Car colours, NHS, government funding, UK stocks

5 July 2025

We know cars come in different colours and shades which you can choose if you buy new (those of us who buy secondhand take what we can get) and manufacturers make so many of each colour according to the demand for them.  Or do they produce more of one colour in order to create a ‘fashion’ for it?

Henry Ford memorably said of his original Model T, ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black’ (because black was the cheapest paint and changing colour would need the production line to be shut down).  Towards the end of its 19-year life, after 15 million had been sold, Ford did introduce some additional colours and it was replaced by the Model A in 1927 and this did come in a variety of colours.

Over the years, there have been periods when most cars were a similar colour, which changed every few years when manufacturers realised people who cared about this sort of thing would realise that driving a particular-coloured car dated them.  For several years now, most cars have been painted in dark colours that blend nicely into the shadowed background of country lanes.

However, in the last year or so, there seems to be a trend towards cars painted yellow, or a rather horrid bile yellow-green colour, probably not called ‘vile vomit’ by the marketing people.  More visible in shadowy lanes of course …  Come to think of it, I’m not sure what colour our car is and can’t be bothered to go and look, but we’ve only had it for just over 6 years.  It’s either black or dark grey.

Misogynist petrolheads like to joke that women choose a car by its colour, apparently not realising that women tend to have a much finer sensitivity to shades of colour than men:  men worry less about where the colour falls on the pantone spectrum than about how many carburettors a car has and how many seconds it takes to get from 0 to 62 mph, not that any of them ever actually do this.

A dental technician was recently trying to choose the colour of a crown to match my neighbouring teeth and asked me which I thought was closest.  I told her I’d leave it to her because women are better at matching colours than men;  “That’s what Mark [the dentist] says” she replied.

Dental treatment used to be covered by the NHS on the weird assumption that the health of teeth is an integral part of our overall health but this was changed years ago by someone who had never had an infected abscess on the root of a tooth.  Whatever next?  They’ll probably be refusing to let the NHS treat the ravages of ageing next.  After all, they stopped providing glasses on the NHS under Mrs Voldemort and it can only be a matter of time before they catch up with hearing aids so we’ll end up with an ageing population of toothless old people who are purblind and deaf who will need to claim state benefits to survive.  Go figure. 

The next logical step will be to replace the Assisted Dying Bill now going through parliament with a Compulsory Dying Bill.

The government seems to be aiming in this direction but there have been a lot of very encouraging objections from Keir Starmer’s own MPs to his welfare bill and he had to water down to get it through.  Following this, the Chancellor said she probably couldn’t avoid raising taxes in the next budget.

Perhaps this will encourage the government to rethink the approach to funding services.  Traditionally, cutting costs has been seen as better than increasing income.  Except in business.  Try telling big business they can’t put their prices up but have to cut their costs.  Since we don’t do much manufacturing any more, a large proportion of company costs is people so they either have to get them to work harder for less money or cut back on what they do.

If the government – any government – started with a blank sheet of paper they might even realise they’re not charging enough for the services they provide so, once they’ve cut costs to the bone, they need to increase prices.  Fine so far, except that they have a monopoly and must therefore accept they have a responsibility to support the less fortunate by increasing prices to the more fortunate, a curious inversion of ‘market forces’.

One of the problems all governments seem to have is that they’re subject to self-centred decisions made by people with money.  We saw a classic example last week when ‘markets’ were worried about the hole in the country’s finances and Chancellor’s future and sold UK government bonds left, right and centre after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, raising the yield to nearly 4.7%.  But they then took their Valium and bought the things back again on Thursday morning, leaving gilts yielding closer to 4.5%.

(As I’m sure you all know, UK government bonds – aka ‘gilts’ – are stocks sold by the government to raise money to waste on nuclear weapons, or whatever.  They offer a fixed rate of interest on what you give them and the government will give you back whatever you paid the government for them when they ‘mature’ on a given date. 

(So far, so good, if you hold them until the repayment date, but you can sell them before they mature and the price you get for them will depend on what current interest rates are, not what you paid for them, so you may get more or less than they cost you.  Thus, if a stock is issued at, say, 4%, and comparable interest rates rise above this, you’ll get less than you paid for them because the buyer will want more than 4% interest.  So, if interest rates go up, gilt prices will fall, while gilt prices will go up if comparable interest rates fall below 4%.)

As Buffy Sainte-Marie said in her song ‘The Priests of the Golden Bull’, “Money junkies all over the world / trample us on their way to the bank”,

World War III and Civil War II, social ‘norms’ and fruit drinks

14 June 2025

Labour’s spending review last week allocated more money to housing, nuclear power, carbon capture, new rail links and defence.  Defence?  For heavens’ sakes, what can we offer on the world stage by allying with or against the big world powers of America, China, India, Russia, and even the EU?  The days of empire are gone.  We’re not even part of the EU now.  Britain is just a small island that, apart from renting property to USAF bases, is militarily irrelevant even when compared with states in the Middle East and North Korea.

