Taylor Swift, Celine Dion and moondust

29 June 2024

Without doubt, the biggest event of the week was the first concert in the British leg of Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour.  I have to admit I’m not a dedicated Swiftie but I have listened to some of her stuff and she seems to have written some very pretty songs as well as a lot that would be pleasant as background while you’re removing dog hair from carpets and corners.

Nevertheless, I do have a sneaking regard for her because she comes over as a bright cookie.  She’s not a stunning beauty and no better or worse than many other singer songwriters but she’s created a particular image and has determination and an admirably bolshie streak which has made her a billionaire.  What a wonderful example of entrepreneurship at work for aspirant capitalists, or possibly just another example of the benefits that can be gained from being in the right place at the right time.

She was born in 1989 to what sounds like a very supportive and comfortably-off middle class family (insofar as America goes in for social classes) in Pennsylvania and received a lot of support from her parents, who moved to Tennessee when she was 14 to encourage her musical career.  Spoilt?  The word didn’t cross my lips – just look at what her genuine talent did for her and her family, and the fact that she’s renowned for her philanthropy, supporting causes like education, disaster relief, and LGBTQ rights.

She signed up with the Big Machine Records label in 2006 and stayed with them for 12 years until it was sold to somebody called Scooter Braun who then owned all the rights to her first six albums.  Swift and Braun had known each other since 2010 when he represented Justin Bieber, who opened for Swift on the ‘Fearless’ tour, but he had refused the offer she had made to Big Machine to buy back the rights to her own music.  She wasn’t consulted about the deal and only discovered that Braun now owned the rights to the masters of her first six albums after the deal had been done.

Braun, who clearly doesn’t have any developed business skills, offered her the chance to rejoin the label and be given the rights to one old album for every new album she produced.  There followed an acrimonious public debate between Swift and Braun but her business acumen finally came to the fore and she reacted as I would have done in the first place and said something like “No thanks old chap, I’ve a better idea” (though I’d have phrased that rather differently), which was to re-record all six albums with the same songs and the same arrangements, issuing them with the same titles but with ‘Taylor’s Version’ added.  And they’ve sold like hot cakes.

She owns her management company, ‘13 Management’, which she set up when she started her career, and still takes an active part in its business activities.  Not much is known about the company’s people or their operations, which are shrouded in secrecy.

She’s even made herself so successful that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has issued a new Taylor Swift-themed ‘tube map’ for London, with lines named after her albums and stations named after the songs on them, to celebrate her doing eight gigs in London.  Emma Strain, TfL’s customer director, has said the new ‘map’  “brings two icons together” and added “London is blessed to have eight dates for the Eras Tour.” 

Blessed?  Strange word to use, but Swift’s performances are expected to add £300 million to the London economy so I guess if you worship money …  I do have slight worries that we’ll see baffled tourists trying to use the new ‘map’ to find their way from Tooting Bec to Mornington Crescent.

Another child prodigy from an earlier generation was Celine Dion, a French Canadian, who issued her first album in 1981 when she was 13;  she continued recording studio albums in French and English for almost 40 years.

She was forced to cancelled a series of concerts planned for the spring of 2022 because of “severe and persistent muscle spasms” and, in December that year, announced that she had been diagnosed with ‘stiff person syndrome’.  This is a rare and very unpleasant neurological disease that causes progressive muscular inflexibility and unpredictable spasms that leave the sufferer unable to move. The spasms can be so strong they can break ribs and make the throat feel as if it’s being strangled.

In order to spread knowledge of the devastating effects of this disease, she allowed the filmmaker Irene Taylor to include film of a spasm in a documentary she was making called ‘I am:  Celine Dion’.  Dion went into spasm while filming something else and has allowed the distressing recording, lasting almost 10 minutes, to be included in the final version.  She is surrounded by various people who know what to do but you can see her lying on her back grunting, apparently in pain and unable to move.  When Dion was shown the film, she didn’t ask for a single change and it stayed in the film so people like me, who hadn’t previously heard of SPS, can see exactly what it can involve.

How brave.

And let’s give credit where it’s due.  Their Chinese lunar Chang’e-6 probe not only achieved a successful soft landing on the far side of the moon but lifted off again, rendezvoused with the orbiter and returned to earth with a kilogram of lunar rock and soil in the re-entry capsule.

This must now be the most expensive kilogram of anything on earth. 

Of course it’ll be exciting if scientists discover something they didn’t expect but imagine how much more exciting if all those billions might had been spent on discovering the causes of neurological diseases such as SPS, and MS, and MD, and migraines, and dystonia, and finding cures.

CEOs admit being lazy, Jews v Hamas, Navalny buried and Sunak says

2 March 2024

What a fascinating confession from senior executives of the UK financial and corporate sectors:  they don’t work as hard as they should.  Obviously it’s true but how refreshing that they are prepared to admit it.

Naturally, they don’t put it quite like this but companies like AstraZeneca, HSBC, LSEG – owner of the London Stock Exchange – and Smith and Nephew have revealed they want to pay their executives more so they get the same as their American counterparts. In a public company, the only justification to pay people more is to get them to work harder to generate bigger profits for the shareholders, which means the executives will need to work harder, which means they’re not working hard enough at the moment.

