A review of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
March 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I love films and one of my favourite genres is the superhero movie.
I liked “Captain America: The First Avenger” [my review here] and this weekend I enjoyed even more “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” [my review here].
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Why did the Black Death spread so quickly?
March 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
In the 14th century the Black Death ravaged Asia and Europe, killing up to 200 million in total, including around 60% of the population of London.
It has long been assumed that the disease spread so quickly because of rats, but new evidence unearthed in London now suggests that it was an air-borne disease. So it was not bubonic plague but a pneumonic plague.
See story here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Sometimes it’s a good idea to revisit an old film: “Salvador”
March 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’m a big movie fan and I’ve put hundreds of film reviews on my web site here. But I don’t see the same film more than once very often because there are so many other movies that I want to view.
However, this weekend, I rented a film that I first saw in the cinema 27 years ago. It is the Oliver Stone movie “Salvador” which I have reviewed here.
I wanted to see the work again because I recently visited El Salvador and went to a couple of locations associated with the long-running civil war featured in the film. You can read about my time in the country here.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
Catching up with Catrin
March 29th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
As regular visitors to this blog will know, i usually try to see my adorable three year old granddaughter Catrin once a week. Here’s a couple of photos from our delightful time together this week.
Catrin attempts to set a new world record
for how much frozen yoghurt one can get into
the standard cup. She only ate some of it.
Who needs a buggy when one can take
a scooter to and from nursery?
Catrin acquires new independence.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
What now for consumer representation in the UK?
March 28th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
As I explained in this posting, Consumer Futures – formerly Consumer Focus – is about to transfer to Citizens Advice.
The organisation has put together a short document to capture the essence of its time as Consumer Focus and Consumer Futures, so that it is on record for future interested parties and as a handover to the successor bodies.
“Building on the past, Focused on the future” outlines the environment the organisation has worked in, the key themes it has learnt, and some of its achievements.
I hope that Citizens Advice will make my Consumer Futures colleagues welcome and strengthen the representation of consumer interests in the energy and postal sectors and indeed other regulated industries.
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
How a decent level of welfare can actually promote economic growth
March 28th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“There is no general correlation between the size of the welfare state and the growth performance of an economy. To cite a rather striking example, despite having a welfare state that is 50% bigger than that of the US (29.4% of GDP as against 19.2% of GDP in the US, in 2009), Finland has grown much faster. Between 1960 and 2010 Finland’s average annual per capita income growth rate was 2.7%, against 2% for the US. This means that during this period US income rose 2.7 times while Finland’s rose by 3.8 times.
The point is that the welfare state – if well designed and coordinated with labour market policies to re-train people and get them back into work – can encourage people to be more accepting of change, thereby promoting growth. Firms in countries such as Finland and Sweden can introduce new technologies faster than their US competitors because, knowing that unemployment need not mean penury and long-term joblessness, their workers do not resist these changes strongly.”
This is the fundamental point made in a piece published today written by Ha-Joon Chang who teaches economics at Cambridge University.
Posted in Social policy | Comments (0)
How BIG is the solar system?
March 27th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The short answer is: it is larger than you thought – and even astronomers are having to recalibrate their estimates.
The solar system consists of the four inner planets (including our own), the asteroid belt, the four outer planets (or five if you count Pluto), and then the Kuiper Belt and probably the Oort Cloud.
But now we have the news that:
“Astronomers have increased the size of the observable solar system after spotting a 450-km wide object orbiting the sun. The lump of ice and rock circles the sun at a greater distance than any known object, and never gets closer than 12bn kilometres – 80 times the distance from Earth to the sun.
If its size is confirmed it could qualify as a dwarf planet in the same category as Pluto. Researchers said the discovery proves the existence of the inner Oort cloud, a region of icy bodies that lies far beyond the orbit of Neptune – which at 4.5bn kilometres from the sun is the most remote planet in the solar system.
Until a proper name is decided upon, the body is known only as 2012 VP113. According to the science journal Nature, the team that discovered it call it VP for short, or “Biden”, after US vice president Joe Biden.”
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
How will the crisis over Crimea ‘end’?
March 26th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“We know where this is likely to end. We will accept Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea. Sanctions will be quietly dismantled, Moscow will reassure Kiev with a deal on neutrality. Nato will agree no further eastward expansion. The G7 will again become G8; and Crimea will join Tibet, Kosovo, East Timor, Chechnya, Georgia and other territorial interventions which history students will struggle to remember. But how do we get from here to there?”
