Category: Politics

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Let’s All Burn Our Waste Paper!

In these environmentally conscious times, we are constantly exhorted to recycle. This is a tedious ritual involving coloured bins, soggy cardboard and the faint smell of moral superiority. Yet I submit that recycling is, in fact, the least responsible thing we could do with our waste paper.

Instead, I propose a bold, innovative, and unquestionably sustainable alternative.

Burn it. All of it. Immediately. Preferably with gusto.

“He’s kinda sexy and mysterious about it. Hot eyes, all my judgement is clouded. I’m in your city, can you show me round it? You can put your money right where my mouth is.”

“But burning paper releases CO₂!” you cry. But here is the true genius of the plan.

Once we stop recycling paper, industries that rely on recycled pulp will face a sudden, catastrophic shortage. Their only recourse will be to turn to lumber mills for virgin fibre. Lumber mills, in turn, will be forced to plant vast new forests to meet this demand. All that CO₂ we released earlier will be taken up by all those newly planted trees and taken out of the atmosphere!

Compare that to recycling paper. Send slow-moving fossil-fuel burning trucks to everyone’s house to pick up waste paper. Pulp it, bleach it and flatten it and you’ve got recycled paper that’s not quite as good as wood paper. Why not cut out the middleman and let nature grow the wood for us?

By burning paper, we create a powerful economic incentive for growing more trees, bigger forests and a greener planet. In short, every time you set fire to a stack of old utility bills, you are personally contributing to reforestation.

Furthermore, the lumber industry will enjoy a renaissance. Rural economies will flourish. Entire regions will be revitalised by the sudden need to plant millions of trees to replace the ones being fed into the paper mills at industrial speed.

🔥 Imagine the community cohesion created by weekly neighbourhood paper bonfires.
🔥Imagine the joy of watching junk mail fulfil its highest purpose.
🔥Imagine the catharsis of consigning tax forms to cleansing flame.

Recycling never gave anyone that. ♻️

“Daisy’s bare naked, I was distraught. He loves me not, he loves me not. Penny’s unlucky. I took him back and then stepped on a crack and the black cat laughed.”

But seriously…

Yes, I am joking, but only a little bit.

I had the idea when I was reminded of a TV advert from some years ago from a toilet paper company. Their bold promise was that for every tree they used to make toilet paper, they would replant three. Sounds good, but I had a slightly more cynical rewording of that slogan. “We’ve taken steps to secure the future supply of the raw materials we need.”

I mean, those three trees they planted are going to end up being cut down and turned into more toilet paper, right?

But I can’t be really cynical about toilet paper manufacturing. Even if you apply maximum cynicism, the worst I could say is that their industry is neutral. They grow trees which take carbon out of the air, but then they turn those trees into toilet paper which gets used and decomposes, releasing that carbon. Which then becomes more trees. The circle of life.

And honestly, I could hope to be neutral too. I buy potatoes, made from carbon that was taken out of the air, but then I cook and eat those potatoes which means that carbon ends up in the air again. The paper industry has more in common with a potato farmer than a plastic factory. Agriculture, even at industrial scale, is the application of the natural carbon cycle.

Recycling plastic and metals make sense, but recycling paper? Sure, I’m going to keep dropping my cardboard packaging into the recycling bin, but if I were to suggest we should recycle potatoes after we eat them, you’d call me insane. (And I must apologise for the disgusting image I put in your head just now.)

The real issue isn’t how many trees we plant, but what we do with them. Cutting down a tree and planting three saplings doesn’t remove carbon from the atmosphere; it just keeps the short carbon cycle spinning. If we actually want to lower atmospheric CO₂, we need trees that grow, mature, and stay standing. Planting three trees only matters if at least some of them are allowed to become forests rather than future toilet rolls.

And if that means lighting the odd ceremonial blaze in the name of carbon sequestration, well, that’s just responsible citizenship.

Credits
📸 “Bonfire” by Jonas Bengtsson. (Creative Commons.)
📸 “Cat on Laptop” by Doug Woods. (Creative Commons)

Thanks to my sis and sis-in-law Heather and Hilde for their insightful review. Thanks also to The YIMBY Pod for the inspiration to write this.

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The UKIP Effect – How to Win by Not Winning

UKIP, the British political party, is a failure.

