The London mayor’s office has been running a campaign to dissuade people, particularly women, from using unlicensed cabs, because a fair number of rapes and other violent attacks were perpetrated by drivers of fake minicabs at night. Only black cabs (i.e. official London taxis, which are in fact not always black but are one of about three specific classes of large car) are allowed to pick people up by the roadside, and their drivers have to do ‘the knowledge’, meaning learn a particular area of London (usually central London) like the back of their hand, and pass various other tests of suitability. They can also stop pretty much anywhere, they frequently block traffic at green lights, and are pretty expensive nowadays. Minicabs have to pick up passengers from pre-arranged points and cannot drop people on red routes or anywhere else that an ordinary private car cannot stop.

Taking an unlicensed cab that stops by the side of the road is pretty foolish at the best of times, and when you’re the chair of the London Assembly and the authority is running a campaign against cowboy cabbies, it’s the kind of inconsistency which should provoke a resignation. However, bragging about doing something stupid which could get you robbed or murdered is an obvious sign of arrogant male privilege at work: a man showing that he is invulnerable while you, girls, aren’t. Don’t do what I do, do what I say. Of course, men are often much less aware of their own vulnerability in general than women, but the risks of diving into shallow water, for example, are the same for a man or a woman (and a fair number of women have broken their necks this way), but the risks of being sexually assaulted are much less (although not absent). His action shows obvious contempt for women and surely it is inconsistent with the Green Party’s progressive reputation. I would hope that they would give him a sharp dressing down, but he should do the decent thing and resign his chairmanship.

Rounding the British coast is popular right now; Hilary Lister did it in her little sip-and-puff sailboat, the BBC keeps doing it to make one series of Coast after another (unless they’re repeats), and now that a footpath is being planned round the whole coast, the rest of us will soon be able to do it on foot.

This video raises one of the problems - that parts of the coast are covered by marshes, which are submerged at high tide and thus dangerous, and are also environmentally sensitive as bird habitats. Get any Ordnance Survey map of some coastal areas of the north-west and you’ll see messages saying “public rights of way across such-and-such sands can be dangerous; seek local advice”, because at high tide, those rights of way are under the water.

The other, not raised in the video, is that some of the footpaths, although they officially exist, are so badly eroded that they are impassable or barely passable. While at Aberystwyth I walked along the coast path from Aber to Borth, where two of my friends lived, and while the section from Aber to Clarach Bay was in good shape, the section north of there was in places really dangerous and, unless it’s had some serious TLC, it probably no longer exists. There are long river estuaries, and paths along some of them (e.g. the banks of the Deben in Suffolk between Martlesham and Waldringfield), although supposedly open to the public, are breached.

Building or repairing footpaths along spectacular bits of the coast will not be controversial or expensive; how long will they take to repair paths along lengthy, desolate estuaries in unglamorous parts of the country?

It was on at 6:30am this morning, but you can still listen to it online for a week or so (at least if you’re in the UK). There was a feature about it in the Guardian in August also.

The firm chartered the ship, Probo Koala, which transported the cargo to Ivory Coast in 2006.

An official Dutch analysis of samples of the waste carried by the Probo Koala indicate that it contained approximately 2 tonnes of hydrogen sulphide, a killer gas with a characteristic smell of rotten eggs.

The story is told in greater depth here and here:

Asked to comment about the potential toxicity of such a mix, John Hoskins, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, told BBC2’s Newsnight last night: “If you dropped this in Trafalgar Square, you would have people being sick for several miles around and that would involve millions of people. You’d see the effects out to the M25 [the ring road around London, i.e. up to 25 miles away].

“It’s not very hard to imagine that if a pregnant woman was poisoned her body reacts by aborting the foetus. There will be long-term effects. These things are chronically damaging and, once you’ve damaged your lungs, kidneys, that damage will not recover.”

It is alleged that what Trafigura was really doing was very far from routine: that the company was trying to transform consignments of cheap and dirty petroleum, heavily contaminated with sulphur, into something more profitable.

