Lucky Wilbury, rapists, UK prisons, genocide, Trump’s latest gaffe, Brexit and dodgy lawyers

24 May 2025

Today’s biggest news is, of course, that Lucky Wilbury (aka Bob Dylan) has made it to his 84^th birthday.  Who said mind-altering drugs were bad for you?  They helped him become the greatest lyricist in the last 100 years …

Other goodish news this week (at least for us sadists) came when Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor, was reported to be considering chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders.  I know of two young women who were violently raped and suffered permanent damage and wonder if this goes far enough;  I’ve heard enough about these two people to be tempted to support the use of a pair of blunt bolt-cutters.

They’re also considering releasing and tagging killers and rapists half-way through their sentences.  Surely these are exactly the wrong people to release.  Shouldn’t they be releasing (and tagging?) non-violent offenders to release overcrowding in prisons and perhaps never giving first offenders custodial sentences if their crimes didn’t involve violence against people?

Talking of criminals inevitably makes me think of Benjamin Netanyahu who is committing war crimes in the name of Zionism and then accusing his critics of being anti-Semitic.  I don’t know enough about him to know if he actually is that stupid or if he’s intentionally manipulating the truth because he wants people to think he’s slaughtering Palestinians in the name of a religion rather than for political reasons.

Gary Lineker has been fired by the BBC after re-posting a pro-Palestinian video criticising Zionism on social media .  Unfortunately, it included a picture of a rat which was, apparently, used by the Nazis to associate Jews with vermin.  Lineker later apologised and said he would “never knowingly share anything antisemitic” and he’d deleted the post “as soon as I became aware of the issue”.

Still, it’ll save the BBC a fortune because they grossly overpaid him.

Even the UK is taking a stand and the Foreign Secretary David Lammy has suspended negotiations over a free-trade deal saying calls from some of Israel’s cabinet ministers to “purify Gaza” by expelling Palestinians were abhorrent, and he condemned their refusal to allow thousands of aid deliveries to reach starving Palestinians.

Israeli troops fired what they called “warning shots” at an international group of diplomats from 31 countries who had been invited by the Palestinian Authority to see what was happening in Gaza.  Israel’s explanation was that the group had deviated from the route they’d tried to impose on the delegation in a country which they’d invaded where they have no legal rights to impose a tax on bread.

The leader of the Israeli opposition has said Israel “kills babies as a hobby” and even Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, has said what Israel “is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime”.  “Very close”? What haven’t they told him?

Netanyahu’s apparent lack of intelligent reasoning seems rather like Donald Trump’s more stupid outbursts which last week included accusing South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa of “white genocide” which Trump ‘proved’ to his complete satisfaction with pictures taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Ramaphosa himself remained dignified and stood up to Trump by drawing attention to his apparent attachment to far-right conspiracy theories.

Trump could, I suppose, have responded by saying that one of his latest ploys has been to suggest that women with more than five children should be awarded a National Medal of Motherhood in attempt to increase the population.  Doesn’t this sound like something Mao Zedung would have done if he hadn’t been encouraging people to kill flies though I don’t think even Trump would believe Mao was on the far-right so his at least his delusions are balanced.

Over here, my Conservative friend is trying to convince me that, because Brits voted for Brexit, it’s undemocratic for Keir Starmer to be negotiating with the EU to remove some of its daftest consequences.  However, he refuses to accept that an even greater majority of Brits elected Starmer’s party, which empowers the prime minister to reduce some of the inconveniences such as queuing with other ‘aliens’ to enter an EU country, and allowing EU citizens to be given visas and permits to work in the UK, a right that already exists for young Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Koreans.

In a different arena, another friend recently discovered the unfairness and misleading claims of ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawyers.  They had a perfectly good case against their landlords (a housing association, also registered as a charity, with assets of almost £1bn!) who took 5 years to act on reports of damaged window frames.

Unfortunately, one of these firms managed to convince them they could get compensation from the landlords so they drew up a case which went to Court on the day before the Easter weekend when people wanted to rush things and get home early.  I accompanied her as a McKenzie friend and discovered that the solicitors, who are based in Liverpool, had instructed a barrister from Cardiff (well, Cardiff, Exeter, they’re all south of Crewe aren’t they) to represent her in court.

I know some KCs and this one didn’t impress me nearly as much as he impressed himself. He didn’t discuss either the case or what sort of compensation they would accept with my friend, instead talking about his personal life and showing us pictures of his house.  He also ignored a specific instruction that costs were to be in addition to compensation (since he didn’t know what the costs would be) but, after some to-ing and fro-ing with the other side, he announced that he’d agreed a settlement out of court, without saying what it was.

This turned out to be a lump sum which included costs totalling more than 80% of the total so the actual compensation was derisory and, so far, the lawyers have ignored the Court’s instruction that payment should be made within 21 days and my friend has so far received nothing.

I’m now trying to help my friend put this right but the main lesson I’ve learned is never to use no-win no-fee lawyers because at least some of them don’t know what’s written on their tin.

