AIRSTRIP ONE

On Monday 17th November 2003 feeding pigeons in London’s Trafalgar Square became illegal and anyone caught feeding the birds faced a prosecution and a £50 fine. The penalty fine has since been increased to £500.

In 2002, before the feeding ban was imposed, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone hired a pair of Harris Hawks to fly over the Square and scare the pigeons away. This measure cost £44,343 in 2002, their first year, rising to £78,241 in 2003/2004. In 2005/2006 they cost £38,160. Figures show that “Operation Harris Hawk” resulted in the deaths of 121 pigeons and cost tax-payers an average of £90 per bird and bringing the pigeon population of Trafalgar Square down by 121 could hardly be considered a large step forward in the science of pigeon management.

One wonders why the pigeon population has to be “managed” at all. Yes, they do make a mess but hardly more so than people dropping gum and litter in the Square. Surely the pigeons have been an integral part of Trafalgar Square for a century or more. Tourists expect to see them there. I remember standing in the Square as a small boy in the 1960s, with seed on my arms and being smothered in pigeons. I enjoyed the novel experience and I remember getting “hit” a few times by pigeon poo. My father told me that it was “lucky” and that whenever it happened I should make a wish. I survived the poo. I didn’t catch any nasty diseases and lived on to tell the story forty years later.

Since 2003 the perceived wisdom of banning pigeon-feeding has been adopted by councils throughout the land and people have even been fined for feeding birds in their own back gardens. In 2006 Portsmouth City Council managed to fine Ruth Shorter £100 for a “littering offence”. She was dropping bird seed for pigeons near her home. She was taken to court and had to pay an additional £250 in costs. The court heard how Mrs Shorter suffered from depression but took “great pleasure” in feeding the pigeons. One wonders how much the NHS is paying to treat her depression now that she is unable to feed the birds.

When the ASBO (Anti-social Behaviour Order) was created we all rubbed our hands together with glee and imagined that at long last something would be done to curb badly behaved yobs. Little did we know that the new powers were to be used against Bernard Humbleton, a 66-year-old bird lover with terminal cancer and Graham Branfield who had the temerity to feed birds with left-overs in his own back garden. Oldham Council are considering an ASBO for Dawn Benson and Norma Hughes faces eviction if she continues to feed the birds in her front garden.

All over the country from Trowbridge to Derby councils are waging war against the humble pigeon. Why do some people hate pigeons so much?

Are we forgetting the valiant pigeons who have served their country in times of war? Should we stop feeding Chelsea Pensioners too? A pigeon called Gustav was the first to bring back news of D-Day to the UK. He was awarded the “Dickin Medal” along with 31 other pigeons; all birds that carried secret messages during WWII. Their story was recently made into a Hollywood film, “Valiant” staring Ewan MacGregor.

In 2004 the Princess Royal unveiled a memorial sculpture to the animals that served and died alongside British and allied troops and a batch of pigeons was released as a part of the unveiling ceremony. In the same year a Dicken medal awarded to a pigeon called “Commando” was auctioned in London.

A loophole in the law meant that until recently pigeons could be fed from the North side of Trafalgar Square but since this loophole was closed the pigeons have been dying in droves and this week an organisation called the “Pigeon Action Group” held a candlelight vigil in the Square for 2,500 birds. Post mortem tests have shown that the birds have been literally starving to death.

According to the BBC News today, Westminster Council’s efforts to ban feeding does not end with the birds. They are now trying to ban charities from running soup kitchens for homeless people and their typically “Orwellian” justification defies common sense. In a masterful piece of “doublespeak” they claim that it is the soup kitchens themselves which actually keep people on the streets; an interesting-sounding but plainly nonsensical intellectual justification for those minor local bureaucrats who already have warm homes and enough to eat but who would like to “eliminate” homeless people.

My only worry is that this attempt to “eliminate” could see our homeless people eventually suffering the same fate as the pigeons.

Do the British people really deserve a lecture on how-to-haggle in shops as a part of their morning news fodder?

Bollocks! No they don’t.

It is 8.30 a.m. and the last thing I want to be told over my morning coffee is that I should be haggling in shops. If I were to be offered such bad advice then the last person I’d want to be offered it by would be a very ugly and super-sized American woman with thick black horn rimmed glasses and a certain amount of pride in the roles of flab she chooses to display through her see-through blouse.

We don’t walk into Woolies and start haggling! This is not our way you stupid American! That’s not our culture. We aren’t talking about a market place in Jurusalem. We are talking about British high street shops.