Trafigura employees were trying to remove sulphur from the so-called “coker gasoline”, it is claimed, by adding highly-corrosive caustic soda and a catalyst. This process leaves the improved petroleum in a top layer and a toxic sludge underneath.

It is widely-known that western firms use developing countries as dumping grounds for toxic and radioactive waste; much of our household waste ends up in China, while countries without functioning governments are easy targets for this kind of dumping, Somalia being a favourite destination. In 2002, a shipment of wood preservative was sent to Ethiopia in plastic cans rather than the required metal drums (the chemical is highly toxic and carcinogenic), causing a massive leak which killed at least three people and injured many more in the port of Djibouti (also here).

From the Guardian today:

The most dramatic element will be the building of a railway hub at Heathrow which will form part of a new 200mph rail line, running parallel to the congested west coast mainline, linking London and Birmingham direct, with a spur to Heathrow from St Pancras station, linking the new line to Britain’s current high speed Eurostar line to Paris and Brussels.

The government will declare that it is delivering a new high speed link for the whole of the west coast mainline to the north-west of England even though the new line will stop at Birmingham. This is because most of the congestion occurs around Birmingham, allowing new trains to continue at speed, though not the full 200mph, to Manchester and Liverpool even after they come off the new line.

Anyone who uses the West Coast Main Line knows that it does not run out of St Pancras. It runs out of Euston. Anyone who uses it also knows that they have just spent a decade upgrading it so that the new tilting trains can use it. They also purged it of a lot of slower old-style trains, like the Southern region Gatwick-to-Rugby service, so that the Pendolini could run at, pardon the pun, full tilt. So, why did they bother with this rather than just build the 200mph line ten years ago? It would probably be cheaper to reconstruct the old Manchester to St Pancras line, which would take a lot of pressure off the West Coast Main Line.

Second, the likely route of the link to St Pancras would be along existing freight lines, which are not direct by any means: the link to the Great Western, known as the Dudding Hill Line, branches off the Midland Main Line the north of Cricklewood and joins the Great Western near Acton Main Line station. It is unelectrified, unlike the lines it links (although electrifying that stretch would not cost much), and presently has a 30mph speed limit. This is presently used by freight trains (freight locomotives tend to have slower maximum speeds than passenger trains), so unless they want to bulldoze large tracts of Neasden and Harlesden to build an extra pair of tracks, it will not be very fast, and if they do improve that line, no doubt the people of Neasden and Harlesden will want a piece of the pie as well, in the form of a couple of stations. And then there will be the problem of extra pressure on that bit of the Great Western line, which has already lost capacity to the Heathrow Express.

Then there is the matter of St Pancras itself. There is already a direct link from St Pancras to Heathrow: it’s called the Piccadilly Line. Yes, it stops dozens of times, but you can still use it on a London Travelcard. You cannot do this with the Heathrow Express, or even the stopping Heathrow Connect service from Paddington. Only the very rich, or the very hard-pressed, will use any direct rail link from there unless you can use Travelcards.

St Pancras may be well-connected, but it is in what is essentially the northern suburbs of London: if you wanted a link to the City via that route, it would be better to start the service at Moorgate, and pinch those two terminal platforms from the Metropolitan Line. If you did that, you would also add four extra platforms to St Pancras (reduced from six to four platforms by the international station), which would make a bit of extra room for that Manchester service (and the new link to Corby), and for anyone who might say “but the Midland Mainline is diesel”, diesel trains were run into Moorgate on the old Midland City line for decades until the 1980s.

And why build a spur from Heathrow to a high-speed link from London to the north anyway? Surely, nobody really wants to go ten miles east and change trains in central London to get from Heathrow to Birmingham or anywhere else in the north; they want to go direct. One way of doing this is to rebuild the old Great Central line as far as Rugby, where it could join the WCML to Birmingham, but cheaper options would be to link Heathrow to the Chiltern Line or to the westbound Great Western. As for Eurostar, whatever happened to that idea of a direct link from Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle, and failing that, just to Ashford International? What about that link from Feltham on the South Western lines?