Surely the money could be better spent?

Almost certainly, but not on corporate failures like Thames Water, whose horrific incompetence continues to make headlines.  Its potential buyers are now asking to be let off its £123m fine for environmental and other criminal breaches of its licences and permits, including intentionally diverting millions of pounds it was granted for environmental clean-ups into bonuses and dividends.

KKR, an American private equity firm, has already pulled out of the auction, worried about its politicisation and its inadequate assets and only a bunch of bondholders who lent the company some £13bn remain.  If their bid isn’t accepted, it’s probable that Thames Water will return to public ownership but a recent report has suggested this could be done without spending a penny; and people spending pennies is one of their problems (younger readers may need to ask what ‘spending a penny’ means because it now seems to cost anything between four and ten shillings).

A recent report by Common Wealth, a not-for-profit group formed in 2019 to “reimagine” the relationships between ownership and society at large, has disputed the cost £99bn reported as the total cost of renationalising of all English water companies, pointing out that this figure was produced by a thinktank funded by water companies.  Common Wealth has suggested that the government could use a process called ‘special administration’ to return Thames Water to permanent public ownership and that when its debts and past dividends paid to shareholders are set against its supposed regulatory capital value, the cost would be much less, possibly even close to zero.

Israel has recently admitted to a novel approach to war:  arm enemy criminals.  Israel Defence Fund officials have confirmed they have been supporting a Palestinian gang, led by Yasser abu Shabab, known locally for his involvement in criminal activity, in an attempt to undermine Hamas after 50 members of this gang have been killed in recent months. 

Then, to distract attention from its culpability in Gaza, Israel attacked targets in Iran to stop them making nuclear weapons.  Does Benjamin Natanyahu really believe it’s better to get your defence in before an attack?  Iran has now promised the attack that would ‘justify’ its response.  They’re like squabbling children, except they’re potentially squabbling over the world’s future instead of which is the best YouTube clip of people falling over.

Except squabbling children don’t risk starting World War III, even if it appears Netanyahu would accept this if it would keep him out of prison for longer.

There’s more confusion in Germany where Joachim Streit, a German MEP, is campaigning to get the EU to admit Canada as a member.  I wonder how he fared in “Geografie” at school.

In America, Donald Trump’s trying to start Civil War II by calling in 700 marines and 4,000 members of the national guard to control protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions taking place in Los Angeles.  The ICE raids targeted immigrant workers in the city but the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and other civic leaders called the mobilisation of troops “authoritarian” and “a brazen abuse of power”, that has “inflamed a combustible situation”.

By Monday, even more residents were taking part in protests and sympathetic protestors were starting their own demonstrations in places like New York, Austin, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco.

In Los Angeles, national guard troops and marines are reported to have told their families and friends they were not comfortable about being used as pawns in politically-motivated domestic operations, while Trump is trying to convince people it’s all a foreign conspiracy.

What makes it all the more poignant is that the actual insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol have been pardoned and released from earned prison while those protesting peacefully in the streets against ICE raids face the US marines.

Even a Republican senator, Rand Paul has described Trump as “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag” while another dedicated Trump supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has admitted she didn’t actually read Trump’s tax and spending bill before voting for it and that, if she had, she’d have voted against it.

Public records show that, during hubby’s first 100 days in office, Melania, Mrs Trump, spent just 14 days in the White House, which might appear to a cynic to imply a marriage not entirely based on mutual infatuation.

Jonathan Haidt has written a book, The Anxious Generation, which proposes four “norms”:  no smartphones before the age of 14; no social media until 16; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. 

I’d add “no more crisps and pop” to the list (and would limit sugar because I’ve seen too many sugar rushes in children).  My own experience last week came when shopping and I bought a Robinsons orange and mango drink as part of a ‘meal deal’ (“no added sugar, real fruit in every drop”). 

Puzzled by its bitter taste I took a magnifying glass to the list of contents, printed in a white 4-point typeface reversed out of an orange background, a combination not recommended by the Royal National Institute of Blind People.  There was, predictably, more water than anything else, followed by fruit juice from concentrates (apple 16%, orange 1% and mango 1%), citric acid, acidity regulator, antioxidant, carrot and apple concentrate, orange and other natural flavourings, stabiliser, sweeteners, and natural colour (carotenes).  That’s the last time I buy an apple and carrot drink described as an orange and mango drink.  Back to Adam’s Ale next time.

