Burbage

neilson99 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I still don't understand how these are classed as > temporary. They've been installed so long, how > exactly will new "permanent" lights be any > diffrent to the ones we have now? There are three things that are being done. First, they're going to play with the phasings. Specifically the pedestrian phasings. Secondly, they're going to move the stop lines nearer the junction, ostensibly to better match pedestrian 'desire lines'. Thirdly, they'll be installing some expensive 'pedestrian detection' systems to allow those pedestrians that are presumptuous enough to push the button an extensive period of grace in which to contemplate the appalling consequences of their action, repent inwardly and 'move away' before the signals commit themselves to disturbing the flow of traffic. The reason they're being 'made permanent' is because, during an entirely self-interested period of arrant activism, a number of nearby residents campaigned to have them retained. And because the force of localism is strong in the borough, the council waved it's paws in the air without for a moment considering the impact it will have on the majority of junction users. It's even spending money on improvements to the "public realm" which are presumably being kept secret for a reason. The truth is that the majority of juction users don't live near the junction, nor would most of them countenance walking across it. Yet most won't have been consulted at all. This whole madcap scheme is entirely down to a tiny minority who just happen to live nearby and entertain some trumped-up delusion that death-free access to schools, shops and parks is some sort of entitlement rather than a self-indulgent luxury. Sadly, while there's a subversive and antisocial rump with the brass neck to write to councillors, respond to consultations and so forth, this is the the sort of thing we end up with. Before long, and without so much as a referendum, we end up having our own money spent on speed humps and bicycle lanes and other acts of environmentally-questionable lunacy. And it's not as if pedestrians pay road tax.

Ant Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It may be worth noting that in the eight or so > years I've been registered with DMC (Crystal > Palace Road) I have hardly ever seen the same > doctor twice I'm not surprised. The DMChealthcare website lists it as a 'training practice'. Whether that's a bad thing or not depends on whether you prefer being treated by embittered cynics or inexperienced idealists.

jennyh Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > hellosailor Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > > DMC have 55,000 patients, > > Wow! That is insane! Not entirely insane. DMC healthcare is a group that runs seven or eight practices of which two, at Chadwick Road and Crystal Palace Road, happen to be in our area. Those branches reported having exactly 12501 registered patients each, which, though an interesting coincidence, is reasonable enough (the Forest Hill Group practice is reckoned to have over 14,000 patients), and the remainder of the 50k patients, seems to be easily accounted for by the more provincial outposts of the empire.

LondonMix Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > So eating crap food is a type of suicide to escape > a miserable life and destitute old age? Yes. Like any other risky behaviour. Whether it's cake, coke or woodbines, or more explicit forms of self-harm, a balance is struck between action and consequence, at least subconciously. The assumption that poor people are uniquely incapable of making appropriate calculations is not just patronizing, it relies on the complete and utter myth that everyone's life has the same potential and that people can sustain themselves indefinitely on unsubstantiated optimism. That might have worked in the days when a pointlessly painful life was a necessary preparation for an eternity in paradise. But now it's supposed to be its own reward.

Marmora Man Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The question is cause and effect. Does being poor > make you fat or being fat make you poor? Correlation is still no evidence of causation, and the consistent failure on the part of our finest advisers and opinion-formers to find such evidence is no guarantee that it exists. I'd hazard a guess that if you lead a harrassed and worrisome life, with the sort of stress that doesn't earn you a few hundred grand and a chubby pension, you're not really going to care very much about prolonging it. As is often pointed out, the healthcare industry has been very good at adding years to our lives, but they've not been added at the healthy end. That's especially the case for the vast majority of people for whom sunny pension ads are a distasteful fantasy. And it's why each giant leap for the medical trade seems only to deliver a painful shuffle for mankind. The link with education is similarly spurious. It's only sustainable as an argument if you wilfully confuse ignorance with indifference. That hasn't stopped some of our most enterprising chefs and biddable politicians forcing us to sit through over a decade of five-a-day advertising, curricular blather and patronising chef-based telly, but none of it has had the slightest detectable effect on public health; a fact that, whenever it's published in the papers, results in calls for more advertising, more curricular blather and more patronising chef-based telly. The interesting question is not so much why poor people are fat or vice versa (though even well-heeled fat people earn less than their scrawny counterparts), but how it is that the people who shouldn't really have much choice in the matter, and perversely fail to meet our formal educational targets, seem to be so much better than the rest of us at cost-benefit analysis. Eating broccoli might mean you get to live longer, but it also means adding years to the sentence of indignity, isolation, pain and poverty that most of us will reap in return for a lifetime of hard-won and soon-lost work. If that's the bargain on offer, I can see why it gets few takers.

