The most pointless task in history

No, I don't mean creating a few thousand non-jobs with a billion pounds of money we don't have or seeking to defend the indefensible about the adequacy of equipment provided to UK troops in Afghanistan. We are back to my gammy leg.

By Monday the hippo-strength antibiotics prescribed by my GP were not even making a dent in the spread of infection and my right lower-leg was looking like a prosthesis discarded from use in The Elephant Man for being too gruesome to be true. The GP referred me immediately to a local hospital to which I was admitted without delay, put on intraveinous superjuice and told I could be incarcerated for up to ten days.

The hospital is arranged in numerous wards of varying sizes, all of them split into lettered sections known as bays each containing six beds. My first port of call had me in Bed 1, a quiet fellow with gastric troubles in Bed 2, argumentative drunks in Beds 3, 4 and 5 who had been together for many days and enjoyed little more than shouting their ignorant opinions on a wide range of topics, and a quiet old fellow in Bed 6 who appeared to want nothing more than to die after having spent two nights with Messrs 3, 4 and 5. Two things were clear from the beginning. There were no circumstances in which I was going to get involved in the "debates" and sleep would be impossible.

It was while on this ward I had my only encounter with the Consultant in charge of gammy legs. At least I presume that's who she was, she introduced neither herself nor her colleague by either name or rank but drew the curtain round my bed and started looking and prodding in a manner I would expect of a consultant and she certainly had the saggy, unmaintained features of someone who has spent many years working in the NHS. After looking at my leg and expressing agreement with earlier diagnoses she noted I had a history of liver problems and took it upon herself to try stabbing her bony fingers in the general direction of that troubled organ. My jacket was drawn shut apace, the sheet removed from my covered limb and I pointed, saying firmly "I think you'll find I'm here because of my leg - this is the one, here". She looked as though I'd just slapped her with a wet trout which, had it happened, would have been highly appropriate considering her facial features and general demeanour. She went off in a huff, never to be seen again and to remain anonymous for evermore.

By this time it was about 11pm and my mind turned to ways of amusing myself during the sleepless hours to come without engaging in conversation with the drunks. Hope lay in the fact that it was E Bay. Just before midnight bids appeared to have closed and the quiet chap in Bed 2 and I were moved elsewhere, far away. Only two others occupied the new Bay on our arrival, a hunched religious fundamentalist and a man practicing for the World Coughing Championships. The latter proved a captive audience for the former who, fortunately, spoke at mild volume. Sleep was difficult, as it had been for the last few days, but it was reassuring that pain rather than vocalised idiocy was the cause. No improvement was noticeable until Tuesday afternoon just after receipt of my second set of injections for the day. The redness started to recede ever so slightly and the swelling followed suit. At the same time two beds became available in a much nicer ward. Only I was invited to view these sumptuous properties and so the perfect setting was found for the remainder of my sentence.

No doubt time on a ward with other people will always be slightly troublesome, particularly for someone who thrives on solitude, but this was probably as good as it gets. Bed 1 featured an East European junkie of impeccable manners, Bed 2 a cockney junkie with the same excellent trait, in Bed 3 was an elderly gentleman of subcontinental origin who enjoyed a good moan and lengthy loud phone conversations with family and friends but showed himself to be of warm and generous spirit if those conversations were any evidence, I had Bed 4 - opposite Bed 3 and enjoying a splendid view from the window, Bed 5 contained a young oriental fellow who spoke no English and the occupant of Bed 6 was always hidden under his bedclothes and too ill to do anything except fart.

8am Wednesday saw the eighth set of injections being administered followed shortly afterwards by a visit from a new doctor, a fine looking young lady without a single truttaceous quality. She too strayed onto the subject of the FatBigot liver and was asked "what's that got to do with my leg?" The wry smile showed her bosses' ruse had failed. Shortly after the ninth set of injections following lunch on Wednesday a short nap was required, during which I ran a high temperature and sweated like a pig. On waking, all fever had passed although the pain in my leg was intense for about an hour. It was clear the nastly little bugs had put up their final desperate fight for dominance, only to be defeated by a combination of the 21 large pills and 18 massive injections of antibiotics administered over the previous 124 hours. They were beaten by modern medicine, not a single crystal or drop of homeopathic waters proved necessary, and a day later injections themselves were no longer necessary. I was granted parole on condition I continue to take seven pills a day for the next ten days to make sure all trace of the little buggers has been eliminated.