In rather the same vein, Lee Anderson resigned as deputy chair of the Conservative party and had the whip withdrawn after using his regular slot as a presenter on GBNews to claim that Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, is controlled by Islamists and has given control of London to “his mates”.  Rishi Sunak took 24 hours before chucking him out, claiming only that Anderson’s comments were “wrong” but not Islamophobic.

The divisiveness such nutters cause has led to a number of MPs, Conservative and Labour, receiving threats fearing for their lives and it was reported this week that three female MPs have been given bodyguards and cars out of fears for their safety

Similar divisiveness is seen in the way that so many people simplistically think Gaza = Hamas = terrorists or Israel = Jews = good people.  It was therefore encouraging to read that almost 3,000 British Jews, including the CEOs of two major Jewish denominations (Liberal and Reform) and 60 rabbis have made it clear there are vast numbers of British Jews who are “deeply unhappy with Israel’s vastly disproportionate onslaught against Gaza”; the senior rabbi of another UK Jewish denomination, Masorti, has also warned that “unimaginable suffering” would be caused by an attack on Rafah.

The former group issued a statement of principles says that “Israel must take care to protect innocent civilians” and that it can “never be acceptable … to deny civilians their basic human needs.”

We have some friends who know a professional family in Gaza whose house has been destroyed and close relatives including young children have been killed.  They have lost everything and are now trying to stay alive in the Rafah refugee camp, hoping to buy passes for their family to cross the border into Egypt.  Our friends have started a JustGiving page to help support them in Egypt while other friends of the family are making a similar effort in Canada to raise funds to buy their exit permits.  While I would like to help everyone there and I try to do my bit by supporting charities, I believe that sometimes one can make a big difference by being selective so I have given money to this appeal.  If anybody else would like to support them, here’s a link (you can give anonymously):  https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/gazanfamily?utm_term=3eJWEyaDn

(Please excuse this personal appeal but every bawbee will be welcomed.)

In the north this week, some aid trucks were expected in Gaza City and a crowd of people gathered to wait for them.  Two Israeli tanks watched them gather and started shooting when the trucks arrived. More than 100 people died.  Israel claims that they only fired at a small group of people who were threatening a checkpoint while witnesses claim they saw people standing by the aid trucks being shot.  Israel says that most of the dead were run over by trucks as they tried to escape or were crushed as crowds surged round the aid trucks.  People treating the wounded said afterwards that many of the wounded had bullet wounds and many of the dead had been shot.

In Russia, thousands of mourners bade their last farewells as Alexei Navalny’s funeral took place in the Borisovsky cemetery despite a warning from the Kremlin that people attending any gatherings they hadn’t approved risked being arrested.  It’s reported that 67 people were arrested and that many more who attended will have been identified and their names entered into a database for possible punishment later.

It now seems certain that Navalny’s death was due to state-administered Novichok poisoning and his mother Lyudmila, who was allowed to see his body, said he had been abused but his supporters gave him a hero’s send-off by playing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ while his coffin was being lowered into the ground as well as the theme from ‘Terminator 2’ was also played.  This was said to be Navalny’s favourite film and definitely not a reference to Vladimir Putin.

It’s to be hoped that these public shows of support for dissenters in a state of increasing repression mark a turning point towards a less frightening regime and away from Putin’s KGBisation of the Kremlin.

The UK was given some light relief yesterday evening when Rishi Sunak gave a sudden address to a crowd of damp journalists and photographers outside 10 Downing Street.  Most of what he said was predictable and anodyne and included the admirable hope for a country that is “kind, decent and tolerant”, something most of us already aspire to in our own lives.

He then went on to condemn the activities of extremists such as Islamists (which he emphasised are not the same as Islamics) and those on the far right, saying they are threatening democracy, and he would support police action against extremists in peaceful demonstrations and marches. He then went back into number 10 to start weeding his own party.  The police were presumably overjoyed because, if “extremist” is not defined very clearly, they will now have the power to arrest anybody they think is an extremist anywhere, even if they’re not wearing a badge saying “I’m an extremist”.

But the thing that impressed me least this week was when I was powering up my Gmail account and the screen showed a message “Google sign-in has a new look  We’ve improved the sign-in page with a more modern design.”  I wonder how much they spent getting this done and how many of us couldn’t tell you what the old sign-in page was like or how it’s changed, and care even less.

Wealth distribution and poverty

27 January 2024

Joseph Rowntree was one of the chocolate philanthropist Quakers who built Earswick, a village in York, for people on low incomes giving them access to decent homes at affordable rents.  While continuing to make chocolate, he wanted to understand the causes of poverty and disadvantage in order to create a better society so he set up the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with a major donation of shares in his company in 1904*.

Since then, the Foundation has been working towards “a future free from poverty, in which people and planet can flourish”.  They believe escaping poverty has become significantly harder over the past two decades and note that it’s been 20 years and six prime ministers since there’s been a sustained fall in poverty, and that progress to eradicate hardship stalled when the Conservatives took over in 2010.

This is one of the conclusions in the Foundation’s poverty report for 2024 which was published on 23 January (the report can be found at https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk)  Their annual reports on poverty are accepted as one of Britain’s most comprehensive and authoritative studies.

