‘The Commission has made clear to the trustees their legal and regulatory responsibilities and that the Charity’s current activities must cease immediately.’
– Charity Commission Regulatory Case Report: The Atlantic Bridge

Regular readers will be well aware of my one man campaign against the Atlantic Bridge, a charity established by defence secretary Dr Liam Fox to promote the ‘special relationship as exemplified by the Reagan-Thatcher partnership’ that includes on its advisory council William Hague, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, and other senior Conservatives.

The Charity Commission published its report earlier today. The good news is that the Atlantic Bridge was found guilty of being party political. It also failed the public benefit test because its work was found to be insufficiently educational (promotes a pre-determined point-of-view) and its events are not sufficiently open to the public. Despite this it retains it charitable status. Its punishment is to be given twelve months to get its act together.

That’s a great outcome for Liam Fox who registered the Atlantic Bridge as a charity in 2003 and has made no attempt to hide its political affiliations. The Atlantic Bridge achieved charitable status by claiming to be an educational trust, but in place of education has sponsored predominantly private events at which senior Conservatives – including present cabinet ministers – and their US allies may bond behind closed doors.

Throughout this period, it has enjoyed tax exempt status and so its activities have been subsidised by the taxpayer.

These activities have included promoting a book by William Hague, subsidising a dinner for Tory MPs with a Fox News film reviewer in LA and sponsoring trips by Tory MPs to neo-Conservative think tanks in Washington DC.

The Charity Commission has now agreed to turn a blind eye to all of this, if the Atlantic Bridge agrees to comply with the law within the next 12 months. In no other arena would such a blatant disregard for the law go unpunished.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

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Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gets a DVD and Blu-ray release next month and that should certainly delight fans of hammy old movies, for this is the most delightful of hammy old movies.

Originally released in 1951, you can’t help but notice that it is in glorious Technicolor, the heavily saturated colours reminding the viewer of a young lady who’s overdone the fake tan. The contrast must have been so much greater for the audience of the day, which was still used to seeing so much in black and white. That’s not to say that star of the show Ava Gardner isn’t looking wonderful (if a little out of focus); she is the the most wonderful femme fatale, for whom absolutely every man must fall.

The film is very much of a time before film acting had really taken off and depends heavily on its narrator. So we feel we are having a story read to us and are continually told what the characters are thinking and feeling rather than shown.

So its curiosity, but a curiosity worth spending a couple of hours with.

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George Osborne has good reason to sound smug following his budget, especially as he has the Lib Dems’ popular Vince Cable working ever so hard for him and the darling of the Lib Dem left, Simon Hughes, claiming its a budget for the ‘needy and vulnerable’.

But what must particularly please Osborne is that he’s been able to push his ideological agenda, setting a course to shrink the size of state, claiming there are some functions the state can no longer perform.

The Tories have proved adept at exaggerating the country’s economic woes in order to achieve a level of reform of which Thatcher could only dream. The Institute for Fiscal Studies ran the numbers and found that the VAT rise is not unavoidable. But the Lib Dems appear to be in awe of their Conservative partners. Nick Clegg claimed the budget was progressive.

George Osborne is an ideologue and there is nothing wrong with that. Politicians should have a clear idea of the kind of society they’d want to create. They should have an ideal and have a route in mind.

But the Lib Dems have lost their way. They have become a party of pavement politicians, building a movement of oppositionists by pounding streets with ‘crumble sheets’ to find out what people don’t like and playing their whinges back to them. In this way any core beliefs have diluted to such an extent they have lost all their influence.

Thrust into power they are delighted and relieved to be allied to a Conservative Party brimming with ideas. But they need George to reassure them that he’s just a pragmatist who doesn’t really believe in anything too.

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It may not have made any great headlines, but Nick Clegg’s defeat on new rules for a fixed term parliaments is a real victory for democracy.

Nick Clegg’s original proposal for fixed term parliaments was a blatant gerrymander and I’ve outlined my fear that his proposals for the Alternative Vote are another gerrymander on Labour List.

The coalition government has so far cherry picked half-hearted constitutional reforms that serve its narrow interests without regard to any long-term consequences.

The revised proposal is a genuine reform. Setting the threshold for a dissolution vote at two-thirds, makes it very unlikely the prime minster of the day would be able to call an election to suit his or her own agenda, while the two-week time limit protects against a zombie parliament.

This also shows that if pressure is applied in the right way, the coalition government can be forced to democratise its proposals.

The Alternative Vote is not a system of proportional representation. It may create more Lib Dems, but Electoral Society projections show it won’t help smaller parties. And the Conservatives obviously like the idea of reducing the number of MPs in places they can’t win like Scotland, Wales and inner cities.

Yet the Take Back Parliament campaign, a coalition of groups that have supported constitutional reform for many years shows no sign of lobbying for a system of proportional representation. When I challenged Unlock Democracy’s Peter Facey, it was clear he hadn’t thought any of this through. They seem strangely content to sign up for a reforms specifically designed to benefit the coalition parties alone.

A great, once in lifetime opportunity to democratise our electoral system is about to missed.

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The Original Pantry Cafe has been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week since 1924 and claims never to have been without customer. Operated by a former mayor it is clearly a Los Angeles institution. It must be doing something right, but going off the food it’s difficult to see what that might be.