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 18^th 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.

SUVs, two idiots and UK prisons

19 October 2024

A quick update on last week’s piece on assisted dying:  on Wednesday, Kim Leadbetter’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill had its First Reading in the House of Commons and there will be a vote after the Second Reading on 29 November.  Since this a Friday, many MPs will often be working in their constituencies so please encourage your MP to attend and vote.

On a visit I once made to Belfast at the height of the troubles, an election was approaching and one of our hosts told us, deadpan, that the slogan there was “Vote early, and vote often”.

A new danger is appearing in the wide-open racetracks of Chelsea and Notting Hill:  an American pick-up truck / SUV with the modestly self-effacing name of ‘Ram’.  It’s slightly larger than Nazi Germany’s Panzer I tanks and almost as heavy.  The European Transport Safety Council has said “This type of vehicle is excessively heavy, tall and powerful, making it lethal in collisions with normal-sized vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists … Europe should ban the Ram”.

If pedestrians are hit by normal cars with sloping bonnets and sides, the car tends to strike them at leg level and deflect them to one side.  SUVs generally have higher bonnets so it’s harder for them to see children in front of them and, if they hit somebody, smaller people will be hit in the head while taller ones will be hit in the trunk that contains all the vital organs.  Their square fronts also make it more likely that the pedestrian will be thrown forward and run over.

In Belgium, a recent study by the Vias institute, formerly the Belgian Road Safety Institute, studied the dangers of these vehicles and concluded that pedestrians are 90% more likely to suffer serious injury and almost 200% more likely to be killed if they’re hit by one of these things.

Simple physics helps explain an added risk.  Einstein’s famous formula E=mc² proves that the force of the impact is equal to the weight of the vehicle multiplied by the square of its speed, which means that heavier vehicles like SUVs (and lorries) will cause more severe injuries and greater speed will disproportionately make them even worse.

It’s thought that SUV buyers, who are the target market for Rams, are predominantly male and there is a popular rumour that they are over-compensating for personal inadequacies. Why don’t they just save money by having penis-enlargement therapy and give the savings to charity?

Other idiots include the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who has posted a comment on X/Twitter saying “Yes they can control the weather.  It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”  I have a feeling this translates as “Hurricanes like Helene and Milton wouldn’t have happened under a Republican president and Joe Biden targeted them at Florida because that’s where Donald Trump plays golf.”

Another bozo was the MSP chucked out of the Scottish National Party in August.  The Glasgow Shettleston MSP, John Mason, had said “If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed 10 times as many.”  Come on John, they’re doing their best.

In the Netherlands, the prison population is 40% lower than it was 20 years ago, down from 51,000 to 30,000.  The UK prison population is at a record high of almost 98,000, an increase of 50% from 65,000 in the same 20 years so the UK now has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in Western Europe.  Our prisons are dangerously overcrowded with corresponding increases in violence and drug abuse, and each prisoner costs us an average of £47,000 p.a. – that’s a total of £4.6bn.

If we set aside violent crimes (and I’m happy to include gaslighting as a violent crime because of the destructive effect it has on its victims), does any first-time offender going to benefit from being locked up with a bunch of experienced prisoners who can teach them all sorts of new tricks and approaches to crime?  I’ve muttered before about my belief that all ‘white-collar’ criminals’ assets should be confiscated by the state in exchange for the rights to live on state benefits.

Perhaps, as happens in the Netherlands, ‘new’ offenders should be made to do community service and, if thought necessary, made to pay compensation or fined and/or given a suspended sentence which is only enforced if they re-offend.  Dutch research shows this leads to lower rates of re-offending and it would certainly save the UK by a billion or two.

It’s a pity that governments prefer spouting tough-sounding slogans to actually doing something about the problems.  Stuff like “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.  Well, that worked a treat, didn’t it?  Sounded impressive, achieved nothing except increased overcrowding in prisons.

Let’s see if the forthcoming budget is better thought-out.  Recent research by the IPPR thinktank has discovered that a bunch of millionaires believe capital gains tax should be increased and the entrepreneurs have said was not a major influence on investment decisions.  The report also recommends a return to the system introduced by the Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson in 1988 which charged capital gains tax at the top rate paid in income tax by investors. Sounds fair.

In “The Other Place”, the Earl of Devon* is reported to be objecting to a proposal to remove all hereditary peers from the House of Lords.  As someone rather neatly put it in a recent letter to the Guardian, would you want root canal work done by somebody whose great great grandfather had been a dentist?

And a final piece of news that surprised me when I heard it:  the diameter of the Moon is less than the width of Australia.  I suppose that means that, if it crashed into Australia, the antipodean island would be left with a coastal strip in the east and another in the west, some 3,000 miles apart, and it would lead to the extinctions of humankind and any dinosaurs still undiscovered in the impenetrable forests of Hampstead Heath.

*   Come on, fess up – who knew Devon had an Earl?