But anyway, what's all this got to do with "the most pointless task in history"? On each of the three wards graced by my flabby presence others were subjected to visits from relatives and some, even, by people they liked. It's such a very cringeworthy thing to witness. Let me give just three examples.

The quiet fellow with gastric difficulties, who I would estimate to be about thirty-five years old, was visited by his mother. When he did not telephone her as expected on Sunday she went round to his flat and on getting no reply called the police who broke the door down. He was already in hospital and now faced the cost of replacing his front door as well as the potential loss of all his personal property because it was not left fully secure. Her visit comprised an hour-long tirade against her stupidity during which it transpired that a neighbour knocked on what was left of the door while the police were inside and informed them that the occupant had left in an ambulance a couple of hours earlier and that his girlfriend was out of town on business. The words "unthinking stupid old woman" featured in the address to the jury.

Then there was the challenger for the title of World Coughing Champion. His wife nestled down in the way only a certain type of middle-aged lady can nestle. Those old enough to remember Les Dawson and Roy Barrowclough as Cissy and Ada will know exactly what I mean. She wasn't going to risk any of her words missing their target, so she said nothing as she bustled onto the ward in her raincoat and bonnet, snuggled her ample backside on and over the edges of the reasonably generous chair and fixed her husband with a glare he obviously knew well. And then she started. Many years of experience had taught him not to interrupt and a good hour-and-a-half monologue followed, ranging from the state of the cat's bowels and the price of the weekly shop to the most important topic of all - her husband's inadequacies. If ever someone was turned from having a nasty cough to wishing for a terminal condition, it was him.

The third example was the kindly subcontinental gentleman. He has one child, a son aged around forty, who brought his rather frail mother along. She was clearly very distressed to see her husband of long-standing in a state of both immobility and pain and he knew he had to try to cheer her up. It seemed to work, but by the end of the exercise the poor man was exhausted.

And so I ask - what is the point of hospital visits?

My own experience is limited to my only previous sentence to a term of hospitalisation, when I had a heart attack a few years ago. I had visits from relatives and friends and found it all utterly tiresome. The only news I ever had to impart was that a heart attack hurts like billy-o but the pain ceased after I was drugged up to the gills and I would go home when the doctors decided it was appropriate. Apart from that it was pointless smalltalk. My final visitors on that occasion were a neighbour who is a dear friend and her niece whom I have known for many years. You simply couldn't meet nicer people but I had nothing to say to them. It was an hour of sheer torture when all I wanted was to be left alone.

This time round I contacted all those likely to threaten to visit and made clear that I did not want visitors, thank you very much. I had books to read and people to observe, I wasn't going to have that spoiled by spending time saying "it hurts less than yesterday and expect it to hurt less again tomorrow". This spell inside has proved to me beyond any doubt that visiting people in hospital is the most pointless task in history

A cup of tea with Mr Darling

Nothing incenses an old Trotskyite like profit. It has been observed that banks are charging higher margins than they did before the financial crisis hit. All the usual special interest groups are rallying round to condemn this wicked greed, shouting from the rooftops that Bank of England base rate is only 0.5%. Today the hapless Chancellor of the Exchequer, the inaptly named Mr Darling, joined in the shouting and said he was going to drag the High Street banks' big cheeses in for a chat. He didn't say he was planning to force them to reduce their margins but that threat was lurking in the background. This impending meeting was first disclosed to the government's official leakee-in-chief and reported by him last Thursday. According to Thursday's leak it is not just the banks that received injections of money from public funds who will attend but also the four largest lenders who had the sense not to tie themselves intimately into the State machine.

It is entirely understandable that both businesses and individuals would like a return to the days of cheap credit but there is no escaping the fact that credit was too cheap and backed by too little security, resulting in significant losses when the borrowers could not repay. You can't have it both ways. Either you lend to decent or good risks and cover your arse with security (in which case the risk of an overall loss from this business is kept low) or you lend willy-nilly and take only partial security (in which case you can hardly be surprised when it all goes pear-shaped). And, of course, the people who are hit hardest are those who over-stretched themselves, the little people for whom Mr Darling has so much compassion that he wants more of them to enter the lion's den.