The poverty line is defined by a household whose income is less than 60% of the median income after housing costs (or £21,900 for a couple with two children under 14);  deep poverty is when income is below 40% of the median (£14,600). 

The report says that 14.4 million people – more than one in five people – in the UK were in poverty in 2021-22, 6 million of whom were in deep poverty and would, on average, need to more than double their income to rise out of extreme hardship, an increase of a third from 4.5m in the mid-1990s.  The 14.4 million people in poverty included 4.2 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.

Paul Kissack, JRF’s chief executive, said:

“Over the last two decades, we have seen poverty deepen, with more and more families falling further and further below the poverty line. 

“Little wonder that the visceral signs of hardship and destitution are all around us – from rocketing use of food banks to growing numbers of homeless families … It is a story of both moral and fiscal irresponsibility – an affront to the dignity of those living in hardship, while driving up pressures on public services like the NHS.”

The most recent crime statistics issued by the Office for National Statistics reveal that, in the year to September 2023, there were more than 400,000 shoplifting offences, an increase of more than a third to a record high.  I wonder, if I were faced to choose between starving or stealing, which I’d choose. 

I also wonder if the problem is exacerbated by poorer people trying to bring some enjoyment and hope into their lives by buying expensive drugs such as alcohol and nicotine and gambling with lottery tickets?  Some also turn to illegal drugs that bring short-term relief but transfer even more money from the poor to the rich gang leaders, leaving the poor with even less money to spend on food, and more incentive to steal and, because the poor don’t have access to the rich, they tend to steal from other poor people. 

Money in the bank is intrinsically useless unless it’s being saved for something you need, like a deposit on a house, or a holiday, or the next rent and energy bills.  If the rest of a millionaire’s savings disappeared overnight, it wouldn’t affect their lifestyles at all.

The poverty trap snapped shut on the poor a few years ago when state benefits were cut and their value has continued to fall since then as they don’t keep up with the cost of living.  Some politicians (and some otherwise normal people) still believe everyone who claims benefits is a scrounger living a life of luxury because they’re too lazy to get a job, but they obviously don’t know any ex-prisoners or people with long-term medical conditions, or disabilities that require special access, or single parents who can only work during school hours because they have young children.

They then also get ripped off by businesses who rob the poor to pay the managers and owners who are already rich.  For example, if you can’t afford to pay insurance premiums in full and have to pay 12 monthly instalments, the insurer will charge you for additional ‘premium finance’ and add between 20-35% p.a. on top of the premium itself.

This frightening unfairness is even becoming increasingly accepted by the super-rich themselves:  more than 250 billionaires and millionaires recently wrote an open letter titled ‘Proud to Pay’ to world leaders at the World Economic Forum demanding the introduction of wealth taxes to help improve public services worldwide.  In it, they said “Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society. This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”

In a recent poll, 74% of the super-rich were in favour of higher taxes on wealth to help with the cost of living crisis and improve public services, 58% supported the introduction of a 2% wealth tax on people with more than £10m and 54% thought that extreme wealth was a threat to democracy.

My own ambition is to die skint (although as a hypocrite, I’d like to keep the house till I do) so I give money to charities and help individuals when I can.  I even offered one friend a bribe to stop smoking (unsuccessful so far but thank you for asking).  The only problem I have with wanting to die skint is not knowing when I’m going to die.

*          One of Joseph Rowntree’s apprentices was a 16-year old George Cadbury who was called back to Birmingham where his family firm was in trouble and, with help from his two sons, built up their own chocolate business.  The Cadburys’ Quaker values included a particular commitment to adult education and George taught hundreds of people to read and write.  He also moved the firm out of the centre of Birmingham to a site they called Bournville – after a bourn (stream) that ran through it and the French ville meaning town – where they built housing giving their employees and others good housing, schools and leisure facilities.

Tina Turner, bad management, GB News and good management

27 May 2023

I was saddened to hear of Tina Turner’s death.  Her life story was fascinating: from picking cotton with her father to an abusive relationship with her husband Ike, to establishing herself as a solo rock singer and, until I started to know more of them, the sexiest grandmother in the world. 

Suella Braverman had almost as bad a week but is too thick to realise it.  Last year, she was caught breaking the speed limit.  This happens (I now call myself a police-trained driver) but Braverman tried to get Home Office officials to get her special treatment.  Had she gone on a course, or paid up and accepted three points on her licence at the time, none of this would have emerged.

Senior sources in government also complained this week that her grasp of facts was tenuous at best.  One said she made “basic errors” and another complained she “keeps getting facts wrong”. 

It was also Braverman who enchanted the far right with her repeated claims (which ignored the facts previously reported by her own department) that grooming gangs targeting vulnerable girls are predominantly run by British-Pakistani people because of their different “cultural values”.

And there’s a rumour she’s got something on Rishi Sunak because he hasn’t fired her yet .

English water companies have now been embarrassed into committing £10bn this decade to cleaning up their act after humiliating themselves by giving money to owners and executives instead of solving their sewage problems.  From 2010 to 2022, water companies paid their shareholders some £20bn in dividends and they’ve promised to pay good dividends in future; a Greenwich University professor has estimated could cost them another £15bn by the end of this decade.  That’s £35bn to shareholders and just £10bn more on doing their legal duty.

