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.

2 DVLA cock-ups, another government disaster and a capitalist admits breaking the law for money

27 March 2022

I’ve been driving an untaxed car!  I discovered this recently when I thought it was due an MoT so I decided to check the log book, only to discover I hadn’t got one.  So I filled in a form and sent it to DVLA with the slip headed “Do not sent this to DVLA” they requested and a log book arrived remarkably quickly – or, if you add in the two years since we bought the car, remarkably slowly.

I also decided to check when the road tax was due so I went online and found it was due on 1 January last year.  Heigh ho, I thought, and got to the payment page which would only let me tax it from 1 January this year, which I did.  Before some genius did away with them, you could look at the disc in the windscreen to see when your tax expired.  (No wonder the police say there are now so many more untaxed cars on the roads.)

The obvious thing to do then was to tell the police what had happened so I emailed them and told them the whole story in glorious technicolour.  The following day, I had a very helpful call from the police saying not to worry, I’d done all the right things and no action would be taken against me.

We also have another ‘car’ that’s been adapted so my wife can drive her wheelchair up a ramp into it and, last week, we actually had a tax reminder letter from DVLA.  Sadly, it was headed, in bright red letters, “Last chance”, saying “Tax it or lose it, we can always spot an untaxed car”, which was entirely misleading.  To somebody who, as a point of principle, pays bills on the day they’re received, the most irritating thing was the “Last chance” threat which should have read “first chance, reminder and last chance combined” and explained that they’re saving the planet by only sending a single reminder 6 weeks after the tax expires.

They also said they can take the car away because they can always spot an untaxed car.  Yes but.  In the other car, I must have passed hundreds of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras which would have registered the fact that it wasn’t taxed and I’ll leave you to guess how many letters, emails, phone calls, police tow-away trucks or threats of court action we’ve seen and how many times I’ve been stopped by Highway Patrols on motorways.

But my new passport arrived safely so I now have alternative photo ID to my driving licence.   I never used to care about my passport, though I was quite proud of my expired plum-coloured EU passports that allowed me travel all over Europe without having to queue with other aliens at borders.  My new passport is blue and has “British Passport” written across the top.  I find I’m now feeling ashamed to be so publicly identified as British and will have to attempt to talk French with a New Zealand accent next time we’re in France.

Vladimir Putin continues to lay waste to a country he thinks should be part of ‘his’ Russia.  Surely, if he really did believe Ukraine should be part of Russia, wouldn’t he want to keep it as pristine and complete as possible?

In China, the Carter Centre’s US-China Perception Monitor published a suggestion by Hu Wei, a Shanghai scholar, that China should sever its links with Putin.  This received over a million views but was swiftly rejected by the Chinese authorities and the author and the publisher’s websites were blocked in China.  In essence, the translation I saw said “China should avoid playing both sides in the same boat, give up being neutral, and choose the mainstream position in the world.”  While the sentiment is clear, let’s hope the translator is now taking lessons in English metaphors and their use.

The penultimate turf was laid on last week’s grave by the unrepentant extremist greedy bastard capitalist Peter Hebblethwaite, the boss of P&O, after he’d fired 800 UK staff without notice.  When asked on Thursday by an incredulous Darren Jones, chair of the Commons business committee, “Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing, or are you just a shameless criminal?”, Hebblethwaite told the committee that he had “absolutely no doubt we were required to consult with the unions. We chose not to do that.”

He later apologised and said “we will compensate everyone in full” but “I would make this decision again, I’m afraid.”  The replacement crew will receive an hourly rate starting at £5.15, except on the Larne-Cairnryan route between Northern Ireland and Scotland, where it’s bound by UK law.

Hebblethwaite told MPs he was “saving the business”.  He admitted he was paid £325,000 a year (approximately £1,500 per working hour) plus two bonuses.  New crew members working in international waters that aren’t subject to the UK minimum wage, would be paid £5.15 per working hour.  Hebblethwaite didn’t answer when asked if he could live on £5.15 an hour.  Arrogant pig.

The final turf was laid on last week’s grave by the Chancellor of the Exchequer who cut fuel duty by enough to take its cost back to last week’s level (if garages pass the cut on to customers), raised the threshold for making national insurance contributions and said that the basic rate of income tax would be cut by 1p but not until just before the next election in two years’ time (coincidence that, eh?)

I have two friends whose gain from the billionaire’s husband’s budget is that fuel will only cost 25% more than this time last year but heating will still be 3 or 4 times as much.  Neither of them pays NIC because one is retired and the other is an unemployed single parent of a 4-year old and has to scrape by on benefits, which will only increase by half the current rate of inflation.  It seems that both are too low in the heap for governments to care about.

I realise people voted Conservative because they wanted a Conservative government to favour the rich and make the poor pay for it but I can’t begin to understand how society decayed so badly so fast.  Shouldn’t we, however we vote, support those less fortunate than ourselves and, if that means taking money from those who have too much, so what?

Having vented my spleen on the evening of the budget, I was somewhat comforted to see that even the right-wing press felt his budget had blown Rishi Sunak’s credibility.  ‘Levelling up’ didn’t last long did it?

But what can we ‘normal’ people do?  Our answer is to do our best to help individuals and support charity appeals for things like the victims of Putin’s war; and pin a Ukrainian flag to our fence.

The only cheering things last week was Nazanin Zaghira-Ratcliffe’s press conference at which she slammed the government’s failures – six years, five foreign secretaries, how many does it take, she asked.  This led to a horrific outpouring of bile from people who thought she should be grateful it had only taken six years and five foreign secretaries, including at least one sexist misogynist, probably on the far right, who accused her of disloyalty to her husband because he had just thanked the government for getting her out.  Men who imagine women should be subservient still seem to exist – I wonder if you could slip a pill for that into their beer.

Another person summarised the problem rather neatly by tweeting “She doesn’t owe us gratitude: we owe her an explanation” but, sadly, this noble sentiment was rather undermined by the tweeter himself, who was Jeremy Hunt, one of the foreign secretaries who had failed to bring her home.