One of the reasons I rail against "personality politics", and the baying of the "Tory mob" which would lay every sin and every failure at the door of "McStalin Broon", is that so much of what he is accused he had nothing to do with, or over which he had little or no control.

Kenneth Clarke – God bless his silken socks – alluded to this in his evidence to the public administration committee last week, when he noted that the constant intervention of the government into wider and wider areas of our lives had led to an "infantalisation of the public, who are led to believe that any problem that they face is the fault of their political masters who are expected to sort it out in the next two or three weeks."

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Do tell, I have no doubt that it will come in useful someday and in the meantime it can be used to impress party kitchen dwellers.

.. Do you whack the ground with a metal bar, listening for a hollow sound?

It's them bead-counters what done it all, banks, rats and sewers sounds about right. £15,000 a week for being ignorant.

I gave that very question a Google and guess what? Richard is the only person who knows.

Perry

There are several ways you can do it. I never found the steel bar worked very well. Sometimes it did, but you got too many false echoes and look a right prat when you made them dig in the wrong place.

These days, you can use ground penetrating radar - but even that has its problems ... false signals, and bloody expensive. We even put radio transmitters in the pipes, dragged them through and tracked the signal with above-ground receivers. We also pioneered the use of miniature TVs, dragging them through the pipes and watching on a monitor. With modern technology, you can also use GPS tracking, in combination with the cameras.

The old fashioned ways, though, still work. The most obvious way is to ask the owner. There were times when you got the keen youngster, beavering away, and you'd spot somebody watching him through the window. You'd go and speak to them and they told you what you wanted to know. You'd ask why they didn't tell "the lad". 'Cos 'e didn't ask! would be the response.

The second - and very often most successful way - was to find the "little old lady". In a street, there would always be one ... been there for ever. You had to be patient, but if you kept with it, they knew everything. Ah yes, she would say, that was done by Bert's cousin, good lad he was ... it was just after Ethel 'ad her kid, and there he was ...

Sometimes, they came up to you on a job and asked what you were doing. If you were officious, they just buggered off without saying anything but if you gave them the time of day, and got chatting, they'd suddenly say, "you know there's a drain there ...? somewhere you hadn't dreamed of looking.

One of them, amazingly, had complete plans. Her dad, long dead, had been the builder and she'd kept them as a keepsake. She let me sit in her parlour and trace out the entire drainage system. Good job that - spent the rest of the day in the pub and still got a pat on the back from the boss for doing it so fast.

But, failing all that, you wait until it snows. In a fresh fall, the snow melts over the covers. You just go round, mark them off and Bob's yer uncle (or builder).

Well that explains why everyone's forgotten.
Global Warming innit??

Give you that ... global warming's totally buggered the job!

I see the missing 'devil' every day, here in the Philippines. Nice projects on paper; the basic building looks fine (but still the bodgers are at work but can hide). As the project is coming closer to completion so the bodgers really come into their own: feetmarks in wet concrete; paint splashed over windows & frames & tiled floors; no protective edge strips on tiled steps, unseasoned wood used; doors not fitted squarely; door fittings and knobs not aligned properly. As the detail becomes smaller and so requiring more attention so it gets less and lesswith the overall finished result looking shoddy.

If you are building a house for example, here, you had just better be on-site for the duration because the detail is be-devilled. The building standards inspector has been diverted with a nice lunch and a brown envelope by the owner who want a quick signature in short order, with the same at the next inspection. The government becomes invisible as most of the dealing goes on 'under the table' - the problem is that it is the government who is under the table! And so it becomes invisible.

As for the rats, well, as no underground sewerage system exists in most parts of Asia they are forced to the surface - they climb trees, get into the roof; move from place to place by crawling along telephone/cable TV wires; ease under those ill-fitting doors the bodger-builders bodged.

But at least we get a weekly refuse collection - no wheelie-bins because we are not there, yet - no care as to how much or what is put out for collection which all ends up in the land-fill outside town. At least fly-tipping has not reared its nasty head yet. As for the 'other government' in Manila - they may as well not exist for all the effect they have in the Boondocks, north.

Slightly OT, but

"Ian Poll, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Cranfield university, and head of technology for the Government-funded Omega project ..to reduce environmental damage from aviation ....nuclear-powered aircraft ..will be transporting millions of passengers around the world later this century...the risk of reactors cracking open in a crash could be reduced by jettisoning them before impact and bringing them down with parachutes.. the worst-case scenario.. there would be a risk of radioactive contamination over a few square miles "

First of all, why bother? The civilian aerospace industry knows that fuel is a key cost and will presumably take what measures it can to reduce it. The UK, having made a dog’s breakfast of its own civilian nuclear programme, is going to lead the world in revolutionary new technology ?

On top of that, you would struggle to get 1 nuclear scientist/engineer in 1,000 to display this level of idiocy. OK - the study has probably only cost a few £M in an ocean of government waste in the £10bn s - £100bn, but does government have to make a laughably incompetent mess of absolutely every single thing that it attempts?

The problem today is there are too many nose pokers, managers, armchair bosses etc who don't have a clue how to do the jobs they are responsible for administrating.

My old profession is a good example where all that is needed is a sufficient number big hairy bottomed men banging their feet up and down on pavements and sorting out the 5% of the population that need to be kept in their place. The skills have been lost and so has control of the streets?

If Jamie Bulger's abductors had met a bobby on the beat then ...

interestingly enough, across the water in Ireland the very same "broken" society is occuring - prisons are full, criminals let out on bail only to commit murder and rape, skyrocketing crime rates because of immigrants from eastern europe, parts of Dublin experiencing English style "white flight" with certain schools having a preponderance of immigrant children with no English...

so the EXACT same problems are occuring in an independent state.

no prizes for guessing why.