Good news about bookie lookalikes, U-turns, intelligent millionaires and climate action

12 April 2025

Lots of cheering news this week, including that wonderful picture of Donald Trump holding up his tariff board and looking exactly like a bookie on the hill at Epsom on Derby Day.

Amy Coney Barrett, a Republican member of the American Supreme Court has, for the second time in recent months, voted against her Republican colleagues in a ruling against Trump to put justice before politics.  Who’d have guessed she still had the integrity to do that.

Trump did a Liz Truss by imposing a 10% levy on imports from Ukraine and the UK, and 20% on imports from the EU (and 0% on imports from Russia), financial markets worldwide crashed and he was forced into a humiliating U-turn, which just goes to show that if you say “Boo!” to a bully, they’ll chicken out.

Jaguar Land Rover had immediately suspended all further exports of their cars to America, thereby boosting the owners of ones already over there by increasing their second-hand values.

Trump’s tariffs also provided a wonderful excuse for our Labour government to rethink its economic policy and Keir Starmer has said “old assumptions should be discarded” so they can forget their crazy undertaking not to raise taxes.

All over America, there were demonstrations against Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda” with an estimated 500,000 people taking to the streets in Washington, Florida and about 1,000 other places, including state capitals.

There have even been rumours that Elon Musk will be leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, possibly because people have sussed that he thinks cutting expenditure must automatically improve efficiency.

Both Trump and Musk were started in business with inherited capital but, while Musk has increased his with some successful businesses, Trump has lost a large amount of his inheritance with his unbelievable incompetence in running businesses – remember his casinos were bankrupted, beating the odds that were stacked in his favour by the rules of the games.

Another millionaire who inherited wealth is Abigail Disney, one of my heroes, who has acknowledged she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”  She has for many years been giving large sums of money away and a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation dedicated to changing the system so that its members and others with even more money pay more tax.

Last year, she wrote that “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”  She accepts that instituting a global minimum tax on the very rich will be complex, but not impossible, and she pointed out that, four years ago, 136 OECD countries “joined an accord to enact a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations”.  She added that “If we can institute a tax floor for the world’s largest corporations, there is no reason we can’t do the same for the world’s wealthiest individuals”, pointing out that a 2023 survey found that even millionaires in G20 countries support the idea.

More good news over here is that the planning application for a deep coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria has been withdrawn after the High Court ruled that the permission granted by Michael Gove when he was in charge was unlawful.  This follows another, earlier decision by the Supreme Court that quashed planning permission for an oil well at Horse Hill in Surrey on the grounds that the impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be included when the climate impact of a proposal must be included.

The Labour government is also proposing to extend restrictions on the burning of peatland which has led to the degradation of 80% of them in England.  They are comparatively uncommon but, when they’re allowed to remain undisturbed, they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes in the UK alone.  The Conservative government started with a small step in the right direction by limiting the burning to areas of ‘deep peat’ (over 40cm deep) in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in conservation areas and some even smaller sites.

Labour’s plans include reducing the definition of deep peat from 40cm to 30cm and would do away with the limitation to conservation areas, increasing protected areas by two thirds to a total of 368,000 hectares, but this still leaves almost half the total area unprotected. 

Needless to say, organisations like the Countryside Alliance are up in arms.  They don’t care about the wildlife, such as adders, toads, and ground-nesting birds, that are killed when land is burnt but they’re horrified that this will restrict the land where otherwise relatively normal people pay a lot of money for the sheer delight of blowing the heads off the grouse that live there bringing up their families.

I have no real problem with somebody shooting something to take home to eat (actually, of course, picking up and eating roadkill avoids the slaughter and is much cheaper, but remember fresh blood is good, maggots aren’t) but shooters don’t even get to keep the birds they killed without paying for them;  and what worries me more is the thought that some people actually get pleasure from killing, and are willing to pay to be allowed to do it.

Still on the subject of corpses, I’m always fascinated by the facial reconstructions of Neanderthals and other people who have been for tens of thousands of years just from a skull that’s been dug up by an archaeologist.  I know pictures are sometimes drawn using similar techniques in attempts to picture the faces of bodies that haven’t yet been identified but I wonder whether any research has been done reconstructing the faces from the skulls of people who’ve died more recently, and of whom there are photographs, to see how accurate they are? 

They’re welcome to use my skull for a test when I’ve finished with it because I find it hard to imagine how they could guess where my wrinkles are from the underlying bone so it would be an interesting test of their system.

Paying more tax, a lettuce and Banksy

24 August 2024

We have a new government and many people will be paying more tax.  One of the new Chancellor’s first decisions was that the Winter Fuel Payment of up to £300 to pensioners who don’t receive pension credit or other means-tested benefits is being scrapped for all.  (I hope its withdrawal will be subject to ‘marginal’ adjustments so that somebody who gets, say, £10 more than the means-tested limit doesn’t suddenly lose the £300.)