I only discovered this week that the ‘regulators’ don’t make the water companies disclose the volume of raw untreated sewage discharged in each overflow and – spoiler alert – they don’t volunteer the information.

“A lot of our pipework and drains are Victorian” they say.  This has, of course, been known since … er … Victorian times and was part of the infrastructure the private owners took on when the old water boards were privatised by Maggie Thatcher, whose government wrote off loans to the old companies and injected a lot of money into the new ones. 

Because each private company is effectively a monopoly (a result of England’s topography rather than a political decision), they don’t have to worry about losing customers and can pass on all their costs, including dividends to shareholders and fines for failing in their statutory duties, to those of us with taps and loos connected to their pipes.

(I used to have an aunt with a croft in Scotland who didn’t pay water rates because her water came from under a bog on the top of the hill and ran down a pipe through a couple of settlement tanks, and it was delicious, except when something died in one of the tanks.)

A small team of masochists recently monitored the output of the GB News channel which is watched by 2.8m viewers (about twice as many as watch Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV).  It is regulated by Ofcom and says “Ofcom is very clear that due impartiality does not mean a 50:50 balance. Instead, broadcasters are required to include a range of views. Diversity of opinion is what GB News is all about.”

Ofcom says its broadcast code is clear and that opinionated hosts are fine but “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented”.  It hasn’t specified what exactly ‘adequately’ means, but GB News believes 10-15% representation of differing views is adequate.

The masochists’ conclusion was that its content is mostly uncontentious and is basically gossip about Eurovision, Phillip Schofield’s future and Harry’s car chase, interspersed with anodyne news updates, rather like a sort of televisual Daily Mail.

What does make it contentious is the deliberately provocative anti-establishment programmes presented by fiercely right-wing hosts who pander to those on the radical right with subjects like gender, the “war on motorists”, working from home (which is “bankrupting Britain”) and, above all, the menace of migration, rather like a sort of televisual Daily Mail …

They do broadcast some archly serious discussion panels that often include a left-winger (rarely a senior figure) but the radicals on the right preach their own views with no attempt to balance them.  They also read out emails and include vox pop sections where viewers urge the reintroduction of capital punishment or link the covid vaccination programme to mass murder, rather like … well, you’ve got the point.

Ofcom has said it had “issued guidance to GB News to ensure they take care when discussing conspiracy theories, given the potential harm to audiences”.

Good news comes from the organic vegetable box company Riverford.  Guy Singh-Watson, its founder, sold three-quarters of the company to its 900 employees in 2018 and is now transferring full control of the company to a trust for the benefit of its staff.  He said he will continue as a trustee, non-executive director and spokesperson for Riverford but added “Founders can hang around too long, and I don’t want to be that person who needs to be told to go.”

After looking at the possibilities and the finagling of senior politicians, he said “I have decided to make no attempts to avoid tax liability on the sale of the shares.  I’ve not set up trusts to avoid tax, even though much of the money will end up supporting charitable projects. I will pay my tax as others who can’t afford creative accountants do, and I strongly support the idea of a wealth tax.”

Britain would be a better place if more self-made millionaires thought like him.

I also discovered last week that our dog has a phobia.  He happily climbed up some modern stairs with a clear glass balustrade but refused to go back down them and I had to take him in the lift, dreading being asked why a fit young man like me was taking the lift for one floor and having to explain that the dog has vertigo.

New Zealand v UK, NHS, taxing billionaires

21 January 2023

SHOCK!  TRAGEDY!  New Zealand’s prime minister is stepping down.  Jacinda Ardern thought about this over the summer break and concluded that, to be a good prime minister, one needs “the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.”

For 6 years, she’s led the country’s housing, child poverty and climate change policies, interrupted only by a global pandemic, a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, the White Island volcanic eruption and the international economic crisis;  and she had a baby in her spare time.

Of course she wasn’t perfect but she tried;  what an example to other world leaders (and would-be leaders) including, from west to east, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinpin who need to be forced out when they’re well past their sell-by dates.

When asked how she’d like New Zealanders to remember her, Ardern said “as someone who always tried to be kind”.

Wouldn’t it be nice of all UK politicians had to make kindness their foremost duty when doing their jobs, either at constituency or national level.

But what do we have?  Rishi Sunak now wants to broaden and ‘clarify’ the legal definition of “serious disruption” so that, in Downing Street’s words, police “will not need to wait for disruption and can shut down protests before chaos erupts”. This of course means that people could be arrested for planning or thinking about demonstrations to draw the public’s attention to things like the government’s forked-tongue approach to reducing carbon emissions (we pledge to reduce … / we’re going to open a brand new coal mine …).

A TV journalist reported that Sunak’s desire to change the new public order bill would “give the police the power to intervene [to prevent] disruptive behaviour before it becomes disruptive”.  Goodness, gollygosh, I exclaimed, Orwell’s Thought Police really are here, and I was relieved to see this report immediately followed by a specialist lawyer saying that it was potentially very dangerous to arrest people on suspicion of what they might do, rather than on the facts of what they have done or are doing.  Imagine their being able to arrest you because of what they think you might be thinking.

