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This morning I was watching the news about the US requiring UK passport holders to either provide biometric information on it or stand in queues and pay money for visa for any visit to the US. Bugger. And I was looking forward to travelling to the US more regularly in the future. It did strike me as a move out of the blue and rather harsh in the light of both the Anglo-American relationship and the global trade and tourism links between the US and the UK. But, I thought, the terrorism meme has won the day and the US is going to ‘protect’ itself back to the Middle Ages.
However, as the day progressed I have learnt that the situation may not be as bad the media represent. Apparently, the news reports that talk about passengers having to have biometric passports containing fingerprint details as well as digital photographs are, quite simply incorrect. It is true that discussion has been taking place between the USA and all of the 27 countries on the visa waiver programme regarding mandating this information on the machine readable passports currently being issued and it may be that some countries will have to comply. However, at present, no such stipulation has been enforced and it is felt “unlikely” that such measures will be forced upon the UK.
For the time being nothing has changed. The position remains as originally stated by the US – all travellers from the UK had to be in possession of machine readable passports by 1st October 2003 or would require a visa. The deadline was subsequently seen as unachievable and it was extended until 26th October 2004. Advice given to corporations by their agents acting as liason to the US Embassy and the Foreign Office remains that UK travellers will have to be in possession of a machine readable passport by the 26th October in order to gain entry into the USA under the visa waiver scheme. (A machine readable passport is one with the electronic strip on the back and containing a digital photograph of the holder).
I am still confused. Despite my reservations about the BBC and other major media I find it hard to believe that they would report such a huge factual error about this matter and got ‘biometric’ confused with ‘machine readable’. I am quite anxious to know the truth not only for the impact such measures would have on my personal travel arrangements but also their implications for introduction of biometrics into documents in the UK in general. Daniel Johnson points out in the Telegraph today:
British passports are not, of course, biometric; nor, for that matter, are American ones. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Government will be speeding up their introduction – as a form of ID card – before you can say “David Blunkett”.
The Telegraph also has doomsday reports about his issue. Can anyone tell us what’s really going on?
It’s useless new law time again in the UK.
From today it will be an offence to drive a vehicle on a public road while using a mobile telephone (or ‘cellphone’ for our North American readers).
A complete waste of time. Which is not to say that driving a vehicle while using a mobile telephone certainly can be dangerous, so is driving a car while unwrapping a sandwich, tying shoelaces, fiddling with the buttons on the radio or playing the accordion. Whatever the object of distraction, the point is that the motorist is driving without due care and attention and since that is already an offence, surely no elaboration is required.
If the police are unable or unwilling to prosecute motorists for extant offences then what on earth is the point of merely enacting more?
Really this all smacks of the the short-term ‘something-must-be-done’ mentality and the impulse which requires the demonisation of objects rather than the uses to which those objects are put.
The UK media are blitzing the issue as a part of which I have been drafted in as libertarian voice-du-jour. I have not long returned from the BBC studios in Central London where I got my oar in on the Jeremy Vine show and, this evening, I will adding my piece to a similar debate on Classic Gold radio.
For anyone interested enough to listen in or phone-in, the show will be streamed live on-line at just after 8.00pm UK time.
Inspired by the posting below about soundbites, Patrick Crozier has lashed up a list of attempted transport policy soundbites. Not all of them have quite the zip and zing that you are looking for in a soundbite. For example, I don’t see this catching on:
Transport is not an unalloyed good.
“Unalloyed”?
Or this:
The chaos on Britain’s railways is to a large extent the fault of the EU.
“To a large extent”? That sounds like John Major as enacted by a TV puppet.
But, as I said in a comment there, never mind. As soundbites they are mostly unfinished, but they’re a definite start. Others can maybe get polishing.
And, as I have also already commented at Transport Blog, before realising that the thought might also be worth airing here, one of Patrick’s suggestions may actually be ready to spread around. Here it is:
Safety is dangerous.
This little phrase may have been arrived at many times before (comments about that are of course very welcome), but I’ve not heard this exact combination of words before. I think it might be a winner.
First, it is short. Three familiar, easy-to-remember, easy-to-say words. Very important.
Second, it asserts an important truth, which is that an overzealous pursuit of safety, by (for instance) shutting down a pretty safe transport system in a vain and very expensive attempt to make it ever more safe can actually cost lives. The costs incurred (but hidden because spread around) can make everyone’s lives a tiny bit more unsafe, and the alternative transport they use in the meantime might be a lot less safe. Shutting down railway systems after crashes, or grounding huge airplane fleets ditto, can kill, on the roads. And of course “safety is dangerous” has numerous applications besides and beyond transport.
