The night before last, I did not sleep particularly well as I suspect that the jabs I had received in both arms were keeping me awake. I failed to ask the doctor in which order the jabs were administered but if the COVID jab was given in my left and the flu jab in the right then it is the flue jab which is giving me a little bit of soreness. I know this will pass in a day or so and it is not really troublesome and I am glad that I am fully protected before the winter colds and flu season gets under way. My way to church was eventful if only because there had just been a most horrendous crash and the police had closed off the road that I use to cross the Kidderminster Road. The fact that a crash had occurred here is of no surprise as it involves a five-way junction with a camber on the two principal roads and the County Council refuse to erect traffic lights. I have heard it said that this junction is the most dangerous in Worcestershire and there are constant near misses when motorists misinterpret the hand signals given by others. Just to make matters worse, when a new gated estate was built about one hundred metres away, the developers offered to pay 50% of the cost of some traffic lights under the ‘Section 106’ legislation of the planning acts. But the County Council gave the developers their money back and argued that they could not afford even 50% of the costs of some traffic lights (but some have been installed near a new development down the road which is infinitely less problematic) Some traffic lights have been promised when the local roads are reconfigured after the local building work is complete but this may be years off yet. I wonder whether the latest crash (and there are multiple near misses as well) will force the hand of the county council who may not move, even now, unless there has been a death at the scene of the crash. I got to church after a massive detour but an hour and a half later all of the crashed cars had been cleared away and I managed to return home expeditiously. The weather has calmed down today and I have no social visits of any kind in prospect so will probably walk down to collect my Sunday newspaper later in the morning.
The Tories are meeting in conference this week and are desperate to stop the leakage of their vote to even more right-wing parties such as Reform. The Conservatives are pledging to create a new ‘removals force’ to detain and remove 150,000 a year as part of a broad plan to tackle illegal immigration to the UK. Modelled on the ‘successful approach’ of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, this new force would be given ‘sweeping new powers’, and over £1.6bn in new funding. The pledge is part of the Conservative Party’s broad new plans to stop illegal migration to the UK, set to be unveiled by Kemi Badenoch on the first day of their annual conference on Sunday, where reducing immigration and creating ‘Strong Borders’ will be one of the key themes. The new ‘removals force’ that she will unveil will replace the existing Home Office Immigration Enforcement (IE) and will be given broad new powers, including being able to use facial recognition without warning in order to spot illegal immigrants. Given the strong adverse community reaction in the US to this policy, one can only predict the most turbulent of times ahead as the immigration issue drives policies more and more rightwards.
In the morning, after I had done my Pilates exercises, showered and breakfasted, I made my way down into town on quite a nice day. On my way down, I bumped into a Welsh acquaintance who lives just around the corner on the main road but we have not coincided for quite some time now. She had put her house on the market but has now decided that she is quite content with her lot and is going to stay put. I must say that I was delighted by this news if only because 2-3 of my acquaintances from down the road have moved away from the area. We exchanged news about families as her own mother is gradually fading away and so we discussed with each other the plans that we both had for the ultimate resting places of our deceased relatives. The rest of the trip was unremarkable and although I collected my newspaper and had a coffee in Waitrose, the sum of my social contacts was dealing with two scammed messages on my phone. Not being particularly hungry today, perhaps as a consequence of yesterday’s jabs, I made myself a light lunch of fish on bread which was all I felt I needed. Then I watched quite an interesting programme on paleo-anthropology in the BBC series ‘Human’ and this documented the very first human incursions across a land bridge from Asia as far as the northern coast of Canada and then, following the seashore eventually getting as far as Patagonia. We know some of this from fossilised footprints that have been found in North Western Canada and which can be carbon dated to at least 4,500 years ago. Tonight BBC4 will be broadcasting a whole concert on the music of South East Asia from its archives and, somewhere in all of this, there will be a performance by Ravi Shankar who brought the music of the sitar to western audiences.
In the domestic political agenda, the Green party who have just elected a charismatic young leader, Zack Polanski who made a pretty dynamic conference speech recently. The Green Party now has more members than the Liberal Democrats, despite having 68 fewer MPs in parliament. Rachel Millward, the party’s deputy leader, announced the achievement to members on the second day of the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth recently. It is believed to be only the second time this has happened, with the last time being more than a decade ago – in January 2015. The Greens have revealed they now have more than 83,500 members, to the Lib Dems 83,174. So, we are now in a multi-party democracy as there are five parties on the political scene and before we count in the three nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.