This was, coincidentally, on the same day as a police officer pleaded guilty to multiple charges of rape.  He’d been known to his fellow officers as ‘Bastard Dave’ and his file had several red warnings on it, like that of the police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, but nobody did anything about him.

Here I should admit I’m generally an admirer of the UK police.  I think the majority of them do a difficult job extremely well but there obviously are, at least in some forces, problems with recruitment and an unwillingness to report colleagues for racism, sexism and other inappropriate behaviour.  This shows that existing ‘quality controls’ and support systems for whistleblowers don’t work;  and that their superiors should now be held responsible.

Surely Sunak should be putting this right with national rules rather than giving them extra power to arrest people for what may or may not be going on in their heads.  I’m now thinking about how best to organise peaceful demonstrations that will disrupt parliament, and am planning how to do it – surround the palace of Westminster with protestors, at least three deep everywhere, who just mooch around exchanging pleasantries about the weather, from the Westminster Bridge balustrade round to the embankment wall at the upstream end.  It’d start at low tide so the more intrepid peers, MPs and staff could provide media fodder by squelching through the mud on the riverside of the buildings.  Then I’ll sit back and wait to be arrested so, if this blog doesn’t appear next week, you’ll know why;  come and whisper at the grates, and bring my divine Althea.

Sunak’s lack of common sense and forethought was demonstrated all too clearly this week, the former when he failed to put his seatbelt on in the back seat of a car, the latter when he filmed himself without it on.  He’s since been fined (his second fine since he’s been in office – shouldn’t this be treated as gross misconduct?)

He’s also been criticised for flying short distances oin a private plane three times this week to Lancashire, Leeds and Scotland.  His defence at a public event was:  “I travel around so I can do lots of things in one day, I’m not travelling around just for my own enjoyment – although this is very enjoyable, of course. I’m travelling around so I can talk to people in Accrington this morning, then I’ve talked to you, then I’m going to get over to Hartlepool because I’m working on all of your behalf.”

Leaving aside the syntactical problem, just think how this would compare with a 4-hour train journey to Scotland during which he could have walked the full length of the train and talked to people and sat down with them to get their views, rather than preaching from a script to public meetings of the converted;  and then coming back on a scheduled flight so he could meet and talk to more people.

The Health Secretary joined in with another particularly stupid thing on Wednesday when he said they can’t afford to give the nurses what they want or they’d have to give teachers more, and then the rail workers, which is why they’re aiming to close the NHS.  Well, he didn’t actually use quite those words but that was the gist of it.  Nor did he say the reason they can’t afford it is because they squandered so much over the last 13 years (remember prime minister Wossname who lost £50+bn in six weeks).  About the only thing Britain has left to be proud of is the bits of the NHS that remain unprivatised, and they’re now going to sell them.

Sajid Javid, a former health secretary has even said in an article in the Times today that patients ought to pay for visits to GPs and A&E.  Downing Street has said Sunak is not currently considering the proposals.  Note the “currently”. Javid is not standing in the next election.

Meanwhile, a group of 205 billionaires round the world have said in an open letter “Defending democracy and building cooperation requires action to build fairer economies … The solution is plain for all to see.  You, our global representatives [at Davos], have to tax us, the ultra rich, and you have to start now.”

To be fair to my Conservative friend who I mentioned last week, I’m giving him a right of reply. Taking my comments personally rather than as a key to how people on the right generally think, he said my views were based on my claiming to be “centrist and unbiased” even though the very top of my webpage explains my position.

He went on to say “It [the blog] is full of truths, half truths and misleading comments.  I will pick on only one, as it is the shortest to point out – I do not hate Biden …”  In fact, I never said he (or others on the right, except perhaps in America) did hate Biden, I just said he disliked him. And he’s too modest to have commented on the bit where I said “he’s actually a good and kind man”.

(I know this all sounds very impersonal but I never use the names of my wife and friends and other ‘real’ people I write about unless they’re already a public figure and widely known.)

NHS, strikes, governmental BS, Twitter hack and two American brainwaves

7 January 2023

What a joyful start to 2023!  There is no crisis in the NHS.  And there was I thinking nurses are striking because there is one.  But no, our cuddly prime minister has assured us that, even though the NHS is under “extreme pressure”, it has the money to needs to cope with the winter surge in demands for their services.

Dr Vishal Sharma, the chair of the consultants’ committee at the British Medical Association, responded with amazement to this, saying “No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional … [and] is taking the public for fools.” 

One of Rishi Sunak’s spokespeople produced the rather feeble claim that “We are confident we are providing the NHS with the funding it needs, as we did throughout the pandemic”, carefully refraining from making any reference to the repeated reductions in the real value of funding for the NHS in the previous 10 years since the Conservatives came to power and believed austerity would cure all ills.

So, with the ever increasing number of staff vacancies, they’ve been able to close cottage hospitals and reduce the number of rehab beds.  This means that patients who no longer need acute care but aren’t yet well enough to go home have to block beds in acute units instead of being transferred into rehab units which can have just two staff on overnight, and a GP on call.  Austerity also meant they had to reduce the costs of maintaining buildings and equipment by not bothering to do any and relying on strategically placed buckets to collect water dripping through the ceilings.