More drugs, water companies, sewerage, and prisons

13 July 2024

Following my brief mention of cannabis in last week’s mutterings, a friend said their son was surprised to get a receipt when he bought some cannabis in one of the American states.  I hadn’t thought of that before but I’ve never been offered a receipt when I’ve bought cannabis over here.  I wonder why.

The illegal drug market is flourishing in Britain and some people believe that legalising cannabis for recreational use will stop users from having to buy from dealers who have a vested interest in converting them to more unpleasant and expensive drugs like cocaine (which, as far as I know, hasn’t been legal since the beginning of the 20^th century when Coca Cola had to stop putting it in their fizzy drink.)

Other people don’t think this is such a good idea and say there is some evidence that legal drugs would have to be subjected to quality controls and tax, which would make them more expensive than illegal drugs.

I obviously don’t know which way it would go but cannabis buds are hard to ‘dilute’; it’s much easier to cut cocaine with salt, bleach powder or other white crystalline substances.

Perhaps there’s a case for legalising cannabis and letting market forces decide whether stoners will pay more for a purer product or will take the risk by continuing to go to their friendly neighbourhood dealers where they can place a side-order of amphetamines.

We now have a new government so, while I don’t think their manifesto mentioned rationalising the drugs market, we can always hope.  The chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has told business leaders Labour will “fix the foundations” of the British economy so why not practise by starting here? It’d be easier than trying to sort out the sewage problem.

Thames Water is the biggest water company and is threatened with bankruptcy after the water companies in England and Wales were sold to the highest bidder in 1989 in the dying throes of Maggie Thatcher’s government.

In the following 36 years, the privatised companies rewarded their shareholders and executives handsomely while, as ‘wild’ swimmers all over the country are suffering, failing to deal with any of the big problems.  Ah but, says Thames Water, many of their water mains and sewage pipes are Victorian.  So?  Weren’t they Victorian when they did their due diligence before buying the company?

Thames Water had no debts when it was privatised but owed £14.7bn in 2022.  Its pension fund was £26m overfunded in 2008 but was £260m underfunded by 2015.  Much of this is down to Macquarie, which started as a small Australian bank in the 1960s and grew enough to become an asset stripper and buy Thames Water in 2006.  

It immediately rewarded itself by paying out £656m in dividends (mostly to itself of course) even though the company only made a profit of only £241m, grabbing the shortfall of £425m from the company’s reserves.  

It broke Thames Water up into a complex structure of inter-related companies, including subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and added insult to injury by taking approximately £2.8bn out of the company before it sold Thames Water in 2017.

A Macquarie spokesperson said: “During the 11 years in which our funds were shareholders in Thames Water, we oversaw the largest investment programme in the company’s history and the highest rate of investment per customer in the industry.”  They didn’t mention that they’d taken out all the money and been forced to borrow huge sums from lenders, paying them large amounts of interest, to provide the money for what they claimed was “their” investment in the industry.

Robert Maxwell, come back, all is forgiven.

Like Maxwell, Macquarie proved between 2006 and 2017 its dedication to ripping off everybody in sight, including the pension funds of the staff who actually do the work.  The company has been described by one commentator as “a powerful totem of mismanagement, corporate greed and lax regulatory oversight”

Only 9% of Thames Water is now owned by UK investors.  The rest is owned by investors in Canada, Abu Dhabi, China, Australia and the Netherlands and these shareholders recently decided the company was “uninvestable” and refused to throw good money after bad to bail the company out.

Of course, Thames Water isn’t the only water company to abuse a monopoly but, as the biggest water company, it offers a costly warning to governments not to repeat the stupidities of Thatcherism.

Oop north, another private company has let so much filth into Lake Windermere that the algae it produced on the surface of the lake can be seen from space.  Scotland doesn’t seem to have fared too badly but its water companies were never privatised and what is now Scottish Water is still owned by the Scottish government.  In 1988, when water privatisation was being considered, it was rumoured that the Loch Ness Monster had applied for accommodation in Lake Baikal.

(By the way, did you know there’s more water in Loch Ness than there is in all the lakes, rivers and reservoirs in England and Wales combined?)

Labour’s manifesto also promised to make life easier for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence and are now (I hope) trying to find a way of keeping these people in prison after the last government recently came up with the brilliant idea of reducing overcrowding in prisons by effectively reducing criminals’ sentences and letting them out early.  Why don’t they take up my earlier suggestion not imprison ‘white collar’ criminals but to bankrupt them, transferring all their assets to the state, and make them live on state benefits?

With everything else that was severely damaged during the last government’s 14 years in power, like the NHS, education and social care, Labour will need to prioritise actions and I suspect the purification of what we ingest and egest is an even lower priority than the classification of drugs.

The last government seemed to believe that privatising and sub-contracting services would bring more money back into the economy because of taxes on their profits and on wages paid to their staff;  this would then allow further investment in infrastructure, such as waterproofing roofs in schools and hospital buildings.  They also seemed to believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden but I haven’t seen any yet.