However, I must admit that I applaud the principle.  We have received this in the past but didn’t really need it ourselves so we gave ours to friends who needed it more and to a charity such as The Trussell Trust (who, incidentally, give a list on their website of household goods most welcomed by foodbanks, and where your nearest collection point is.)

Other hopeful signs that our new leaders realise that, once the family silver has all gone, you need to cut unnecessary costs and find another source of income.  Limiting winter fuel payments is a positive step towards the former, as is the decision to write off the £700m already spent by the last government and cut the £10bn they had planned to spend over 6 years sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Rachel Reeves has also indicated that the autumn budget is likely to be tough but at least some of us are hoping she’ll feel able to unfreeze the ‘personal allowance’, which people can receive before they have to pay tax;  the Tories thought this was a brilliant wheeze because it was worst for those who didn’t earn very much – which is exactly why I hope she will unfreeze it so people on the borderline do start to get some help meeting the ever-increasing costs of life’s little luxuries, like food and heating.

Spain’s socialist government tried an interesting experiment in 2022 when it introduced a “temporary” solidarity wealth tax to be collected in 2023 and 2024 from those whose net wealth exceeds €3m (£2.6m).  It’s estimated that it will only apply to 0.5% of the households in Spain.

The Tax Justice Network is a British group of researchers and activists, founded in 2003 which “believes our tax and financial systems are our most powerful tools for creating a just society that gives equal weight to the needs of everyone.”  It focuses on tax avoidance and tax havens and has calculated that a similar tax imposed worldwide would free up trillions of dollars to give help where it’s most needed, from relieving those suffering from starvation and ill-health to helping slow climate change.  If it were introduced just in the UK (which Reeves has sadly ruled out), it could raise some £25bn a year …

This is of course a dream, but what a wonderful one!  Let’s start with small steps and, full disclosure, I’d be happy to pay more tax despite not being in the top 0.5% of Britain’s wealthiest people, but nor am I in the bottom 0.5%.  There’s enough wealth in this country for everyone to be able to live comfortably so why don’t we spread it around more evenly?

Reeves has said she is inheriting the worst financial position in 80 years and has accused the Conservatives of being economical with the truth about a forecast overspend of £22bn in government departments.  While nobody really believes her predecessor was the sharpest pencil in the box, it is traditional for the incoming Chancellor of a new government to make things look as bleak as possible to throw the blame onto the previous government so we must expect some over-reaction in her first budget.

She’s already said she’s planning to raise more revenue from inheritance tax and capital gains tax and to cut public expenditure.

She’s likely to face the usual threats from the very rich to leave the country if they have to pay more tax but, despite similar threats when three Scandinavian countries introduced wealth taxes, only 0.01% of the richest households did actually move out.  That’s one in ten thousand of them.  Pessimistic estimates of similar migration rates from the UK in similar circumstances reckon that 0.02% (one in five thousand) of the richest families might leave the country.

Bon voyage!

(At this point, I realise that I can now expect an outraged email from my Conservative friend who believes that entrepreneurs should be allowed to grow businesses from scratch and build them up into huge corporations, becoming unconscionably rich in the process.  Of course his opinion is valid, I just disagree because I don’t think it’s in the best interests of the greatest number of people.  Nor do I believe that everybody receiving state benefits is milking the system and should just get on their bikes and get a job.)

Luckily, some people retain a sense of the absurd and the satirical artists’ collective ‘Led by Donkeys’ recently lowered a banner behind Liz Truss while she was giving a speech supporting Donald Trump’s attempts to get re-elected, showing a lettuce over the words “I crashed the economy.”  (Remember The Daily Star newspaper featured a lettuce while she was prime minister to see if it would still be alive when she had to resign as prime minister, and it was?)

Led by Donkeys had predicted she’d say “That’s not funny” and storm off the stage.  In fact, she said “That’s not funny” and stormed off the stage, adding that the group were “far left activists” and “I won’t stand for it”.  Sit, lady, sit.

Another iconoclast is Banksy who has been active for longer than most of us realised.  He’s done thousands of pictures, many of which just raise a smile but some of his works make clear social comment which is then endlessly analysed by critics who want his work to have deeper meanings.  He remains anonymous, he doesn’t obviously do his work for money, and he seems to accept the transience of all graffiti.

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled” *

3 August 2024

Just outside our front door, immediately beneath the letterbox, is a large notice saying “This is NOT [house name] or [road name] or [postcode]” in 24pt bold type.  Guess the address on the packet left by this notice on Friday.  And guess which courier had abandoned it there.

That’s right:  Evri.  As in “We Screw up Evri Delivery”.  They used to be called Hermes until they were judged to be Britain’s most unreliable courier when the management decided the obvious solution was to change their name.  So Hermes became Evri. 

