You may recall that just a few weeks ago I attended the formal reading of the Proclamation for the Dissolution of Parliament as it was read on the steps of the Royal Exchange in the City of London. Such a proclamation is not the only one read on that location though, as the announcement of a new Monarch (and by inference, the death of the previous) is also carried out here.

There is also another more sombre proclamation that can be read out on the steps of the Exchange – and that is declaring War on another country.

As far as I can tell, the last time such a proclamation was duly proclaimed from this location was on December 8th, 1941, when the UK declared War on Japan. Thanks to increasing multilateralism in international affairs, with most countries now tending to resort to UN sanctions or so-called peace keeping measures, the chances that another such proclamation of war will be issued by the UK is now, slight.

Legally, the UK didn’t declare war on Argentina during the Falklands War – and military actions in other countries were under the authority of the United Nations, or were dubious – such as Suez.

Although obviously it is good that the UK doesn’t declare war any more, I think it would be sort of exciting to attend a formal Proclamation of War being read out.

Can we invade someone? Please?

Below is a short excerpt from the Illustrated London News of April 1854, when war was declared between the British Empire and Russia – marking the formal beginnings of The Crimean War.

ROYAL EXCHANGE

The ceremony of Proclaiming War – of which, as enacted in olden times, we gave some account in our Journal of last week – was performed in the City on Friday last; although it must be acknowledged that the scene was unattended by any of those heraldic or other official accompaniments which invest the form with attraction.

About noon, Mr. Beddome, the mace-bearer, accompanied only by Mr. Hill, the gate-porter at the Mansion-house, proceeded from thence to the Royal Exchange, wearing their black robes of office, but without the mace or any other insignia. These officers were soon recognised, and followed to the steps in front of the Exchange, and were speedily surrounded by between 200 and 300 persons. The news spread in all directions, and a rush was made to the point of interest; but before many reached the spot, the brief ceremony was finished amidst loud cheers.

This morning, The Queen signed the formal document that dissolved Parliament for the General Election. By tradition, the Proclamation, once signed by HM The Queen, is expected to be publicised as soon as it is received. It is delivered by hand by the Privy Council Office to the Serjeant-at-Arms at the Lord Mayor’s official residence, Mansion House. He then forms a procession to The Royal Exchange, where the Corporation of London’s Common Cryer reads out the writ to the citizens of London.

Fortunately, they don’t read the Proclamation out as soon as it arrives, but announce that it will be read out at 3pm – otherwise we could have been hanging around for several hours depending on the traffic conditions on the trip down from Windsor Castle.

It’s a nice bit of City tradition, albeit one with a formal legal framework.

I turned up about half an hour before the allotted time, not really sure if 4 people, or 400 people would turn up to watch. For some reason, I seem to have an “air of authority” and was repeatedly quizzed by passersby as to what was about to happen. I’d guess that maybe 100-150 people gathered by the steps to listen to the event, with AP News filming it for later broadcast, apparently on ITV.

Anyhow, at 3pm, the Common Cryer, the Serjeant-at-Arms at the City of London Corporation and two honour guards took up their positions on the steps of the Royal Exchange. The Serjeant-at-Arms opened a red tube containing the Proclamation and bowing, handed it to the Common Cryer.

Then, with the traditional cry of Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!, the Cryer read out the formal document, written in that wonderfully old fashioned language that never changes.

With references to Lords Spiritual and Temporal as well as to us the loyal and loving subjects, Queen Elizabeth declared the Parliament dissolved and called a General Election so that she can continue to accept the wise council of her ministers.

You can listen to the full 3 minute declaration via an audio recording made by Darryl 853.

Throughout the event, the loyal subjects responded with the mandatory salute of an arm outstretched holding a camera phone aloft.

After reading out the document, and a cry that the Great Parliamentarian in the Sky should save the Queen, the Proclamation was deemed to be duly proclaimed, and the document was handed back to the Serjeant-at-Arms with more bowing and off they marched back to Mansion House, where they probably put their feet up and had a glass of sherry.

That’s it over until the next election.

Sadly we were not able to get a close up look at the Proclamation document itself, which would have had the Great Seal attached to it in the Palace of Westminster on its way to the City.

Incidentally, now that the Proclamation has been read out, at 5pm today all the current MPs will cease to hold that office, and can no longer call themselves a Member of Parliament.

Although Parliament was dissolved today, it was Prorogued last Thursday, and you can watch the brief ceremony in the House of Lords, with more bowing, hat doffing and references to the Great Parliamentarian in the Sky via the UK Parliament website. Skip right to the end – to 6 hours, 20 minutes in for the start of the Prorogue Ceremony.

Like most industries, the web design industry is affected by fashions and trends. As soon as one website tries something and coincidentally happens to be successful, people instantly presume the design was the key factor and update their websites accordingly.

Google introduced the minimalist website at a time when most websites were cluttered and suddenly everyone wanted to pull in the Digital Feng Shui experts and de-clutter their websites.

Blogs looked like the future once, and big corporate websites not only needed blogs written in a casual way by the Managing Director Press Office, but this expanded to making the whole website look like a blog, and in some cases putting out key financial information in in blog postings rather than in the investors or financial news section.

Now there is a new trend – the analogue clock.

I am not sure where it started, but the first version of it I saw was on the relaunched UK Parliament website, which apart from being full of bugs had suddenly acquired an animated clock at the top of the page. Despite being fairly universally disliked in the comments section, the website designer was adamant that it would remain.

Recently,  the BBC website received one of its periodic evolutions and gained a clock at the top of the page. Semi-tolerable in that it is in the style of the BBC clock from about two-decades ago, so old people will like it, but I still wonder what functionality it adds to the website.

Recently I noted that the Chinese website, Xinhua had gained a clock – although it looks suspiciously like the BBC clock and even had the same animated seconds hand. The file name is different though, so they have at least tried to cover their tracks if plagiarism has occurred.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a website promoting a course about tea tasting (nice idea, ouch price tag) and it has a clock on the top of the website. Are people timing their tea making process by website clocks I wondered?

These are just the websites I could recall this morning – I’ve seen clocks sprouting up all over the place over the past couple of months.

The clocks are taking over!

As quite a fan of both the art and the science of Horology, and at one time had about a dozen different clocks in my living room, I love clocks – but not on websites.

If I want to see clocks, I’ll go here. I don’t need to be reminded of the time every time I visit a website though.

Please, let the fashion for putting analogue clocks on the tops of websites be a short-lived one.

Update:

It’s been drawn to my attention that the beta version of the new BBC website has dropped the clock. It seems the era of website clocks may indeed be a short-lived one. Hurruh!

Although the State Opening of Parliament happens every year pretty much without fail, the people involved in it tend not to be there every year, so the huge precession needs to be practiced before the live event.

While a fair bit of the public procession is basically following a route along easily defined roads from point A to point B, it is still nice to try the route out in person, and on horseback.

In the absence of a fake Westminster to play with, last night at around 3am, parts of Westminster were sealed off to traffic and various members of the Household Cavalry and other ceremonial horsy types cantered around Westminster in rehearsal of the formal event later this week.

Thinking this would be potentially quite an interesting thing to watch, I checked the night bus options,  dutifully went to bed rather early last night…

…and slept through the whole thing.

Therefore, I don’t have a selection of photos of large contingents of horses ceremonially parading around a deserted Westminster to present to you this morning.

Sorry.

You can see the main event on Wednesday though (Nick Clegg not withstanding) and if you wear very dark glasses maybe try to imagine what it would have looked like last night.

There should be two State Openings next year – one for the new government and one following the Summer recess – so maybe I will manage to stay awake for one of those rehearsals. Maybe.

Let me tell you a story – was how a talk this lunchtime by Prof. Steven Levitt started as he gave a talk about economics and some of the weird but true facts he has come across in his research.

He is noted for being the co-author, along with Stephen Dubner of best selling book, Freakonomics and is in the UK promoting the suitably titled sequel, Superfreakonomics.

A quick run though of some of the more interesting or plain funny anecdotes started with the tale of John Szilagyi.

Mr Szilagyi, who worked at the US tax office wondered why American children were being given increasingly weird names and had a suspicion. After some effort, the tax returns form was changed to require a social security number to be placed alongside each child being reported by parents when claiming their $250 child’s tax credit.

In 1986, some 7 million children “vanished” from the USA, including as it later transpired, a non-existent brother and sister to Prof. Levitt. The moral was that if you create an incentive, then people will find a way to abuse it.

The purpose of the talk, and the book, is to expand on how simple insights into information and human behaviour can lead to surprising outcomes.

For example, the oft-cited, but not acted upon finding from studying the data that special seats for children in cars make no difference to fatality rates in car accidents when the child is more than 2 years old.

Unfortunately, the politicians felt the facts disagreed with their political policy and not only disregarded the findings, but actually attacked them. Although the talk was being given in a House of Commons Committee Room, no mention was made of a more recent episode of politicians and facts conflicting – this time the recent Nutt sacking over drugs policy.

A more recent bit of work he has been engaged in lead to the title of this blog post – and that was the analysis of bank account activity (with necessary privacy issues dealt with). Not the big stuff that governments like to worry about, and pass silly laws on – such as money laundering etc.

How about monitoring when a person uses a cashpoint machine? If they never ever use one on Friday evenings, is there a chance that they are Jewish or Muslim? What if they lack life insurance or other long term financial plans?

It’s a lot more sophisticated than that – but out of 10 million accounts enough data existed to identify around 30 accounts that had particularly unusual behaviour.

He said that any suicide bomber seeking to evade detection prior to their crime should simply take out a life assurance policy. You can bet the security services have a few other key items they are watching that haven’t been put into books though. Indeed, they might be watching for a spike in people who never use ATM’s on Friday evenings suddenly taking out life assurance policies!

During the Q&A session, much time was spent dealing with their fairly controversial views on climate change – but if you get away from the tabloid media hype, their views are not actually that weird and indeed make a lot of sense.

In essence, it will cost a fortune to reduce CO2 emissions, and whatever we do will take 50+ years to have an effect. Or, we could spend a comparatively tiny amount on geo-engineering which can have an effect almost immediately and if it doesn’t work, we haven’t really wasted any time.

He is arguing that we should look at mitigating CO2 in the short term, and spend the money saved on developing the low-carbon economy that we will need in the future.

Hardly controversial, but the way some in the green-lobby have reacted you would think he was one of the climate change deniers. He isn’t – he just thinks that spending $1 trillion per year on reducing CO2, when alternatives costing maybe $200 million are available seems a bit odd.

His metaphor was that of an approaching asteroid.

One team of scientists come up with a plan that costs $1 trillion, takes 50 years to work and requires every human on the planet to be involved.

Another team comes up with a plan costing $200 million, can be tested in just one year and involves a few thousand people.

Lacking a Bruce Willis to save us, which option would you try first?

If you want to know more, then the duo are giving another talk, this time tomorrow at the RSA, and they will be broadcasting it over the internet.

Tune in, it will be entertaining (especially if he includes the potty training story), and quite possibly enlightening.

Thanks to the Henry Jackson Society for the invite to the event.