Tory triumph, presidential immunity, Gary Trudeau and blood alcohol

4 May 2024

With due ceremony, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ventured into distant realms of his fiefdom this week to offer his personal congratulations to the most triumphant of all the Tories who had been been standing in Thursday’s local elections.  Off he trotted, all the way to Teesside, where Ben Houchen, that’s Baron Houchen of High Leven to you, had managed only to lose a third of the people who voted for him last time and held on to the Tees Valley mayoralty.

The reason for his win might have been explained is his acceptance speech in which he thanked voters for “backing my plan” and failed to mention Rishi Sunak, saying very clearly that he’d be happy to work with a Labour government if one is elected later this year.

Ah yes, that’s the sort of graciousness and loyalty we Tories expect from the chaps in the field God bless St George and all who sail in her.

Further south, the person who’d given him a peerage a couple of years ago, Boris Johnson, was refused permission to vote by a polling officer in South Oxfordshire until he went home and got a note from his mother some photo ID.  Wicked journalists leapt on this with glee because he was the prime minister who had introduced the requirement for photo ID in 2022, and the polling officer had to explain their schadenfreude to fellow volunteers.

Naturally, how the results are reported at a national level depends on the media doing the reporting:  whether they headline ‘Tories Crushed’ or ‘Labour Fails to Win Teesside’. 

Views will also differ on whether the results are likely to be repeated at a national level, with everybody’s nerves jangling as a general election approaches.

Equally fascinating, and potentially terrifying, are Donald Trump’s claims that presidents should be above the law, with a side order of ‘is a convicted criminal eligible to serve as president?’  He’s facing so many charges for so many felonies it’s difficult to know where to start but I did rather enjoy the very small triumph of the law when he was fined a token amount for contempt of court and threatened with a night in jail if he keeps on doing it.

The worrying thing is that they even have to consider a president’s criminality.  Imagine the founding fathers sitting round over a late-night pipe and a cocoa wondering whether a serial rapist who’d served their sentence should be allowed to stand as president;  or whether a school shooter, still in prison, should be allowed to stand.  Until the scribe spoke, holding up his quill in a highway that was curling up like smoke above his shoulder, and said “Come on folks, shirley that’s commonsense, and there ain’t room left here on the paper for all o’ that anyways.”

So this is now being debated with, presumably, the question of whether a president could legally pardon themselves of a crime for which they’d been convicted, or whether they would have to recuse themselves.  And what would happen if they failed to do so.

Just think of the implications of the unlimited power that the ability to pardon oneself for any crime, not just ‘official’ ones, would give to a crook, or a mafia boss;  and if the power isn’t unlimited, where would the line be drawn between ‘official’ crimes that are OK and can be pardoned, and ‘unofficial’ crimes that can’t?

One of the supreme court judges has even proposed that presidents who weren’t immune from prosecution for ‘official’ acts might then face prosecution when their term ended, and this would put a stable democracy at risk.  I can’t see the link myself but he’s a Republican and America supreme court judges are political appointments and base their decisions on political expediency, not the law, which itself destabilises what they like to consider a stable democracy.

Sadly, there have been moves in Britain to empower the government of the day to overrule the judiciary’s understanding of statute and case law, so our own democracy is also teetering.

Incidentally, Gary Trudeau, the American, Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist and satirist, is not the first person to suggest that Trump is suffering from dementia, offering real quotations as evidence.  His work is syndicated to 1,000 daily and Sunday newspapers worldwide and is accessible online.  If you don’t know it and enjoy wry smiles, he is brilliant and his Doonesbury strips are well worth a look.

A few days ago, I decided not to do any muttering this week because I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather (which, thank you for asking, is bright and sunny today – Dog thinks the sky has fallen) and wondered about pulling a sickie. 

Do you know I always thought ‘pulling a sickie’ was a joke but, when I was in Australia many years ago, we were planning a trip with a local who had taken all their leave for the year, and they said “well, I’ve still got some sickies left”.

Then I heard of something called ‘auto-brewery syndrome’ and thought you might like to know about it.  It’s very rare but the body manufactures its own alcohol which gets into the bloodstream and teetotallers can get busted for drink-driving unless they can produce a note from their mother countersigned by a medic or two confirming that such a condition does actually exist, and they have it.  So I sat down at the keyboard and out this came, stream of consciousness stuff.

By the way, I’ve only intentionally mangled two and a half quotations in the seventh paragraph but if you can find more, do let me know.

Vets, fruit, dogs, Strine and what’s under our feet

23 March 2024

Those of you not privileged enough to get the Guardian will have missed a piece in last Saturday’s issue by Lucy Mangan.  Talking about the recent exposure of how vets, especially those that are part of large groups, charge extortionate amounts to people who feel they must do their best for their beloved pets, she said “As the owner of two cats whom I love more than life itself (well, one of whom I love more than life itself – the other one and I are in talks), … I am shocked. And as an upstanding member of western capitalist society, I am appalled to learn that the profit motive could ever lead to unethical behaviour or any kind of corruption, major or minor.”

