Letters From A Tory

…I’m going on holiday so blogging is postponed until 7/8th January.  Have a fantastic New Year and I will return to the blogosphere in 2008, fully refreshed from some scuba diving in Egypt.

Best wishes

A.Tory

Dear readers,

I admit to being quite poorly versed in the intracies of Pakistani politics, but the death of Benazir Bhutto strikes me as a serious blow to establishing a stable and peaceful country.  Here is a short news report from the excellent Al-Jazeera TV on the background to yesterday’s assasination:

Another very helpful video was produced by Jason Burke, the Observer’s Chief Foreign Correspondent which you can watch by clicking HERE.

“I get to hang around with all the best women. Drive the fastest cars, travel in speedboats and private jets, sleep in the best hotels and have beautiful women pursuing me from all over the world. It’s absolutely bloody awful”

- James Bond actor Daniel Craig

I consider myself very fortunate to have acquired a hint of political clairvoyance over the Christmas period.  For example, many commentators are already suggesting that Hilary Clinton has left it too late to start a fightback against Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination - but through my incredible clairvoyance I can predict with some certainty that she will leave it exactly 11 days too late.

“So, remind me again, how does the Thunderball thing work?”

There are many people in and around the world of politics who deserve to be mocked for all sorts of reasons - be it incompetence, poor dress sense, inability to make any sense, compulsive liars etc.  I am usually happy to jump on the bandwagon and make fun of these people like everyone else - but I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever be stupid enough to show such disregard for my own personal safety by making fun of Chuck Norris.

Dear David Davis,

I assure you that many other people also have grave concerns about gun crime in this country.  On Christmas Eve, London witnessed yet another horrific shooting that has left a boy fighting for his life.  In a bizarre parallel, this reminds me of the frequent scandals about the government losing our personal data time and time again to the point where we don’t even pay much attention to the latest story, having heard so many similar tales before.

Your view on gun crime is perfectly clear - we need more armed police officers.  I’m not sure how far I agree with this because there are surely less ‘inflammatory’ measures that should be taken, bearing in mind that the police having more guns on the streets may encourage others to do so.  Why does the government continually fail to stop the guns entering the country?  We have lost control of our own borders and the accompanying influx of criminals and increased access to weapons is very disturbing.  Foreign criminals remaining in the country is another related problem that should be addressed simultaneously.

Apologies for the sombre letter during the festive season, but I fear that 2008 will bring even greater loss of life due to gun crime than we have seen this year and one can only hope that the government does something about it for a change.

With season’s greetings,

A.Tory

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 1 in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second — 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them— Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance — this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accellerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

But regardless of Santa, Merry Christmas to all my readers and I hope you have a wonderful day.

… here is something that always makes me laugh.  Put the volume up and enjoy this classic clip from South Park.

“Please have a wonderful Christmas. Drink too much. Eat too much. Don’t feel guilty about the presents you give or those that you receive. Care not for your carbon footprint or the impact of your naked consumerism. Be happy. And remember, you are having a much better time than Gordon Brown because he has no friends and you’ve lots”

- Jeremy Clarkson

Dear Allan Mallinson,

I think what surprised me most about your article in the Telegraph this morning was that you sounded surprised.  With Labour getting hammered in the polls week after week, it does not surprise me in the slightest that Gordon Brown is trying to appear more ‘British’ and provide some nice soundbites that suggest he gives a damn about the Armed Forces.

Cynical as it may be, Gordon Brown will obviously jump on any bandwagon he can to erase the memories of his government’s incompetence over the past few months.  The public have turned against him and he knows it.  When stuck in the middle of crisis, what safer way of trying to woo the public back to supporting the government than coming out in favour of our Armed Forces.  Thankfully after the debacle during conference season where he tried to play us all about the troop withdrawal from Iraq, people just don’t believe him anymore.  As you pointed out, his Christmas message to our troops rings hollow in their ears after years and years of underfunding and overstretching their resources as Chancellor.

