Last batch of holiday photos

Sinop

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Bosphorus

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Kusadasi

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Libertarian Alliance Conference

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Guido Fawkes addresses the dinner.

Libertarian Alliance Conference

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Brian Micklethwait blogging and being watched by the LA's tech guru.

Libertarian Alliance Conference

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Guido Fawkes, Dr Tim Evans and the Devil's Kitchen

Libertarian Alliance Conference

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

The LA's David Davis and Brian Micklethwait are blogging.

The destruction of Scotland

These practitioners of the global warming scam plan to destroy the Scottish economy. Maybe not directly, but that's what they are effectively proposing:

Domestic flights must be faced out by the end of next year if Britain is to avoid “a climate emergency”, a group of MPs has said.

The UK is just about the most centralised advanced country of its size. And the "centre" is down at the far end of a long, narrow island. The abolition of domestic UK flying would kill off the Scottish economy. Unsurprisingly, all but one of these MPs represent southern seats at Westminster. OK, here's the deal: abolish domestic flying but move the UK parliament to Glasgow. That'll sort them.

Crimea

This guided missile cruiser (Moskva) is based at Sevastopol.

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Other photos from the area are here:

Sevastopol.

For the Crimean War, see here:

Valley of Death.

The state marches on

This is so depressing:

In her closing speech to conference in Inverness, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon sounded the death knell of the "right-to-buy", the emblematic policy of the Thatcher revolution, which allowed council tenants to buy their homes.

She also revealed that Stracathro hospital, which the previous Labour-Liberal executive had handed over to an independent operator, would now be returning to full NHS control.

The government should have nothing to do with housing provision. Nor should it provide health services. The only legitimate function of the state is to protect us against aggressors.

I've more or less decided to vote SNP at the next election as I did at the European one but this kind of thing will make folk like me think seriously about voting otherwise.

I think that it's fairly likely that the English will eventually expel Scotland from the Union. The English establishment won't be happy about that - they understand that an independent England would be less likely to have a seat in the UN Security Council, would be outvoted in the EU by France and Italy and would face considerable resource shortages that the Union makes less dangerous.

But plenty of English rank and file voters think that Scotland is a socialist basket case that they'd be well shot of. This SNP decision will do nothing to alter that widely held opinion. I can only presume that the SNP are deliberately encouraging anti-Scottish views down south. God help us if the SNP really does believe in this statist nonsense.

Red October?

It was a bit strange to wake up next to Soviet Russian warships.

More photos from Sevastopol will follow. The Russian Navy has a lease on part of this now Ukrainian port.

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

More photos

from my recent trip:

Messina

Katakolon

Nafplion

Istanbul

Sochi

Batumi

Trabzon.

No surrender

This guy is holding out against a Turkish version of Donald Trump:

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Back again

First photos from the holiday are of Rome, Civitavecchia and Stromboli.

These Italian communists look somewhat more bourgeois than ours...

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Originally uploaded by David Farrer

Posts, or rather the lack of them!

I have a big project going on at the moment. Blogging will resume ASAP.

Airport traffic

Once again, Edinburgh airport is beating Glasgow:

Passenger numbers at Edinburgh airport increased by 4.8% in August, one of the few airports which recorded growth.

The figures from airport operator BAA showed that Glasgow had the sharpest decrease in traffic with a fall of 13.4%

Unlike some residents of the capital I am a fan of Glasgow. Scotland needs a prosperous Glasgow. Clearly Edinburgh's benefited from the Festival, which seemed to be busier than ever this year, and Glasgow depends on outward holiday traffic to greater extent than Edinburgh.

I fear that the SNP administration is making the same mistakes as its Labour predecessor. This remains typical of the Scottish government's mindset:

Mr Swinney questioned the drinks firm's claim that the rescue package was not viable.

"There's two points of basic economics at stake in this," he said.

"The first point is the fact that the Kilmarnock economy will be devastated and the Scottish Government and the UK Government will have to pick up the pieces, at a cost we estimate at £14m a year.

"The second point of basic economics is that when you come to a proposal with a financial gap of let's say £3 to £4m, and a company is making profits of £2bn, I don't think it's an unreasonable proposition to say to the company you have a corporate social responsibility to protect communities that have served you well."

The Kilmarnock economy will only be "devastated" to the extent that new entrepreneurs fail to make up for the lost Diageo jobs. Instead of government "picking up the pieces" why not remove the barriers to entrepreneurship? That's what will make the west of Scotland prosperous and help Glasgow airport boom again. And Prestwick of course.

