Another anointment, broken records, an underdressed climber and winning insults

23 October 2022

What a wonderful week for cynics – if you didn’t finish reading any day’s paper, you could put it out for recycling and go straight on to the next day’s paper because so much had changed again overnight.

What we tend to forget is that all MPs work for us as public servants and we pay their salaries and fiddled expenses.  They have no right to our respect, they need to earn it by doing what’s best for the country.  Which is not what they’re doing at the moment and why, when my wife called out “She’s gone!”, our cleaner punched the air and said “Yeah!”

By resigning, Truss can now claim two records by becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever and by reducing support for the Conservatives to the lowest level ever seen in the polls.  At least she had confirmed to parliament on the previous day that the triple lock on pensions would remain, although she failed to confirm disability benefits would also rise in line with inflation;  which just goes to show the priorities of a government that relies on the geriatric (sorry ‘grey’) vote and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities.

Until she resigned, the shortest-serving prime minister was George Canning whose sole term lasted 119 days in 1827 but he at least had the excuse that he died of TB.  (The BBC website originally reported that “Canning had served for 119 days after dying in 1827” but, sadly, somebody spotted the error and corrected it.)

With their recent repeated failures in choosing competent leaders, even the Tories must now be beginning to wonder if there’s a better way to choose them.  It’s a pity their rules don’t have an emergency clause to cover the loss of a leader within (say) three months.  This would cover the sudden death of a newly-elected leader and could allow the person who came second to take over as prime minister.  It would also help avoid yet another undignified scramble for power.

Actually, a general election would be the fairest way of finding one that a majority of the electorate actually wants but the Conservatives daren’t do this because they’ve made themselves so unpopular that they might disappear up their own ballot boxes.  What they are doing this time, with their usual blithe disregard for everybody, including party members, is abbreviating the process to leave only three possibles, each of whom will know only that almost 75% of their MPs didn’t want them and voted for somebody else. 

With their backs to the wall and all polls showing the Conservatives would be obliterated at a general election, this would seem the ideal time to change the electoral system from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation.  A PR voting system would almost certainly give Conservatives more seats than the polls are suggesting they’d get at the moment and it would ensure fair representation of Tory (and other) voters for the foreseeable future.

However, they’re now so desperate that there’s even talk, apparently serious, of resurrecting the compulsively deceitful Boris Mimi MiToo Johnson, the man who fractured the Conservative party, dithered throughout his term, made stupid decisions, abandoned some 50,000 people in Afghanistan, was ultimately fired for having been caught breaking the law and whose conduct is still subject to another investigation.  So he’s scuttled back from a beach in the Dominican Republic with indecent haste to round up the loonies.

May it please all the gods anyone can think of, don’t let them be so stupid as to let Boris loose again.  

The health secretary Thérèse Coffey has admitted (as she puffed on a fat cigar) giving leftover antibiotics to a friend and has been accused by one doctor of “monumental stupidity”.  Even I remember that we’re told to complete the course so how come she had any spare?

The only saving grace they managed to find this week was when Jeremy Hunt, the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked a reasonable question in parliament and just said “I don’t know but I’ll find out” before sitting down again.  What a brilliantly honest response, something even his greatest critics can surely accept as a point in his favour.  He’s not standing for PM but wouldn’t be nice if whoever gets the job feels able to show the same honesty?

Other news included Ghislaine Maxwell saying of Prince Andrew “I accept that this friendship could not survive my conviction. He is paying such a price for the association. I consider him a dear friend. I care about him.”  With friends like her, who needs enemies?

She then went on to complain about the service offered by her prison …

In South Korea, the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi shinned up a wall without wearing the headscarf ‘required’ by Iran’s male theocracy (who are so insecure they think they’d lose ‘their’ women if other people could see how beautiful they are).  She said her not wearing a hijab was “unintentional” but, on her return to Tehran, she was hailed as a hero by people demonstrating against the arrest of Mahsa Amini for being improperly dressed and her subsequent death in custody.  Rekabi’s friends and supporters now fear for her safety and her brother has been summoned to an intelligence agency office. 

British protestors from the climate action group Just Stop Oil blocked a motorway and were attacked by Suella Braverman, who was still home secretary at the time, who said “I’m afraid it’s the Labour party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati* – dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”  The patronising berk then had to resign after she admitted sending classified material from her personal email account.

Truss had invented and condemned an “anti-growth coalition” that she thinks lives in North London and takes taxis and Boris Johnson dissed the “Islington remainers”* in an attempt (which seems to resonate with many on the right) to blame Brexit remainers for failing to accept the vote and causing the covid pandemic and the economic chaos that helped him onto the slippery slope to dismissal.  All the remainers we know regret the stupidity of Brexit but accept we have to live with it and try to find ways of minimising the economic and political problems it’s caused.