I’m sure that if one were to haggle, a shop assistant or floor manager might eventually be willing to knock off a fiver but Life isn’t simply about getting away with as much as one can and attempting to live with such an attitude is a sure way to change the landscape in the long-term. If everybody suddenly started haggling in the shops then retailers would simply change their pricing models to match the culture. Nothing would be gained and a civilised way of doing things would be lost.

So, shame on the BBC for giving this tent-wearing vacuous waste-of-space the opportunity to talk to the whole country (indeed, the World) on the TV News! Get real BBC, this is not news it’s pure bollocks.

The Ministry of Truth today announced that a long-term study into the achievements of the Airstrip One Youth Corps shows that social injustice between individual members is largely caused differences of parental affluence. A senior Minitrue member of the Inner Party said, “The research suggests that clever children from poor families face being overtaken by less bright children from affluent backgrounds”.

The Ministry immediately announced plans to hasten the responsibility of the State for Youth Corps members as well as introducing a new initiative to limit the wealth of the individual. Parental responsibility has been decreased by 4% per annum over the last 10 years and this rate will increase to 6% per annum. This means that the state will accept full responsibility for all Youth Corps membership by the year 2027; doubleplusgood for all parents.

Commenting on the new Minitrue initiative Big Brown Brother said “Only by levelling the wealth of the individual members of Airstrip One will we be able to combat this social injustice. When the State assumes full responsibility for the Youth Corps then all members will be equally provided for.” He added that the initiative had been sanctioned by a secret ballot of Inner Party members without there having been a single vote of dissent.

In this day and age of cable TV, video and the Internet it is easy to forget that only seventy years ago we were stumbling around in “the dark”.

It must have been exiting to be living at that time,

Here is a suggestion for anyone who would like to experience the sense of wonder that is no longer possible today.

Get yourself a recording of H.G. Wells’ original radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” and start listening to it from three minutes in to it (as many people at that time did, due to a boring broadcast on the only other radio chanel available). Light a candle and turn out the lights. Then listen to it and imagine yourself as living in the late 1930s without any TV or internet. Listen to the whole thing with just one candle buring.

My, oh my. What an experience!

It is no wonder that people panicked and got into their cars with all their valuables to drive away from the “alien invason”.

By comparison, “Alien” and “2001 A Space Odyssey” are like “The Magic Roundabout”!

Two news stories caught my eye today.

The first is the on-going debate about GM foods; controversy that is principally perpetuated by a lobby group known as The Soil Association.

Let’s face it, if this group did not exist then we would all be eating GM food right now.

The World Health Organisation says that GM foods are safe and Americans have been eating the stuff for over ten years. To date, not one single US citizen or organisation has brought a law case against a company for selling GM foods.

The other story is the small level of protest in China by those who disagree with the building of the Three Gorges Dam, an enormous project that will ultimately bring clean electricity to millions of people who are presently exposed to dangerous levels of smoke inhalation as a result of having to cook over open fires.

The green lobby in the West has considerably slowed the progress of the building of this dam through lobbying the World Bank into withdrawing their support for the project but despite this unfair meddling by home-county-type liberals (who already have clean drinking water and plenty of electricity) the Chinese government has pushed forward with the project and the dam is expected to be finished within another three years.

Where is the connection between these two stories?

Well, they both illustrate that pressure from the heart-following greens in the West has a detrimental effect on the scientifically-based reason used to try and solve the World’s big problems.

The best thing we can do to aid the third world is help them industrialise. Surely the people in the third world deserve not to die from water-borne disease? Do they not also deserve to have electricity so that they can breath clean air? Yet our well-meaning, but mostly ignorant heart-following (rather than head-following) green lobby is preventing their industrialisation by portraying their way of life in a romantic way. They are seen as living “naturally” unlike us, the evil people of the West who are just raping the planet.

This is dangerous nonsense.

From the same clouded thinking also comes the story, this morning, that three protesters have chained themselves across a supply road to Sizewell Nuclear Power Station. They are protesting against the present populist thinking that supports the building of new nuclear power stations.

The fact is that we do need electricity and have learned, in the last twenty years, that Nuclear Power, if produced responsibly, is probably the cleanest way of producing it. Sure, the disposal of the waste produced is undoubtedly an obstacle that must be overcome but at a mundane level, that’s what the modern scientific “machine” is there for; to find solutions to these sorts of problems. Who knows what the future holds? Maybe we can blast the waste into space and towards the Sun, where it will be just another drop in an ocean.

History teaches us that progress is only made by those who dare. If we stopped to examine the ramifications of every new technology under the microscope, there would be no progress at all.