"Common" in which sense?

geh Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > 94 page document and 64 pages of appendices. Not > exactly public facing is it DoT? No. And I don't think it's supposed to be. The following extracts, three selected from the consultation, the other to give some wider context, should demonstrate exactly how this consultation has been designed. To spare the Administrator any awkwardness, I make no further comment, save that careful reading is needed, even of these tiny fragments. "in relation to the impact on children, the evidence is inconclusive. Daytime noise exposure may have cognitive effects (particularly on reading) and chronic noise may affect children?s stress levels, blood pressure and mental health"- Night flying restrictions at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted consultation document, 2013 "Whilst there is evidence of aircraft noise causing cognitive impairment in children the science is not considered mature enough to monetise those effects at this time."- ERCD Report 1209, ?Proposed methodology for estimating the cost of sleep disturbance from aircraft noise?, 22 January 2013 "There is a growing body of literature on the impact of aircraft noise on children?s health. Across the literature the evidence for the effects of noise exposure on child health is strongest for cognitive effects (particularly reading). Some studies have found that chronically noise exposed children have raised levels of stress, increased blood pressure and mental health effects; however there is still insufficient data to provide unequivocal evidence of such effects"- ERCD Report 1208, ?Aircraft noise, sleep disturbance and health effects: a review?, 22 January 2013 "Aircraft noise has detrimental effects on learning, memory and reading in children. This conclusion is further strengthened by noting that more than twenty studies have shown detrimental effects of noise on children's reading and memory, and there is no study to the contrary."- Overview of the World Health Organization Workshop on Aircraft Noise and Health, 2008

steveo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I would love a clever forumite to superimpose this > on today's map Et viola.

david_carnell Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Am I naive to think that as the Eastern giants > (India, China etc) raise their standards of living > as their economies grow, that wages for those in > their factories making every garment and geegaw > trinket, that we currently consume in the West, > will rise? Not necessarily. For a start, at least some manufacturing sectors have shifted away from China to places like Vietnam and Indonesia where labour is even cheaper* (in 2010, Vietnam wages were about a third of rates in China, though strikes and inflation may have changed that slightly). Which might explain the rapid fall in prices of everything if there'd been one. Secondly, average wages don't necessarily mean very much. For example, the ?4bn paid out in bank bonuses last year is equivalent to ?500 for every one of the 8 million Londoners. That adds 2% to the average wage. That's great news on paper - it's an extra week's pay for everyone. But I doubt many will have felt the benefit. The perception that, rural poor aside, China's economic growth must be creating a prosperous middle class is a nice one, and coincides nicely with (Western) European versions of economic history. But that doesn't mean it's true, and there's some suspicion that the Chinese middle class is 'missing', and only a tiny minority of the very rich are benefitting much at all. This might not be true, but there are subtle signs that white-collar work doesn't necessarily imply a disposable income, and it's the last bit that matters. *Huguenot's point about efficiency is also true, and that will also be keeping prices down. But the same efficiencies are also helping bring manufacturing back to the US (and, possibly, Europe), so it may be a zero-sum game.

You could try this instead.