Richard Russell speaks

Great quote on Jim Puplava's site this week:

Let me get this straight.

Obama's healthcare plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a congress that hasn't read it and whose members are exempt from it, signed by a President who smokes in secret, funded by a Treasury Secretary who does not pay his taxes, overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that is broke.

I hate Aviva

I've got a couple of pension policies that I'm drawing from Aviva (Norwich Union in the good old days). One is at a fixed annual rate and the other is RPI linked.

Today I received a letter from Aviva that said:

Your payments are changing because the gross amount from policy number xxxxxx has been reduced and this will affect how much we pay you.

Do I need to do anything?

No, I've written this letter for your information only. You don't need to take any action. Your payments will be made in the normal way.

Unbelievable. Wouldn't I like to know by just how much this pension has been reduced? Of course I would. Why didn't they tell me? How do they know that I don't have to take any action on spending? I phoned Aviva ("You may be charged from calls from this mobile") and after being kept on hold by the operative I was told that they had no record of the letter. They'll get back to me tomorrow. Hopefully.

I guess the RPI reduction will be quite small and I may well have earned enough this morning to cover the annual reduction. But for goodness sake - writing to folk saying that their pension is to be cut surely requires telling them by how much, does it not?

Let's vote

There's been quite a bit of anger at the news of bonuses paid to Scotland's top policeman:

MSPs have reacted angrily to revelations that the chief constable of Scotland's largest police force was awarded almost £65,000 of perks on top of his £170,000 salary.

Stephen House, of Strathclyde Police, received a bonus, a housing allowance and even a council tax subsidy last year. The taxpayer also footed the tax bill for his private use of a car.

Here is a response from a member of the public.

Is the chief worth all this money? How can we tell when he's in the public sector? The best way is to have police chiefs stand for election. That way they'd have to spend their time providing the sort of service wanted by the public instead of lording over us as the para-military wing of the Labour party.

More from the Book Festival

On Wednesday we went to hear Dan Cruickshank, the architectural guru. Cruickshank certainly knows his stuff but I found his presentation technique a bit wearing after a while. Session chairman Ruth Wishart asked if he would be rendered speechless were his hands to be tied together. Probably yes...

Later on we listened to Lindsey Davis, the "goddess of Roman crime" according to the programme. This was a very good event and was chaired by local crime writer Lin Anderson who lives in Edinburgh's "writers' block" alongside Rowling, McCall Smith and Rankin. Afterwards I told Anderson that someone should write a crime novel in which a publisher gets bumped off by an irate reader fed up with the changing size of books in a series. Watch this space...

Thursday found us at yet another McCall Smith evening. He's a friend of Laura Bush, thought that New Yorkers were "insincere" at his event there, but very much enjoyed appearances in Hollywood, Philadelphia and Texas. McCall Smith writes from 4 till 6 AM, sleeps for two hours, has breakfast, and then starts work again.

Friday saw the appearance of former Labour minister Chris Mullin. An enjoyable performance from this socialist who told some good stories about Blair, Bush and the Duke of Edinburgh. Pity about his politics.

Later on I went to the Beyond Devolution evening in the Spiegeltent in which one can have a bevvy while listening to the politicos... Henry McLeish (second First Minister!) and the three others all more-or-less agreed on a federal solution for Scotland within the UK. I told Tom Brown about the Freedom and Whisky plan. The man was so impressed that he got me a wee dram.

Saturday brought us the Scotland's Future event, with Ming Campbell, George Foulkes, Fiona Hyslop and Michael Forsyth. Hyslop told me afterwards that she thought the Megrahi affair would die down soon but she seemed nervous about the whole thing. The audience was 50/50 on the MacAskill decision.

At noon today it was time to hear Tom Morton and Alan Clements talking about their new thrillers. I've read the Clements one and shall probably get Morton's book too. Clements' wife was sitting just behind me and sounds just like she does on the telly.

Lockerbie

This is my reply on an American site to the claims in today's Sunday Times about a Libyan oil deal:

I'm not convinced.

I was born near Lockerbie and vote for the Scottish National Party whose justice minister released Megrahi. I think Mr MacAskill made the wrong decision, but I don't believe that he was motivated by considerations of oil.

The SNP hates the Labour party and vice versa. I can think of no reason why the SNP would do something to favour the UK Labour government. On the contrary, the SNP uses every opportunity it can to embarrass Labour and usually succeeds.

As for oil, Scotland contains around 95% of the UK North Sea oil reserves but has only 8.5% of its population. For 40 years or so the SNP has argued that an independent Scotland with its oil resources would be as rich as Norway. Again, why would the SNP agree to an oil deal that would benefit its main enemy, the Labour party?