Since their launch in the 90s, their peak of power was two members of parliament but now have none. Their most prominent party leader, who you might reasonably expect to be the most successful, ran for election to parliament a total of seven times and won none of them. (He was since elected as an MP in 2024, long after leaving his leadership post.)

And yet, the UK is not a member of the European Union anymore. I hurts my remoaner Euro-enthusiast heart to admit it, but far from being a failure, they might be the most successful political party ever!

How did it happen?

“They sailed away for a year and a day, to the land where the bong-tree grows.”

Winning Without Seats

They never governed. They never held power. They barely held seats. And yet, they bent the arc of British history.

UKIP didn’t win elections, they warped them. Like a black hole in the political field, they pulled the discourse toward Euroscepticism and toward a referendum. The mainstream parties, once content to grumble about bendy bananas, suddenly found themselves triangulating around Nigel Farage’s pint-and-flag persona. Not because they admired it, but because it worked.

And that’s the strange success. UKIP didn’t need to win, they needed to make winning impossible without addressing their cause. They became the ghost in every campaign room. The reason David Cameron promised a referendum that he never wanted to hold nor take any responsibility for.

It’s a kind of political parasitism. Infect the host, rewrite the DNA, and vanish. No seats, no legacy, no infrastructure, but plenty of impact. They proved that you don’t need to govern to change everything. You just need to haunt the system long enough that it starts to dream your dreams.

It only makes sense when you understand the machinery it exploited. In the UK, we don’t vote for a prime minister but for our local MP. The party with enough MPs forms the government. That means national sentiment is filtered through hundreds of local contests, each decided by a simple rule: whoever gets the most votes wins.

This is a system that favours blunt choices. Within each constituency, if two candidates share similar views, they risk splitting the vote and handing victory to someone neither of them agrees with. This is called the “spoiler effect”. It means that standing on principle can mean losing on numbers.

The result is that simplicity is rewarded and nuance punished. The more finely you slice a viewpoint, the less likely it is to win. UKIP thrived in this system not by winning seats, but by threatening to spoil them.

The big parties had to steal their clothes. A Conservative candidate in a marginal seat couldn’t afford to ignore UKIP’s talking points. A handful of disgruntled voters could very realistically swing the result.

Then came the Brexit referendum. It didn’t happen because UKIP demanded it, but because the Conservative Party feared what would happen if they didn’t do it. UKIP didn’t force the vote but haunted it into existence.

It’s a strange kind of democratic judo to use the system’s quirks against itself. Exploit the spoiler effect not to win, but to warp. They made their presence felt in every calculation, every campaign leaflet, every doorstep conversation.

Once the goal of leaving the EU was achieved, the party collapsed under the weight of its own irrelevance, but the effect remains. I’ll call it The UKIP Effect. A reminder that in politics, influence isn’t always measured in seats. Sometimes it’s measured in the shadows you cast.

What’s the lesson for similar small parties with large goals?

“Ever singing, marching onwards, victors in the midst of strife. Joyful music leads us sunward, the triumphant song of life.”

Spoil to Win!

The UKIP effect is not for the faint-hearted. It demands conviction so strong that you’re willing to risk empowering your ideological opponents to make your point unavoidable.

It’s a kind of political brinkmanship. You stand on the edge and yell “No Compromises!” If you do it loudly enough, consistently enough, the big parties start to twitch. Not because you’ll win but because you’ll make them lose.

For The Party of Women, The Reclaim Party and The Jeremy Corbyn People’s Front, the lesson is clear but uncomfortable. If you want to shift the narrative, you must be willing to spoil it. That means resisting tactical voting and accepting that your vote might help elect someone you oppose — you’re playing the long game. It’s about changing the menu, not choosing from it.

It only works if your core policy is sharp, singular, and resonant. UKIP had one idea, to leave the European Union. Everything else was window dressing. That clarity gave them gravitational pull. Without it, you’re just another star in the political sky.

The question for small parties is “What are we willing to lose to make our idea unavoidable?”

And maybe — just maybe — the answer is everything.

Credits:
📸 “Cats Eyes” by Ivan Phan. (Creative Commons)
📸 “Haunting Resilience” by Dr Partha Sarath Sahana. (Creative Commons)
👥 Thanks to my friends Andrew Williams and Heather McKee for their feedback.
🤖 Thanks to Microsoft Copilot for reviewing my drafts, random philosophical mischief and taking a break from destroying all humanity.
🔨 This was edited post-publication to make the introduction a little more concise.