I also had a delivery due here between 6 and 7 one evening last week.  I gave up at 7 because I was going out and already late. Then, as I drove out into the road at about 7.15, an Evri van arrived, blocking my exit.  Guess if they were apologetic.

Time for another name change methinks.

I’m also having an argument with Boots to whom a duplicated delivery was returned but they’ve only refunded 30% of what I paid for the stuff.

And, while I’m having a moan, I mustn’t forget vets.  Our local veterinary practice was privately-owned and provided services in two local towns.  When our last dog died, the vet who came here and gave her the injection charged £184.  At some point in the following three years, the old vets apparently sold their practice to one of the avaricious national groups but – here’s the clever bit – they didn’t tell anyone and they kept the same local name so, when I called them out last week to give Toby his final injection, they charged £336.

I queried this and was told prices have gone up.  I asked if the person I was talking to was now getting paid 80% more than they were 3 years ago and they said “I wish”.  They did say they were now using a different crematorium (for which they charge £95 instead of £35) but couldn’t explain how putting, say, ten dead animals into a furnace could possibly cost £950.

Perhaps it’s me, getting annoyed by greedy pigs assuming they can fool all of us all the time.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have friends on universal credit who have to choose between paying the rent and having supper.  Perhaps I just should find a sugar mummy (even though this might be a little difficult at my age) so I’d no longer care.

Our new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has discovered that her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, had been economical with the truth about the state of the nation’s finances.  Hunt has claimed this is a stunt to justify future tax increases. 

Much of this posturing is to be expected when a new government comes in and blames the government that was just chucked out for all the problems it can find.  This argument is often weakened by the fact that the opposition also had already had access to most of the information at the time but, in this case, it does appear that the Office for Budget Responsibility only became aware last week of the additional spending pressures.  It has now confirmed that the figures quoted by Reeves had not been published before, that the £6bn cost of housing asylum seekers hadn’t been included in the last budget and it has launched an enquiry into the omission.

It’s widely accepted that Hunt wasn’t the most competent of Chancellors but it’s probably unfair to remember that he was also the minister who did such huge damage to the NHS while he was in charge of health some 12 years ago.

In America, things are writ much larger with what looks like a Kamala Harris / Donald Trump duel in November, if the gods don’t intervene.  Many of the accusations Trump levelled against Joe Biden have now been rendered powerless and Harris has gained huge financial support from the Democrats’ funders since she took over as their front-runner.

For all that we don’t know about Harris, there’s a lot we know about Trump:

• he’s 78, the oldest presidential candidate ever
• he’s the first president to have been impeached twice while he was in office
• he’s a convicted felon, having been found guilty on 34 criminal charges
• he could still be sent to prison
• he’s still got 54 more criminal cases to face
• a civil case found him guilty of rape and ordered him to pay millions of dollars
• his speeches ramble incoherently, containing mistakes and errors of fact, and he answers difficult questions with abuse
• he’s promised to rule as “a dictator” if he’s re-elected.

At a panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday (for which he arrived an hour late) the first question was ““Why should Black voters trust you?”  In reply, he said “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner … I think it’s a very rude introduction … I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln”.

This aggression just makes him look more foolish than ever. More ‘insiders’ are speaking out about him and next week will see the publication of Nancy Pelosi’s book ‘The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House’.  In this, she says that, at a 2019 memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” unexpectedly approached her and volunteered their concerns that they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong [with Trump] and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.

His niece, Mary Trump, a qualified clinical psychologist who has known him from childhood, is also publishing a second book about her uncle in September. 

Of Kamala Harris, Trump has said “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”  But Harris has sussed him and said it’s “the same old show … America deserves better” and that what Trump and JD Vance have been saying about her was “just plain weird”, thereby reducing their burblings to the absurd and laughable.

Moral:  always look past abuse to see the weakness behind it.

*          Mark Twain

No bed for Bacon, Brahms v Beethoven, UK’s back door, an unmanned(ish) ship, and assisted dying

9 March 2024

A friend said recently she was “sad about the state of the world.  I think I might ditch the news.”  I know exactly how she feels. 

I scrabble around each week to find some good news to help cheer everybody up but there ain’t much out there and I’m coming to the conclusion that we just have to carry on until we can’t take any more, then give up.  I’m thinking of taking out a subscription to Hello magazine so I can chuckle at the irrelevant and boring activities of people I’ve never heard of. 

I am actually cheering myself slightly at the moment by re-reading a book that makes me laugh:  No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon.  You probably need to know a little about Shakespeare and the times he lived in to get some of the jokes but it still makes me smile.  For instance, it explains in passing that the Elizabeth’s second best bed, which Francis Bacon wanted, was delivered to a cottage in Stratford.