Whatever you order, expect to start with a huge plate of coleslaw and some not very fresh bread. Everything seems to come with a huge slop of almost liquid mashed potato and a tiny portion of green beans that have been boiled to the point of disintegration (i.e. shit on a plate). To compensate for the poor quality, the portions are enormous. In this way it seems to sum-up America’s relationship with food: cook it very simply, serve it very large and price it very cheap.

All this is a great shame because, while the food is barely edible, the Original Pantry Cafe does have a great atmosphere. Perhaps if we’d tried breakfast rather dinner, we’d have been more easily satisfied.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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Los Angeles has an awful lot to offer the tourist and yet it is a difficult city to get the most out of. Famously vast and sprawling it is not possible to base oneself in one location convenient for everything as each of the major attractions seem to be twenty minutes drive from each other. As a result, you should expect to spend sometime driving in congested traffic and to spend a fortune on parking.

And yet we’re all the more determined to visit Los Angeles again. It needs more than a just a few nights and the more you work at it, the more it rewards you.

A downtown boutique hotel, the O Hotel is a trendy little establishment of just 67 well appointed, if a little small, rooms. It’s all done very well, except that the hallways are a little bit Travelodge.

Preferring to explore, we don’t usually eat in the hotel, but Downtown is actually very quiet after about 10.30pm and the all night diners are crap. The O had a very well presented contemporary menu served in a bar that may be just a tad self-concious. Their take on bread and butter pudding is particularly worth a mention. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches have never taken off this side of the Atlantic, but having tried the combination some years ago, I am now occasionally struck down by a craving. And bread and butter pudding has always been the king of traditional English deserts. So O Hotel’s bread and butter pudding with peanut butter and blackberry jam served with banana ice cream was a must. It did not disappoint and it’s worth booking a stay here for this pudding alone.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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A couple of hours out of Las Vegas in the general direction of Los Angeles is the Mojave National Preserve the main visitor centre for which is at the ghost town of Kelso.

Kelso grew rapidly in the early days of the railroad. Very long trains still pass through, but they no longer need to stop off to secure the assistance of helper engines to get them over the mountains. The end of mining nearby is another reason the town become redundant, although it wasn’t completely depopulated until the mid-1980s. All this is interesting enough, but Kelso is not particularly exciting in itself, especially compared with the ghost town of Bodie (more on this later).

The Mojave National Preserve is most interesting for its natural wonders of which the Kelso Dunes most appealed and are probably easiest to take in en route from Vegas to LA.

The views to be gained high up in this vast expanse of near perfect sand are glorious, but what was particularly special on the day we visited was that the Kelso Dunes were singing. The Dunes are only loosely held together by various grasses and the sands are easily moved by the wind to create an ever changing landscape. As wind and sand moves through the grass, various sounds are created which occasionally harmonise.

To hear the Kelso Dunes sing is supposed to bring good luck, but about an hour-and-a-half into our resumed journey to Los Angeles, we had a tyre blow out. Given the appalling state of California’s highways this was not that great a surprise and we had to limp the rest of the way on a speed limiting space saver  tyre.
Tag: USA2010. Written 20 June 2010.

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Our one regret about booking the Trump, Las Vegas for the first night of USA2010 was not booking a room with view of the Las Vegas strip, something we corrected when we stayed at the Wynn across the road (from where this picture is taken).

Positioned behind Fashion Show Mall, just after a bend in Las Vegas Boulevard it offers the most perfect view of Paradise, Nevada from the Venetian south.

The Trump positions itself as a non-gaming sanctuary and so unlike other significant Las Vegas hotels is not a tourist attraction in itself. That is a plus because it is not just the scale of Las Vegas hotels that can make it hard to feel at home, but that you find yourself in a public place where your swimming pool, for example, is served by a bar populated mostly by non-residents. This certainly helped to ensure that the breakfast we had at the DJT restaurant was the best of the trip (and regular readers will know how much I love breakfast).

Naturally, our relatively modest mountain view suite was a fantastic place, with a substantial living area, (unused) kitchenette and a good size bathroom with twin sinks, spa tub etcetera. One is never short of a towel at the Trump. Towels of all sizes are piled high throughout the suites and in the fitness room every machine has its own towel, which did seem a tad excessive, but hey!

My deep tissue massage was great after our ten hour flight, but I felt the spa was let down just a touch by the vanity area. It’s nice to lay on free razors, deodorant, aftershave etcetera. But not cheap ineffective disposable razors, industrial size cans of Right Guard and down market aftershaves. These items were out of place and jarred with the experience.
Tag: USA2010. Written 16 June 2010.

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There is little doubt that Avatar is a movie event or that it looks absolutely gorgeous in Blu-ray, but that wasn’t enough to keep me glued to the screen for much more than an hour.

The problem is that the story is predicable, with protagonist — ‘I told them I was from the jar head clan’ — on a journey with a very obvious conclusion and a cast of stereotypes. An hour in you suddenly become aware that there another two hours to go and nothing of significance has happened yet.

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Out next Monday 31 May, Winter in Wartime comes across as a deceptively simple film; you know where you are with Nazis the oppressed people of Holland and the odd collaborator. But what emerges is coming of age film as the protagonist, Michiel, discovers that all is not so black and white.

Some reviewers have been less than generous, but while it’s true there are no particularly great surprises, I felt it was well made and well paced. The film very much depends on Martijn Lakemeier’s Michiel and fortunately he makes for a convincing fourteen year-old slowly robbed of his naivety.

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