LondonMix Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > What we should be thinking about perhaps is creating > more apprenticeships, developing new teaching and > assessment styles etc that are relevant to the > modern economy's needs. What needs? Perhaps it's worth considering the lessons of this cheery tale, which demonstrates, to a nicety, exactly what'll happen to the 'knowledge economy', should it ever get off the ground. Napoleon was sort-of right. But instead of a nation of shopkeepers, we're a nation of middlemen, consultants, project managers and advisors, making a living by marking-up the work of others. What the internet is doing for retailers, so it will surely do for middlement, consultants, project managers and advisors - as the story illustrates. Some things, by necessity, will remain. But pawnbroking and manicures aren't likely to get us very far. The beauty of globalization is that, like all democracy-delivering revolutions, they empower the poor and leave the feudal barons gibbering in bedsits. Britain, and the other developed nations, are in the place of those feudal barons and although we're still clinging on to past glories as if they're some sort of birthright, singing Rule Britannia and parading our timeshare Navy, we're also beginning to gibber. Every time our politicians promise the world, with all the benevolence of desperation, the unsustainable living standards that we can no longer deliver for ourselves, a little bit of us must die. Sure, compared with a bankrupt US and a broken Eurozone, we've managed to borrow and print enough money to temporarily achieve stagnation. But you can't honestly think that's anything more than a fraud. Our regulatory nonchalance might make our financial sector, and our land, pleasant targets for a multinational plutocracy, but only until they get a better offer. The education fraud is similar. Every few years, a government will decide we should teach youngsters the skills they'll need for the future and, after months of consultation and millions of futile pounds, valiantly rebrand woodwork. But the future they're looking at is always the future of ten years ago. Take the current spate of calls to teach kids how to program computers. Now put that in the context of the outsourcing tale. Our programmers are competing directly with counterparts in countries where a dollar an hour is more than a living wage. You may as well teach them needlework or typing.

steveo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > What about an ugly tax? There's no need for one, apparently. Ugly people in Britain earn up to 18% less than the merely plain (compared with 15% less in the US, according to one book-touting professor), which seems reasonable enough to me. In any case, the effects of sexism, ageism and racism seem to be of the same sort of magnitude, despite reams of arrant legislation, so the more insidiously subjective -isms are bound to go untackled for the moment. Besides, nobody's going to join an Ugly People's Alliance (with the notable exception of Italians) and, even if they did, I can't imagine the meetings would be without a good deal of suspicion and rivalry. Perhaps surprisingly, organizations for larger individuals are more active and the NAAFA has been running, with conventions and everything, for over forty years. Sadly, that's only in America. In puritanical Britain, despite the presence of a branch of the International Size Acceptance, a rival American NGO that's fond of mid-90s web design and prefers to make its public appearances by radio, we're mostly stuck with the cruelly commercial Weightwatchers and the vile parasitism of bus-shelter snake-oil and bullying sanctimony. As for Westminster's proposals, I'd be surprised if they were legal. As far as I can tell, the plans are to order doctors to prescribe the use of council-run facilities, and I'd be very surprised if the Office of Fair Trading didn't have something to say about that. Any alternative arrangement, however, would require commercial 'studios' to snitch on their customers, which would fall foul of data protection regulations. Moreover, there's at least some reasonable-looking evidence suggesting that at least a handful of fat people might have genetic causes for their conditions. It can't be proven either way as yet but, if the presumption of innocence still holds, that's the point. You only need one spectacularly expensive legal challenge to make an indiscriminate bit of cheese-paring look very silly. They could change the law, I suppose. It's not just Westminster behind this report (there's a whole Local Government Information Unit), and there may be hundreds of other councils, those with leisure facilities left at any rate, ready to pounce on any chance of skimming a few quid from those in hardship as soon as it's safe to do so. And that's a precedent we might want to keep an eye on. If being fat keeps you out of the job market, so might not going to evening classes or failing to start your own business, and there are lots of us not doing either. The other precedent, of course, is removing benefits on grounds of ill-health (except for those ill enough to be dead), and we might want to think for a while before changing that principle. A near-equivalent proposal would be to cut benefits to people who refused 'flu jabs. Yet we can't even suggest that health workers take vaccines without suffering the protectionist screams of their banshee publicists. I'd like to think that Westminster's wheeze will be dead in the water by spring. But I have a horrible feeling it'll be staggering along for some time.