How lucky we all are to have the option of getting private healthcare without having to wait.  All we have to do is marry a billionaire or rob a bank or two.  The only problem private patients have to overcome is emergency care – if a scalpel slips, or the anaesthetist gets stuck on 12 across, while you’re having an operation in a private hospital, they will usually transfer you to the nearest NHS emergency unit, knowing that they’ll still get paid even if you die.

Sunak’s attempt to distract people from the not-crisis was to make maths lessons compulsory until A level.  Why?  I took A level maths (and, naturally, failed) and have since used the basic skills of multiplication / long division, geometry and trigonometry that I did in the earlier years but I’ve never once needed calculus.

And nurses are going on strike because the government refuses to discuss how much the real value of their pay has been whittled down over the last 12 years.  Despite the government’s frantically blaming the strikers, nobody’s fooled and several recent polls show the majority of people realise the strike is the government’s fault, not the nurses’.

The government’s response seems unlikely to improve things (but when has this ever stopped any government doing something stupid?):  they’re going to limit unions’ powers to hold strikes.  Sheer brilliance.  Anything to avoid dealing with the problems that cause strikes.

The anti-strike law will define “minimum service levels” in key sectors including health, education, fire and rail.  They plan to allow bosses to fire staff if minimum service levels aren’t met and to sue unions former damages.  Tougher thresholds originally wanted by Jacob Rees-Mogg have apparently been taken out for fear of challenges to their legality. 

I could perhaps understand their wish to do this if they limited the powers to essential services provided by the state but so many of these services are no longer state-owned but are run by, or contracted to, companies which, under established ‘rules’ of capitalism, provide their ‘customers’ (forget old-fashioned words like ‘patients’ or ‘passengers’) with the minimum levels of service necessary to maximise what they pay to their shareholders and directors.

I’ve mentioned one of the more heinous breaches of faith before, when the Conservative peer Michelle Mone pressurised the Department of Health and Social Care to award PPE Medpro, a company with close ties to her family, a £122m contract in June 2020. They duly supplied 25 million sterile surgical gowns which were rejected because their technical labelling was “invalid” and “improper”, and they “cannot be used within the NHS for any purpose”.  The Department is now seeking a return of the full £122m in public money plus £11.6m for storing and disposing of the gowns, plus interest.

Mone, founder of the lingerie brand Ultimo, was appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015.  I wonder if Cameron was been gifted a lifetime supply of crotchless Y-fronts.

This inevitably (well, it seems inevitable to me) reminds me that more than 200m email addresses have been hacked out of Twitter and posted on an online hacking forum.  According to a LinkedIn post on 24 December by the Israeli cybersecurity monitoring firm Hudson Rock, the breach is likely to lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and dox(x)ing (no, me neither, but it means releasing identifiable personal information to people who aren’t entitled to it – a gift to stalkers and others with equally dubious motives.) 

Twitter (aka Elon Musk) hasn’t yet commented.

Musk has lots of money and lots of idea, some brighter than others, but seems to have the attention span of a gnat.  While I’d love to go into space, I’m not sure I’d want to go up in one of his rockets because the Which? magazine award for the least reliable used car is currently held by Musk’s hugely expensive Tesla Model S.

As food inflation in the UK jumped from 12.4% in November to 13.3% in December and the Government thinks a 2% pay increase is ample, a Citizens’ Advice survey showed more than a third of UK adults would find it difficult or impossible to cope if their monthly costs increased by £20.

Recession?  What recession?

While homeless people in America are facing similar problems to those in Britain and many states are passing anti-homeless laws, Missouri has come up with a novel scheme to help them by making it a crime to sleep on state property.  This means that homeless people can sleep on the steps of the local courthouse, get arrested and, if they’re persistent offenders, they’ll be fined up to $750 or, if they haven’t got it (and how many homeless people have?), they’ll get 15 days in prison where the state will provide them with a roof over their heads, a warm bed and free meals for a fortnight.  Recidivists unite!

It’s not clear whether the law will also penalise people dozing off in senate meetings, school classes or libraries.

However, there are more than 2,500 community-supported agriculture schemes in America which support both the farmers and the consumers.  Customers make regular payments in return for fresh produce but the clever bit is that the price they pay is based on their finances so people who rent their homes or are on benefits or have large debts, pay less.  We should start something like this to supplement foodbanks.  I’d join.

While I was scanning the website of a large supermarket (which I won’t name to save Waitrose’s blushes), I saw an offer on minced lamb which said “Our fresh lamb is always British and kept happy with room to frolic and graze”.  Until somebody hits them on the head with a hammer and cuts them up into little pieces.

Poppies, dead people, BigTech bubble, economic fallacies, art and starving children

12 November 2022

Poppies are worn in many countries on Remembrance Day, 11 November, the day when, in 1918, the last shots were fired in the First World War.  The significance of the poppy is that their seeds can lie dormant in soil for decades.  In the slaughter that took place, soil all over northern France and Belgium was disturbed by trenches and artillery and poppies sprang into bloom, inspiring John McCrae to write the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’.  And, nourished by the blood of the undiscovered dead, the poppies flourished, careless of the nationality of the blood.

I always hope that, when people wear poppies, they think of all those who gave their lives, or had their lives ripped out of them, in all wars, whether they were military or civilian, old or young, British or German or, now, Ukrainian or Russian.