I think that what you see is what you get. I've been to several political gatherings in the last two weeks during the Edinburgh Festival. Only yesterday I heard the SNP education minister assure her audience that MacAskill's decision was based solely on Megrahi's health condition. I've heard the same from other SNP politicians. Once again, I think MacAskill made the wrong decision, as do most folk in Scotland.

The SNP is a coalition of of people who favour Scottish independence. Some are on the left and some are on the right. I'd place MacAskill on the left, and a different justice minister from his party might well have come to the opposite conclusion about a Megrahi release.

As for those who think that MacAskill's release of Megrahi was some sort of anti-American move, consider this: the country that lost the highest proportion of its population on that terrible night was Scotland.

Book Festival - a quick update

Saturday: Ian Jack (former Granta editor) and Sarah Lyall (London-based US journalist) spoke about Britishness. Mrs F&W bought The Field Guide to the British, or rather the paperback edition, which has been changed to The Field Guide to the English. Jack, a London-based Scot, thought that it was actually a guide to the southern English. He's probably correct.

Saturday evening: McCall Smith again. Still excellent value.

Sunday: Matthew D'Ancona cancelled which was just as well as it clashed with a summer party that I wanted to attend. The party went on so well that I bailed out of the Paddy Ashdown event. Got my money back though...

On Sunday evening I went to listen to Quintin Jardine, creator of the Bob Skinner crime novels. Like Jardine, Skinner lives in Gullane (incidentally, McCall Smith champions the "Gillin" pronunciation). Jardine supports Motherwell, as does Skinner. But Jardine insisted that he wasn't Skinner, seeing himself more as a McIlhenney character. Jardine thought that Kenny McAskill was a "national hero".

Steve Bloom

Wildlife photograper Steve Bloom was at the Book Festival today:

More from the Book Festival

Yesterday we went to hear Sandy McCall Smith in conversation with James Naughtie. As always, McCall Smith was in good form. He could probably pack in big Edinburgh crowds every week of the year. As always with Sandy there was nothing threatening, nothing nasty. Just quite a few of us thinking that McCall Smith's civilised world is quite achievable once the political class has been sorted out...

Afterwards I listened to Antony Beevor speaking about his new book on D-Day. Or, more precisely, on the Battle for Normandy. His talk was mainly about the fighting after the landings. Having read his Stalingrad and Berlin, this is certainly one to get once the paperback is out.

This afternoon it was time to hear Claire Harman and Charlotte Higgins on Jane Austen and Ancient Greece respectively. A very enjoyable session with both ladies dealing well with the other's speciality. Another sell out - as have been eight of nine events so far.

Lockerbie

I posted this brief message on an American site earlier:

I was born a few miles from Lockerbie and know people who were there on the night of the downing of the 747. God damn whoever did it.

I also vote for the Scottish National Party, the folk who want independence for Scotland. That's mainly because voting SNP is the best way up here to defeat Labour, but also because I expect that Scotland will become independent eventually and I'd quite like to be around long enough to see how it all works out.

The SNP currently runs the Scottish Government within the wider UK. Legal matters are under the control of the Scottish administration.

But something fishy is going on here, I suspect. The SNP leader, First Minister Alex Salmond, never misses the slightest opportunity to create division between Scotland and the wider UK in his quest for independence. But not in this instance. As mentioned above, Peter Mandelson (probably the most powerful UK Minister other than the PM - or even more so according to some) has been liaising with the Libyans, as have others. Tony Blair (whose government destroyed Britain's liberties) had meetings with Gaddafi and Blair always has an agenda. Why hasn't Alex Salmond defied the UK government's wish to keep in with the Libyans? I don't know, but I feel sure that there's a lot more going on than simply a stupid decision by the Scottish Justice Minister (who regularly demonstrates stupidity, by the way).

(Conspiracy note: the spell checker can cope with Gaddafi, but not Mandelson or Salmond...)

Double-cross

My father spent part of the War training to be a mountain soldier. Or so he thought. Actually, he was being conned, as were the Germans. It was all part of Operation Fortitude North.

The art of military deception was the subject of Nick Rankin's wonderful presentation this afternoon. We heard it all, from the invention of camouflage to Monty's Double. I asked Rankin whether he thought that deception was being undertaken in Afghanistan. He thought it likely but perhaps not as much as should be done. Of course, he'd have to have killed the entire audience if he'd revealed the full story...

I am very much looking forward to reading the book.