The idea of her being “in talks” with the “other” cat made me hoot with laughter, leaving half a mouthful of my lunch spread over the table.  Then of course I had to read it to my wife without giggling.

Down under, a fruit and vegetable producer in New South Wales has just won the title for the world’s heaviest blueberry with a fruit that weighed 20.4 gms and is 39.3mm wide.  Isn’t it wonderful how different we all are!  Brad Hocking decided to see if it was a world record;  I’d have wanted to know what it tasted like.

But they do have strange tastes in Australia.  I once asked if they had any proper beer, tasting of hops, served at room temperature with a slight scum on the top.  The response was along the lines of “Bloody whingeing pom.  Beer should be cold, fizzy and taste of aluminium.”  I resisted the temptation to point out that’s lager not beer and, if they can grow massive blueberries, why can’t they manage humble hops, because Bruce – I’m sure that was his name – was twice my height and proportionally muscled.

They also have their own language, collected in a 1965 book called Let Stalk Strine by Afferbeck Lauder*.  It includes translations of ‘Emma Chisit” (“how much is it”), ‘Gunga Din’ (as in “I gunga din, the door slokt”), “Egg nishner” (that keeps you cool in hot weather) and ‘Tiger’ (as in “Tiger look at this, Reg”).

Which inevitably leads to French Bulldogs, flat-faced little dogs that have been bred by vets so they can’t breathe properly without unbelievably expensive treatment.  They’re accepted at Crufts and have become favourites of the sort of female ‘celebrities’ who like to be papped with something furry nuzzling their paps.

According to the RSPCA, their appeal is fading and the number being dumped has risen from 8 in 2020 to 582 in 2023.  The number of other breeds being dumped has also increased but the French Bulldog is the top reject.  Strangely, Staffordshire bull terriers are also being rejected, probably because they’re associated with those illegal bull terriers that go deaf when the ‘owner’ says “Let Go. Give. GIVE.  That’s my doughnut.”  Actually Staffies are rather nice little dogs and rate very highly for being good with children.

As any fule kno, scientists only have a basic ‘understanding’ of what 15% of the universe is made of so they labelled the 85% ‘dark matter’ or ‘dark energy’ (one always feels better if something inexplicable is given a name).  It doesn’t react with electronic forces or light so, basically, it could be anything from an overlap with another universe to the smell left by the iguanas of the gods.

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking this is slightly arrogant for a species that discovered the uses of electricity about 180 years ago and inhabits a microscopic particle of dust in an unimaginably vast universe that came into being about 13,700,000,000 years ago.  In fact, we don’t even inhabit this particle of dust, we live on its very thin skin and know very little about what’s under it.

For instance, we do know that the magnetic north and south poles swap over every so often and scientists have only hypothesised about why this might happen, and when it’s going to change again.  I just worry whether my satnav will still work.

It’s almost 4,000 miles to the centre of the earth and we know very little about the vast bulk of it.  Even one mile down, it is noticeable warmer than on the surface.  It’s thought that the centre is a viscous liquid (if molten rock can be called liquid) with tectonic plates floating around on top of it, tearing the surface apart (at geological speeds) so magma can spurt upwards through the gaps, or crunching together and buckling the surface to throw up mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Alps.

In an article just published in Nature, scientists from a range of institutions including the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Ames Research Center claim that the two huge, anomalous structures buried 1800 metres below the surface under the Pacific Ocean and Africa are remains of the ancient planet Theia which, it’s generally agreed, crashed into the earth millions of years ago.

The study was led by Dr Qian Yuan, a geophysicist at Caltech, who believes that this would explain the existence of these “large low-velocity provinces”, or LLVPs, that were first discovered in the 1980s.

And just room for another bit of fascinating information contrasting the tails of dogs and wolves.  It’s been found that hand-reared dog pups wag their tails far more often than hand-reared wolf pups and dogs wag their tails to the right when something has pleased them, and to the left when they are submissive in threatening situations.  Mind you, somebody else has suggested that dogs wag their tails in more than 30 different ways so who knows.  Our dog certainly has very expressive ears that he can operate independently – his favourite position is combined with a look that says “Did you see me back there with the other dog, I was very good wasn’t I, do I get a treat?”

*   You guessed it of course:  alphabetical order.

Problems in search of solutions

2 December 2023

There’s been a short ceasefire in the Middle East and some hostages have been exchanged.  One family waiting to welcome hostages back home was reported as saying “I recognised my niece immediately” which, after only 8 weeks of separation, shows the anguish they’ve been suffering.

Now just imagine of horror of then having to tell one of the children that their mother had been murdered and their father was still missing.

It made me remember the words of a Suzanne Vega song:  “A soldier came knocking upon the queen’s door / he said ‘ I am not fighting for you any more … I’ve watched your palace up here on the hill / and wondered who’s the woman for whom we all kill / but I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will”. 