Having spend a good three or four years moulding a massive pear the banks have woken up to the error of their ways. They don't really have any choice. Not only do existing losses have to be covered but they know that in a deep recession more losses will be incurred as businesses close and individuals lose their jobs. None of this is any excuse for usury but we are not talking usury we are merely talking rates that are a higher than in the mad days.

In his interview with Labour's favourite BBC Poodle, Andrew Marr, this morning Mr Darling said he wants banks to rebuild their balance sheets and that he wants them to lend more. In all of this there is a curious twist. As everyone knows only RBS and Lloyds took the Chancellor's twenty pieces of silver, Barclays, Santander, Nationwide and HSBC kept well away from him. The terms on which RBS and Lloyds were rescued seem to include requirements about lending policies (according to the Pre-Budget Report and today's interview). No doubt these are vague to the point of being useless, nonetheless the Chancellor can say that they made promises about lending and hint that they have broken their word. The other lenders are operating in the real world in which all the usual forces - supply, demand, costs, human error and all the rest - combine to determine the amount they can borrow, the amount they can lend, the margin they apply and the security they require. Absent a cartel operating there is no reason why HSBC or Santander could not undercut the "nationalised" banks and steal a lot of business yet it hasn't happened. Why not?

I am not privy to the workings of the big banks' boffins but the most obvious answer is that they know they have to charge substantially more than they did a year or two ago because they cannot raise cheap wholesale money and they need to cover existing loss-making loans and those anticipated to creep out from under a stone in the next year or so. They do not have a magic money tree of the kind so beloved of socialist politicians, they have a real business to run and just as the prudent individual tries to put a little aside for a rainy day so do well run banks.

One thing said by Mr Darling really made me chuckle. He said "... because of the fact that we've got into this recession, we ... need them to lend money ... that's why we recapitalised them ... and that's why they've got to live up to the promises they made". If we look back to the time of the recapitalisation, we find that he announced the recapitalisation scheme on the 18th of November. There is reference in paragraph three of his statement to the House of Commons to the government imposing terms as to "lending policy and wider public policy issues". Perhaps these wider public policy issues included something about the recession, I know not. Even if they did, just six days later he told us how damaging the recession would be in his Pre-Budget Report, he predicted a contraction in GDP of between 0.75% and 1.25% in 2009. Presumably any obligation to help fight recession is limited to a recession of that magnitude rather than the 3.2% we seem to have experienced so far.

I would love to know why he can't be brave for once and tell people the truth rather than just peddle soundbites to make him look busy. Why can't he say "the days of cheap credit are over, the days of 100% mortgages are over; it's a different game now and you just have to adjust your lifestyles accordingly"? Could it be because he thinks there are more votes in leading the charge to blame the banks? How very cynical I have become, it must be the horse-suppositories.

Oink, oink, atchooooo

Oh dear.

Feverish, shaky, sniffly, sneezy, headachy, chesty, sweaty. And not a Snow White in sight.

Still, it's cheaper than visiting Dignitas.

Update
Woke up this morning with a bright scarlet right shin, very sore. Phoned the quack, described all my symptoms, she said "it's not piggy flu you fat fool, come in and let me see your leg". Now I have to take seven horse-suppository sized antibiotic pills every day for the next ten days. Not piggy flu, just an infection caused by an insect bite, probably a mosquito. How very disappointing. I've never been able to be trendy.

The only way to social mobility

I don't understand class. Well, in a way I suppose I do, but only in a way. I am from a working class background in that my father earned his living through manual work, but after spending my working life in the law I count as middle class. It was once the case that barristers were upper-middle class according to some classometer or another, but as far as I can tell that is not so these days. Yet I am not and never could be a toff.

Undoubtedly I now speak differently from how I did as a teenager, I smoothed some edges because people expect their brief to speak "proper". Early in my career I was appearing on behalf of a youngster who was following the family path by stealing things. He was only about 16 or 17 and already had an impressive string of convictions. The family was out in force to give their support at a preliminary hearing. He was refused bail and after the short hearing it was my duty to explain the state of play to his parents, cousins and grandmother (known, inevitably, as his "nan"). When pausing for breath at one point, Nan took the opportunity to turn to her daughter and say "aw, dunee speak noice". Your criminal classes expect their brief to speak noice.