But all that is just blue-sky thinking, just like the government’s own proposals. They will be forgotten about. If they are built at all, they will be done on a private finance basis and use of the new stations will be reserved for people who pay premium prices, like the Heathrow Express. Others will take the Piccadilly Line or arrive by car, which will mean more congestion along the roads to Heathrow, including the M25, the M4, the A312 and all the suburban roads, much to the inconvenience of anyone who lives nearby and doesn’t work at Heathrow, or needs to use those roads to get anywhere except Heathrow, unless they revive long-dead road schemes like the Cobham-to-Reading link or build a bypass for the M25 round that whole section.

The third runway is to be a short one, for short-haul flights, not jumbo jets, and short-haul flying is the most unnecessary and the least justifiable in terms of the damage it causes (and we already have a runway at Southend capable of taking 737s, and that’s right next to a railway line that runs straight into the City at Liverpool Street). There must be no third runway.

An excellent opinion piece on the stream of lies and broken promises which have led to the proposal for the third Heathrow runway, which the Government is expected to approve. New Labour has a long history of giving into “Big Carbon”:

Brown will do what his predecessors have done, which is lie. In the 1960s ministers promised “for all time” that there would be no expansion of Heathrow. It expanded. When T4 opened in 1978 there was another promise of no expansion, and a cap of 275,000 flights. The pledge was broken within a year. At the time of T5 the cap was raised to 480,000, and the prime minister and cabinet agreed that a third runway would be “totally unacceptable”.

That promise is now broken. In 2006 the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, promised that a new runway would be a short, domestic one, with flights only over countryside to the west. She also promised carbon and pollution limits. Those promises have been broken. The government wants almost to double the number of Heathrow flights to 700,000, an astonishing increase on the present chaos, and careless of the impact on west London or its infrastructure. This is an orgy of planning abuse. No Heathrow promise is worth a bucket of spit.

Ministers lie because they know they will be out of office, or out of sight, when their pledges are broken. They know that no government can bind its successor and that Big Carbon, like Big Pharma, always gets its way. When we were young we were told that new airports could go anywhere because new planes would be so clean and quiet that nobody would mind. It was all rubbish.

G2 also had a feature on the places which are likely to be bulldozed, or rendered virtually uninhabitable, by this monstrous scheme. I think it’s madness to expand an airport which is already huge, which already has two full-size runways and is right on the edge of a major city with flightpaths running right over the suburbs. Rather than bulldozing more houses or farms to build runways, they should build (or improve) rail links between the four full-blown international airports London already has - which would only actually involve improving a few junctions, not building vast new lines.

To be fair, Cyprus to Egypt is not that far - about 250 miles from Larnaca to Cairo (plus the journey from your resort, be it Ayia Napa or Paphos). There are close links between the two countries, and Cyprus is used as the base for printing newspapers which sell in Egypt. However, I have even seen trips of this type advertised which start in London. Yes, London. The guided tours take you to the pyramids, down the Nile for a few miles, to a museum in central Cairo and to a bazaar (Khan al-Khalili) in the old city. I was told that the museum was badly-organised and disappointing. They also told me that they found the place hot and grimy and noisy, and that they didn’t know how I survived living there when I visited. My friend from Canada, who was there for two weeks, also told me of problems with the heat and of only being able to go out in the evenings, when the sun was not at its peak. I must say that when there, I did go out during the day, but I also spent the first couple of days (or most of them) in the flat. I had a long time there to get used to the heat, and I had the advantage of living in the older part of the city, where the streets were narrow and there was a lot of shade.