But third, just as important, “safety is dangerous” has just the right degree of counter-intuitive outrageousness, such as will arouse interest and stir up debate. Because this soundbite is, literally speaking, untrue, it could cause opponents of the truth it flags up to get drawn into a stupid argument about its truth, and its unfairness. “It’s not true!” “Ah but you’re missing the point, what it says is true.” Etc. etc., blah blah. The sense of outraged logic of the victims of the soundbite could be all part of the fun, and will cause TV interlocutors to keep on throwing this soundbite in their faces, simply because they hate it so. Like all good soundbites, it could supply a cushion for the lazy TV compere to fall back on.
Well, maybe. Most attempted soundbites are like newborn fish, doomed to die immediately. But maybe this one will prove to be a fish with legs, if you’ll pardon the expression.
It could be that “safety is dangerous” needs more work done on it. Maybe it should read: “Safety is unsafe.” Or maybe the even shorter: “Safety isn’t.” Personally I think that “Safety isn’t” is too brutal towards the banal truth that safety, properly understood, is indeed safety. Also, the claim is too absolute. It isn’t being claimed that “safety” is always unsafe. Just sometimes. You might have to change “safety is unsafe” to “safety can be unsafe” and then the word count starts to rise. (“Safety is to a definite extent unsafe.”) “Safety is dangerous” is the best, I reckon.
Low cost airline RyanAir is a subject that gets mixed feelings from this blog’s different contributors. Their latest problem is an EU ruling that affects their French and Belgian operations from the British Isles because the preferential rates offered to RyanAir amount to a state subsidy (funny how state subsidies to farmers do not seem to get the same response, eh?) because the airports in question are all state owned:
The airport is owned by the Walloon regional government, which approved grants worth an estimated £5 million a year to subsidise landing and handling charges and marketing costs. Ryanair pays a landing fee 85 per cent lower than the list price. However, since the airline’s arrival, the annual passenger “throughput” at Charleroi has risen eight-fold to nearly two million, sharply boosting the local economy.
[…]
Managers say they would adopt the same approach for other publicly-owned airports. Negotiations are already under way with a dozen private alternatives. Some European countries, such as Italy, Germany and Sweden, have a significant number of non-state airports, but not France.
The solution is screamingly obvious. Privatise all the frigging airports in Belgium and France and the problem goes away! Duh.
One of the pleasures of British television as the nights get longer and darker is watching the gloriously laddish and unPC gentlemen on the BBC2 show TopGear, fronted by irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson, a sort of British version of P.J. O’Rourke. I am not quite sure how the great man continues to work in the Guardianista-infested corridors of power at the BBC, but maybe the bosses there feel they need at least someone like him to ‘appease Middle England’ or whatever.
Sunday night’s show had a number of good features, not least the bit when Jeremy and his two co-presenters drove a variety of BMW sports cars, very, very fast around the country lanes of the Isle of Man. Apart from some built-up areas, there are absolutely no speed limits on the island. Yep, not one.
At one point, one of the younger presenters – sorry, I forget his name – said this place was the motoring version of Fantasy Island. And Clarkson waxed lyrical about how the place was a ‘nanny-state free zone’.
Yes, I know it is just about cars. But somehow, I find it mighty encouraging that these sentiments get aired on prime-time British telly.
We rag on the BBC a lot in these parts, and rightly. Well, TopGear is a veritable oasis of petrol-head good sense. Clarkson for Prime Minister!
Tedd McHenry writes in with some creative musing on an idea that would allow even the most extreme privacy fetishist to harness a splendid cost minimizing technology whilst keeping the user shielded from intrusive data mining. With apologies to John Donne for the editor imposed title.
This idea was inspired by Highway 407 in Toronto, Canada, which is a toll highway. I do not know if it is privately managed, but it could be. I am very interested in both toll roads and private roads, which have been discussed before on samizdata.net. Highway 407 solves the toll-collection problem with two technologies. When a car enters and leaves highway 407 its licence plate is photographed, and that information is used to bill the owner for the distance traveled on the highway. Regular users can get a subscription wherein they mount a transponder on their car, which makes billing easier (and gives them a discount). Both of these technologies make toll roads much more viable by making toll collection cheaper and easier. But they both entail a very serious compromise of privacy, in that someone collects information on where and when your car travels.