There, you see, an example of class in action. To me, the criminal class consists of those who make their living from criminal activities, those who supplement their income from criminal activity and those who hit people. A great many of them exist. They know they have chosen to act as they do, they know they might get caught and they know they cannot defend themselves in court as well as a trained lawyer can - even a lawyer of pretty modest ability. So they are always grateful for any help they are given and go out of their way to thank you at every step in the court process. They will happily go to a specialist criminal solicitor with a cockney accent, but their barrister must speak like a gent. That's just part of the natural way of things for them. But woe betide you if you speak down to them. They might be the criminal class but they know their instructions pay your bills so they expect respect and politeness at all times.

I speak of the "criminal class" as shorthand for people who choose to behave in certain ways, ways that happen to be against our current laws. Whether they count as a class for the purposes of politicians and the great concept of "social mobility" is beyond my knowledge, I would guess they don't but I don't know.

When I read anything about social mobility there is one central theme running through the piece. It is not about getting invited to a Duke's cocktail party or playing polo in the grounds of Windsor Castle, it is about education. In particular, it is about families with no history of working in fields that require high educational qualifications and the difficulties faced by their children in gaining access to those jobs. Since I started writing this piece I have completed my daily blog reading and have found that both Mr Raedwald and Mr Tyler have addressed this very point, but I'm going to plough on anyway.

Spending a working lifetime in the law you get to meet a very wide range of people. At one end of my historic spectrum of clients were uneducated thugs, at the other were senior executives of multinational corporations. Many of the former were more pleasant to deal with and more sensible than many of the latter. And among my legal friends and acquaintances are numerous QCs, a fair number of judges and a smattering of members of the House of Lords. That is just a consequence of the world in which I worked, it says nothing about me other than that I worked with a lot of people of greater ability and/or drive than me. At no time did I find the social background of anyone to be relevant to any issue I had to address.

Perhaps the time when it could have come into play was when assessing applicants for pupillage - the apprenticeship barristers have to undertake. All applicants submit a detailed synopsis of their education, their hobbies and any non-academic achievements they have to their name. Inevitably they include the name and location of their secondary school and university. In the three different sets of chambers from which I practised I am not aware of a single example of anyone being refused an interview or a pupillage because of where they went to school or university, still less because of what their parents did for a living. In real life, outside the dreamy world of politicians with an agenda, the quality of the applicant is what matters. We did not want to waste a scarce pupillage on a turkey any more than an employer wants to take on someone who will be a burden to his business.

As it happens we took plenty of people from nicely expensive schools, but only because they appeared to have the necessary wherewithal. On occasions we were wrong and they were in fact turkeys. Equally, we took on plenty from St Bog-Standard's Comprehensive school in the town of Notta Niceplace, only to find some of them were turkeys too. What mattered was not where they came from but who they were at they time they presented themselves to us. Good people from poor backgrounds were still good people and an asset. Poor people from a wealthy background were still poor people and a burden. Education at Eton and Cambridge simply don't help if you are competing against someone better than you, no matter where they went to school and university.

The key to the type of social mobility I am addressing is education. Pure and simple. It is about having a mind that has been developed throughout the school and university years. It cannot be engineered, it cannot be spun, it can happen in one way only - by providing a strong academic education for those children of strong academic ability. The fee-paying schools will always provide this and for that reason they will turn out plenty of would-be doctors, accountants and lawyers. There is no point pretending that children educated in the State sector can gain access to these jobs unless they are provided with the same opportunities for academic development as those against whom they will later challenge for the limited number of available places.

A range of factors combine to make it difficult for many children educated in State schools to gain access to the professions despite them having the natural abilities required. Four factors seem particularly important to me.

First, academic education is valued insufficiently as a good in itself. Because not everyone can do it, so it is seen by some as being undesirable.

Secondly, targets and league tables dictated by politicians make it more important for a school to squeeze as many as possible into a C grade for fear of the consequences if insufficient numbers of pupils meet the target. Resources that might be better targeted at stretching some from a B to an A or a C to a B are instead focussed on the natural Ds and Es to move them up a grade despite it being of no real utility to those children themselves.