Cairo is indeed hot, even to people coming from a Mediterranean climate like that of Cyprus, and noisy. It is also a place with a lot of poverty, and a lot of in-your-face begging, and a fair number of hucksters and scammers around as well. It is also a very interesting city with a long history, and a lot of great architecture, but if you have literally a few hours to spare, and you come in the middle of the summer, and you have no choice but to go out in the middle of the day because you don’t have the benefit of being able to wait until the evening, you are not going to appreciate much of it. Cairo is also a big place. It is not as big as London, although is population probably is (and London’s population count includes places like Croydon and Kingston, which were incorporated into London very recently), but who would take a flight from, say, New York, take a brief ride down the M4 and a boat trip down the Thames, a visit to the Tower of London to take a few pictures of the “Beefeaters”, a two-hour shopping trip in the West End, a drive around Westminster and then go back up the M4 to Heathrow again? It would cost hundreds of dollars, would seem rather excessive, but it is the equivalent of what these day trips to Cairo cost.

Where I live, I’m on the edge of London, which is a major city of about ten million people. We often talk of “going to London”, but what that means is going to the Natural History Museum, or shopping in the West End, or to see a play or musical and have a meal, or to do a bit of business; we don’t think we can say we’ve “seen London” on the basis of a day’s visiting, as there is too much to see. What is the point of making a flying visit to a major city from far away? You will be too tired, after getting up early to make sure you get your flight, to appreciate much, particularly if the climate is inhospitable. The best time to visit a place like Cairo is in the winter, or any time except the height of summer, although this is not practical for a lot of people, particularly those with school-age children.

A better place for a flying visit from Cyprus, if they have to lay one on at all (and if they can manage it with the red tape) is Damascus, because it is not in the middle of the desert and has plenty of history and fine architecture (it is a candidate for the longest continually-inhabited city on earth), it has Roman and other ancient ruins within and nearby (and a lot of tourists who go to places like Greece, Cyprus and Turkey love those ruins), but what it doesn’t have is three stupid stone monstrosities plonked in the desert on its western fringes. Am I the only one who is left cold by the pyramids? They have no intricate stone carvings or other decorative features (admittedly, they might well have eroded over the centuries, like the sphinx) and are not even useful except to grave robbers; they are just monuments to the egos of the idiotic kings who had them built, who could not think of anything more beneficial to leave their people (and posterity generally).

I love travel; I like the excitement of seeing new places, which is one of the positive aspects of working as a driver, even though often I see little of any town or city and much of the countryside (which is fantastic if the countryside happens to be the South Downs, but not everywhere in the English countryside is that thrilling to look at). However, day trips to a city like Cairo, where there is grinding poverty, strike me as not quite right somehow, not to mention the effect flight has on the environment, and the offer of trips like this is a perfect example of the disproportion between the environmental damage caused by flight (massive amounts of carbon dioxide, straight into the sky) and the ease with which it is available.

The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature a few issues back which was not entirely laudatory, stating among other things that the chain does not recognise unions. (In the UK, they have to recognise if there is enough support from the staff for the union.) There were a couple of letters in the current issue, one of them from an un-named current employee, who said that the “offending” issue had been removed from the stores, as was any member of staff who had to take time off for family reasons or who “exercised their freedom of speech”. It also notes that the store throws out a huge quantity of food (perhaps inevitable with their huge buffets) and that a third of marriages between staff fail.

So, all that glitters isn’t gold. Actually, I’ve become adept at identifying which foods are good value to buy from WFM and which are not - you may well be able to get some of their products cheaper at your local health food shop (Food for Thought in Kingston is one example) or in Sainsbury’s - and keep in mind that WFM isn’t a little health food shop but a huge multinational chain, so don’t feel guilty. One would have thought that a company with their economies of scale could compete on price with a local organic chain or a company with two small shops in Surrey, but no.