dbboy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > oops, seems like the boys in blue have perverted > the course of jusitice in making untrue > statements. Now throw the book at tham and get > them into court to face the charges. Its nor about > either backing the police or tories, its about > justice being done. I'm not sure, but I think perverting the course of justice is only possible if the evidence they've fabricated would have affected a court case, and there's been no suggestion that any charges would have been pressed. There are four possible grounds for prosecution: 1) the leaking of the initial reports which might have had a public interest justification had they been true, but now seem not to. However, as both Plod and Press are arguing against Leveson's outrageous criticisms of their bung-larded relationships, and Mitchell is also supposed to be toeing his party's line against regulation, I can't see any of them complaining. 2) the faking of the police report, and the apparent collusion in that fakery. We suspect, from as many high-profile cases as you can shake a stick at, that fiddling logs, forging notebooks and collusion between officers is rampantly routine. But, unless it's relevant to a court case, it's a cheerfully internal matter. 3) the theft of the details of the police log by a member of the public who turned out to be a Plod from Ruislip, making it not really theft at all. The Information Commissioner might have something to say, but the Information Commissioner is having an intensely relaxed year, and I doubt that will change. 4) the apparent conspiracy in the stitch-up by official respresentatives of the Police Federation who were valiantly defending their hard-working members until the CCTV footage turned up. They've currently gone to ground, save for an impressively weasel-worded statment of monumental chippiness, but I don't suppose it matters. I imagine Mitchell could have them up for libel, but I don't imagine his party would encourage it. Overall, the chances of book-throwing look very slight indeed. An arrest has, admittedly, been made, but apparently only on the grounds of pretending to be a citizen, and I guess that's a tactical preparation in case things go badly wrong and they need to offer someone the opportunity to apply for sick leave and render themselves unfit to stand trial. And they wouldn't even need that if they'd remembered to requisition the CCTV footage nearer the time. I suspect the only fun we're likely to get is watching the Federation trying to distance itself from itself, and Hogan-Howe trying to look concerned. But given that, in less than a week, those of us sat at festive tables will be grimly embroidering history and lying through our teeth, perhaps we shouldn't make too much of it.

woodrot Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You can fill in your own pro monarchy comment > below - try to include statements about how the UK > is a net benficiary due to the Royals and give me > a good ole pasting with COLD HARD FACTS delivered > with a sleek confident nonchelance. With whatever respect you feel due, it is members of the Royal Academy that have decided to hand the Queen their daubs. It really takes very little scrutiny to calculate the probable strength of that organization's republican tendencies, and it would have hardly have been excessively polite of you to have bothered. If you are genuinely perturbed by the nefarious antics of our constitutional monarchy and its craven cadre of obsequity, I suggest you spend more time with the Express, and less time wasting mine. If you're genuinely shocked that artists prostitute their alleged talents, I suggest you find another planet.

I'm broadly in favour. But I wouldn't start with Alan Turing. It's not as if the decrimininalization of certain sexual acts is the sole bit of unfinished business. Lots of things have been decriminalized, including abortion, blasphemy and libel. Yet thousands suffered the penalties, including death, for having committed them. It is clear that, for the moral good of the nation, we must find out and pardon all those who have been imprisoned, fined, killed, humiliated, tortured or exiled for acts that we, currently, don't consider criminal. As well as being morally right, a proper, coordinated effort would stimulate the economy through the wholesale employment, at public expense, of tens of thousands of otherwise redundant history graduates and struggling lawyers for decades. In fact, I see no reason why a permanent Royal Commission of National Apology shouldn't be constituted as soon as practically possible, in order to examine, cross-reference and collate the evidence found and devise some suitable National Ceremony of Pardoning to be held on as regular a basis as found necessary in order to bring much-needed comfort to the generations of decendants of those who hadn't, all things considered, really been very naughty at all. That might, arguably, be taking things a little far. But to do anything less would mean arguing that the concept of all being equal in the eyes of the law is hokum, and justice is only due to people you happen to have heard of - an argument that, I'm afraid, is not just unprincipled, immoral and odious hogwash, but unlikely to succeed even with an unprincipled, immoral and odious legislature.