Thirdly, far too few children are advised to aim for these jobs. I don't know this as a fact, my view is based wholly on things I have been told by people who did make it and related their experiences of "career advice" at their State school. The finest example of this was described to me many years ago by a dear friend with whom I worked for several years, it involves unashamed name-dropping on my part, but I'll risk my reader's opprobrium. The lady barrister in question told me that when she was at school she was advised to aim for a career as a secretary and to learn short-hand and typing to increase her chances. Her name is Patricia Scotland, she is now the Attorney-General.

Fourthly, and perhaps most absurdly, those who are not burdened by the first three factors or who have had the strength to overcome them must then face university. Some grants are available but not many. It is an inevitable consequence of the ludicrous policy of cramming as many people into university as possible that it is not feasible for the taxpayer to cover the cost of course fees and maintenance for all those whose families cannot afford it themselves. One hears tales of students graduating with £30,000 or more of debts. It is necessarily the case that some very able young people will not be prepared to take on such a liability and will forgo a university education despite being eminently suited to it. It is also necessarily the case that some who do attend university will be deterred from taking professional qualifications because the additional cost/debt is a step too far. And, quite obviously, those who are deterred by cost will mostly come from families of modest means.

Social mobility is nothing to do with "class" as such. It is everything to do with providing academic education for children of an academic bent. No one seems to complain when special sports or theatre schools combine general education with specialist development of the particular talents for which the pupils have been selected. When the England football team is ailing or there is only one British male in the top fifty in the world at tennis, cries go up for special provision to be made to identify the most talented youngsters and nurture them. Everyone involved knows that not all those who show talent at age twelve or fourteen or whatever is the cut-off point will turn into professional players, everyone also knows that some who are pretty average at that age will develop their talents later. Yet the principle is sound - identify those who appear to have a special talent, develop it as well as you can and provide the finance needed to allow it to develop. The same applies to academic ability.

Unless that is done, social mobility will remain nothing but a dream for far too many people who started just as I did and just as my accountant did, and just as my GP did and just as the Attorney-General did.

38 Pall Mall please

Non-smokers might not know that different cigarettes have different flavours. My particular favourites are a medium tar product of the Camel stable. Camel cigarettes are commonly available in three strengths, differentiated by the colour of the packet; yellow if you like them quite strong, blue if you like the medium strength and white-ish if you prefer something mild. I'm a Camel Blues man. They used to be called Camel Lights until some bright spark thought it was misleading to refer to any version of ciggies as "light". The thinking, if you can call it that, was that all cigarettes are potentially harmful and "light" could give the impression that they are not potentially harmful. It's complete hogwash, of course, "lights" - whether Camel, Benson & Hedges, Marlboro or any others - contain less tar and deliver less nicotine than the standard version. Whether that reduces their potential harmfulness is beyond my knowledge, but it does mean they are lighter in tar and nicotine than other available products. No smoker has ever been shown to have been misled by the term "light" but little facts like that never get in the way of official bigotry.

These days Camel are too expensive for me at £5.99 per packet of twenty. One of the great joys of visiting the USA, which I do every couple of years or so, is to be able to buy Camel Lights again. Another is that they cost half what they cost here. A third delight is that Camel sell a slightly shorter and considerably fatter version known as Wides, thereby allowing me to adopt my best Louisianna accent and proclaim "I's gotten me some Waaaaaaaaaaaaades".

The one thing you should never do in America is ask for twenty of your favourite brand. The shop assistant will react in one of two ways. Either they will stare at you in a state of complete bewilderment or they will plonk twenty packets on the counter. They don't order in twenties or tens but in packs. Over here, as you might know, the standard argot is to order either ten or a multiple of twenty. Ironically, on the very rare occasions I have bought ten they have been turned to ash and a cough far faster than it takes to reduce half a packet of twenty to the same state. So my practice is to buy one or more packets of twenty and to do so by asking for twenty, forty or sixty. Even in these days of dumming-down, the most arithmetically challenged shop assistant is able to work out how many packets need to be taken from the shelf.

Being a man with a dickey ticker my consumption of ciggies is now less than it used to be. I try to keep to just twenty a day and I buy every two or three days. A couple of years ago I switched from Camel Lights/Blues to a cheaper brand. The exact price of Camels at the time is lost in the mists of history but an indication of the disparity is that Camel now cost £5.99 for twenty whereas my new brand, Pall Mall, cost £4.25. Other cheaper brands were sampled, but only Pall Mall passed my taste test.