There are quite a few books on my shelves waiting to be re-read (the ones I don’t want to read again go straight back to the charity shop) so I’m not sure why I picked this one, an old orange Penguin edition.  It might be because I remembered a discussion with a friend many years ago about the relative merits of Brahms and Beethoven;  she said she thought Brahms’s music was much more intellectual and I said that I thought Beethoven wrote better tunes, which just goes to show what a philistine I am.

One piece of good news this week came when the Daily Mail reported that David Neal, the UK borders inspector, reported that 10 private jets a week land at London City airport alone and let the passengers in the UK’s back door, without their having to go through any of those tedious passport checks that make life so difficult for drugs and arms smugglers, illegal immigrants, child slavers, politicians and other undesirables.  The government immediately took the obvious action and fired Neal.

But we must look on the bright side.  After the budget, Rishi Sunak praised the government’s successes in an interview on Thursday and said “we’ve got inflation down from 11% to 4%”.  I found myself squirming as I listened to this hypocrisy.  After all, wasn’t he one of the chancellors who had so dismally failed the repair the damage inflicted by George Osborne’s disastrous years of austerity and the later collapse of Trussonomics?  In fact, when the Conservatives were first elected, inflation was about 3% but saying “we’ve got inflation down from 3% to … er … 4%” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

A similarly cavalier approach to the truth was taken in the triumphant announcement that an “unmanned” ship is being tested in a Norwegian fjord.  It’s 78 metres long, is being controlled remotely by computer operators in Southampton and will only need a crew of 16 instead of 40 or 50 people.  Yes, I wondered that too.  16 crew on board = “unmanned”?  Perhaps they’re all women.

But National Insurance is going down by another two percentage points, from 8% to 6%, in April which means you’ll have to pay 25% less from next month in addition to the 20% reduction you were already given in January.  If you pay it, which the poorest and the oldest don’t …

The amount the government will receive from national insurance contributions will therefore reduce by 50% in a year and Jeremy Hunt promised to remove it entirely in due course.  What?  Where else are they going to get the money from, did you ask?  That’s being passed on to the next government to decide so if, as many people expect, Labour will win, they can take the blame for having to fill the hole Hunt has dug for them.

And look at the wonder of George Galloway who’s been elected as the Workers’ Party of Great Britain MP for Rochdale despite having supported more parties than Winston Churchill.  He seems to be on the left at the moment but he backed Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit and voted Conservative in Scotland three years ago.

What chance does integrity have when it gets in the way of someone’s ego?

In response to another attempt to legalise assisted dying, the Ministry of Justice has reminded us that “the Government is committed to providing time to the Backbench Business Committee which gives MPs the opportunity to bring forward debates of their choice and MPs also have the option of introducing Private Members’ Bills which provide MPs with an opportunity to address public concerns and to change the law”.  Or, in plain English, no comment.

In the real world, there is increasing pressure for something do be done in England as its legislation lags behind outliers like Jersey and the Isle of Man.  It isn’t even a political matter and various surveys have shown that about 3 in every 4 people support the principle.  There are of course differing opinions about the various conditions that should be included and the extent of protection for vulnerable people but a change has been backed by an ever-increasing number of famous names including Jonathan Dimbleby, Prue Leith, Terry Pratchett, Esther Rantzen, Diana Rigg and Harriet Walter.

I rather fear a new law might be too late for many of us so I’m keeping my own inherited supply of pills (which I’m hoping haven’t lost their power in the decades since they came into the family) and I will take them if the need arises and, like my mother, die alone if the law hasn’t been changed enough to let someone hold my hand as I drift away.  My only problem is that I need to do so much tidying before I go but I naturally have an up-to-date Will and a DNR just in case.

(Ken Kesey said he wanted to die during an LSD trip.  Does anybody know if he did and, if so, was he able to communicate his feelings as he died?  “Wow man, just look at that!” perhaps?)

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.

Paying for votes, far right gains, California leads the way

25 November 2023

The Tory party is now desperate enough to try buying votes with a budget that left next year’s promised pension increase unchanged and eased some of the restrictions on ISAs for rich people with money to spare;  yes, they increased Universal Credits but they also said that shirkers and scroungers who refuse to accept jobs will lose all rights to state benefits including free prescriptions and help with energy bills.  Quite right too.  Why should the rest of us support shirkers like disabled people and people with long-term chronic illnesses and mental health problems and single parents with young children who need jobs to fit round school hours and term time? Let them eat cake. 

The Tories are also boasting about how they’ve recovered almost half what they’ve lost since they’ve been in power and imposed austerity, and that inflation is half its recent peak even though it’s still more than twice their target.  And look at the money they’re saving by not spending money on public services;  I mean, who needs public services anyway when you have spare money to put into ISAs?