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What’s a kWh? (And other money-saving tips)

When I was at school, they taught us how electricity works only as part of science lessons. It was something future engineers might need, yet we all use electricity at home every day.

The problem with electricity is we’re a little bit separated from its cost. With cars, we fill up the car with fuel and pay for it right there and then. With electricity, we use many different appliances which all add up to an eye-watering bill at the end of the month.

This is my guide to what everyone needs to know about electricity.

Introducing the kWh.

Electricity is sold in units of “kWh”. We’ll come to exactly what those three letters mean later on but for now, imagine your electricity is being delivered to you in barrels, each one a standard size called the “kWh”. Think about your local electricity station and imagine one of these “kWh” barrels of electricity being hooked up to the wires that lead to your home. When a barrel empties, someone comes along and replaces it with a new full barrel.

The “kWh” has a scientific definition that all electricity suppliers agree on. It is so ubiquitous that if any supplier decides to use a different unit, they’re most likely up to something dodgy.

How much is a single kWh barrel of electricity? Check your electric bill. Here’s mine…

The 45¾p per day standing charge is fixed. It doesn’t matter how much or how little I use; I still have to pay that 45¾p every single day and there’s little I can do about that other than maybe switch providers.

More interesting is the 33p per kWh. At the end of each month, they count up all the empty barrels of electricity I’ve gone through and bill me 33p for each one. I’ll use that figure in my examples but do look up your own rate and replace it with however much your kWh costs.

Also note that it doesn’t matter how quickly I go through each barrel of electricity. If I go away for a few days leaving everything except the fridge switched off, it will take a lot longer to finish that barrel than when I’m home and everything is switched on. Either way, they still charge me 33p once that barrel is empty.

We’ll now pull apart those three letters, but always keep in mind that metaphor of barrels of electricity hooked up to the wires leading to your house.

Little barrels on the hillside.
Little barrels full of ‘tricity…

What Watt?

The W is short for the “Watt”, named after James Watt who invented them. If you’ve seen a capital W or “Watts” or “Wattage”, they all mean the same thing. The number of Watts any electrical appliance has is a measure of the rate of consumption of electricity over time. If you like, think of it as the speed that something eats electricity coming out of the outlet on the wall.

"High power fan heater. 3000 Watt. 2 heat settings, 1500W/3000W. Adjustable thermostat with overheat cut out protection."

This heater consumes electricity at a rate of 3000 Watts, or 1500 Watts if you use the low setting. Because one Wattage figure is twice as much as the other, you can safely assume that the high setting consumes electricity exactly twice as fast as the low setting.

Lightbulb in packaging. "15 year warrantee. 13.5W. 100W replacement. 1527 Lumens."

This lightbulb consumes electricity at a rate of 13.5 Watts, yet it shines as brightly as an old-fashioned 100-Watt filament lightbulb. Quite the improvement!

A quick exercise: Find an electrical item in your home and look up its Wattage figure. It might be on a label or written on the original packaging. If you can’t find it written down, try using a search engine.

Ooh kay!

1 kW (or one kiloWatt) means exactly the same thing as 1000 W. Adding “k” to “W” to make “kW” means the amount is multiplied by one thousand. The heater above could have “3 kW” printed on the box instead of “3000 W”. It would mean exactly the same thing.

Devices that draw a small amount of electricity like lightbulbs or phone chargers are usually rated in Watts, while larger devices that eat a lot of electricity like ovens or electric car chargers are typically rated in kW. They mean the same thing underneath.

Whoever makes your electrical appliances might have a personal preference for small numbers in “kW” or big numbers in “W”. The manufacturer of that heater probably wants to emphasise how well it heats, so they prefer to use the bigger number of “3000 W” instead of “3 kW”. More W equals more heat.

Our hours

The last letter is “h”, which is short for an “hour”, named after its inventor Sir Claudius Hour. (At least that’s what a man at the pub told me. He might have been joking.)

You know what an hour is, don’t you? It’s the time it takes to watch a normal episode of Star Trek with ads. It’s how long it takes me to walk all the way around my local country park if I don’t stop. It’s the time it takes to walk my sister’s dog before she (the dog) gets tired.