Why can’t people just stop killing and go home to their families to see what’s for supper?

But no, the ceasefire’s ceased and they’re all killing each other again.

The Covid inquiry drags on not (it has been emphasised) to find out who’s to blame but to identify mistakes made so they can be avoided in future.  So, naturally, all the big names have been telling us why they weren’t to blame.  Boris Johnson’s appearance next week is likely to follow suit – see how many “errs” you can count in any random five minutes of his replies.

What has become abundantly obvious so far is that the government was made totally dysfunctional by individuals who are convinced of their own overwhelming competence but surrounded by fools;  and to think that we (I use the word in its loosest possible sense) elected them.

Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has claimed that the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, a cornerstone of post-Brexit “global Britain”, would benefit the UK economy by 0.08% to 0.1%. 

The Office for Budget Responsibility’s report that accompanied last week’s autumn statement estimated this deal would actually add only 0.04% to GDP in the next 15 years so Badenoch was only 100% out.  The report also estimated that two separate bilateral deals with Australia and New Zealand, both hailed at the time as new landmark trade agreements, “might increase the level of real GDP by a combined 0.1% by 2035”.

Despite the old saying that “many a mickle makes a muckle”, the OBR’s calculations recognise we’re going to need a lot more mickles to improve the UK economy which the OBR reckon will be 4% smaller by 2035 than if we had stayed in the EU.

To put this in context, the Daily Telegraph thinks the OBR is “a waste of money” (“Surprised are we not” spake Joda.)

But don’t get too depressed. Britain can now make its own laws, free from the shackles of the EU, and Rishi Sunak confirmed on Wednesday that he will be introducing a law that declares Rwanda is in fact a safe place to send refugees and asylum seekers and it has an impeccable history of human rights and it doesn’t shoot migrants at its borders.

With luck, he might now realise that, using the same argument, he could introduce a law declaring Ukraine the winners of the Russian war and saying that Israel should return to its kibbutzes and Hamas to its bunkers, and all shall be well.

Talking of bunkers and Israel’s belief that a major Hamas command centre is hidden under a hospital, despite the only evidence we’ve seen so far being unconvincing and unverified, Israel’s ‘Defence’ Force has surrounded the hospital chucked out the patients and medics and is rootling through the basement.  Why doesn’t it just identify the routes of the tunnels that must radiate from the centre by using ground-penetrating radar in a complete circle outside the hospital grounds?  They could then simultaneously destroy them all from open ground above each tunnel and wait for the terrorists in the control centre to surface (they couldn’t disguise themselves as medical staff if they’ve all been evacuated).

Nowadays you don’t even have to go abroad to get killed.  In America, the Department of Agriculture uses ‘cyanide bombs’, aka M44s, to kill wildlife, hikers and dogs.  In 2017, when he was 14, Canyon Mansfield was walking with his Labrador in the hills behind his home and accidentally triggered one which sprayed both of them with sodium cyanide.

After emergency treatment, Mansfield survived but the dog convulsed and died on the spot.

In Iran, you don’t even need cyanide, you just upset the government.  Last year, Iran executed 582 people, compared with 333 reported in 2021.

Research from the Office for National Statistics released recently shows that, based on information taken from the NHS, DVLA, Department for Education, other datasets and field visits showed that there were more than 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings just in England on census day.  90% of these were genuinely vacant (having no usual residents and not used as a second home or by visitors) and 10% were empty second homes.

Neither category accounts for dwellings that have no usual residents because they are used as second homes for more than 30 days each year. There are an additional 1.625 million of these in England alone.

The survey also found that the South West has the highest proportion of empty second homes in England and Wales and the highest proportion of unoccupied dwellings in use as second homes with more than 150,000 homes across the region entirely unoccupied and another 33,000 second homes that were unoccupied on the day.  Exeter alone has far more than previously thought with 3,100 second homes vacant or empty, 5.6% of the city’s housing stock.

The South West also has the highest concentration of holiday homes in the country.

And they say we have a housing crisis – sounds more like an ownership crisis.

The Peter Principle writ large, and rocket science

21 October 2023

In 1968, Laurence J Peter published The Peter Principle which drew attention to the fact that, for as long as they do their job competently, people get promoted until they reach a job they can’t do and they become incompetent in the new role.  (He added the caveat that this wasn’t necessarily because they were intrinsically incompetent but because the new job required skills and experience that their previous job didn’t.)

So, he implies, there’s a tendency for people at the top to be incompetent, whether they’re politicians or directors / trustees, but their failings are concealed by the churn factor:  people leave and are replaced by new people, some of whom are competent and prevent complete collapse.

It’s not an anglophone monopoly and examples can be found all over the world, from Myanmar to Afghanistan, and it’s worst where incompetent dictators and military rulers are able to impose their incompetence on whole countries.

The most shocking example last week was when, Israel Katz, Israel’s energy minister, said in response to claims that Hamas is believed to be holding about 200 hostages in Gaza: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. Humanitarianism for humanitarianism. And no one will preach us morality.”  Does Katz not understand what “humanitarianism” and “morality” actually involve?