The solution that occurred to me was to have, for lack of a better name, a privacy agent through which a car owner could subscribe to the highway. The transponder would be registered to the agent, and the agent would collect from the car owner. There would be no way for the bill to be tied to any actual person or vehicle.
Then it occurred to me that this system could be generalized for any service. You could interact with governments and markets through your privacy agent, much as subscribers to anonymizer.com interact with the web. Privacy agents could provide credit and debit card services allowing you to buy any product or service anonymously. Where a service requires identification (name, social insurance number, etc.) you would simply provide your privacy agent account number (and a PIN, to prevent fraud). Your public identity would be somewhat like a corporation, but with a reversal: whereas a corporation limits the liability of its owner but must publicly declare who he is, this body would not limit the liability of its owner but would also not publicly declare who he is.
There must be some holes in this plan, other than the obvious difficulty of selling it to politicians, but I am not coming up with them on my own. Any thoughts?
Tedd McHenry, Surrey, BC, Canada
I can not tell whether this is real or a joke. It could very easily be both of course.
Fuss has recently been made about an amphibious sports car, which seems genuine enough, if rather extravagant. But this, linked to by BoingBoing, is an amphibious bus, and is strictly for the luxury end of the bus market:
John and Julie Giljam, a married couple from South Carolina, created a first-class motor coach that doubles as a yacht.
The Terra Wind is an amphibious 42 ½ foot motor home. The RV can cruise down the highway at 80 mph, and when it hits water it becomes a yacht … with just a few maneuvers.
What it looks like when in water is a drowning bus caught in a flood. I seriously wonder how seaworthy it is. So how well is it doing?
The Giljams said there has been a lot of interest in the amphibious motor home. They plan to show it off at boat shows, RV shows and yacht shows.
Oh dear. “A lot of interest.” They “plan” to show it off at shows. This is salespeak for no one wants to buy the bloody thing. → Continue reading: Floating luxury bus anyone?
It seems self-indulgent to regale readers of this blog with a personal gripe, but indulge me a moment. Like all too many Londoners, I usually have to take our Tube (subway) system to work. It is unpleasant. It is irregular. It is often extremely noisy and the air pollution is bad. In the summer months, it is incredibly hot (we Brits cannot figure out airconditioning without bleating about how vastly expensive it is). And it seems a cult of incompetence has gripped the organisation that runs it, like ivy creeping around the trunk of a tree.
This morning, on the Victoria line, all trains north and south were halted “owing to a signal failure in the Kings Cross area.” At least that is what I thought the announcer mumbled into the microphone, though the voice was so hushed and marked by embarrassed pauses that he or she could have been announcing something entirely different, such as last night’s football scores.
We gung-ho capitalists may hope that an injection of raw, competitive private enterprise will blast all this complacency and mule-headed uselessness away. Maybe. But sometimes I wonder whether if the country that built the first great railway network 150 or more years ago is capable of every again running big engineering projects with a modicum of talent.
Right, I’ll cheer up now.
Just a reminder to anyone planning to tour Britain, this bank holiday weekend, by rail. Well, the bad news is, you can’t. The good news is that the cricket’s on.
That useless subsidy-addicted creature of government, Network Rail, has decided to shut down large parts of the rail network in order to create road chaos, sorry, in order to carry out essential engineering work. For instance, if you’re a small bear from Peru, with a fondness for marmalade, hoping to stowaway on a Great Western locomotive from Bristol to London, this weekend, don’t do it. Otherwise a whole series of books about you in the future will have to be named ‘The Adventures of Reading Bear’. Paddington station is closed.
If you’re old enough and stupid enough to remember voting for Mr Tony Blair, in 1997, on the back of the glittering promise that he would sort out Britain’s transport system, you’ll by now have realised that we only get what we wish for. For he’s well and truly sorted it, by turning it into a snake-pit! Why doesn’t the fool just hand it over to the Transport Blog, who’ll make a much better fist of it?
I myself shall be attempting to navigate a path, to Victoria, to take a train to Worthing to visit my mother-in-law (Reginald Perrin fans, please note, I am not making this up.) Let’s hope it’s not as warm and humid down in the Tube, this afternoon, as it was this morning on the Bakerloo line, where I literally thought I was going to liquefy. Yes, literally become a puddle of once human flesh.
