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”,
Lesser Mutterings 