“And I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 miles more.”

All together now!

Now we know what each letter of “kWh” stands for, let’s bring them all together. A “kWh” is the amount of electricity consumed by a 1000 W appliance if it is left on for an hour.

Find an appliance that’s rated at 1 kW. Plug it in and switch it on for an hour and then switch it off. You’ll have used exactly one kWh and your electricity bill will have gone up by 33p. (Or whatever your supplier charges.)

Let’s work out a practical example. Recall that 3000W heater from earlier. How much do you think it costs to run that heater for five hours on the high setting? We’ll ignore practical realities like the built-in thermostat and assume it goes for five hours straight with no gaps.

3000W is the same as 3 kW and we want to run it for 5 hours, paying 33p for each kWh. Multiply those numbers together:

3 kW × 5 h × 33 p/kWH = 495p (or roughly £5.)

Try this calculation yourself. Pick an electrical appliance in your home and find its rated wattage. Think about how long you switch it on for and work out how much it costs to use it for that amount of time.

Applying the knowledge

It can be tempting to look at how much some appliances like heaters or ovens cost and conclude the only way to save money is to be cold and not eat. I hope that’s not the conclusion you draw. The benefit of knowing how much something costs to use is that you can make informed choices.

Will buying an air fryer save you money when your kitchen already has an oven? Work out how much it costs to cook your favourite meal in the oven then do the same for an air fryer. If you know both in actual pennies, you can make an informed decision to make that purchase or not.

While the Wattage figure tells you the rate it consumes electricity, it may be that the higher Wattage appliance gets the job done faster. Say you have a choice of two kettles, one runs at 1 kW and the other at 3 kW, it may seem at first blush that the 1 kW kettle will cost less. However, if the 3 kW kettle gets the water boiled in a third of the time as the 1 kW kettle, they will cost the same to use.

Does your supplier offer a different service with more expensive electricity during the day and cheaper electricity overnight? Which appliances would you use overnight when the kWh barrels are cheaper? Would that save you money overall?

Many thanks to my wife and my brother Andrew for their helpful feedback. Thanks also to my local B&M store for the pictures of lightbulbs and heaters I took while shopping there.

Creative Commons Picture Credits:
📸 “saturday recycle” by Andrea de Poda.
📸 “sad kilo” by “p med”.

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‘First Past the Post’ isn’t.

I’m a bit of a nerd for vote counting systems. So I discovered with delight that in the UK, there will soon be a referendum on changing the way votes are counted. As I write this, most of the UK (and the USA) uses a method we call “First past the post”.

It’s called “First past the post”, but it isn’t. The name is about as ridiculous as calling North Korea;  “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. The country is on the Korean peninsula, so at least that name is a little bit honest.

Put what you know to one side and think about what a vote counting system called “first past the post” should look like by the name alone. It’s a clear analogy to running in a race with a “post” at the end of the track. So there’s a predetermined number of votes and the first candidate to get past that threshold wins?

Nope. “First past the post” doesn’t work that way at all.

Imagine a vote of 100 voters selecting one of three candidates; A, B and C.

A 45 votes
B 30 votes
C 25 votes

If we put the “post” at 51 votes (a simple majority), then all three candidates lost. They all fell over and dropped out of the race before anyone reached the finish. Three pathetic failures. Rather than declaring no-one the winner, the people organising the race then dig up the post and re-plant it just behind A, as if the post was always there. He is declared the first one to pass the post.

If that wasn’t confusing enough, the other counting system to be offered in the referendum, “Alternative Vote” or “AV”, does indeed look like how you’d imagine “first past the post” to work. To continue the analogy with AV, candidate C drops out of the race after the first round. The second preferences of C’s voters are counted and added to A’s and B’s total.

A 45 + 3 votes 48 votes
B 30 + 22 votes 52 votes
C 25 votes

Hurrah! After two rounds, B was the first candidate past the post. A had an early lead but couldn’t keep up as far as the finishing line, overtaken by B in the closing straight.

So remember, the vote counting system that works in a “first past the post” manner is the one called “Alternative Vote”. The one without anything like a “post” is called “First past the post”. Clear?

Picture credits:
Vote Goat by Jeremy Richardson (Mr Jaded on flickr).
Racing demons by Simon Webster (shaggy359 on flickr).