Russia is continuing to conscript men (an estimated 300,000 of them) to be given two weeks’ training before being sent to fight in Putin’s war on Ukraine.  Of one unit of 600 conscripts, there are reports that only 130 were still alive after their commanders abandoned them just before the Ukrainians started shelling their position.  One of the survivors said that many of the other survivors were “losing their minds after what happened”.

There is no need for this:  ‘fighting for peace’ is an oxymoron.

In Borodyanka, a town near Kyiv, a series of murals has appeared and Banksy posted three of them on Instagram on Friday, apparently confirming that he had been in Ukraine.   After Vladimir Putin had announced the Russian retreat from Kherson, one of the murals showed a large man looking rather like Putin being thrown in a judo match by a small boy.

Many people believe that death is not the end and there was a curious twist to this in Pennsylvania (America, not Gloucestershire) last week when 85% of voters in the mid-term elections re-elected Democrat Anthony “Tony” DeLuca as its state representative.  The twist was that DeLuca was dead.  After surviving lymphoma twice before, the 85-year old had finally succumbed to it and had died on 9 October (when it was too late to change the ballot or substitute another candidate).  A special election will be held later to appoint a more vocal state representative.

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin said “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes” but here in the UK, only death is certain.  Those who are too poor to qualify to pay taxes and those who are rich enough to avoid paying them leave the rest of us to support them with state benefits (a Good Thing) or having their ocean-going yachts de-barnacled (a Bad Thing).

At least the government seems to be realising that they must increase their income and taxes will have to rise. Sadly, there still seem to be credulous politicians who believe in the discredited ‘trickle-down’ theory that, if the rich pay less tax, they’ll invest increases in their income in their businesses and provide more work for the unemployed which will allow poorer people to get jobs and earn money, which will mean fewer people claim benefits, thereby saving the government money and improving poorer families’ living standards.  Unfortunately, these daydream-believers haven’t noticed that there is no evidence that this happens;  if it did, the rich wouldn’t have ocean-going yachts and more than one house, they’d own bigger businesses and employ more people.

If further proof of the falsity of the ‘trickle down’ effect were needed, the world’s richest man has provided it by firing thousands of staff in case the company makes a loss.  Elon Musk, who is reportedly ‘worth’ $200,000,000,000 claims that, following his ill-judged takeover of Twitter which led to a lot of advertisers heading for the hills, “unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4m/day”.  No choice?  Well, I suppose if it carried on losing $4m a day, he’d be skint in 50,000 days, or 137 years, by the year 2369, when he’d be 188 years old, or dead).

Will more follow?  Is the BigTech bubble beginning to leak?

What’s the effect of a rich company’s making a loss?  It just means that more money is being paid to its staff out of the owners’ pockets.  (You might get the impression that I’m not sobbing my way through a box of tissues.)

(At this point, I have to admit I’ve made a slight oversimplification to make the point.  What I have said about not reinvesting profits in growth tends not to apply to smaller businesses that do often do this but, of course, in their case, the numbers involved and their effects on the nation’s economy are tiny.)

Another billionaire, the late Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, left his collection of 150 artworks to be auctioned, instructing that the proceeds be donated to philanthropic causes.  (I wish I were sure that Christie’s, the auctioneers, waived their seller’s commission to increase the amount raised for good causes …)

60 “extraordinary works” were sold and raised more than $1.5bn, breaking umpteen records in the process.  The collection included one painting – Gustav Klimt’s ‘Birch Forest’ which I’d have offered $200 for but it went for $104.6m … 

As an utter philistine where art’s concerned, I’d want few famous paintings in the house but that would have been one of them, as would John Atkinson Grimshaw’s ’Moonlight after rain’ and Miyamoto Musashi’s ‘Shrike in a barren tree’.

If a household’s income is more than £7,400, the children are no longer eligible for free school meals and teachers have found that what these children bring in for their lunch can be a small tub of dry breakfast cereal or a cupful of leftover plain rice or some mouldy bread or a single bar of chocolate; and some bring in nothing at all.  The Liberal Democrats have calculated that, if the income limit had been increased with the cost of living, the income limit would now be £8,575 and an additional 110,000 children would be eligible for free meals.

I refuse, at least this week, to be drawn into the fallibilities of the UK’s current cabinet members but wonder when they’ll reinstate Chris Grayling – they could probably all do with a good pizza and he’s proved that he knows the right people to deliver these.

The good news is that, from its October draw, NS&I increased its premium bond prize fund rate from 1.4% to 2.2% (tax free of course).  These figures are overall totals and don’t mean any individual holder will get 2.2%, or anything, but a few will get £100,000 every month.  NS&I’s publicity for this increase included a curious word and said there would be “a small increase in the number of larger prizes available and a drastic increase in the number of £50 and £100 prizes on offer.”  Drastic?   Would we say “There’s been a drastic reduction in the number of murders”? Couldn’t they think of a word with more positive connections – “significant” perhaps?

Another wonderful week, and a smile

29 October 2022

Our third prime minister in three months took office this week – Italy eat your heart out. A cartoon showed the king meeting Rishi Sunak and saying “One hears that your wife is richer than one’s mama”.