So, while we’re celebrating all these brilliant achievements, let’s have an early election to re-elect the Conservatives and they can do it all over again.

But perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies.  It seems that, in a way that makes our own dear Tories seem relatively moderate, the far right is gaining ground in other countries.  In France, Marine le Pen is gaining followers and, in the recent Dutch elections, Geert Wilders’ party, the anti-Islam party PVV, got more votes than any other single party.

Wilders himself looks relatively normal from a distance but, in 2007 (and again in 2008), described the Qur’an as a “fascist book” and has proposed “a head rag tax” of €1,000 on headscarves.  He specifically doesn’t like Moroccans and got a criminal record in 2014 for “unlawful discrimination [by] insulting a group”.  He brought to mind a line from a Richard Thompson song:  “Everybody don’t like something and we all don’t like you”.

In 2015, he argued for a closure of the Dutch borders and said the Dutch parliament was “fake” because it didn’t agree with him.  It remains to be seen whether he can now get enough support from other parties to form a government.

In Argentina, the anti-woke “libertarian” Javier Milei has won a landslide victory in the presidential elections, despite having a hairstyle that comes a close second to Donald Trump’s.  He calls his predecessors “socialist” because they legalised gay marriage and abortion and even threatened to tax the rich.

And, of course, there’s still Trump himself bleating in the shadows, planning to punish anybody who has criticised him (“vermin” as he calls them), when he’s elected next year and to disempower American idiosyncrasies such as democracy and the rule of law, the justice department, the FBI and other federal agencies, leading the country towards total authoritarianism

You’d think these people, especially the Dutch, would remember this has been tried before and that people like Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein are now, I hope, in a secure area of Hell where they have to build walls around themselves that collapse just as they’re trying to fit the capstone.  (Outside their cage, Sisyphus is watching their endlessly fruitless endeavours, thinking “There but for the grace of Satan go I”.)

But we do have our own Scheißmeisters here in England even though they’re rather feebler than the Big Guys. 

At kindergarten level, the Home Secretary, James Cleverly, was accused of dissing Stockton after the Labour MP for Stockton North, Alex Cunningham, asked Rishi Sunak at Wednesday’s PMQs why 34% of children in his constituency were in poverty and Cunningham, who was obviously listening to the answer, heard Cleverly say “Because it’s a shit-hole”.

Cleverly initially said he’d never say that, then someone in his office said “James made a comment.  He called Alex Cunningham a shit MP.  He apologises for unparliamentary language.”

Suitably briefed, Cleverly subsequently apologised for using “unparliamentary” language about another MP.

Oh please!  Nobody with an IQ greater than their age would have said that one in three children are suffering because their constituency’s got a shit MP.  All he achieved by trying to cover his back was to lose a lot of votes in Stockton for the Conservatives.

Why couldn’t he just say “It was meant as a joke but it was totally tasteless, and I’m sorry”?  Why can’t more people just fess up and apologise?

In eastern Missouri, a committee in the St Charles city-county library system has plumbed similar self-defeating depths of stupidity by banning the book Bang Like a Porn Star: Sex Tips from the Pros, thereby giving worldwide publicity to a book about sexuality and sexual health for gay men which the committee thinks is unsuitable.

Better news came from the town of Tracy, California where the first commercial direct air capture plant opened last week.  It uses limestone, apparently the second most common mineral in the earth’s crust (after silicon dioxide, SiO₂, which is most commonly found in sand and quartz), to absorb carbon from the air.  The limestone is heated to 899^oC (1,650^oF) when it breaks down into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide.  The carbon dioxide is locked up again in concrete that can be used in construction while the calcium oxide is in the form of a grey powder which is sprayed with water and then absorbs carbon from the air.

Also in California, there are more than 100 projects using state-funded solar panels which will, by 2030, produce enough power for 150,000 tenant families in low-income rental buildings across the state.  Over here, we’re still reducing stocks of council housing by letting tenants buy them so they can move and rent them out to councils at twice what they were paying.

The bad news for those of us wanting to go into space is that studies of astronauts’ physical condition after spending some time in space have shown that, in addition to wasting muscles, thinner bones and increased risk of getting cancer, the men may be more prone to erectile dysfunction so, when we colonise the moon, we’ll have to send out a new bunch of men every generation.

The quote of the week came from Professor Sir Chris Whitty at the Covid enquiry when he was asked if he had seen the then prime minister as indecisive or chaotic and said “I think that the way Mr Johnson took decisions was unique to him.”  How exquisitely phrased.