DaveR Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > What is now proposed is a system of regulation > specific to the press, whose job will be to > determine what newspapers should be allowed to > print. I think you've missed the point. The point is mainly that the civil law (the only bit the PCC was designed to circumvent) is inaccessible. The criminal law is enforceable, as always, by Plod. The trouble with that, however, is that there are no privacy laws and victims criminal journalism are often blissfully aware that they're victims at all. With the phone-hacking, it was a series of unfortunate leaks that opened the can of worms, not a stream of complaints. Because civil law (mostly libel) is too expensive for most, the PCC was set up as a way to allow those with awkward grudges to be paid off cheaply behind closed doors, and the rest to be given the brush-off, thanks to the PCC's handy lack of an appeal process. However, the PCC was rubbish even at that. First it was voluntary, so papers didn't even have to sign up to it's weaslish code of conduct if they didn't fancy it. And it failed to investigate anything much at all, preferring instead to lob gentle questions to PR departments and copy out the answers. In response to the phone hacking scandal, it went to the extent of printing a glossy report saying it wasn't a problem and nobody had ever done any. This is not surprising. Not just because self-regulation never really works (even when 'legally-underpinned' in the manner of the FSA, CQC, IPCC etc), but because such bodies are designed to insulate their members from the cost of defending themselves in court. Leveson's solution is exactly the same as the PCC, with the exception that it'll be run by people appointed by another body run by people appointed by government. It will still be reactive (i.e. won't have any powers to look at pieces before they're published), and the only change will be to make it more independent from the press. Unless you're going to appoint it by lottery, then it's better, for tediously democratic reasons, that appointments are made, albeit at arm's length, by elected representatives rather than newpaper proprietors. Of course, that does mean it will be under arguably more government control, but we can change governments. We can't change Murdoch. As for censorship, there's no chance of it. It will still only consider pieces that have already been published. If a government wants to suppress stuff, it's not the PCC it looks to, but the D-notice. And, for anyone else with enough money, there's the superinjunction (despite last year's fuss about superinjunctions, nothing has changed). In summary, once you take into account the facts that (a) the law is not necessarily of much use, (b) the press is captive to plutocrats and © politicians pay more attention to the press than vice versa, then the whole idea of Leveson's recommendations being an unprecendented attack on a free and fair press looks risible at best. What's at stake here is the composition of a cut-price arbitrator handling bleats about old news. Whichever way you look at it, it's hardly a "massive change", and still as far from a Ministry of Censorship as you can reasonably imagine.

RockyZool Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I was keen to take your thoughts on how ED has > progressed over the last 10 years, but was > particularly keen to take views on what we should > ED to be like a further 10 years from now. > Ten years ago, there were skips and removal vans in every street, and the finest crop of estate agent signs between Hampstead and Tonbridge. Now it's just the skips, and none too many of them, either. In ten years time, whatever the agents may have told you*, ED will boast no underground station, trains will still take 30 minutes to crawl the five miles to Victoria and the Co-Op will still be out of polenta. *The creativity of agents should not be underestimated. But given there's no online forum for Honor Oak Borders or the Camberwell Gulch, I don't suppose it matters.

The maps for the Early Morning Noise Respite Trial are buried in a powerpoint document linked from the foot of a sub-page of the noise action section of the BAA website. Apologies for the shocking quality, but I've cut out and enlarged the relevant bits. East Dulwich is approximately two thirds along from the left of the blue box, though its exact location remains a subject of some dispute. Before Trial: During Trial:

the-e-dealer Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Postcodes arent boundaries. The Boundary Commssion > sets boundaries please keep up! It sets electoral boundaries, but they're more a statistical exercise than anything. They don't override administrative, ecclesiastical or postal boundaries, and the Electoral Commission are not the only boundary-fiddlers. London boroughs can create new 'community councils', within their own area, wherever they wish if the residents agree to it, irrespective of any pre-existing boundaries. But what matter in human terms are the physical, geographical boundaries that can be seen, patrolled and defended. Humans are, broadly, territorial; our homes are our castles, we strongly identify our personal space, and we define ourselves, at least in part, by where we live in terms of manors, patches and stamping grounds. In a state of nature, the boundaries would be physical features - topographical barriers in their own right. Rivers, coastlines, mountain ranges, floodplains, forests and so on, with the odd magic stone where necessary. Later, these same barriers informed the division of land into kingdoms and dioceses and parishes and manors, decided less by maps and paper and more by the tonnage of slaughtered peasants. Areas that could not be defended against marauders, whether bent on blood or taxes quickly stopped being areas in their own right. Although we now have relative peace and comparative stability, our money disappearing not into the pockets of bloodthirsty Danish invaders but the urbanely nebulous accounts of French rubbish companies and German bus operators, the ancient topographical boundaries largely remain. Dog-Kennel Hill, Dawson's Hill and Peckham Rye are there for all to see. Rivers may have been buried, forests stunted and floodplains made drier, but in their place, are railway lines, parks, fences and uncrossable roads that often follow near-identical lines and similarly act as psychological, if not physical, barriers. That doesn't mean that virtual landgrabs haven't been made. "Dulwich Wells" in Sydenham were so called mainly for advertising purposes, and we're all aware of the misinadvertencies of estate agents. But for practical and visceral reasons advertisers, estate agents and boundary commissioners all belong in much the same sack.