Most of the wealth he shares with his wife comes from her father’s business, Infosys, which was founded by her father in 1981.  While Sunak had to be shown recently how to use a contactless card, his in-laws live a very modest life.  N R Narayana Murthy and his wife Sudha have lived in the same flat for decades and he drives a small car.  The only reported difference in their lifestyles is that their flat is now filled with books and his commitment to philanthropy has come to the fore with his having said “The real power of money is in giving it away”.

No doubt his time at Winchester and Oxford will have cured Sunak of any such nonsense.

To everyone’s great relief, Boris Johnson withdrew from the leadership contest after apparently failing to get enough support, saying “ … in the course of the last days I have sadly come to the conclusion that this would simply not be the right thing to do.”  A new Johnson!   Concerned about “the right thing to do”!  Perhaps leopards do change their spots.  Perhaps pigs will fly.

The only bum note so far is Sunak’s reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary.  Six days earlier, she was fired from the post for multiple and serious breaches of the ministerial code on the security of market sensitive information.  Although Sunak told parliament she’d declared her error and repented, she actually fessed up only after the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, had challenged her about it.

But let’s give Sunak a clean sheet to start with and see how he deals with all the other problems he’s inherited. 

One of these is the controversial public order bill which will add to the restrictions introduced by the new police, crime sentencing and courts act.  Their combined effect will be to criminalise carrying a bike lock or superglue with intent, or making a loud noise, so heaven help anybody who sings as they cycle home from the DIY shop.

The right-wing has condemned some road-blocking demonstrations saying they delayed ambulances responding to emergencies, a claim the Ambulance Service has described as “farcical”.

It seems traditional Conservative values are still alive and kicking as Lee Anderson, a Tory MP, asked whether female representation in parliament would “increase or decrease” if Eddie Izzard were elected an MP and he told Talk TV he “would not follow him [sic] into the toilets”, presumably because he considers himself so devastatingly attractive that Izzard would be unable to keep her hands off him.  Izzard actually identifies as female and uses women’s lavatories, which means Anderson himself must habitually use ‘the Ladies’ if he’s worried about following Izzard in.

And in Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then business secretary, who saw the writing on the wall and resigned.  He then hopped up to the back benches and, when a fellow Conservative MP, Richard Graham, questioned the practicality of repealing and replacing more than 2,000 pieces of EU law within the next 14 months, accused him of refusing to accept Brexit, thereby totally missing the point. 

Rees-Mogg had been attempting to get the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill enacted;  this would require the replacement of more than 2,000 laws covering almost everything from holiday pay rights to environmental protections to aircraft safety.  Luckily, it seems Sunak is likely to de-prioritise the Bill.

(Lawyers behind the original concept of EU-retained law have described the new Bill as “anti-democratic” and “completely barking”.)

Northern Ireland of course doesn’t even have a government in Stormont at the moment because the Democratic Unionist Party still refuse to share power with Sinn Féin who won more seats than they did.  I wonder which parts of ‘democracy’ and ‘union’ they don’t understand.

Germany is planning to legalise cannabis for recreational use while some UK politicians (none of whom, I’m sure, ever use nicotine or drink alcohol) are trying to get it reclassified as a Class A drug.  Wouldn’t it be more sensible for medical scientists to take an objective look at all drugs, including ‘natural’ and ‘processed’ ones, that are available legally or illegally (or only on prescription) and come up with a rather more sensible classification than the sledgehammer approach of the politically motivated Class A/B/C system?

The new Bond Street station on the Elizabeth line in London finally opened on Monday, four years and an estimated £570m over the original budget of £110m.  And that’s just one station.  Then try not to think of HS2 and restricted increases in state benefits.

We also heard that Salman Rushdie has lost his sight in one eye and the use of one hand after being stabbed about 15 times in the neck and chest at a lecture in New York in the summer.  I read ‘Midnight’s Children’ and enjoyed the first half but found the second half very heavy going and haven’t read any of his other books since.  It had won the Booker prize in 1981 and has been lauded ever since, which just goes to show what a philistine I am, but not why anybody should stick a knife in him even if he did subsequently write ‘Satanic Verses’ – it’s just another book.  I wish him well. 

Some students at Penn State university in America are protesting because Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group Proud Boys was invited to speak at a college meeting last week.  My immediate reaction was that anybody should be allowed to speak even if you disagree with what they might say.  Then I thought of the benefits arising from Donald Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and wondered how open-minded I actually am, particularly since Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, is apparently considering reversing Trump’s ban. 

The number of people killed in clashes with police fell by more than half and the number of people resisting arrest fell by almost two thirds when police in the São Paulo state in Brazil were fitted with body cameras.  The far-right candidate who is the favourite to become São Paulo’s next governor, a Covid-denier, is talking about removing them to give the police more freedom of action.  Another idea for Trump here.

Did you know that, like lizards, some scorpions can shed their tails when attacked but, unlike lizards, their anuses are in their tails so they are doomed to die of constipation?  The researchers who discovered this were awarded the 2022 Ig Nobel prize in biology. 

And a smile.  The actor Bill Nighy is currently promoting ‘Living’ and, in one interview, said with dry self-deprecation that he’d gone alone to Paris when he was 17 “to write the great English short story”.  Well, it made me smile.