Putin’s body doubles, H2G2, embarrassments and Lipizzaner foals

8 July 2023

There’s been some debate about Vladimir Putin having body doubles and, if he does, how many there are.  For someone who comes across as so paranoid and fearful, I’d be surprised if he didn’t use body doubles, as is a flourishing area of the internet devoted to the subject, many of them concentrating on his ears.

Naturally, I googled ‘Putin’s earlobes’ and my eye was immediately caught by an advertisement from uk.bestdeals.today saying “Buy Vladimir Putin Now – 70% Off Today.  Expires Soon – Save Up To 75% Off Today”.  I was almost tempted to see how much they were charging but never open ads on principle. 

I was more convinced by his recent public appearance in Derbent which seemed wildly out of character for a man who is reported to be Covidphobic and meets representatives from other nations at opposite ends of a 20’ long table.  In a video, he was seen mingling with the crowds, shaking hands with people and even kissing the top of one fan’s head.  I found myself wondering what would happen if he was shot, or stabbed with a poisoned umbrella, while he was mingling.

Presumably his security people would spirit the body away and, two days later, the real Putin would appear on a balcony and claim a miraculous recovery.

Various pictures of his earlobes are compared online with some people arguing one has an unusual fold and another one doesn’t, while others argue it’s an illusion caused by the camera angle, lighting, lenses etc.  Others claim he appears to be different heights in different pictures and the shape of his chin changes.

What I found slightly more convincing was the different ways he sometimes comes down the steps after a flight, but perhaps he just suffers from constipation which restricts the way he walks.  Or he’d been flying economy with Ryanair.

I suggested last week there seemed to be something fishy about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted advance on Moscow and subsequent ‘exile’ to Belarus and it seems that China too shares my doubts, having described the divisions within Russia as “an illusion”.  There were reports that his assets were being seized but he’s apparently now back in St Petersburg and Putin may be using the affair as an excuse to build up the Russian military presence (including nuclear weapons) in Belarus as a way discouraging the Belarusians who’d like closer links with Europe. 

Incidentally, I also admitted last week that I’m not a great Wagner fan and am delighted to say that one reader told me they are and they’d love to go to the Bayreuth Festival.  I didn’t offer to accompany them but isn’t it lovely that we all have different tastes and I’ll bet I’ve been to more Bob Dylan gigs than they have.

Anyway, back to Russia:  Unilever (Marmite, Dove, Domestos and Magnum) has four factories in Russia and, with Procter & Gamble (household chemicals and personal care products) and the French supermarket group Leroy Merlin, has been placed on a ‘sponsors of war’ blacklist by Ukraine after Russia introduced a new law that could lead to the conscription of their Russian workforce (up to 3,000 people in Unilever’s case).

So there’s a risk that the Russian forces in Ukraine could be augmented by very clean shelf-stackers. 

This reminds me of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which was loaded with all the middlemen of Golgafrincham, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants, because they were told their home planet was threatened with some sort of imminent destruction.  When the survivors were encountered on Earth by our heroes, the captain said there was a reason why they’d been sent but he couldn’t remember it;  it was later revealed to be because they were a ‘bunch of useless idiots’.

Why that should make me think of the government I can’t think, except that Rishi Sunak has diluted his five “promises” to “things that might be done if the government ever had the time and the money”.  His position on onshore windfarms has also been reversed because too many of his MPs fear repercussions from the Nimbys who elected them.  In other words, their re-election is more important than climate change, so we’ll all fry together when we go.

Its other major embarrassment last week was, after 8 years of planning and designing the new HS2 station at Euston, to see its estimate of an overspend of £400m amended to £4.8bn by the National Audit Office. Well, what’s a decimal point if it’s just our money they’re spending?

The good news is that, the University of Massachusetts published a paper saying that they’d discovered how to generate a tiny but continuous electric current from moist hot air.  (We could fit such a generator in the Houses of Parliament.)

The discovery was accidental and was discovered when a student forgot to turn the power on before using a simple sensor to measure the air’s humidity.  The current generated is approximately that needed to power a single pixel of a computer screen so, like nuclear fusion as a power source, it needs scaling up a bit.

I knew that the famous dancing Lipizzaner horses trained at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna to jump so that all their feet are off the ground at the same time (a movement called ‘airs above the ground’) are grey – that’s grey as in grey, not the grey that colour-blind riders call white horses – but I didn’t know till this week that their foals are born black or brown – that’s ‘bay’ to you, Jocelyn – and they only turn grey as they age and grow white hair over their black skin.

I was also fascinated by a recent reference to the circumference of the Cornish wildlife reserve on Looe island (aka St George’s island) being “only a mile”.  The spurious precision of this worries me.  How did they measure it?  High tide?  Low tide?  What scale did they use to measure it?  A 1:50,000 map would produce quite a different answer from a 1:2,500 map.  Answers on a postcard please.

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.