Atticus Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > to suggest that drivers take less care around > cyclists with helmets is utter folly. I would ask > how you go about measuring this if I didn't think > it was such rubbish. Idiosyncratic at best. You could read this and then you'd find out.

Here's a picture of the event what the Manchester Evening News called a "celestial spectacle". Jupiter is the one on the right.

the-e-dealer Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Verbiage seems to think that populations > never change and MPs should get an easy ride. Not quite. I meant that the Boundary Commission aren't the best people to ask where anywhere happens to be, simply because their answer will necessarily reflect their opinion (or lack of it) at a particular moment in time, and their opinion is not the same as my opinion, nor does it necessarily coincide with the opinions of cartographers, historians, Postal Czars or those with houses to sell. To elaborate the point, they are the arbiters of democratic expedience rather than geographical truth, and have no monopoly on the matter, save with respect to electoral concerns which, with respect to the e-dealer, are far from the only possible concerns. Consider this: if everyone within the current electoral boundaries went to live in Margate, leaving the place devoid of human inhabitants, East Dulwich would cease to exist in the mind of the Electoral Commission. Yet, to anyone else, the impudent persistence of the Railway Station, the Sorting Office and the Palm Tree Roundabout would clearly attest to it continuing to be a place. Happily, given the question was what your (or, in my case, my) opinion of where the East Dulwich boundaries are (or by implication, should be), the question of whether the Boundary Commission is or is not an infallible bureacratic ornament becomes entirely irrelevant. Given the level of interest in the issue, I have sacrificed a portion of my afternoon in pursuit of enlightenment and am now in the happy position of being able to publish the results here for the benefit of all. I trust no further clarification will be required.

Salsaboy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Explain. 1) It's a full Moon 2) There are gaps in the clouds 3) The air is relatively clean (the rain's knocked all the dust into the gutters) There are two other possible reasons. The first, that the Moon's got nearer, doesn't count today. For today the folk on the Moon are celebrating Apogee Day, which they do whenever they stop moving away from the Earth. They're now about 30,000 miles further away Earth than they were a fortnight ago (30,000 miles per fortnight is about 90mph). Which means, on the whole, the Moon is a bit less bright than average, all else considered. The second possible reason is that all the lights are dimmer. Recent reports of flickering lights in the area suggest a degree of Electrical Tampering, and it may be that we've had the voltage dropped in a last-ditch attempt to meet some carbon reduction target. I been suspicious of something of the sort recently, as my toaster's got annoyingly slow, though that might be as much to do with the bread being colder-than-average, what with the weather. Incidentally, the shiny thing a little to the left of the Moon this evening was Jupiter, at probably the brightest we're likely to see it.

the-e-dealer Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > John the Boundary Commission agreed that Goose > Green Bellenden Road Adys Road etc are part of > East Dulwich. The sole purpose of the Boundary Commission is to move boundaries. If it was a reliable guide to anything, it wouldn't exist.

DJKillaQueen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's not so much assiting, but filling the gap > left by cuts. > > I can understand why charities oppose government > cuts though. Cuts mean increased traffic to those > charities... That's far from the case for many charities, which are effectively operating as contractors for government work. That may involve thinking up policies, delivering end-of-life care, training workless youngsters, rehabilitating offenders and a whole bunch of other stuff of more or less importance. The advantages to the government of 'involving' the 'third sector' are clear. Or as clear as no tax and unpaid labour can be. The advantages to the charities are also clear, at least to the well-paid chief-execs and 'fundraisers' who, by tarting themselves out though large state contracts, have been able pocket their salaries without having to worry about raising money from the public. And it's those, together with the umbrella-bodies, think-tanks, foundations, consultancies, leadership groups and the whole self-serving bureaucracy that's grown like fungus on the backs of volunteers, who are now complaining. They have good reason to complain. But to pay them any heed is to make the same mistake as the thousands who've been inadvertently funding Tuscan villas through their taxes, donations and freely-given labour. Many years ago, charities were founded to deliver services that the state can't or won't provide, and they have always been busier when times are hard. But that's what they are for, and it's why the public give them money. Charities that only exist in economic boom times, or to facilitate tax dodges for former prime ministers, are a recent invention and the sooner they're dead and buried, the better.