The week before last I received something of a shock to my already delicate system. I asked for forty Pall Mall, paid £8.50 and returned to FatBigot Towers to enjoy a nicotine fix. On opening the first packet something was seriously amiss. Cigarettes have always been packed tightly in their little box, like Russian virgins in a shipping crate en route to a new life as "waitresses". But these were not packet tightly, there was a gap, a highly noticeable gap. The packet contained not twenty but nineteen little tubes of addiction. My first thought was that something must have gone wrong at the factory and that I was in possession of a collector's piece, like a stamp with the Queen's head facing the wrong way. But no, careful examination of the packet showed the number nineteen stamped on the side and examination of the unopened packet disclosed a tiny yellow corner on the outer cellophane wrapper on which the same number appeared.

The following day I returned to the shop and pointed out this sad fact to the owner. At first he didn't believe me but a careful look at the stocks still on his shelf corroborated me. He couldn't believe his eyes and assured me that there was nothing to alert him to this radical change at the cash-and-carry. Since then I have bought Pall Mall at other shops and pointed out that they only contain nineteen cigarettes. At only one store was the person serving aware of this fact and she said it was brought to her attention by another customer a few days earlier. The latest batch of Pall Mall have the price printed on the cellophane covering, it is now £4.22. A reduction of three pence in price in return for a five percent reduction in volume. I'm not complaining really, they are still markedly cheaper than any other brand, but it is a bit cheeky.

Yesterday I needed to re-stock and asked for "thirty-eight Pall Mall please". The look on the face of the assistant made me feel as though I was in America again.

When is a budget not a budget?

On Thursday I bemoaned the government's idea of putting Windy Miller in charge of electricity generation, today I want to discuss another aspect of their exciting "low carbon" plan. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced that every government department now has a "carbon budget" as well as one dealing with pounds and pence. He said it was part of the scheme of "legally binding carbon budgets" announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer earlier this year. The use of the term "budget" is a complete nonsense. What he means is that every government department will be set targets. That is not a budget any more than setting a target for the number of exam passes to be attained by schools is an "examination budget" or the number of arrests made by the police is an "arrest budget". But that is only the start of the absurdity.

Let's just stop for a moment and try to absorb the concept of government departments having "legally binding" targets of any kind. What are the consequences of the target not being met? It's easy to see what "legally binding" means in the real world, it means that the law requires you to do or refrain from doing something and will impose a penalty if you breach that requirement. We have things called courts which enforce legally binding obligations and administer penalties to those who fail in their legal duties. How can that apply to the failure of a government department to meet a target for reducing the production of carbon dioxide resulting from, say, the manufacture of giant windmills? What penalty can be imposed, and who will impose it? Will the department's funding be reduced next year if it fails to meet this year's target? Of course not. Will a fine be imposed or the minister and senior civil servants face prosecution and imprisonment? Of course not. These are just targets.

At the moment they seem to be only internal targets for government departments themselves. As such they are nothing but a massively expensive exercise in navel gazing. Some of it is already in place. NHS trusts and local councils have departments dedicated to reducing their employers' "carbon footprint". Lightbulbs that produce the amount of light everyone is accustomed to are replaced by fat curly lightbulbs that don't. The officially mandated guilt associated with the use of electricity and gas is assuaged by spending taxpayers' money on planting trees in Africa. Trees that would have been planted anyway at a fraction of the cost because they provide a crop. Instead we pay not just for the crop but also for the kick-backs to local "worthies". Lowly council employees are told they cannot have a parking space at work because driving is naughty, while the big wigs retain their chauffeurs. Advisors and consultants are made available to local businesses to tell them how they can reduce their emissions. Reams of paper are shuffled back and forth, miles are clocked-up and expenses incurred in order to meet current targets. None of it will make the slightest bit of difference to anything. Absolutely no difference at all.