I wish our troops a Merry Christmas, as I’m sure you do too.  Better luck next time, Gordon.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

In the fight against global terror, I am always happy to see a government planning for all eventualities in order to protect the public.  However, sometimes I really feel that governments can take their planning a little too far.

Dear Royal Mail,

Your managers must clearly be living in a bottomless pit, because otherwise they would have noticed that over the past few years online shopping has become increasingly popular.  With the extremely cold weather (by British standards, anyway) that we’ve had for the last couple of weeks, it was blindingly obvious that Christmas shopping was going to lean towards the internet - a means of shopping that is growing all the time, irrespective of the Christmas break.

To read that Royal Mail will fail to deliver around 2 million presents this Christmas is shameful.  You are literally messing around with people’s lives and yet the best that can be thrown at you is Postwatch - the pathetically weak independent watchdog for your pathetic service - saying that they think you should improve your service.  I have a much better idea: break up Royal Mail and have regional mail providers competing against each other to make sure that we get a good service and our letters and parcels arrive on time.

Yours in a thoroughly un-Christmassy spirit,

A.Tory

“I think anyone who knows me will tell you I’d make a pretty disruptive sheep”

- Iain Dale, being interviewed about his new political magazine (no, seriously)

Dear Unite,

I am sick and tired of this.  Here you are yet again, crying like little babies about BAA, who own most of the airports in this country, closing their final salary pension scheme to new employees and now you are threatening to strike.

There are two things I would like to say to this.  Firstly, why the hell should members of the public be made to suffer because you are annoyed with your employer?  What will your strike action achieve, other than heap misery on this country?  If you think that any of us will support your strike action, you are horribly mistaken.  Secondly, do you have any idea how many companies have closed their final salary pension scheme?  It’s been all over the news for two or three years at least, with huge numbers of public and private sector employers being unable to afford it.  The fact that all of your union members will strike over BAA’s decision, which only affects new employees in any case and has absolutely no effect whatsoever on current employees, makes you look even more stupid.

Grow up and do your job.  You have no grounds for striking and the public will hate you for it.

With great contempt,

A.Tory

Everyone knows how much trauma can be inflicted on a child throughout their time at school purely on the basis of having a weird first name or surname, but some parents really do have it in for their kids.

Dear Nick Herbert,

Good job on holding the government to account over the spectacular failure in deporting foreign criminals, despite Gordon Brown pretending to talk tough a little while ago on this very subject.

I don’t know what the Conservative Party’s plans would be if they come to power at the next election.  To my mind, this is one of those desperately simple issues.  If a foreign national is found guilty of a crime in this country, they get deported.  We take their fingerprint and personal details and make sure they never ever ever ever are allowed back into the country.  It seems so blindingly obvious, but I doubt the Conservative Party would risk getting into trouble about this so I won’t be surprised if they hold off making any firm commitments to a policy.  Prison places are in short supply in this country and yet 11,000 of the 81,000 people in our prisons are foreigners.  A simple solution could save a lot of time and money and I think you’d be surprised how popular it would be with people from across the political spectrum.

I await your future announcements with great interest.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

“I think this team is the strongest political team in British politics today”

- Nick Clegg, on announcing his Lib Dem cabinet after having a few too many down the pub

A charming and pleasant political moment or cynical electioneering using your family?

Dear Alan Johnson,

It is hard to know where to direct this letter, seeing as the current situation with regard to GP’s pay has been building up for years.  Even so, your tough talking on the latest pay increase for GPs will ultimately be fruitless unless you bribe them with even more taxpayers’ money.

Let’s start by reiterating a few important points.  In 2004 GPs worked shorter hours for 25% more pay thanks to a new government contract, and in 2006 the average earnings of GPs increased by nearly 10% to more than £110,000 in just one year.  If you are trying to tell me that GP’s are working 35% longer hours or seeing 35% more patients than they were in 2004, you deserve to be taken out the back and given a metaphorical kicking.  The latest bribe of £150m is apparently designed to be a sweetener for GPs to work longer hours, which shows how completely out of control GP’s pay and conditions are.