I shall be imbibing a ridiculously over-sized bucket of iced gin and slim-line tonic, the moment I descend the steps at Worthing station, if I should get there before midnight. My advice to everyone else who can, is stay at home.
For those poor blighters, like me, having to travel: Good luck, everyone!
Blogging is unpredictable. It began as innocent posting by me about the Segway, which is a sort of mobile Zimmer frame, on Transport Blog.
Then Patrick Crozier, presiding boss of Transport Blog, made this rather more profound comment.
I have no idea whether the Segway is a good idea or not. But it strikes me as one in a long list of good ideas eg. bikes, roller skates, the C5, which might have been the answer to all sorts of our problems had it only been possible to give them the right sort of road space.
Take roller skates. Small, fast, relatively easy to learn. They should be fantastic. Lots of people should be using them. Why aren’t they? Because if you skate on the pavement you are constantly bumping into people and if you skate on the road you get run over (if not arrested).
But what if you had dedicated roller skate lanes or even dedicated roller skate highways? Different story – perhaps.
Incidentally, this is one of the most compelling reasons (I think) to want a free market in transport – because if entrepreneurs could do their own thing we might actually find out what forms of transport were actually (given all the factors) the best. We certainly aren’t going to find out so long as the state runs the show.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. → Continue reading: David Sucher on the necessity of states to contrive and maintain “infrastructure”
Kevin Connors talks about a certain British civil servant with a licence to kill, er, drive
Bond purists know that there are only two ‘proper’ cars for 007 to drive, an Aston or a Bentley. But for many years, while the British auto industry decayed, neither Aston or Bentley produced anything James would be caught dead in (book readers might recall Gardner gave him a Mulsanne Turbo in 1984). But over the last decade, the British Car business has been undergoing a renaissance, riding a wave of American and German capital and technology. The fruits of this are really starting to come now. Two years ago, Aston Martin (now owned by Ford) introduced their beautiful V12 Vanquish, seen in last year’s Die Another Day. But still, relative to the breathtaking Ferrari 575M Maranello, it’s only real competition, most automotive commentators declared it an also-ran. (While the comparison is far closer than that of the classic DB5, introduced in Goldfinger, and the 1964 Ferrari 500 Superfast, to say nothing of the incomparable 250GTO. Even the Lamborghini 350GT and Maserati 3500 GT, would likely have cleaned the DB5’s clock.)
Now, all that is behind us. After many teases, Bentley Motor Cars, (now owned by Volkswagen) is finally releasing their latest masterpiece, the Bentley Continental GT:
It has no competition.
This 4 passenger, 5000lb, W-12, AWD monster does 0-60 in 4.7 seconds, the same as a Porsche Carrera. It tops out at 198 mph, faster than all but a handful of 2 seat super-exotics. All this while coddling the passengers in the lap of luxury.
With plenty of room for Q to hide toys, this is a car Commander Bond would love. Of course, the next car 007 actually drives will be determined by the real world consideration of how much the manufacturers are willing to pony up in product placement money. And, although the producers know the fans want to see Bond in a British car (and not a plastic toy Lotus, even if it does go underwater), If Toyota forked over enough, James might be driving the new Supra.
BUT WAIT!
There’s a new player on the scene
I didn’t consider this at first, because of the leading name on the moniker. However, on further consideration, there’s likely more actual British engineering and manufacturing content in this than the Bentley. Ladies and gentleman, coming in about six months, I give you the revolutionary Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren:
As opposed to the Bentley’s porcine two and a half ton mass, carbon composite construction helps keep the SLR to a svelte one and three-quarters. This, along with slightly greater horsepower (580, not 605 as stated on spec. sheet), shave a full second off the Bentley’s 0-60 time. Top speed is 211 mph. A handful of currently available automobiles are in the performance league with the SLR: the Lamborghini Murcielago (also VW, btw), the Pagani Zonda C12-S 7.2, the Ferrari Enzo, and the Saleen S7. But all these are, to one degree or another, racing cars for the street. The SLR promises to be the first super-exotic that’s also a viable daily driver.
Of course, the SLR costs (before Q-izing) two or three times the price of the Bentley. But, to Her Majesty’s Government, it’s just chump change seeing as they have all those taxpayers to call on.
Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I’m sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.
His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between “Right to Roam” legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain’s railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.
The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn’t occur. Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.
The folk at Network Rail are – wisely – looking out for number one:
“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”
Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:
I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.
And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …
… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.
David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.
Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.
“Joined up government” is what David calls his posting. You can’t get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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