore what current ground existed – what kind of housing was needed and where. If the community had an NDP this would make the process easier.

This wouldn’t always work. However, attempting to shift the idea that development happened “to” a community but rather that it could take place “with” it seems a laudable goal. If the resulting applications could be even a bit more aligned with the needs of the community that would also be good, and a lot of time would be saved. A more vibrant village would be one possible outcome.

I’m not sure if this approach has been tried, with regard to planning or other issues like community transport and leisure provision. All I’m saying is that I’m not aware of it. The whole idea seemed too good, and too important, to drop: yet it appears that it has been. If anyone feels differently, let me know.

• Looking at the plan

The analogy of painting the Forth Bridge to describe a never-ending task is an over-used one. None the less, it could be applied to the gargantuan business of producing a local plan. This is essentially the main reference point for a planning authority when deciding what is to be built. It contains all the policies and site allocations. It’s detailed and technical. Above all, it’s big.

It also needs to be refreshed every five years. This time, the work needs to start earlier, due mainly to the disparity between the housing numbers that the current plan provides for and the much higher ones that the government has demanded.

Although it’s been adopted, an important part of the current local plan is still unfinished – indeed, in some respects, un-started. This is the ill-fated master-planning exercise for NE Thatcham which was mandated by the Planning Inspector last year. We take a closer look at here.

Work is thus beginning on the new plan not so much before the ink is dry on the old one as before some parts of it have been written. To make matters even more interesting, this will be done under a new government structure with a new series of gateways or benchmarks or whatever they’re called and a new timetable. This must be supplied and agreed by WBC by 30 June this year.

One of the things that needed to happen with the new plan, and presumably will with this refresh, is a detailed examination of the documents, pretty much line-by-line. The officers will spend time on this but it’s also important that elected members do.

Three aspects are important: firstly that the work be cross-party; secondly that it me conducted by members who have knowledge of the byzantine world of the planning system; and thirdly that it be conducted in private – there are arguments against the last point but I can see the benefits of letting them get on with it. The results will all be examined and consulted on in due course anyway.

A body existed which matched all of these requirements, the Planning Advisory Group. This has, however, been abolished along with its two sibling organisations that dealt with the environment and transport. What body will conduct this scrutiny – indeed, if this will take place at all – remains to be seen.

I understand there was briefly a suggestion that the Resources and Place Scrutiny Committee take this on but I don’t think anyone serious believes that it would have enough time or resources for this. There’s another objection: most of Scrutiny’s work takes place in public session (known as Part 1) rather than in private (Part 2). The idea of a Scrutiny Committee dealing with something behind closed doors is a massive contradiction in terms.

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