When the government is in charge of the NHS, this is the kind of ridiculously one-sided ‘negotiation’ that the taxpayer faces.  If GPs don’t get what they want, they refuse to reform their practices.  Value for money with regard to GPs will only be achieved when the NHS is handed over to independent firms who will only pay doctors, nurses, consultants and everyone else in the NHS for the work they do and the quality of service they provide.  This is why the consumer must have the power in the NHS and not the government.  If you read my NHS paper uploaded onto this blog, you might begin to understand why this is so important - but I suppose you are too busy trying to bribe GPs to worry about long-term solutions.

Yours in frustration,

A.Tory

I always assumed that most people enjoyed seeing Santa Claus around town when they do their Christmas shopping, which goes some way to explaining why I didn’t realise that his work sometimes entails negotiating a hail of bullets.

Dear Jim Knight,

Very clever indeed.  Most impartial observers might think nothing of it, but the fact that UCAS made a key announcement about the new school diplomas about an hour before the Lib Dem leadership announcement was as deliberate and cynical as it gets - a good day to bury disgraceful news.

So let’s cut to the chase.  You think that your new diplomas (which over 60% of universities don’t recognise as good enough and the Russell Group are still deciding whether they are worth anything) are worth over 3 A-levels in terms of UCAS points for university admissions, do you?  You are therefore saying that a diploma in Hair and Beauty is three times as valuable to the British economy than someone who achieves A-grades in Physics, Maths and Chemistry?  Are you completely insane?!?!  Let’s look at this carefully - Labour create the new diplomas, only for schools and universities to turn round and say that they are worthless compared to A-levels and they won’t recognise them.  So what does Labour do?  Talk to business leaders and improve the syllabuses? Engage in consultation with the universities and schools to see what they would prefer?  Of course not.  You just bribe them instead.  £1,000 extra cash for schools for every student that takes a diploma, and make the diplomas worth so many UCAS points that someone can study a single stupid vocational qualification and end up with more points for a university application than someone with over 3 A-grades who is applying to do Medicine at Oxford or Cambridge.

To arrogantly announce that “pupils can now be confident they will study valuable, first-class qualifications when they take a diploma, and universities and colleges can be assured of their quality” is complete rubbish because you have just made diplomas appear more valuable to bribe schools into offering them and coerce universities into accepting them, instead of relying on the quality of the diplomas to convince them (which was of course never going to work).

It is absolutely sickening that you can interfere with the futures of schools and universities like this by sneaking through such a devastating blow to education in this country.  You are condemning academic qualifications to the scrapheap without any justification other than Labour’s desperation to be seen as doing something, but yet again your efforts will waste tens of millions of pounds and achieve little.

Yours in complete disgust,

A.Tory

“Now I know what you’re all thinking - 3 million sounds like a large number….”

If any readers of this blog remain unconvinced about the intelligence of the average American, it will come as no surprise that there is now scientific evidence demonstrating that Americans can be out-smarted by a monkey.

Dear The Independent,

Thank you for an interesting leading article today on the government’s proposals to set in motion “the biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history”.  As always with Labour, it is more of a step sideways than a step forwards.

For the government to believe that cutting a tourist visa from six to three months will stop people illegally remaining in this country is ludicrous.  Asking families to pay a £1,000 deposit for all visiting family members is also truly absurd.  Furthermore, the fact that these measures only apply to non-EU citizens means that it will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on immigration from other EU countries.  Unfortunately the government’s claims to be moving towards a purely skills-based system are undermined by this policy and despite my strong belief that immigration is completely out of control in the UK, I agree with you that this particular set of policies is nothing more than vindictive.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory