23 November 2024
Sixty-one years ago yesterday, American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot.
It was a truly shocking event and, as younger people remember where they were when they heard Lady Di had died, older people remember where they were when they heard he had been shot.
He was the youngest American president ever to be elected, and the youngest ever to die in office. He was also the first Roman Catholic president and was part of what Americans don’t call an ‘upper class’ family. He was good-looking and he was married to Jacqueline Bouvier, also good-looking, from another ‘upper class’ family.
Even today, his name is still remembered (who can name the three presidents who followed him? Or his three predecessors?) and his undoubted charisma has led to an image that has persisted into this century.
After rupturing a disc in his spine playing football at Harvard, Kennedy concentrated on politics and international affairs but his entire life was plagued by health problems and he was frequently in pain. He was awarded a purple heart when a Japanese destroyer sank his PT boat and he led the survivors of his crew to swim some three miles to the nearest land, helping another crewmate who’d been badly burnt.
While he was convalescing from another back operation in 1955, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history, and he subsequently became active in politics.
In the 1960 election, he narrowly beat Richard Nixon and gave birth to a whole new era in American politics, most of it progressive. Although he had authorised the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to oust Fidel Castro, he then called Russia’s bluff in 1962 over their missile bases in Cuba, leading the world to the brink of World War III, which frightened the hell out of people everywhere; but he won and Khrushchev backed down.
Kennedy then argued that the confrontation showed how important it was to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and this finally led to the 1963 test ban treaty.
He formed the Peace Corps of volunteers who worked all over the world on projects in education, farming, health care, and construction and he was active on equal rights and proposed new civil rights legislation in the belief that all Americans, regardless of their skin colour, have the same rights to a good and happy life in America. He also introduced the Equal Pay Act in 1963 so women were entitled to the same pay rates as men and he was an advocate of income tax cuts but his premature death meant this legislation wasn’t enacted during his lifetime.
Then, on 22 November 1963, he and Jackie were being driven slowly through Dallas, waving at the cheering crowds, when a bullet hit him in the back of his neck and exited through his throat. As he fell sideways, another bullet removed a piece of his skull. His head landed on Jackie’s lap and she cradled him as the motorcade raced to the hospital.
She later refused to change and, still wearing the pink dress covered in his blood, later stood beside Lyndon B Johnson as he was sworn in, saying she wanted people to see what they had done.
Because the person believed to have shot him was himself shot two days later, there was nothing to stop conspiracy theories springing up, including one theory that there was a second shooter on ‘the grassy knoll’ in front of the car and another that the person believed to have shot him had been trained and/or set up by communists, or some conspiracy or secret organisation.
Coincidentally, his murder was filmed by a supporter, Abraham Zapruder, and frame 313 of his film shows Kennedy’s head jerking backwards as the first shot hits him. The conspiracy theorists believe this shows the first shot came from in front and knocked his head backwards; others believe that the head automatically jerks backwards if one is hit hard in the back of the neck.
The 888-page report of the Warren Commission concluded that no evidence had been found that the killings were part of any conspiracy. This naturally fuelled rumours that there had been a conspiracy that had been covered-up.
After his death, it became public knowledge that he’d been a philanderer and had several affairs including, most notably, with Marilyn Monroe, and there were rumours of the Kennedy family’s links with organised crime.
These appear to have arisen because JFK’s younger sister Pat had, in 1954, married Peter Lawford, one of the infamous ‘rat pack’ of entertainers and, through them, JFK had met and become friends with Frank Sinatra (who first introduced him to Monroe). However, JFK’s brother Robert had written in his 1960 book The Enemy Within that organised crime was the greatest danger facing his country and he began a public and sustained attack on gangs when he was appointed JFK’s Attorney General.
Sinatra fell out with JFK after the latter was advised that maintaining close links with Sinatra, who was believed to have links with the mafia, might damage his reputation, and Lawford himself was subsequently excluded from rat-pack activities.
Thus was the saintlike president de-canonised and made human but it’s worth reminding ourselves that he was the right person at the right time and, peccadilloes aside, he led America through some huge societal changes and his legend lives on.
In many respects, he was a ground-breaker and it would be interesting to know what he would have thought of present-day America with another bout of Trump, this time with Elon Musk, only a couple of months away.
Nancy Friedman, a “Customer service consultant” (by gosh some UK companies could do with one of those), wrote just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, about a kakistocracy, which she described as “government by the shitty”. ‘Kaka’ is of course a word commonly used by children in many countries as a not-very-rude way of referring to ‘poo’ though the word ‘kakistocracy’ itself goes back to at least 1644.
It’s roughly the opposite of ‘aristocracy’, based on the Greek ‘aristos‘ meaning ‘best’, which has come to mean government by people who, in the absence of any supporting evidence, consider themselves to be the best.
Category: aristocracy
Israel, Ukraine, North Korea, Australia, HS2 and our ancestors
26 October 2024
I wonder how much of Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to Hamas’s unexpected attack last year was due to shame at the failure of their intelligence service to have anticipated it, and how much is due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to delay criminal charges for as long as possible?
Latest reports from the UN’s humanitarian office warn that Israel’s undiscriminating bombardment of northern Gaza is “rapidly exhausting all available means for [the Palestinians’] survival” there. Coincidentally, Netanyahu is now planning to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians from operating in Gaza and West Bank and is covering his back by attacking and antagonising a lot of other countries in the region, with attacks like air-strikes on targets in Iran, so he’s got other strings to his bow if international pressure finally succeeds in getting him to back out of Gaza.
Meanwhile, Russia’s war on Ukraine continues without any obvious signs of a solution and is threatening the existence of NATO. Vladimir Putin is increasingly isolated and unstable and he compensates with ruthlessness so it’s vital ‘the West’ presents a calm and united front but Keir Starmer seems to be havering over missiles and other military support for Ukraine.
This isn’t helpful when another Donald Trump presidency in America seems terrifyingly possible: polls show so small a margin between the two candidates that the Washington Post and the LA Times (which traditionally give their editorial backing to one of the parties) aren’t supporting either of them. Why? Because both papers are owned by billionaires who don’t want a vindictive Trump to take revenge if he wins.
Both Russia and Ukraine are suffering from battle-fatigue and, according to the UN Population Fund, Ukraine’s population is now 25% less that it was when Russia invaded the country in 2022 due to war deaths, people fleeing as refugees to other countries and a reduction in birth rates.
North Korea is now planning to sending two units (12,000 troops, 3,000 of which are already being trained) to help Russia’s war efforts. Kim Jung Il’s support for Russia may not be entirely thanks to his unbounded generosity but because he wants his army to have experience of killing foreign people, which they haven’t been able to do for a long time. But it’ll give the braver ones a chance to defect …
More news came recently about the future of HS2 and I couldn’t resist the headline in one newspaper (not the Sun): “Euston, we have a problem”.
The line is currently planned to terminate in the sunny uplands of Willesden Junction and the curiously named Old Oak Common but the Treasury is reconsidering whether the original plan to extend it to Euston should be resurrected. Rail industry leaders have claimed this will make more money for the government from leasing out the line.
Opponents have pointed out the Euston is already one of the worst designed and most crowded stations in London and offers passengers almost the same rewards as changing trains at Birmingham New Street (anybody who’s ever done this with a heavy suitcase will know that ‘joyful’ is rarely the first word people use to describe the experience.)
More amusing was the rumpus caused in Australia when an indigenous senator heckled the king on his recent visit, saying Brits had stolen Aboriginal land. Of course we did: we did the same in North America and committed, or attempted, genocide elsewhere in what became the British Empire, from Africa to India. America rebelled against Britain’s colonisation and, after a civil war, ultimately became the United States of America, though it’s difficult nowadays to understand what made them think they were ‘United’.
Other European countries also built their own empires and we all kidnapped people and used more than a thousand ships over many years to transport more than 12 million of them overseas; those who survived the crossing then became slaves of the white occupiers.
I don’t feel any responsibility for what my ancestors did or didn’t do but I would be perfectly happy to offer my apologies and regrets for what was done by them, or with their knowledge, and admit to a feeling of embarrassment that we Europeans are so primitive that we thought ourselves superior to others. Sadly, it’s not so far from what our own monarchs (and the brown-nosed ‘aristocracy’ who were appointed by monarchs) stole from our own peasant ancestors, including the land from which they had previously made a living.
Isn’t it curious that some ‘aristocratic’ families claim to be able to trace their roots back to William the Conker as if it’s a big deal, even though he was French; how many people claim they’re descended from Harold, who was ‘English’ before W the C?
Do the sums: if we assume average families grow by four generations a century, 958 years ago we had over a trillion ancestors, far more than the population of the entire world (which is, even now, only 8.2 billion people). This, of course, raises another interesting question which I won’t answer now but, if we also allow for the comparatively limited movements of people which means we’re less likely to be descended from Japanese emperors than we are from King Harold, the chances are we must all be able to trace our roots back to Harold (and William) so we’re all related and you, dear reader, are probably my 18th cousin twice removed.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this.
One pleasure this week was to learn that scientists have discovered that a massive dust cloud in the centre of our own galaxy contains ethyl formate. I actually knew that this chemical is contained in rum essence but apparently it can also smell like raspberries and, when combined with other chemicals, smells like horse pee.
If and when this dust cloud coalesces into a planet, its inhabitants will smell fruity, be permanently drunk and keep dashing off behind bushes.
Small steps forward in the UK and elsewhere, and a Lesser Mutterings recommended supplier
7 September 2024
There are small signs that the UK is beginning to move on from the depredations of recent years.
David Cameron, first of the five prime ministers under the last Conservative government, committed himself to “a bonfire of red tape”. The principle was of course widely applauded as necessary to “boost the economy” but he tragically failed to tighten regulations that were inadequate or ambiguous, such as fire regulations that are designed to ensure the safety of buildings.
In 2013, following the death of six people in a fire in the cladding of Lakanal House, a London council block, the coroner recommended that fire safety regulations should be tightened up.
Eric Pickles, housing secretary at the time, was keener on cutting back regulations and is reported to have “ignored, delayed or disregarded” matters regarding fire safety and risk to life. In his recent examination under oath, Pickles still claimed, in the face of hard evidence to the contrary given by his officers and contemporaneous documents, that cutting regulations did not include building regulations.
Then on 14 June 2017, four years later, 72 people (of whom 15 were disabled) were killed in the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower, another London council block.
The 1,700-page report of the official inquiry into the latter disaster, which was published last week, has made it clear that almost everyone colluded in concealing the risks and must bear the blame.
The report found that three firms, Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex, “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”; the architects, Studio E, did not act as a “reasonably competent architect” and “bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster”; the builders Rydon and Harley Facades, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s building control department also share responsibility for the fire and the deaths it caused.
The inquiry also says the government was “well aware” of the risks posed by highly flammable cladding “but failed to act on what it knew” and, even worse, that some £250m more has been since been given to firms involved in the incompetent refurbishment of Grenfell Tower
The good news is that this report is likely to get so much publicity that firms are likely to be excluded from future government contracts and, with luck, key individuals will face corporate manslaughter charges. The bad news is that this is likely to take years and they don’t sound like the sort of people who will die of shame..
More good news is that the new government has scrapped the one-word judgment on state schools after Ofsted ‘inspections’. Why did it take so long after the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry after her school was downgraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ to get politicians to make the change to a system that was obviously fundamentally flawed.
The new government has also cancelled the VIP helicopter contract on which Rishi Sunak spent £40m so he could get from London to places like Southampton and Essex. Not much quicker than the train but so, so much more comfortable my dear. (Even E2R sometimes used a public train from Kings Cross to get to Kings Lynn on her way to Sandringham.) The helicopter contract, which Sunak extended in December last year, expires this December and had already been put out to tender by the Conservatives.
Other good news is that, after a 2-month review, the Foreign Office believes there is a “clear risk” that exporting arms to Israel may allow them to commit serious breaches of international law, and the UK is to suspend some arms export licences to Israel.
According to the Financial Times, our contribution only comprises 1% of Israel’s arms imports (or 0.02% according to GBNews, which has estimated that 98% of arms exports will still be allowed). Still, we have to start somewhere and any reduction is to be welcomed.
Even better is the news that America is bringing criminal charges against at least six of Hamas’ top leaders for the 7 October attack on Israel which has since led to more than 40,000 deaths. And no, I’m not one of those who believe that all Gazans are Hamas terrorists even though they elected a Hamas-led government. Nor do I believe that Brits were all Conservative until very recently and are now all Labour even though they elected both the governments we’ve had this year.
This then made me wonder what would happen in America if Donald Trump was elected president before the various criminal charges he’s facing are resolved. Can a president pardon himself before a case has been judged? If they can, and Trump does, surely that’s an implicit admission of guilt.
Do presidents actually have the power to pardon themselves anyway? Surely the writers of the Constitution couldn’t have intended that, after being elected in November, a president-elect could go on the rampage with a weapon and then pardon themselves after they take office in January. Or didn’t it cross their minds that Americans might be stupid enough to elect somebody like Trump?
Labour is planning to remove the remaining 92 of the nepo babies from the House of Lords. Whether that will significantly reduce the numbers actually attending and voting remains to be seen.
Although I conceal it well*, I’m a great believer in complaining about bad service in the hope it will encourage firms to improve their service for others so I think it’s only fair to acknowledge good service when I come across it.
I recently decided to replace a couple of worn-out shirts with one offered by Savile Row Company and discounted to my price limit, but the discount code didn’t work so I emailed them asking why. (Have you noticed how few companies now publicise their email addresses, presumably because they provide lousy services and then get fed up with people emailing them to complain?)
Anyway, they answered by return saying that code had expired but they had another which gave a better discount and the shirt arrived 2 days later, even more cheaplier than I’d expected. Well done Savile Row Company!
* Comparatively well?
IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries
31 August 2024
Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level. Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.
Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from. Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.
While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported. An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south. It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.
It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.
The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.
There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent.
In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded. The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved. RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible. It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.
Why don’t these people speak English? What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.
To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.
For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.
The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays.
Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars. ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day. This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’: ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.
The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary. I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.
Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.
In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U.
Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’.
Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all. Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.
Aggravated bigotry, House of Lords and octopuses
1 July 2023
A quick PS to last week’s blog: in 1994, a group called Alliance Defending Freedom was set up in America with the express aim of stripping away the rights of LGBTQ+ and, more recently, those of trans people as well as people’s rights to same-sex marriage and abortions. Sadly, the increasing paranoia of the far right about transgender rights and sexual orientation led to its income increasing by $25m between 2020 and 2021.
Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court justice has spoken five times at an ADF training program established to push a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law”, clearly somebody whose ability to judge cases objectively and impartially would be widely respected within the confines of a padded cell.
Apart from the problematic use of the word “Christian” in this context, I’ve a feeling the ADF’s name is oxymoronic and it should change its name to Alliance Defending Bigotry?
One of my other prejudices is, as I might just have mentioned before, that there’s something very wrong with the distribution of wealth so I was delighted to see a recent article by Arwa Mahdawi. She suggested that, instead of comparing the size of their space rockets, billionaires should boast about who’d paid the most tax that year. Brilliant!
Talking of billionaires, isn’t there something fishy about the way Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group suddenly stopped on its way to attack Moscow, with Prigozhin being granted a free pardon before flying to Belarus in his private jet? He started life as a criminal, became a buddy of Vladimir Putin, took up catering for a bit then became a warlord. Let’s hope he doesn’t now start writing music*.
We’ve also been hearing a lot about Evgeny Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer, who was given a peerage by Boris Johnson. Despite the warning in Exodus 20:5, I believe we are, mercifully, not responsible for the sins of our fathers, but Evgeny and his father co-own two British newspapers, the Independent and the Evening Standard (and Novaya Gazeta a Russian paper) so they’re both in it together.
But Lebedev the Younger is now in the UK’s ‘upper’ house which, unelected though it is, can influence the laws of Britain.
In 1999 the Labour government introduced the House of Lords Act which was passed by a comfortable majority in the Commons but – what a surprise – met resistance in the Lords. It was nevertheless passed and disenfranchised a lot of peers whose only qualification was genetic, leaving ‘only’ 92 hereditary peers.
In 2007, further changes were proposed with the Commons supporting a wholly-elected chamber and the Lords favouring an all-appointed chamber – another surprise – and, since then, appointments have increasingly been related to the political allegiance of appointees.
Labour’s conflicted views go back at least as far as Michael Foot and have come through people like David Miliband to now, disappointingly, Keir Starmer and the party policy (if it has one) seems to involve mumbling about the need for a democratic upper house while saying its ramifications would make a change very difficult. Even when faced with Johnson’s honours list, Starmer claimed to be scandalised by his stuffing even more Tories into the Lords but failed to mention the need for root and branch reform.
It’s even rumoured by cynics that Starmer would make things worse by elevating more Labour supporters to even the political balance.
Starmer also seems to be avoiding contentious subjects like Brexit, despite the latest YouGov survey showing that 58% of the electorate would now vote to rejoin the EU. (Whether the EU would allow the UK to rejoin is a different question.)
Too many of us remember, 7 years ago, Nigel Farage, John Redwood, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest of their gang promising Brexit would give us increased prosperity, cheaper food, flourishing trade and a better-funded NHS and that we’d be free of all Brussels’ red tape, we’d take back control of our borders and nobody would have to worry about foreigners coming into the country. After the vote, David Davis even promised our exit deal would “deliver the exact same benefits” as EU membership.
The British parliament used to be seen as a model of honesty, open-discussion and integrity but Johnson has put an end to any hopes of that with an independent committee (containing a majority of Conservatives) finding him guilty of contempt of parliament on five separate occasions. The Commons supported these findings by 354 to 7. (Sadly, Rishi Sunak couldn’t vote because he had what Oscar Wilde called “a subsequent engagement”.)
The government’s competence has been further undermined by the Court of Appeal’s ruling that Suella Braverman’s desire to export unwanted refugees to Rwanda was unlawful, concluding that Rwanda was not a “safe third country” even though assurances by the Rwandan government had been provided in good faith. Not to be diverted by irritations such as the law, Braverman has said she will appeal to the Supreme Court.
Official estimates say it will cost £140,000 per deportee. Some people have calculated how many nurses could be hired with the £14m that 100 people would cost.
I’ve just come across an article on somebody called Tuppence Middleton, an actor who was in Downton Abbey. I once had a secretary called Pamela Halfpenny. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they’d been born to each other’s parents so one of them could have been Tuppence Halfpenny (pronounced ‘tuppence hayp’ny’ in old money)?
I’ve also just come across another PS to something I wrote last month: researchers in Japan have discovered that octopuses limbs twitch and there are rapid changes to the texture and colour of their skin while they’re asleep. The scientists think it’s possible the animals are dreaming although they have suggested they might be just automatically refining their camouflage patterns while they sleep. I’d like to think they’re dreaming.
* Apologies to those who would actually enjoy wasting spending 18 hours listening to the Ring Cycle.
Apology, Sidmouth, voting, royal money, Labour and Tory saboteurs, cromulence and a cobra
8 April 2023
A friend who isn’t a crossword fan failed to spot the significance of the date on last week’s mutterings and didn’t realise that they weren’t all entirely accurate. My apologies to all those who didn’t get the clue in the first paragraph that was supposed to lead to ‘a cross tick’ (“an angry parasite”, geddit?), or ‘acrostic’, thereby inviting people to read the first letter of every paragraph in order. It wasn’t meant to make people feel stupid, it was just intended as a bit of fun, so this week’s is deadly serious.
Sidmouth is a pretty town with crumbling cliffs on the coast of East Devon which has hosted an annual folk festival for longer than some of us care to remember and is a good resting place on the South West coastal path, attracting thousands of visitors every year so the town’s last bank, Lloyds, will be closing in September (HSBC and Coop have already closed their branches). Do you think their call centres have a recording saying “Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us. But not so important that we’re going to hire extra staff to reduce your waiting time.”?
Everybody wanting to vote in person next month must now have photo ID even though there were no prosecutions for voter impersonation last year. According to the Electoral Commission, there were just seven allegations of ‘personation’ at local and mayoral elections and the six by-elections throughout the UK in 2022 and no police action was taken in any of these cases either because there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, or none at all.
Downing Street’s defence of this utterly pointless exercise said it was “to guard against the potential for wrongdoing”. If you listen carefully, you can hear Rome burning.
The Guardian has disappointed me this week with what appears to be a republican campaign, estimating how much the royal family gets and what it owns. They have to estimate the numbers because, even though we pay them, the family refuses to disclose their income and assets (“it’s private” they say).
As far as we know, they’re not even the richest family in the UK and we give money to all the others as well for the stuff they sell us (like pageantry and vacuum cleaners), or they stole it from us in the past. Since it now seems polite to apologise for our great6 grandparents’ part in the horrors of slavery, doesn’t it sound reasonable that we should ask various dukes and other nobles who inherited stuff to give back the land that was stolen from people like us by their great12 grandparents?
However, the Windsors do have one big advantage in that they are exempt from tax, even though some of them voluntarily pay what they think they should. Wouldn’t it be better if they were subject to all the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, including capital gains and inheritance taxes? They could always give Cornwall to the National Trust if they haven’t enough spare cash to pay what should have been paid on the Queen’s estate.
I’m not anti-monarchy but I do worry that the Guardian’s coverage looks more like a republican campaign than a simple desire to expose the inequities of rich people.
And now the government is giving £8m to allow every public authority a free portrait of King Charles. You can tell the ministers who decided this by their brown noses.
Luckily for them, Labour has attempted political suicide by using ‘knocking copy’ which accuses the Tories in general and Rishi Sunak in particular of not imprisoning paedophiles. This has been welcomed by the Tories and condemned by clear-thinking lefties.
But the Conservatives have their own saboteur in the form of Suella Braverman. She claimed “almost all” members of grooming gangs were British Pakistani men even though a 2020 Home Office report concluded that most child sexual abuse gangs comprise white men aged under 30 and there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest members of grooming gangs were disproportionately more likely to be Asian or black.
When challenged over the 18-hour delays at Dover, she also denied it was anything to do with Brexit even though Doug Bannister, the port’s chief executive, admitted a year ago that Brexit was causing longer processing times at the border.
This week has also seen reports of falling house prices. Why do people worry about this? If the values of houses go down across the board and we decide to move, we’d get less when selling and pay less for our new house. People with second homes and Buy To Let landlords would lose out but who cares about them?
Suppose all property prices reduced by 90% and became worth only 10% of what they were last week. It wouldn’t make any difference to those of us who already own our houses and would make it much easier for first-time buyers. My first house cost about 2½ times my salary; the same house would now cost about 25 times what I would now get doing the same job I did back then.
Mortgages could then also be reduced by 90% so it stopped people with mortgages going into negative equity. The cost to lenders would be funded by cancelling management bonuses and taxing the Windsors …
I had a slight attack of schadenfreude when Donald Trump announced that he was going to be “indicated” [sic] and he duly was, looking rather grumpier than usual.
Sounds cromulent to me (a new word created for The Simpsons in 1996 meaning legitimate or acceptable, which I heard for the first time this week).
And, in South Africa, a private plane flying four passengers at 11,000’ made an emergency landing at the nearest airport after a 5-foot cobra slid past the pilot’s thigh and curled up under his seat. Everybody left the plane safely, the snake slept on, and the pilot was rewarded with a handful of Valium tablets.
Refugees, Japanese respect, Boris blows it, Teslas, drugs and reality
25 March 2023
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, have been arguing over whether London’s police force is “institutionally” misogynistic, racist and homophobic. Why don’t they agree to differ about words and just get on with the job of cleaning it up?
Using government data and the Home Office’s estimate of how many people it hopes (“hopes”???) to deport from the UK, the Refugee Council has calculated that almost 200,000 people, including 40,000 children, could be locked up or forced into destitution if the government’s Illegal Migration bill becomes law. An official at the Home Office said they don’t recognise these numbers. As Mandy Rice-Davies said 60 years ago in a rather different context, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.”
When Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping this week we saw some interesting body language which made it clear that both of them accept the Chinese president as the more powerful.
On the day after this love-in, Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida made a surprise trip to the devastated Ukrainian town of Bucha to meet president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. After laying a wreath for the dead and observing a minute’s silence, Kishida bowed, a Japanese gesture of respect, especially when volunteered by a prime minister. In his speech he said “Japan will keep aiding Ukraine with the greatest effort to regain peace.”
Despite her having lived in Budleigh Salterton, Dame Hilary Mantel’s memorial service is to be held in Southwark Cathedral because it has links to Thomas Cromwell about whom she wrote some books. What a feeble excuse to save VIPs all the effort of trekking down to her own county, where she also wrote a lot of other books that didn’t mention Cromwell.
Boris Johnson made a characteristically “flimsy” appearance before the privileges committee that’s trying to decide whether he actively misled parliament over Covid lockdown parties but he blew any credibility he had left by losing his temper. A senior Conservative MP on the committee, Sir Bernard Jenkin, told him the committee didn’t agree with his interpretation of the guidance.
The following day’s papers were generally critical. Even the Daily Telegraph headlined “Johnson besieged but defiant” and their associate editor wrote on the front page “The cults of Boris and Brexit are simultaneously imploding”.
Steve Bell’s political cartoon in the Guardian neatly summed it up with a picture headed “The Blair Defence” and showed Tony Blair emerging from Johnson’s head as he says “I lied in good faith”.
Coincidentally, while all this was taking up the front pages, Rishi Sunak published a summary of his tax returns, presumably in the hope that we’d all be distracted from the fact that his income over the last three years was around £5m, mostly gained abroad.
Also on Tuesday, a man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder in Birmingham after dowsing a man walking home from a mosque with something inflammable and setting him on fire. What are the odds that his attacker is white and one of Tommy Robinson’s groupies?
And Donald Trump wants to be handcuffed when he appears in court if he’s indicted for paying hush money to the ‘adult’ actor Stormy Daniels. Why don’t they agree to handcuff him but only if he’ll agree to wear black bondage gear?
Uganda, a former member of the British Empire, has just passed a law that will make a homosexual act a capital offence. If one can believe the rumours one hears about various institutions, doing the same in Britain would (if there wasn’t an age limit dividing gropers from gropees) rid parliament of a lot of MPs who’d been to private schools; and, quite a few who had sung in church choirs.
Sceptics are not rushing to buy electric cars unless they’re either small-car users in large cities or people who want to impress others or save the planet, whatever comes first. My personal concerns are the price (about half of which is the batteries themselves), the vintage technology of batteries, the problems of disposing of used ones, the scarcity of charging points and the additional time you have to spend watching paint dry on long journeys.
According to a recent report from Reuters, there now seems to be a new problem which is that entire cars are having to be written off because it’s impossible to repair battery packs after even comparatively minor damage, and the batteries in Tesla Y SUVs are a structural part of the car. Imagine what this is going to do to electric vehicles’ insurance premiums.
In America, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating two complaints that the steering wheel came off the same model while they were being driven. Whooops a daisy! (Tesla’s response was to shut down its media enquiries department.)
Some neurologists and psychologists at the University of California in San Francisco have studied the effects on the brain of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the psychedelic compound found in the flowering shrub Psychotria viridis and a key component of ayahuasca, a drink that’s been used in Mexico to induce altered states of consciousness in Amazonian peoples for at least a millennium. Further work has been done by the DMT research group at Imperial College London.
Physiologically, recordings of brain activity showed that DMT breaks down established networks so ‘normal’ electrical impulses take new paths between areas of the brain that don’t normally talk to each other and everything gets mashed up. The results are that the connections and networks which usually ‘create’ reality for us offer up different versions of reality.
Psychologically, they can include perceptions of contacts with beings from other dimensions and journeys through alternative realities. People describe leaving this world and entering another that is “incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods.”
Some projects are now in the early stages of testing the combined effects of altered states of consciousness and psychotherapy as a treatment for depression.
Philosophically, the cognitive effects of rewiring the brain so radically, even for such short periods, raise questions about what reality actually looks like …
To add another perspective to this, researchers from Essex University and Berlin’s Humboldt University have recently concluded that drugs do not automatically improve artists’ work, even though John Lennon once described the Beatles’ album ‘Revolver’ as their “pot album”, and it certainly marks a significant change from their earlier work.
Not everybody agrees and ask how we could know if, say, Modigliani’s work might not have been even better without the absinthe, cocaine and cannabis, and his joint opium sessions with Picasso.
Charlotte Church has recently admitted that the broadcaster Chris Moyles once offered to “take” her virginity when she turned 16, and he later claimed his remark was “actually rather sweet”. Isn’t that disgusting?
Do you want the good news or the bad news?
10 December 2022
The most frightening news last week was hearing that thousands of police across Germany had arrested a whole bunch of people from the far right, including some armed police and military officers, and a prince, who had been planning to overthrow the German state. The 71-year-old prince is descended from Reuß family that used to rule over parts of eastern Germany in the 12th century. This is tremendously impressive since (like all of us) he had well over 4 trillion ancestors in the 12th century, which is an estimated 1,500 times as many people as lived on earth at the time, so he’s probably our umpteenth cousin. If there’s a knock on your door, don’t answer it.
The coincidence of the week came when Matt Hancock MP, who’d just been on ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ eating unspeakable parts of wild animals, probably without garlic. Out of the final three contestants, he was only beaten by two others and, having already lost the Conservative whip, he announced that he wouldn’t be standing as a candidate in the next election. The coincidence was that his local constituency association appears to have decided not put him forward as their candidate at the next election.
Encouraging news came when Rishi Sunak U-turned again and reallowed the creation of new onshore wind farms but, unfortunately, it came in the same week as Michael Gove, the recidivist levelling-up secretary approved the digging of a new coal mine in Cumbria, estimated to produce 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, even though the world teeters on the edge of the abyss of climate catastrophe. Even the chair of the Climate Change Committee and former Conservative minister Lord Deben has described the decision as “absolutely indefensible”. How can the UK ever again criticise countries like China and India for their contributions to Armageddon?
By the way, if you want to see what an open-cast coal mine looks like, find a picture of Ffos-y-Fran opencast coalmine in Merthyr Tydfil.
Keir Starmer came up with some new old news and talked about ending VAT exemption for private schools (which is neither new news nor wholly accurate). It’s already been Labour policy for 5 years and even Gove has suggested the same thing; and anyway some charities can recover some, but not all, of the VAT they pay. Still, the sheer effrontery of the policy inflamed the Daily Mail for a couple of days.
The Mail also pounced on Starmer’s children going to a state school which they said is actually a “state-run prep school for the middle class”. Oh, for heaven’s sake. No wonder the Mail has the reputation it has.
(Did you know Eton College is a registered charity? It was founded in 1440 as “The Kynge’s
College of our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore”, which is still its official name. Its income in the year to 31 August 2021 was £85m.)
The least surprising news is that Michelle Mone also lobbied ministers in an attempt to get the government to give huge contracts to yet another company (LFI Diagnostics) that was a secret entity of the office that manages the wealth of her husband, Douglas Barrowman, for which she was formally rebuked by a health minister. She has – wait for it – denied all the allegations but will be taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords “in order to clear her name of the allegations that have been unjustly levelled against her”.
The most predictable news involved the number of people who are going on strike. Privatised railway companies that are mostly owned by foreigners who don’t use British trains cancelled well over 300,000 trains in the last year, more than double the number in 2015, but the companies are still claiming huge bonus payments from the government. The staff are going on strike basically because they think they should be more fairly rewarded even if it does have to come out of the money that would otherwise go overseas to the owners. It’s beginning to look like one of the UK’s biggest exports is the gift to foreign countries of profits earned in the UK.
Postal workers are also striking because they don’t think it’s fair for them to be fired and replaced by lower-paid ‘self-employed’ and casual workers which cost less and increase Royal Mail’s profits.
Even nurses are going on strike, which shows how little the government cares about keeping the real value of wages of some of Britain’s most essential workers up to date. These people keep most of us well and alive, though probably not Conservative MPs who can afford private treatment, and the government treats them like dirt. I wonder if the Conservative governments’ increasing privatisation of NHS services over the last 10 years might be significant? Surely adding the extra costs of paying directors and managers and giving money to shareholders of private companies to make them richer couldn’t possibly be reducing the money left to keep the real value of the wages paid to the people who provide the service?
The worst news this week was that some 6,000 children are born in the UK with undiagnosable medical problems, known as SWAN, Syndrome Without a Name, and the parents have to go the same thing over and over with different medics, and never get an answer, or a cure.
The second best news this week was that the American state of Georgia, the Democrat Raphael Warnock won a 51st seat in the Senate for the Democrats and the Republican candidate Herschel Walker conceded gracefully and made it clear that he was happy with the way the election had been managed.
The best news was that a jury in New York has found the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud and Donald Trump’s own lawyers have found two more classified documents in a storage unit in Florida. Where did the saying ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’ come from? (Actually it seems nobody knows – suggestions vary from boxing to empires by way of large businesses – but it possibly originated from the prolific composer of folk songs, Trad.)
The most idiotic news also involved Trump who said the US Constitution should be “terminated” so he can move back to the White House.
Possibly the most intriguing news is that people can often get an idea of how some animals are feeling just from their vocalisations. The animals ‘tested’ include dogs, pigs, horses, cows and goats. Our Labrador certainly has different barks for “someone’s at the door” and “come on, hurry up, stop chatting, I’m bored, throw the damn ball”. It is of course easy to anthropomorphise animals’ actions and noises but researchers at the University of Copenhagen also measured less subjective things like heart rates and have published their findings in the Royal Society Open Science journal.
But the most enjoyable news is that a girl in Los Angeles has, subject to some conditions, been granted a permit to own a unicorn. The conditions include finding one, feeding it with watermelon at least once a week, giving it access to sunlight, moonbeams and rainbows and polishing its horn every month with a soft cloth.
Racism, wealth, sewage, rodent stoners and soothing radio
3 December 2022
A lidy dun wot she din oughter this week.
Before I go any further, I should explain that the most difficult word in that sentence for me to write was ‘lidy’. I come from a family with a number of linguistic hang-ups which included an abhorrence of ‘toilet’ (it’s a lavatory), ‘serviette’ (napkin),’pardon’ (instead of ‘what’), ‘dinner’ when it wasn’t at school or a black tie affair (lunch, tea – occasionally high tea – and supper for us), and a conviction that, unless they had a title, female people were always women and never ladies.
Incidentally, does it still take a man to make a lady either by his being knighted or having a daughter?
Anyway, Lady Susan Hussey, widow of Sir Marmaduke Hussey (there you go), the late queen’s lady-in-waiting who was recently appointed one of ‘the ladies of the household’, was unspeakably condescending, racist and rude to the founder of the charity Sistah Space at a reception in Buckingham palace.
Ngozi Fulani said she had “never felt so unwelcome or so uncomfortable” and Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality party, said she had witnessed the ‘prolonged interrogation’ which made her “reflect on the increasingly hostile environment of this disunited kingdom”.
The details of what happened have been widely reported and an American commented that, over there, if someone had moved a woman’s hair to read her name badge, they’d have been charged with assault. Had it been me, I hope I’d have had the courage to do the same to her, then ask what she did – I’ve been in the palace a couple of times and chatted with various women there, even some ladies, but I’ve never been that impressed, except by one who fascinated me because she spoke without moving her lower jaw.
Hussey’s was an honorary position (which I’ve always understood to mean unpaid) from which she immediately ‘resigned’ after her behaviour had been made public. Why was an 83-year old who is presumably not badly off (Marmaduke had chaired the BBC) still working? Just so she could patronise lesser mortals I suppose.
The only thing I can understand is her asking about Fulani’s “people”, not because she should ever have said it but because my family (again) would talk about their people and mean their parents and family, not their tribe.
It reminded me of a recent email exchange with a friend who said “Just in case you have heard, as I have this morning, that Brexit is the cause of our shortage of doctors, nurses and carers in the NHS, a quick look at info available shows, quite clearly, the European countries have similar shortages.”
I responded by saying “What are the numbers for Europe, and what’s your source?” and he replied “Why don’t you just accept what I tell you instead of treating me like a suspect in a trial. Just because a fact does not gel with what you would like it to be does not mean that it is incorrect. Try asking Mr Google and you will find multiple sources as I did.”
Needless to say, we each think the other is biased!
We also disagree about the equity of the unequal distribution of wealth so I was interested to see a recent article written jointly by Winsome Hill and Julia Davies. They started by saying “The two of us are from very different worlds.
“One of us is a millionaire investor [and a member of campaign group Patriotic Millionaires], the other a care worker and trade union member. We have totally different experiences of the economy, but we share a fundamental belief that it is broken – and the government in its autumn statement did nothing to fix it.
“The cost of living crisis affects all of us, but it doesn’t affect us equally. One of us struggles to afford the spiralling price of the weekly shop, while the other can shop as before, unaffected by rising food prices. One of us fears turning on the heating to keep her house warm, while the other can heat her home and travel for some winter sun without a second thought.”
They went on to say “This isn’t how an economy succeeds. The argument of the last prime minister – that the only route to economic success is to allow inequality in our country to grow even greater – is simply wrong. Wealth does not come from the top and trickle down, it comes from all of us. There is no route to prosperity through increasing inequality.”
It was comforting to see the extent to which they agreed and their joint conclusion: “Let’s start with taxing the seriously wealthy – people with wealth of more than £10m. A wealth tax of just 1% or 2% on their stocks of wealth over £10m would give our country the investment it desperately needs to see out the hard winter to come.”
Another classic case of chutzpah came to light this week when it was revealed that England’s water companies blamed the government for their continuing pumping of raw sewage into our waterways. The gist of their letters was “you haven’t yet taken any action to pass laws to stop us and we’re buggered if we’re going to increase our costs and reduce our profits voluntarily so we’ll carry on pumping human excrement into rivers and onto beaches as long as it’s legal to do so”.
The situation is of course complicated because at least 72% of the water companies’ profits, or those that are left after the directors have helped themselves, go to 17 foreign countries, which have their own rivers and seaside beaches which aren’t contaminated so why should they care?
Many of them have other companies interposed between the English water company and the ultimate owner, which makes it difficult to find out who is actually taking the money out rather than repairing and replacing sewerage systems. For example, while South West Water is directly owned by Pennon Group plc, a UK-quoted company, there appear to be 10 intermediaries between Southern Water and its ultimate owner, Greensands Holdings, a private American investment firm.
Back in 2019, Jacob Rees-Mogg said of Brexit: “I can see the opportunities of cheaper food, clothing and footwear, helping most of all the incomes of the least well-off in our society.” Earlier this year, he spent a short time as minister for Brexit opportunities and, as far as I know, failed to identify a single opportunity.
The 2011 census statistics now released show “that England is no longer a majority-Christian country [and] have sparked calls for an end to the church’s role in parliament and schools”. Interesting that the Daily Telegraph should have chosen to highlight this in their report!
In response to the reported changes in Britain’s ethnography, Nigel Farage has reappeared and said that the next census won’t include questions about country of birth or racial identity. Absolute rubbish of course but the Brexit bus casts a long shadow.
In India, they blame rats. A court in Uttar Pradesh state asked to see the 200kg of cannabis that had been seized from dealers and was being used as evidence against them but the police said it had been eaten by rats. In 2018, Argentinian police blamed mice for the disappearance of half a ton of cannabis from a police warehouse. When I was younger, the dog ate my homework.
Our local doctors’ surgery issues occasional newsletters, the latest of which finished with some particularly helpful guidance: “Call 999 immediately if you’re experiencing … collapse with loss of consciousness”.
And here’s a date for your diary: Radio 3 will be broadcasting the sounds recorded by a microphone hung round the neck of a reindeer. We’re promised the sound of hooves treading softly on the snow, coupled with the distant tinkling of reindeer bells while the herd eats and sleeps in its natural habitat. Sounds quite wonderful. Christmas Eve, 9 pm.
Choosing a PM, a short history of UK politics, a moral gulf as described by Leonard Cohen and another greedy pig
17 July 2022
People who desire power are, by definition, unsuited for it. Last week, 11 Conservatives admitted they wanted to be prime minister and have, within a week, been whittled down to five by those who know them best. Three more will now get excluded, leaving two who will now have to wait for 7 weeks before they know which one of them the party’s 175,000 members vote think won’t do quite as badly as the other.
These 175,000 members are, of course, the same people who, last time they were asked, got the answer so terribly wrong and elected the worst prime minister in living history.
One of the things that worries me is that Boris Johnson filled his umpteen cabinets with incompetents so he wouldn’t look as stupid by comparison. Wouldn’t it therefore have been more sensible to exclude anybody who’d ever been in one of his many cabinets from the process so there’s at least a chance of finding someone who can take a new look at the future? (I realise this cuts both ways but could they do any worse that they have in the last 5 years?)
Anyway, of the 11 original applicants, three didn’t get enough support to enter the race. Rishi Sunak was the clear winner in the first round with the support of 88 of the 358 Tory MPs who remain after various resignations, dismissals and by-election defeats. This means that, if he does ultimately win the members’ vote, he will know that 270 of his party’s MPs didn’t actually want him as prime minister.
As I write, five people are still in the race but, by the time you read this, there’ll only be four, then two more will have been excluded by the end of next week, leaving just two to use their summer break to big themselves up and slag the other off.
What a palaver. Why didn’t they just put all 11 names on a ballot paper and let all party members put a X against their favourite? Other elections are done on that basis and it would have let the Tory MPs blame the membership if they picked the wrong person again.
(Isn’t it sad that, after Johnson, I don’t really care who wins because I don’t think anyone could do worse.)
Actually, I have a slight preference for Tom Tugendhat since he was apparently the only one of the five contenders at Friday’s debate who unequivocally admitted that Johnson tells lies (one of the others said he “sometimes” did and the others, including Rishi Sunak, just waffled). And the bookies love it when an outsider wins so let’s keep our fingers crossed.
But no, I don’t think Tories have got the bottle for that, especially not for a person who’s willing to be that honest about the failings of another on the same side.
I rather like the name Kemi Badenoch, not because I know anything about her politics but because she accepted what sounds like a Scottish name from her husband. They appear not to pronounce it in Scottish but say Bayder-Knock and 30-seconds of detailed research on the internet doesn’t show Hamish’s ancestors as having any links to Scotland – though ‘Hamish’ isn’t a common name in Merton – so the Wolf may not be one of his ancestors.
In order to understand why modern politics is so confrontational, it’s interesting to look back at its origins.
In the beginning – and I oversimplify things slightly for the benefit of those with short attention spans – anyway, in the beginning there were monarchs and barons and squires and serfs. Then there were the Tories. Then, in the 17th century, there was trooble at t’ court and differences over the constitutional (or not) role of the monarch based, naturally, on religious differences, and the Whigs formed an opposition party which gained the upper hand in the ‘glorious revolution’* in 1688 and sidelined the Tories for more than a century.
As the Whigs’ original motivation became increasingly irrelevant, the party fell apart in the mid-19th century and most members merged with the new Liberal Party, though some joined what became the Conservative Party.
So far, so good, but things got complicated by the industrial revolution that led to the creation of large-scale enterprises and the days when Lady Squire would do the rounds every Christmas, pat their estate workers on the head and give them a plum pudding faded into the already murky depths of the past.
As factories and mines and canals grew and James Watt invented the steam engine while preparing a cup of tea, the division between the people who ran them and those who did the work became increasingly obvious. At about the same time, there was increasing pressure not to send young children down the mines to hack at coal seams by candlelight and some people came to realise that the profits are not made solely by the owners but depend at least as much on the people who processed the raw materials and that they too should get their fair share of the profits.
Having depended on slave labour, adults and children, both home-grown and abducted from other countries, the owners were none too pleased about this and, because there was (is) no way to measure the value of the labour force against the cost of the resources provided by the owners, refused to consider a fair allocation of total profits between the two.
The workers became increasingly pisst orff and restless and, at the end of the 19th century, Keir Hardie started the movement demanding fair pay and conditions for everyone that became the Labour party. This was of course at the same time as people were urging more representative government and ultimately gained votes for all men and, for the first time, women.
The Labour movement grew and became powerful enough to introduce things like the NHS and free education that were run and paid for by the state for several decades, until the Conservatives gained the upper hand and started selling public services and charging for university education.
Hence the confrontation we have to live with today.
Politics is now polarised between those on the right, who think money is the most important thing, and how much profit is made is the only way success can be measured, and the those on the left, who believe people are the most important thing and success can only be measured by the well-being of everyone in society (including the bosses).
This is of course terribly over-simplistic but it illustrates the vast moral gulf between people who think underpaying staff, moving money and shares around to pay less tax and trousering as much money as possible are justifiable, and people who are happy to sacrifice income, give money away and pay more tax to make to make things better for those who don’t have enough money.
Leonard Cohen summarised the contrast neatly when he wrote “When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can. When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.”
Which inevitably leads to another Greedy Pig Award. Prêt à Manger (which doesn’t use the accents in English) lost £255m last year despite demanding another £200m from its shareholders and being given £31m in rates relief and £100m in furlough payments by the government during the pandemic. It also cut staff paid breaks in half so they now get 6% less for the same 8-hour shift. All of which would have been OK if its chief executive Pano Christou hadn’t taken a 27% increase in his salary so, with a share bonus, he extracted £4.2m from the company last year.
I don’t know how he votes.
Meanwhile the Resolution Foundation, a charity (which means it must not take any political position), has found that the average British household gets £8,800 less than those in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Their report coincided with calls from the Confederation of British Industry and the Treasury select committee for the government to produce a coherent growth strategy, but who cares about them?
* Never mind how many people died, it was definitely glorious
Lesser Mutterings 