Real businesses, businesses that make things and generate the wealth that is taxed to pay for the paper-pushers, don't employ "carbon footprint advisors" unless they think there is something in it for them. They know that there is only one measure that matters, pounds and pence. Employing symbolic greenies can be profitable if your business depends on custom from naive, tree-hugging tofu-knitters. But if you are making nuts, bolts and washers your customers are concerned with only price and quality. If you can make the same things at the same or a lower price by adopting a process that emits less carbon dioxide you might choose to follow that path. I defy you, however, to find a government-employed greenie advisor who has the expertise required to find a way for manufacturing businesses to do so. After all, what can these people know about the technical aspects of manufacturing industry? If they knew that stuff they wouldn't be employed as greenie advisors, they would have real jobs in their field of expertise.

None of this will stop some of them coming up with grandiose plans. And none of it will stop most of their "work" being fiddling at the edges to find utterly minuscule savings in carbon dioxide emissions at a cost far out of proportion to any benefit even the most ardent greenie could identify.

It's bad enough that money will be wasted on the fiddling at the edges, far more worrying is the thought of grandiose plans. Grandiose plans make good politics. For as long as it is thought there are votes in greenieness, governments will divert money from sensible stuff because nothing is a better use of our money than buying our votes.

Lying behind all this wibble is the ludicrous concept of measuring in "carbons dioxides". It is a meaningless measure because it cannot be compared to anything else and it has no utility as a measure in itself. The mile is a useful measure because it allows us to judge how long it will take to travel from A to B and, during our journey, it tells what proportion of the trip has expired. The pound is a useful measure because it allows us to judge whether a particular item of paid work is worth doing and whether it is worth buying a particular thing. Measuring carbon dioxide emissions is pointless because there is nothing to compare it to and of itself it means nothing to say "my new car emits 50 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre whereas my old one emitted 150". So what? What difference does that make to anything? No one can identify the difference it will make because it is so small as to be irrelevant to anything.

In fact it can be compared to itself. We can assess, but not measure, how much carbon dioxide we produce this year compared to last year. In doing so we will find that anything we do as individuals is very small because most emissions are unavoidable by individual activity - they come from industry (yes, that industry, the one that lights and heats our homes and provides us with employment). But even that comparison is pointless because the whole man-made global warming circus revolves around worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide, not just the 1.6% or so from this country.

So, what does a departmental "carbon budget" actually amount to? If anyone thinks it will result in substantial reductions in UK carbon dioxide emissions, I fear they are deluded. The likelihood is that there will be a little trimming at the edges and it will cost a huge amount of money.

Just like the windmills. A futile and unaffordable farce.

Whistling in the wind

It is hard to know where to start when discussing the government's new "low-carbon" energy plan, it is so full of internal contradictions and downright nonsense. But I have to pick somewhere so I'll start with the presumption that the world is warming. This ties in nicely with the announcement made last week that some international talking-shop or another is determined to keep global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the level of some time around 1750. There's a bit of slack built in already, the earth has political permission to get warmer provided it doesn't get too warm. So from that starting point my initial observation is that a bit of warming should reduce energy consumption because there will be less of a need to heat our homes and workplaces during the chilly months. There, we have reduced our "carbon footprint" already and it hasn't cost a bean.

Where do we go from there? I know, let's see how they plan to generate electricity without producing carbon dioxide. The headline measure is windmills. I am not sure whether these are the same windmills to which they committed £100billion just a few months ago but I presume they are. The intention is to build about 7,000 new windmills by 2020. I've got news for them. It's 2009 already so they only have ten years and five months, 125 months. So that's 56 windmills per month or the best part of two a day every day for more than ten years. Are we really expected to believe that this will happen? Given enough people, materials and money any number of anything can be built pretty quickly, but even so this task strikes me as impracticable.

And what if it does happen? That's where the real fun and games arise. Windmills can only produce electricity when the wind is blowing. When it is not blowing they often have to be kept turning to prevent the blades buckling in the sun (because the size of the things means the three blades will catch unequal amounts of energy from the sun and will buckle unless they are rotated to keep exposure roughly equal). So they will need to take electricity from the grid when they need to be rotated and there is insufficient wind to perform the task.

When the wind is turning the blades electricity will be generated but at present there is no efficient way of storing that juice, it can be fed into the grid and a coal/gas/nuclear plant can be turned down or it can be drained away to earth if there is no call for it. Yet the wind can stop just as quickly as it starts, so there must always be conventional back-up generators to fill the void. Some of these can be turned on and off reasonably quickly but they use a lot more fuel that way compared to running pretty much constantly. Any saving of fossil fuel use through having windy electricity being fed into the grid is ameliorated by the additional fuel consumption and wear-and-tear of the conventional plants. And there is always a bottom line. The bottom line is that we must maintain sufficient conventional generating capacity to provide all our needs because it can never be known how much will come from the windmills.