This is a the opening to a column in today’s “Guardian” by Simon Jenkins which presents a nuanced and hard-headed look at the crisis over the Crimea.
Jenkins asserts:
“Putin emerges from this crisis not as clever and calculating but as an emotional, scary figure, lonely and alarmingly bereft of checks or balances. His seizure of Crimea has been popular and, in the scheme of things, no big outrage against international order. But the sabre-rattling along Nato’s eastern border is as provocative as were the careless antics of Nato and the EU in Kiev over recent years. Putin too needs a bridge over which to retreat.”
You can read the column by Simon Jenkins here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The end of the dream that was Consumer Focus
March 25th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
At the time of the last Labour Government, there was a grand project to pull together all the statutory consumer bodies – most representing consumers in a particular regulated sector – into one integrated consumer voice. Ofcom resisted the inclusion of its newly-formed Consumer Panel, the Department of Transport kept Passenger Focus outside the scheme, and the possibility of including CCWater was eventually made the subject of a future statutory review.
But the relevant legislation did merge Postwatch, Energywatch and the National Consumer Council into a new body which the Act called the New National Consumer Council but the organisation itself branded Consumer Focus. Funding for Consumer Focus came from three sources: from the big six energy companies for the energy work, from Royal Mail for the postal work, and from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills for the work on the general economy which included a bit of communications work on issues like switching and mobile.
In the run-up to the General Election of 2010, things looked pretty good for Consumer Focus. The BIS funding was reasonable given the economic circumstances and it was proposed that a new post of Consumer Advocate be created and located in Consumer Focus. Then came the Coalition Government and the so-called ‘bonfire of the quangos’ via the all-embracing Public Bodies Act.
So the review of the position of CCWater never took place, the idea of a Consumer Advocate was abandoned, and the Government decided that Ofcom’s Consumer Panel – by then called the Communications Consumer Panel – and all the work of Consumer Focus should be transferred to Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland.
Ofcom was originally willing to see the Panel go to Citizens Advice but changed its mind and instead decided to retain the Communications Consumer Panel and the Advisory Committee for the Older and Disabled but to merge them (a process which formally requires a statutory instrument under the Public Bodies Act but the relevant SI has still not been passed).
Meanwhile the work of Consumer Focus outside energy and posts was transferred to Citizens Advice a year ago with much reduced funding from BIS. The remaining parts of Consumer Focus have been rebranded Consumer Futures and transfer to Citizens Advice at the end of this month. The last Board meeting of Consumer Futures takes place today and last night there was a farewell dinner for past and present Board members of Consumer Focus/ Consumer Futures.
So, where does this leave us? In my view, it leaves us with a consumer voice in the regulated sectors which is much less well resourced and much weaker than before this grand project began. It also leaves us with a very uneven representation of consumers in different regulated sectors: there is a statutory, stand-alone consumer voice on communications within the regulator; there are statutory, stand-alone consumer voices for transport and water outside the regulators; and there are consumer voices for energy and posts in a special unit of a non-statutory organisation.
Finally, I must declare that I am far from a disinterested observer of all this. I was the Member for England on the Communications Consumer Panel for its first eight nd a half years; I was the Greater London Council members on Postwatch for its last three years; I was a member of the Board of Consumer Focus for its first three years; and, for the last two years, i have worked with CCWater colleagues in my current role as Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water.
I wish all my colleagues well in all the consumer organisations mentioned in this posting. At this time of austerity more than ever, consumers need a strong, properly-resourced voice across the different market sectors, especially where choice of service provider is difficult, limited or non-existent. And, one way or another, consumer bodies have to work more closely together because most of the time consumers do not see their lives through the prism of a particular industry sector and often the most vulnerable face similar issues across sectors.
Footnote: This blog posting was published as a feature in the magazine “Utility Week”.
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
Word of the day: coprolite
March 24th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
When I come across a new word, I like to look it up and try to remember it . I am currently reading the J K Rowling novel “The Casual Vacancy” and she uses a word with which I was unfamiliar.
It is ‘coprolite’ which I have learned means fossilised animal dung. Apparently this is important for paleontologists but Rowling uses the world in a metaphorical sense.
More information here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)