It is difficult or even impossible to say without knowing exactly how everything would be divvied up, and just about every aspect of it makes your head hurt to think about it.

So, without being prejudiced by either agreeing or disagreeing with him, I thought that Salmond spoke well. Not bad rhetoric and didn’t go on for hours. More impressive was the parliament itself – both the building and its inhabitants. It all seemd a lot more grown-up than Westminster where proceedings always seem to boisterous and rowdy, especially for major events. I guess that today’s speech was a pretty big deal in Scotland and yet it all looked quite civilised.

It might be because there are fewer members crammed in or because the facilities are better or a bit of both, but I do wish our own parliament was in such a place, with the chair behind a desk instead of on a throne, and where each member has their own desk where they can put papers and have a bit of elbow room.

I know that not everybody shares the objections in principle (the principle being that any savings will end up coming at the expense of staff and by ramping up prices) so here is a practical objection. The story from the Crawley News which reads like it has been largely cut and pasted from a council press release, says that the new management company

…has experience in running theatres, being part way through a ten-year contract to manage the Playhouse Theatre and Winter Gardens complex in Weston-Super-Mare.

Slightly weaselly words there. When it says ‘part way through a ten-year contract’ it implies a lot of experience. Reading it you focus on ten years rather than part way. How big a part is it exactly? The contract in Weston-Super-Mare started in April 2011 so it has now been running for 9 months. Presumably the negotiations and tendering process will have taken a while, so conceivably at the time they put in their bid the only experience they had of running a large theatre was in winning a contract and not in successfully managing it for any length of time.

The real concern, therefore, is that not only has the deal been made with what is effectively an unproven company but that it is locked in for ten years. That is a long time to live with it if they turn out to not be so good after all.

It is almost as if the Tories running the council want to get us locked into the deal quickly and for a long time while they still can. Are they starting to get a bit worried about keeping control of the town hall in May?

I think we had in mind the billions of revenue the country loses from profits diverted to tax havens, non-domiciles not paying income tax, all the cash hidden in Swiss bank accounts, and other assorted tax dodges rather than the estimated £140m lost to LVCR. Strictly speaking it is a loophole and therefore not a good thing, but many people who benefit from it don’t even realise that the reason they are getting a bargain is because they are not paying VAT. I don’t think many people set up a subsidiary in the Caymans or shove the odd few million into a Swiss bank do it blindly.

I guess the argument is that it is what business jargon these days calls ‘low-hanging fruit’ but if you follow that analogy it is unripe fruit with little nutritious value that is being picked while the plump juicy stuff stays on the tree. In equally modern terms, the government is closing the tiny tax loophole used by the 99% while leaving the huge gaping loopholes used by the 1% wide open for their friends and sponsors.

From the front page of the Obby, 26/10/2011

Breakfast was made much more amusing today courtesy of the Crawley Observer and what the youth of today would no doubt call an epic fail.

In such a busy environment as the Obby offices maybe it does only feel like a few months since May 2010…

Not a good day to be a Tory MP really, with that terrible balancing act between keeping on the right side of Cameron and appeasing the local association, and if you decided to vote ‘for’ you find yourself in in the lobby with such a likeable crowd… (Redwood, Dorries, Paisley, Chope, Carswell, Cash, Hooey, Vaz)

I see from the list of ‘rebels’ that Crawley’s Henry Smith provisionally voted ‘for’. I say provisionally because I haven’t seen the list of who voted against, so can’t be sure that he hasn’t done another of his hyperactive abstentions.

Yet again, I found myself watching it fixated not so much on the issue of the day so much as the sheer idiocy of having business at that time of night combined with the amount of time it takes to vote on a simple yes/no matter because of having to traipse through lobbies instead of pushing a button and getting an instant result.

It turns out to mean pseudo-charities like Atlantic Bridge and individuals like Adam Wewwity taking over from the civil service and arranging meetings for cabinet ministers with foreign businessmen. Why didn’t they just say so in the first place?

This meeting is in Friary Hall, Crawley (by the bus station) on October 19th at 7:30pm.

The invited speakers are Norman Baker MP, John McDonnel MP, Henry Smith MP, Bill Randall (Leader of B&H council), Bob Lanzer (Leader of Crawley council), Eileen Short (from Defend Council Housing) and Robin Burnham (Independent Tenants Association)

Worth going if only to see how many of the 7 turn up. I’m guessing at least 5. But it is a serious topic and a topical one. In the Guardian today there is a scary story about unaffordable private rents which backs up all the points made in the flyer for this meeting, except it is even worse. The flyer says that private rents can top £1000 a month, but the Guardian story features a family in Brighton who are paying £1550 a month on rent out of their take-home pay of about £2000.

Of course, £2000 a month means they earn too much for a council house and they are not likely to save up for a 25% deposit with the £500 a month they have for food, clothes, heating, etc. so they are stuck there unless something is done to reduce the demand for private rentals – like building more social housing.

If you can’t make it and want to sign their petition go to http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk and search for Housing crisis! Build council houses.

Regardless of intentions it is a poor idea for several reasons, as others have pointed out. We have all sorts of web filters on at work, so I have seen first-hand what the drawbacks are, with perfectly fine sites being blocked (false positives) and then a false sense of security leading you to getting truly astonished when something you weren’t expecting pops up on the screen – a colleague was searching for information on the GIMP image editing program with hilarious consequences, for example.

If you are really worried about what kids might see on a computer then why not try parenting instead of delegating that job to machines? We are not yet at a stage where all human problems have a technological solution.

More worrying is knowing that some of the sites deemed unsuitable will be sites giving advice on sexual health, abortions and similar. I imagine that if you are growing up in the house of the sort of person pushing these measures then the internet is about the only place you would be able to get such information. And that is just the foot in the door. How long before the paramaters are widened to include sites of political extremists: something that is very much a matter of subjective opinion.

But still I am inspired by the whole thing because it has given me an idea. Why not say OK, but only if religious sites are included as well? If the argument is going to be used that children are vulnerable and should be protected from brainwashing into thinking that certain things are acceptable before they are old enough to make up their own minds I can’t think of a better example of that than religion.

If that fails then let’s just make sure the Daily Mail website with its dozens of photos of semi-naked almost-celebrities gets included in the net.

As a result of having a new toy to play with I probably took a lot more portrait-type photos that I should have done. Here are a few of the pics.

Some of the food

Polish dancing

Manny, stalwart of the CCAR committee and work colleague

Jim - another work colleague, and one of my favourite photos

Jayne - she came along when her shift finished to take me home

Not that it is very feasible, but one reason why I like the idea of a very fast rail connection between Gatwick and Heathrow is that I was saying ten years ago that we should have one. During the last government’s study of runway capacity and expansion there was a lot of talk about hub airports and how Heathrow with its number of terminals and runways could not compete with Schipol, Roissy and Frankfurt, but a shuttle that takes less than 10 minutes to get between airports effectively makes Gatwick and Heathrow a single airport. It took me longer than that to get from one gate at Singapore airport to one at the other end once.

It was always unfeasible, since it would need to be a deep tunneling operation like the channel tunnel and even then would be under a lot of the richest areas of the UK, also the greatest benefit would be if it was a free or very cheap service – who would be choosing London airport over Paris if there was an additional £20 to get from one terminal to another?

Such an idea would be a lot harder to do now than it was ten years ago when Heathrow and Gatwick were owned by the same company.