The Royal Navy’s next class of aircraft carriers is set to be built in the United Kingdom creating real jobs in something called ‘industry’.

The new aircraft carriers replace the diminutive Invincible class carrier (also known as through-deck cruisers) which could only support STOVL/VTOL operations. Typically though, it’s not going to be as simple as going straight back to normal carriers, oh no. The new Queen Elizabeth Class will be built to the dimensions and specifications needed for proper, angle-deck CATOBAR operations and then fitted with a ’ski-ramp’ and no arrestor or catapult gear and used for STOVL operations of the F-35B. You couldn’t make it up.

The MoD say the carriers are ‘future-proof’ in that they can be later fitted out for CATOBAR. I reckon they’ll be fitted out for CATOBAR (at great cost, no doubt) fairly soon on when their abilities with the F-35B get shown up by the Americans who will be launching normal F-35s with greater payloads and the French who will also be taking a carrier of the same design but fitted for CATOBAR to support their Dassault Rafale fighters. The MoD seem hell-bent on getting it wrong to start with and then spending a fortune fixing it in a hurry.

Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales are to be built by VT-Group and BAE Systems with work being carried out at Glasgow and Rosyth in Scotland and Barrow-in-Furness and Portsmouth in England.

The new carriers which will displace 65,000 tons each and carry up to 40 aircraft are due in service around 2015. The contracts for their construction are said to be worth £3bn and could create or secure up to 10,000 jobs.

Now if we (the UK) knew what was good for us, we’d be out trying to sell variants of this carrier design, scaled down versions etc wherever we could as well as using them as marketing material for British ship-building industry at every turn yet these vessels appear to be pretty much a one-off. The single French aircraft carrier based on the same design will be built in Saint Nazaire and Brest.

While not on the scale of some of the previous gargantuan NHS data loss cockups, an NHS Lothian worker has none the less done their best to compromise patient data security.

This time it’s all of the letters sent by 137 patients to their Edinburgh GPs over a period of two years. All this data was stored on a USB flash drive which was promptly ‘lost’.

NHS Lothian say they immediately called in their their own IT team to find all of the patients who had been put at risk by this latest data loss. It begs the question though, why can’t these IT departments start training NHS workers to use industry-strength encryption which is readily available through well-know, free and easy to use open-source software?

Some MEPs have tabled amendments to the EU Telecom Package (draft EU communications framework bill) which would see the previously voted-against ‘3 strike rule’ brought into law.

The ‘3 strike rule’ would see corporations (in some cases non-EU corporations) being given power of judge and jury over private EU citizens under the auspices of the corporations defending their ‘intellectual property’ rights. The EU Commission would effectively be able to mandate the installation of spyware at the ISP level so that 3rd party corporations would be able to directly spy on EU citizens data usage.

The legislation could also see EU ISPs having to bar access to Peer to Peer (P2P) networks such as bittorrent in an arbitrary manner. I’m sure that will go down really well with Linux users who can’t get their distros and World of Warcraft players who can no-longer download their game updates. The problem is that while the likes of the music industry may not like peer-to-peer software, it has so many legitimate uses that it’s as hard to justify blocking as HTTP Port 80.

I’ve written to my MEP opposing this stupidity. If you are an EU citizen, you can write to yours too. Click here for a searchable map to find your MEP. MEPs will vote on the amendments next Monday (7th July) so get cracking and get your MEP informed today!

I also suggets visiting EDRI and La Quadrature Du Net for further information. You can also read La Quadrature Du Net’s arguments against the amendments.

Retired French aircraft carrier Clemenceau (R98) is to be broken up at Graythorp in Hartlepool. Clemenceau was originally sent to India for dismantling in 2005 but due to the large amounts of toxic chemicals and materials on board, was denied access.

In 2006, Clemenceau returned to French waters and was anchored off Brest. Able UK have now secured dispensation to handle the 700 tons of asbestos and will be carrying out the contract to scrap the vessel.

About the Clemenceau

“le Clem” was laid-down in 1955 and launched in 1957, with 32,700 tons displacement and angle-deck CATOBAR configuration, she could carry up to 40 aircraft including the possibility of nuclear-armed Super Etendards. In the 1990s Clemenceau supported sorties over the former Yugoslavia. There was a second ship of Clemenceau’s class named ‘Foch’ (R99) which continues to serve to this day in the Brazillian Navy as Sao Paulo.

Clemenceau is expected in Hartlepool for dismantling in the late summer.

Parked-up trucks are lining the inside lane of the A40 into London today for yet another protest against the price of fuel in the UK. Another group is reportedly setting off for London from the Medway services on the M2.

Some trucks are to be escorted into the city to protest and others are going to go to Whitehall on foot to demand a 25p/litre rebate from the government for hauliers.

According to The Press Association, the Road Haulage Association will be taking part in fuel protests today.

Diesel is now, on average, about £1.32 a litre at the pump, one of the highest prices for fuel in the World. The RHA notes that even when bought in bulk, diesel is little cheaper for hauliers. The average HGV in the UK is said to cost over £1,000 a week in fuel to operate.

Like many people, I like to go out for ‘one or two’ beers at the weekend. Only this is Britain, 2008, so ‘one or two’ beers quickly becomes ‘a few more’ beers and quite often turns into ’so many beers you can’t remember how many’ by the end of the night.

…how did I get home again?

Yes, Britain definitely seems to have a drinking problem, we do it too often, too much and often inappropriately. I’m thankful that I seem to retain the self restraint that keeps me away from the vomiting and violence seen on the old-media news but I’m still none too proud of being part of a such a stigmatised culture.

But I digress, what I really meant to say is that I’ve come to have the opinion that drinking (as the British drink) seriously impacts on productivity. Just using my blog writing as a non empirical metric, I can see that I become almost incable of getting a decent article off no just the following day but possibly for several days after ‘binge drinking’*.

I’m pretty much a wimp now when it comes to dealing with the morning-after hangovers so I do tend to stop drinking long before my friends and associates who seem to drink like there will be no tomorrow, consuming herculean ammounts, mixing their drinks and generally doing all the things your mother told you not to. With my own follow-on alcohol come-down / general malaise post binge, I can’t fathom how some of my own friends can complete a days work the following day. I’d cringe at the thought of my employees turning up to work in such a mental state, imagining all the business disasters that could befall a company staffed by people who are not firing on all cylinders.

So how would I stop this culture? Well, step one would be to avoid the methods the government employs as they clearly don’t work. The extra taxation only serves to make the population resentful. You could tax the British more and more and they’d probably just spend a larger proportion of their income on booze. You also can’t get anywhere stigmatising the general culture as the people seem to have lost their self-esteem. Britain hardly appears ‘Great’ these days on the world stage, everything that made the nation proud seems to have been taken from us.

I think the solution is, in fact, lying with the self esteem issue. Britain needs to be doing something worthwhile. The ’sevice economy’ is clearly a bad idea, in fact it appears to be going down the pan as we speak. We need some serious industry; major stuff. Right now, for example, there is a manufacturer in Germany about to start producing cars that will travel 150 miles on a gallon of fuel. We should be making a car that will go 200 miles on a gallon and cornering the world market!

I’d hope that seeing such results from British ingenuity and labor would get the British into an upward spiral of drinking less and doing more. In effect, just giving the British something really worthwile to live for. I can but dream.

*In the UK, ‘Binge Drinking’ is generally defined as drinking half of the weekly recommended allowance in one sitting ie: 11+ units for men or 9+ units for women on one occasion