How sad that senior Tories have to stoop to pointless soundbites in their attempt to regain popularity.

A letter in the next day’s Guardian asked if King Charles III might have more prime ministers than his mother.

Now, to take our minds off the Westminster shitstorm, here’s a thought for you:  I (and probably you) have more than the average number of legs for a human.

*          In the interests of full disclosure, I must say I have never voted Conservative, I read the Guardian, I like tofu, I once lived part-time in Islington and I voted remain.

Tax cuts, an honourable Republican, splitting parties, Thatcherism, water problems, and stupidity in Florida

21 August 2022

The two politicians vying to become Britain’s prime minister are both promising tax cuts despite having PPE degrees.  I always though the E stood for ‘economics’ but apparently it stands for ‘eejits’.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (a non-political organisation specialising in the effects of economic and fiscal policies) has pointed out that an increase of 10% in the cost of living (five times what it was this time last year) will cost the government more on pensions and state benefits and increasing interest rates will increase the cost of debt interest.

Rishi Sunak has said he will cut taxes, but only after inflation has come down again, while Liz Truss is planning to cut taxes regardless.

But she has a history of inconsistency and, in a co-authored 2012 book (Britannia Unchained), she described British workers as being among the “worst idlers in the world” and that they need “more graft” and lack the “skill and application” of foreign rivals. 

As a self-confessed ‘patriot’, she’s also suggested the north south divide is “partly a mindset or attitude thing”.  Brilliant!

But she still seems to be the front-runner so she could provide easy meat for the Labour party to masticate at PMQs, if they can get their act together. 

America proved that some Republicans’ hearts are in the right places as Liz Cheney sacrificed her seat in Congress to her principles.  Wyoming is staunchly Republican but has been divided by Donald Trump’s attempts to disunite the States. 

Having lost to a conservative Trumpist lawyer, Harriet Hageman, who supports Trump’s claims that he is America’s true president, Cheney said “Two years ago, I won this primary with 73% of the vote … but [repeating this] would have required … that I enabled [Trump’s] ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic.”

She’s since admitted she’s considering running for president in 2024 and has said she will “do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office”.

Perhaps America should split into 4 parties:  the gun-toting, anti-abortion far right, ‘traditional’ Republicans, ‘traditional’ Democrats and soft-centred socialists?

Our own dear Conservative party is also becoming more divided, with some still believing that Maggie Thatcher said, “there’s no such thing as society”.  What she actually said was “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ … so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Some cynics believe that she only became prime minister in 1975 because she was more obviously not Ted Heath than the other candidates.  Curious that the Tories are now desperate to find somebody who is obviously not Boris Johnson.  I wonder why they don’t pick the right person first time?

Thatcher was proud of being a grocer’s daughter but suffered from tunnel-vision which inspired her to think people should look after themselves first and she made it clear that she didn’t think it was the government’s job to help people cope with problems.  This was, of course, only some 30 years after a (admittedly Labour) government had introduced the National Health Service which was free to everyone and the state had taken over responsibility for other public services such as transport and mining.

Thatcher believed that individuals would do things better and more cheaply than the state could so she created ‘Thatcherism’ which starts from the sadly erroneous belief that people would do things better if they operated in a free market with minimum state interference.

What she failed to take into account is that public companies aren’t run by the owners any more than state services were run by the civil service.  Both models are run by people who work for the organisations and the ‘owners’ (whether company shareholders or civil servants) don’t make operating decisions.

She started the privatisation programme by selling half the ‘ownership’ of British Telecoms at a discount, in the vain hope that it would end up owned by its individual customers who would have a vested interest in its operations and take care of it.  There was lots of publicity for the sale and lots of people bought shares.  The share price immediately shot up and many of the new owner/shareholders immediately took advantage of the free market and sold their shares at a nice profit.  Despite this, the government sold its remaining shares in 1991 and 1993 and now one shareholder, Patrick Drahi of the Altice telecom group, owns 18% of BT.

Subsequent governments, including Labour governments, continued to flog off increasingly unlikely services with entirely predictable results.

All but one (British Gas) of the big six energy companies that supply 60% of the UK’s energy are state-owned again, but by other European countries, not Britain, and they use the profits they make from supplying British energy to support their own energy companies. 

Breaking up and selling off the railways to the highest bidders didn’t work either.  Since the initial sales, three train operating companies have been renationalised, others have surrendered their contracts and 14 are wholly or partly state-owned by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy or Hong Kong.