Actually, while on the subject of organics, I noticed that the Natural Cafe, a chain of organic cafes which sprung up in London recently, suddenly went bust a month ago, having only been in business for a few months. Their outlet in Kingston has turned into a Caffe Torelli, an Italian chain owned by the Costa family (and most of the staff really are Italian). I can’t think why that business lasted such a short time, but they cut out a lot of potential customers by serving meat. Some people would go to a vegetarian cafe not only because they like the healthy options but because they won’t eat meat, for religious reasons among other things (I quite often see Muslims in Planet Organic in London, for instance). It would have been an ideal venue for my family’s Saturday outings to Kingston, since we have one person with religious issues and one with various food and chemical intolerance issues, but it wasn’t to be.

The justification for all this is that London’s flight capacity absolutely has to grow, because this maintains the capital’s ability to be a hub for international flights. Businessmen, it seems, like to be able to fly in here from Singapore or wherever, and then just jet off to any place they feel like, and big airports are what you need to do that. Dell apparently shifted its facility from west London to Germany because it found the infrastructure limiting. If we don’t get even more capacity at Heathrow, with its two long runways and four terminals with a fifth nearing completion, people will just go where the capacity is.

Well, last time I looked on the map, the reason other places like France and Germany have the capacity is because they’re bigger countries - it’s that simple. You only have to look on a map to know that France is much bigger than the UK, and much more of Great Britain is unproductive (mountains, marshland and the like) than France or Germany. France and Germany have much more land to waste on concreting over for airport runways. As for Holland, they can just reclaim another bit of inland sea. We cannot do that here.

We are just short of land here in the UK and it’s one reason why there is a dire housing shortage and land and house prices are going crazy. What is the sense in tearing down a whole neighbourhood in a city where people are crying out for housing, just to extend an airport when there are three other big runways within an hour’s driving distance? Surely it would be less damaging to improve the rail links between Heathrow and the other London airports at Luton, Gatwick and Southend, and perhaps even Southend whose runway can accommodate the smaller commercial jets?

How much land can we waste on urban runways? Perhaps before long, they will decide that they need to pair up the third runway with, perhaps, another on the West Drayton side of the M4? Perhaps they will bulldoze yet more houses to build a seventh terminal? What will all this do for the traffic situation in that part of London, which is close to three motorways leading west and north from London and the M25 ring road which never seems to be wide enough? No doubt they will need to upgrade the A312 or other urban main roads, leading to even more land use for transport.

If London cannot afford to be the centre of the world’s air transport industry, so be it - we just need land to do stuff, like live and work. If there is space for another runway, it is out in the countryside, not in west London. We have heard much about this government’s Big Brother tendencies, but I am sure we do not want to turn into Airstrip One either.

The Soil Association, the organisation which advocates for and certifies organic food in the UK, is considering stripping organic status from food which is air-freighted into the country, because of concern about the greenhouse gases these flights cause. According to this BBC report, the bulk of what is flown in is “highly perishable or out-of-season produce”.

While I agree on the necessity to reduce the air-freighting of out-of-season produce into the UK just so that people can get winter or summer vegetables or fruit all year round, I don’t really believe that stripping food of organic status is the way to do this. Food is organic because it is farmed without pesticides or genetically modified seeds, not because of how it’s transported after it is grown.

On top of this, a lot of the organic food sold in the shops is chocolate or other food largely composed of ingredients transported from overseas. How is this brought here - no doubt they do not bring it by sailing ship. It’s brought by big ships and by trucks, and probably by plane, and all of these emit greenhouse gases. Perhaps if they do manage to repair the Cutty Sark after the recent fire, they could put it back out to sea and use it to transport organic cacao beans, coffee and fruit!

It seems like another case of “mission creep” by an organisation set up to further one issue extending its remit into another. It reminds me of the way the Free Software Foundation, in drawing up the new version of the General Public License (which is what allows open-source or “free” software to remain open), have tried to outlaw what they call “Tivoisation”, the supply of “free” software on rigged hardware which will not run altered versions of the software. Sony, which produces the TiVo, does not prevent anyone copying the software and using it in their own commercial product if they like and if they have the money, so what does it have to do with free software? It is another case of a group established for one purpose letting its agenda creep into another in response to behaviour antithetical to its culture.