He also seems to have swallowed the false syllogism:

• Hamas is a terrorist group
• Hamas is based in Gaza
• Therefore everybody in Gaza is a terrorist.

Over here last December, a senior civil servant formally recommended to Lee Rowley, the building safety minister, that he should order a formal investigation into crumbling concrete in schools and public buildings and social housing blocks (remember the Ronan Point collapse in 1968?).  Rowley returned the recommendation for a “substantial rewrite” and demanded it include the option of doing nothing.  Then a primary school ceiling collapsed.

China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has had Liu Liange, former chair of the Bank of China, arrested for taking bribes and illegally approving loans.  Ah well, bankers will be bankers.

The EU has U-turned on its decision to ban the most toxic chemicals in consumer products.  I wonder if the UK is ahead of the EU and has already banned them?  If so, there’s one real advantage of Brexit.

The first European to land in Australia was the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 (or, more likely, one of his crew whose name has been lost in time who secured the ship so Janszoon wouldn’t get his feet wet).  29 other European explorers followed in the 17^th century and it became known as New Holland.  Then, the best part of two centuries after the first landing, Lieutenant James Cook mapped the east coast, ‘claimed’ it for Britain and it became known as Australia.  Nobody thought of consulting the people who’d lived there for the previous 65,000 years and believed that ‘owning’ the land they lived on was as stupid as ‘owning’ the air they breathed.

Last week, Australians voted on whether the Aboriginal peoples should be recognised in the country’s constitution and be allowed to advise parliament on matters concerning the indigenous peoples;  the immigrants voted not to give them these rights.  It sounds barss ackwards to me; shouldn’t the indigenous people have voted on whether the immigrants should have a say in running their country?  (Interestingly, the only state to vote for the proposal was the ACT, which was created to house the immigrants’ parliament.)

In New Zealand, just across the water from Australia, many Pakeha New Zealanders (New Zealanders of European descent) were shocked by the result since Māori people participate fully in their country’s government.

Perhaps it’s because Britain populated Australia with its unwanted convicts and New Zealand with its aspirant kiwi-fruit farmers.

Forbes magazine publishes an annual list of the 400 wealthiest people in America and, for the second time in three years, Donald Trump isn’t in it.  Trump’s response summarises his whole approach to life:  “I demand a full apology from the failing Forbes magazine” he wrote on Truth Social, his failing social media platform.  What a sad man, to care whether or not he’s on a list, particularly a list published by a magazine he thinks is “failing”.

In Northern Ireland, pollution has poured so much waste into Lough Neagh that it’s covering of blue-green algae is so extensive it can be seen from space.

In the UK as a whole, accurate estimates of when people will be able to draw pensions can be made from the day they’re born* and allowances can be made for the proportion of them who will die before they reach retirement age.  In the same way, it’s not rocket science** to forecast the probable future need for ‘social housing’ from projections of demographic trends.

In 1980, most care homes were run by local authorities, the NHS and charities which provided 225,000 beds while the private sector provided 47,000 beds.  Last year, despite an ever-increasing number of older people, only 25,000 beds were provided by local government, the NHS and charities while the private sector provided 380,000 beds and people forced to live in homes run by the larger private companies donated between 8% and 42% of their fees to the homes’ owners.

In the same period the demand for social housing has grown while successive governments have reduced the number of units available by selling them to their occupants.  This has in turn contributed to the rise in house prices that has prevented so many people buying their own properties, thereby leading to an increased demand for social housing …

The Labour party has promised to build 1.5m new homes in the next 5 years, 300,000 a year, including a huge increase in the number of ‘affordable’ homes, and claims to be prepared to take on local opposition to do so.  However, its conference was sadly reticent about the need for low-carbon buildings and the environmental impact of new developments.

However, we must take all politicians’ promises with a grain of salt since another politician has recently reduced ‘promises’ to homeopathic levels by downgrading them to ‘pledges’, and then to ‘aspirations’, and then to ‘not a chance in hell’.

*          I’m not suggesting this is actually done, merely that it’s possible.

**        My physicist / engineering son says rocket science is a doddle – fuel, oxygen and a cigarette lighter – it’s rocket engineering that’s difficult.

Good news / bad news, Wills, assisted dying and social care

31 December 2022

‘Life good in Ashby de la Zouche’ doesn’t sell papers.  ‘Attractive young woman shot dead in club’ does.

This we all know, but why?  Is it that we take ‘good’ news for granted so it’s boring?  Or do we get some sort of voyeuristic pleasure from hearing that something bad happened somewhere we weren’t? Perhaps there’s an element of “There but for the grace of God go I” (a phrase whose origin is attributed to an early 16^th century Christian preacher when he saw a bunch of condemned people being escorted to the scaffold to which he was later taken himself).