You couldn’t make it up.

I’d always assumed that, when selling public transport operations, the government specified the routes and frequency of services to be run and limited ticket price increases but I was obviously over-optimistic about the competence of the governments involved because Avanti has recently cut 2/3 of its services between London and Manchester and local ‘unprofitable’ bus services are being re-routed and cut.  Surely the contract can’t have guaranteed profit margins rather than the services to be run? 

The privatised companies attracting most flak this month are the water companies who agree with the provisional estimate of Ofwat, their ‘regulator’, that they lost more than 1,000,000,000,000 litres of water through leaks last year.  That’s enough to fill Lake Windermere, the largest (but not the deepest) body of fresh water in England and Wales, three and a half times.

Of course many waterpipes are still Victorian but the total water lost hasn’t been reduced significantly this century despite the companies’ undertakings to mend the leaks.

This year’s drought means that the reservoirs we still have are at their lowest-ever levels and rivers are drying up, with some of them probably kept flowing only by the foul water and farming run-off that is squirted into them.  Southern Water was fined £90m for dumping raw sewage straight into the sea and recent heavy rainstorms have led to warnings not to enter the sea on many of southern England’s most popular beaches.

Since 1990, Britain’s population has increased by about 20% (an extra 10m people) and several major water companies have sold reservoirs to make money and/or build new houses.  The creation of only one new reservoir, near Southampton, has been approved. 

Since they were privatised, the water companies have paid more than £70bn to their shareholders in dividends and their directors and top management paid themselves £25m in the year 2021/22.  Thames Water gave its executives £3m just in bonuses last year, despite their having been repeatedly criticised for failing to repair leaks; they’re now introducing a hosepipe ban.

The Environment Agency recently called for water company bosses to be jailed for serious pollution, after finding the water firms’ performance on pollution was the worst seen in years but, since it costs £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison, make them pay the fines personally, debar them from future directorships, and sentence them to community service.

England and Wales are the only countries in the world to have full privatised their water companies – and you can see why!  Scottish water, which is still publicly-owned, spent more than 35% more per household on infrastructure than those companies south of the border.

And a court in Florida has decided that a 16-year-old isn’t “sufficiently mature” to have an abortion but is mature enough to carry and give birth to and nurture a baby.

Next week:  is there intelligent life on earth?

Blades, Catch 22, gin, bad companies, investments and artificial meat

6 December 2020

I was recently buying a gardening tool for pruning from a website I’m not going to name and it was delivered with a ‘magazine’ that I found very disturbing. 

The front cover showed a knife being held point upwards towards the camera by a hand wearing at least three chunky rings.  The ‘model’, out of focus in the background, was a sombre, chunky man in a leather jacket with dark glasses, a scruffy beard and what appeared to be a shaven head – not one of the smiley, bearded young men who model cardigans for Lands End.

Inside were pictures of various blades, a lanyard, a torch and a sheath to help carry them around and a backpack with a “long zipper in the front that enables you to easily reach your gear” – no sign of any shears though there was a selection of axes and meat cleavers.  They say of one knife that it can “legally be carried in many locations” or, in other words, it can’t be legally carried it in other locations.

The centre spread showed the word “Thrill” writ large under – yes, you guessed it, a knife –and, on another page, a knife that includes folding scissors and is so small “no one will be spooked when you pull it out to file your nails or cut off a loose thread”.  I’ve never “pulled out” a nail file in my life, I normally have to scruffle around in a drawer to find it, though I did once have one confiscated in the 1970s when flights were getting hi-jacked;  I still wonder if “Take this plane to Paris or I’ll file your nails” would have worked.

After I wrote recently about a couple of times when I’d dreamt of somebody and been inspired to ring them only to find one of them had just died, a friend said this sounded “spooky”.  There’s still so much we don’t know about things like this that it hadn’t spooked me at all. 

We know that trees and plants communicate, albeit at quite a basic level, and sometimes involve what are considered to be an entirely different species (e.g.  oak trees and mycorrhizal fungi);  what’s so strange about forms of human to human communication we don’t yet understand and can’t control or explain?

But I do find myself quite seriously spooked by a catalogue full of creepy blades.

As I’m sure you’ll have anticipated, my next move was to wonder what you can get on the dark web if clumsily disguised street-knives can be bought on the ‘light’ web so I naturally googled ‘dark web dope’.  A wide selection is available but it looks as if you have to download Tor and set up a Bitcoin ‘wallet’, which looked far too complicated for a direct descendant of the mythical Ned Ludd.  I wonder if they give Nectar points.