Coal-fired generators are included in the plan. The government has kindly agreed to allow these provided they are fitted with mechanisms to capture a lot of the carbon dioxide they produce before it floats into the air. What a splendid idea. Or it would be if such mechanisms existed. Some are being trialled at the moment but they are a long way from being usable on a large scale. And all of them require power which means more fuel must be used to generate the same amount of electricity.

So, the plan is to construct an unattainable number of windmills at an unaffordable cost in order to provide an unreliable supply, whilst maintaining conventional generating capacity but not using it efficiently and making it less fuel-efficient when it is used.

Only central planning can come up with such a scheme.

Technological advances might well find ways of storing spare electricity, I would certainly expect that to happen because history shows engineers to be able to find solutions to such problems. Yet no one can say when a solution will be found and there is certainly no guarantee that it will be before 2020. As and when it does happen, windmills might have a serious part to play but even then they can only generate so much power, we are a very long way from windmills being able to make more than a marginal contribution to our electricity needs.

So why is this ridiculous plan being put forward? Ostensibly it is because of fears of catastrophic global warming. Did you spot the adjective I slipped in there? Catastrophic. A bit of warming or a bit of cooling is neither here nor there, even the doomiest of doom-mongers don't argue that small changes will be harmful to anyone other than those who like the cold. You might think that before embarking on a hugely expensive and inefficient exercise the government would take a look at whether the evidence of risk justifies the expense. Those who believe in the catastrophic man-made global warming scenario argue that current evidence of no measured increase in actual average temperatures over the last decade does not undermine their hypothesis. Those who don't believe in it cite the last decade as strong evidence that the hypothesis is incorrect. For the purposes of what I have to say today it really doesn't matter which, if either, of those sides is correct. The simple fact is that the government did not re-assess the evidence before launching the new plan. To say the least, their approach is slipshod.

A further aspect of the plan is worth mentioning. It seems that they want to compel people to utilise energy-saving measures in their homes and work places. We already see this in the current Building Regulations that require a newly-built property to meet strict energy efficiency targets before the work will be certified and the property becomes marketable. Usually these targets can only be met by the installation of cavity-wall insulation or the use of insulating boarding on internal walls, in either case combined with double-glazed windows. It seems likely that they will extend the Building Regulations to ensure that double-glazing and wall insulation have to be added even where work of a non-structural nature is undertaken.

There is a precedent for this in the regulations about noise insulation between flats. Originally noise insulating flooring (which is nothing more than inch-thick chipboard with a layer of hard rubber) had to be fitted only when a new block of flats was being built. Then they extended it to conversions of single dwellings into one or more flats, and now the installation of nothing more than a new bathroom is viewed by some Councils' Building Control departments as triggering the need to replace all flooring so as to provide effective sound insulation between one flat and the flat below. I expect the same creeping process to apply to double glazing and the insulation of walls.

The reason I mention this is that the cost of the work is almost always far in excess of the saving in heating bills. Decent quality double-glazing of a modest home can easily cost between four and five thousand pounds whilst saving only a few pounds a year in heating costs. Wall insulation might only set you back a thousand or two (including the cost of redecoration) while also saving very little. Say these measures save £150 a year, itself somewhat unlikely for a modest property even with electricity and gas costing what they do today, it would take almost thirty years to recoup insulating costs of £4,000. Maybe the windows and wall insulation will last that long or maybe they won't, no one can tell. What we can tell is that people will be forced to fork-out a lot of money on a pure gamble whether they will ever get a benefit from it.

At every stage of this plan one thing is clear. The costs are enormous whilst the benefits are purely speculative. Actually, one other thing is clear. Even if catastrophe will strike through substantial further emissions of carbon dioxide, those emissions will happen anyway. Nibbling-away at the 2% or so of global emissions originating from the UK is utterly futile while China and India today, and Brasil, Mexico, South Africa and others tomorrow, use coal to provide them with energy to give them a small leg-up in their attempt to match the standard of living we currently enjoy.

The whole thing is a futile and unaffordable farce.