But why does the UK still edit films of killings and accidents?  We seem happy to watch films in which ‘deaths’ are shown in graphic detail, heads exploding or people bleeding slowly to death (thank you for that one Quentin Tarantino) but we know they’re actors and special effects.  In real life, film of somebody being shot or knifed in the street is always stopped just before the end so we don’t see any ‘real’ person’s death.

This might be because of a wish to spare the dead person’s family and friends from seeing the actual moment of death, but I can remember seeing a copy of Paris Match from the 1960s which included a photograph of a plane crash, showing the smoking wreckage and the roofless cabin with burnt bodies still strapped into their seats.

We all tend to say “If I die, I’d like …” while the one thing we know for certain is we are all going to die so we should say “When I die, I’d like …”, and yet we’re still curiously reticent when it comes to talking about death.

Many of us also seem to be superstitious about – or just keep putting off – writing a Will, thus risking leaving our partners and families and friends in a labyrinth of paperwork and bureaucracy at a time when they’re trying to cope with their grief.  (So if you haven’t yet written a Will, go and do it NOW and remember it’s Very Important to follow the exact rules;  solicitors and charities will often help do this free.)

But what about dying?  We’re not all lucky enough to die in our sleep and there are some nasty diseases and conditions that kill us slowly and painfully over a long time.  If this happens to me, I’d want to be allowed to make a choice over when I die, preferably before the pain becomes so bad that palliative drugs can only reduce it by sending me to sleep.

My first blog in this series, posted on 19 August 2018, explains why I am committed to the principle that ‘assisted dying’ should be legal in the UK.  Fans of Emmerdale will also have followed Faith Dingle’s struggles with what to do when the pain of her terminal breast cancer became unbearable.  (Spoiler alert:  she died in October.)

The Netherlands already has a much more enlightened approach to letting people die in comfort and with their family;  in Switzerland, Dignitas apparently charges £10,000 and the Australian state of Victoria passed assisted dying legislation in November 2017.  Closer to home, France will hold a national debate with a view to legalising assisted dying in 2023, a Bill is moving forward in Scotland, Jersey launched the second part of its consultation in October, an Isle of Man MHK has been given leave to introduce a private members bill on assisted dying in the House of Keys in May 2023 and the Irish parliament is launching a special committee to consider the subject after a poll showed 63% of people in the Republic supported the idea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the powers that be are miles behind and can’t even get their heads round the problems of social care.   The result is inevitably that the bulk of the support comes from privately-owned companies whose owners are more interested in getting rich than in the service they claim to offer to the UK’s 1 million dementia patients – and all the others who need care – charging their ‘customers’ an average of £75,000 to £100,000 each per year for residential care.  However, we have to remember that these owners are perfect examples of capitalist entrepreneurs worshipped by free-market Conservatives so the present government is understandably cautious about offending potential donors.

Luckily for these entrepreneurs, dementia patients tend not to know there’s anything wrong with them and can’t remember who did what to them so victims of abuse can’t testify against them.  I have a feeling it’s worse for people watching someone develop dementia, seeing the person they knew and loved slowly drifting away and dissolving, leaving only a shell.

The care homes regulating body, the Care Quality Commission, has reported that more than three times as many care homes in England were given the worst possible rating in 2022 as were in 2019.  Their latest report also showed some homes to be filthy and unhygienic, that medicines weren’t properly administered, that patients had unexplained bruising and injuries, and family visits were restricted.

In addition to delaying the dementia strategy it promised in May to deliver by the end of the year, the government has also postponed its promised funding reform to “fix social care”.

As a carer myself, I know just how exhausting it can be, both physically and emotionally.  We pay a private company some £10,000 a year for ¾ hour of help every morning and the best part of £2,000 for a week’s respite care every so often.  When our savings expire, we’ll be broke and on benefits.

In the meantime, the company’s balance sheet shows that it (i.e. the husband and wife who own it and are the only directors) increased in value by £236,000 in the year to March 2022 and by £430,000 in the previous year.  (The accounts don’t say how much extra, if anything, they paid themselves as directors.)  If the service had been provided by the government, that’s an extra £666,000 it could have used to improve and increase care services just in our small local area.  Isn’t 666 the number of the beast?

Still, this is traditionally the time we look back to last year so I’ll limit myself to the good things because I’m getting short of space.

Ummm.

Women showed that football can be interesting and players don’t have to be failed thespians.

That’s about it really so a happier new year to all of you who are starting a new year tomorrow.

PS:  A friend has criticised me for saying last week that we gave away our winter heating credits, a perfectly fair criticism of something which could be seen as an attempt to impress people rather than trying to encourage more giving.  In fact, I gave a lot of thought to this before leaving it in because I had been inspired by a real person (Joan Bakewell in case you’re interested) saying several years ago that she always gave hers away and I thought that, if she did it, then so could I.  And, if somebody read this and thought here’s somebody I know who’s doing it, maybe I could.  Nevertheless, I apologise unreservedly to anybody who found it distasteful and an attempt to brag – it’s not a competition.

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 17^th 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-19^th 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 19^th 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