Living without Bitcoin, I make do with a Sainsbury Bank account and have just come across an absolutely brilliant Catch 22 created by some geek in their back office.  For some reason, the site wouldn’t let me log in even though I’d reset the password and online PIN several times and it then announced that “Your online access has been suspended … just choose ‘Reset your details’ to get back into online banking”.  So I did.  Several times.  Guess what message kept reappearing. 

Then I tried the ‘contact us’ options, which also has another clever little system that takes you in circles back to where you started.

Since they gave a phone number for online banking support, I rang it and explained the problem to The Geek and asked him to unsuspend my access.  “I can’t do that” he said (yes, it was of course a man) “You have to do that yourself.  Just log in and follow the instructions.”

In an attempt to make things clear, I said “You can’t unsuspend my account and only I can do this by logging in, which I can’t do because my access is suspended?”  “That’s right” he said so I had a cup of tea instead.

I saw a much more wholesome advertisement in the paper with a picture of a car and the legend “It’s OK to stare.  The new Audi Q5.  With OLED rear light technology.”  Imagine you see one in a friend’s drive and ask what its performance is like;  you’ll probably get the answer “Dunno, I only bought it for the rear lights”.

Then, while shopping online, I came across an ad for Sipsmith gin, which says it’s “Hand crafted in London”.   I always thought it was distilled, not crafted, but they obviously have rooms full of people hunched over juniper berries, carving them into irresistible patterns;  not that juniper is mentioned in the list of ingredients unless it’s included in “a classic ten botanical recipe” (I quote exactly, don’t complain to me about the grammar).  Perhaps that was where The Geek used to work.

Perhaps all supermarket managers are geeks.  On Wednesday, two of the largest supermarket chains gave up and agreed to repay more than £850m in business rates relief they had accepted from the UK government and, on Thursday, three more supermarkets were shamed into following suit, taking the total refund to more than £1.8bn.  Then yesterday, two more big companies doing the same.  How sad that they had to be embarrassed into returning government subsidies they didn’t need;  and how stupid that the government hadn’t linked the subsidies to an embargo on dividend payments and a limit to executive pay.

But it’s not just supermarkets:  the Arcadia boss, Philip Green, has come under pressure from MPs and unions to sell assets to make good the huge shortfall in his retail empire’s pension scheme ahead of the company’s collapse into administration.  Do we think he will? Is the Pope a Muslim?

Other charmers include Philip Heath, a “senior executive” at Kingspan, the company which made the inflammable cladding that killed 72 people in the Grenfell Tower inferno after safety test results had been falsified.  The public enquiry was told he invited a builder who’d queried the panels’ safety to “go fuck themselves”.  It’s also claimed he told friends the builders were mistaking him for “someone who gives a dam [sic]”.

Elsewhere, what a not-surprise that the EU negotiators have failed to reached an agreement and have passed it up the line to their guvnors, a classic negotiation ploy which I’ve used myself in the past.  However, for this to work, you need to have a competent guvnor to take over and all we’ve got is Boris Johnson.

Nevertheless, the FTSE 100 has recorded its best month since 1989 in the belief that the discovery of a working coronavirus vaccine will immediately put everything to rights.  Isn’t it fascinating how thick investment managers are.  The second lockdown took them completely by surprise and markets plummeted and now the apparent success of a single vaccine still to be introduced showed that everything’s OK again.

The third surge that celebrates our Christmas freedom to share germs with friends and relations will no doubt amaze them and markets will fall again, and this is before they realise that a few small uncertainties still remain, like whether Brexit will actually benefit the British economy, how to find the money borrowed by the government to help us survive the pandemic, if Ireland will survive, whether Joe Biden’s presidency will be able to repair the damage Trump’s done, and so on, and on.

While some scientists are working on vaccines, others are culturing meat that can be grown in laboratories so animals don’t have to be killed to produce it and the Singapore Food Agency has recently approved ‘chicken bites’ produced by a US company.  I don’t eat (or like) meat so I’m not the best person to comment but I don’t find the idea of eating something “made from biopsies on animals … using bovine serum extracted from foetal blood” entirely irresistible.

Bob Dylan, the end has begun, a changing world and more kindness

29 March 2020

The week’s most surprising news is that, for the first time in 8 years, Bob Dylan has released a new song, a 17-minute opus based around J F Kennedy’s assassination.  Its provenance is, as with much about Dylan, uncertain and nobody seems quite sure if it’s a new song or one he left off an earlier album (he has a history of leaving the best song off albums – remember ‘Angelina’ wasn’t included in ‘Shot of Love’) but he’s said it’s a song he wrote “a while back” and, unusually, he prefaced this by saying “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years.”

Musically, it doesn’t obviously relate to any of his issued albums – his scratchy, broken voice contrasts with a gentle, soothing backing band – and the density of its lyrics will keep Dylan-obsessives arguing for years.

Dylan will be 79 in May and he’s still touring but there’s an overarching sadness to this new song that could be heard as a goodbye.

Elsewhere in the world, I’ve suggested to my younger son he should be keeping notes because he’s actually living through the apocalypse.  Certainly the end has begun.

Whether or not the coronavirus pandemic is worth panicking about is open to doubt, and there are reputable scientists who question this, but the fact that people are panicking is what will drive the changes.

That nice Mr Johnson sees himself as Churchillian but, apart from his waistline and his infidelities, there’s no evidence of any similarity.  International responses to Johnson’s failure to face reality vary from bafflement to anger and public health experts have accused him of being “nonchalant” and “slow” to take the necessary action.

As I write, the total number of deaths is increasing by about a third every day.  If this rate continues, there will have been over 10,000 deaths by about 7 April.  The death rate will, of course, slow as the preventative action begins to bite and the curve starts to flatten, but there’s no sign of this happening yet.

I believe historians will look back and see 2020 as the year when the established order of government, politics, financial markets, capitalism and social responsibility started to change, not necessarily for the worse, or better, just different.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Conservatives are successful in trying to drag the NHS out of the grave the Cameron / Osborne administration had dug for it but there will be other deeper-rooted changes.

It is certain that some businesses, big and small, will go bust and a recession is inevitable, possibly even a depression.  Optimists believe things will bounce back but it took 25 years for markets to get back to their pre-1929 levels although, admittedly, the recovery might have slowed somewhat between 1939 and 1945.  Having had their businesses shut down, some of their owners might find they prefer life outside and will never re-open.

Just thinking of the possible effects of WFH (an acronym that caught on almost as fast as WTF did), many people working from home and their employers will discover the full potential of technology.  There will be electronic meetings and discussions, businesses will realise the savings in overheads and the call for office space will reduce, possibly leading to a fall in commercial property prices.

Many WFHs will realise that they enjoy being able to work when they feel like it, rather than sitting in an office trying desperately to look as if they’re conscious in the graveyard shift, and they can fit family commitments such as school runs around their work.  Many will also realise that their work can be done from anywhere and they don’t need to be based in London, or even in the home counties so they can move to the countryside, leading to residential property prices being rebalanced between London and, say, Cumbria.

However, as a result, there’s a risk people will become more isolated with less social interaction over water-coolers so there could be more depression and suicide.

Of course, many people can’t work from home but it’s possible this dichotomy will lead to a re-evaluation of the value of the people who actually do the work, unlike, for example, when Flybe went bust recently and left an £80m unprotected shortfall in the staff pension fund, which they defended on the grounds that staff knew it wasn’t secured.

(Wouldn’t it be a good idea to introduce legislation that limits the maximum total remuneration of all directors and staff, and forbids any increase in dividends to shareholders, until a company’s pension fund is fully funded?)

Closing the gap could be helped by HMRC’s decision that £150,000 pa is the level at which a higher rate of tax comes into play so perhaps this could be fixed as the maximum permissible remuneration for everyone.

The ratings agency Fitch has cut Britain’s sovereign debt rating to AA- and said a further cut could follow as it kept the rating on negative outlook.  We used to be one of the top countries, with an AAA rating, but the financial mismanagement of the last decade, compounded by Brexit, have dragged us down to the same level as Belgium and the Czech Republic (both lovely countries but hardly world leaders).

But it’s not all bad news:  the railway system has effectively been “temporarily” nationalised by a Conservative government and, as a result of lockdowns, the air quality has improved dramatically in major cities all over the world.

However, we can’t influence any of this and a more pressing problem for those of us watching the “last” series of ‘Homeland’ on TV is whether Carrie and/or Saul will survive the final episode.

More commercial kindness this week.  There’s a company called Cook Food which delivers excellent food that can be cooked from frozen and eaten without any further interference, which is ideal for people like me who can’t cook and start feeling faint if anybody suggests I should learn.

Anyway, they rang us on Monday to say a delivery was expected and, because we order a lot from them, we could have first refusal for delivery next Saturday.

Then, at 8pm on Thursday, millions of people across the country stood on doorsteps and leant out of windows to applaud the NHS workers, from cleaners to consultants, at the sharp end of caring for people with coronavirus.  After the quiet of the day, the clapping and cheering and whistles was very moving.

Perhaps if an ambulance goes past while we’re out, we should all stop for a minute and clap as they pass.