State benefits here, AI and swearing there, stupidity everywhere

1 November 2025

Without doubt, the most shocking of recent excitements is a new insight I gained into the Britain’s state benefits system.  A neuro-divergent friend, a single-parent with two small children, struggles to survive on Universal Credit and Child Benefit.  The older child was recently diagnosed as needing a SEND plan and the school counsellor said they should apply for Disability Living Allowance.

When the DWP heard about this application they immediately cancelled the next Universal Credit payment because they hadn’t been told about a change in circumstances.  People claim benefits because they can’t live without them so letting a Jobsworth remove a benefit because of a technical breach of their bureaucracy leaving the claimant Sweet Fair Angela to pay their rent and heating bills and buy food for the next month seems … petty (the kindest word I can think of)

What can anyone say about a bunch of civil servants (paid by you and me) who enforce such an ineffably stupid and cruel response? 

I wonder how ‘changes in circumstances’ are defined?  For example, should a parent report that a child will no longer drink Ribena but will now drink Dr Pepper?  If this should be reported, we can all overwhelm the bastards with trivialities.

Perhaps I’ll google it and see how changes in circumstances are defined.

I read recently that Google’s AI programming has some sort of swearing restrictions and will anticipate questions rather than offer the results of a wider search.  If you ask “What is AI?”, you’ll get an AI-generated selection of links;  if you ask “What the fuck is AI?”, you get a quite different selection.  (Of course I tried it.)

Apparently, you can also circumvent those irritating chatbots by repeating “I want to talk to a human”, or say something is an emergency, but I haven’t yet tried this.

In other news, Plaid Cymru won an election for a traditionally Labour seat in Wales;  Labour and Conservatives were humiliated and Reform was disappointed.

Further east, Andrew Windsor, the piss-artist formerly known as Prince, was stripped of all his titles  while others just worried about digital ID cards.  Why do people get so exercised about having them?  We already have photo ID driving licences and passports, I have an iris scan on a computer somewhere in America, my mother’s ‘maiden name’ was shown in ‘Who’s Who’ until I deleted it some 20 years ago, and Sainsburys know where I live.

I also wonder how many people give honest answers to ‘security questions’ about things like my favourite football team and the name of my first pet (both ‘hydrangea’ if you’re interested).

However, with the incomparable brilliance of governments generally, it seems a trial run will introduce a smartphone-based veteran card available to 1.8 million people.  “Veteran”?  Does that mean those of us who are a generation behind technology, haven’t even got smartphones and are more likely to be suffering from dementia?  I have already had to accost passing strangers at 11 pm on dark nights to offer to repay them in cash if they’ll use their smartphone to pay for my parking because the car park company’s payment machine doesn’t accept cash or cards or jokes from Christmas crackers.

More worrying still are the results by research by Cardiff University into how viewers’ preferred news media influence their beliefs about what is happening in the world.  For example, they discovered that 84% of GB News viewers believed net migration into the UK is still increasing, compared with 71% of ITV viewers, 62 % of BBC viewers and 51% of Channel 4 viewers.  It’s interesting that, in all these cases, more than half these viewers still believe net migration has increased although, in fact, while net migration did rise between 2020 and 2023, it has since been falling.  But who lets facts stand in the way of a good story?

Incidentally, can anyone think of any other political party leader apart from Nigel Farage who is allowed to front their own series on a television news channel?  I’ve tried watching some of his (and other) GB News shows but my hearing no longer lets me separate individual voices when two people are shouting over each other and I get more pleasure from reading a good book anyway.

In the Middle East, the word ‘ceasefire’ is gaining a new meaning.  Because Hamas hadn’t returned the remains of all their hostages and an Israeli soldier was killed in a skirmish between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a raid on Gaza that killed at least 104 people, 35 of them children, and wounded many more.  The situation was further complicated by Hamas’s return of the remains of a hostage who Israeli forces had claimed to have recovered two years ago. 

And there was I thinking “ceasefire” meant that firing would cease.

More evidence of stupidity came from the covid inquiry when Boris Johnson denied claims that his government had failed to prepare for school closures, saying he thought it would be “amazing” if the Department for Education hadn’t done this.  Chuck Brodsky once sang about George W Bush: “Orders come down right from the top / to punish the guy who pushes the mop”.

So here’s another example of stupidity at the bottom of the food chain in our nearest town: last week, a woman pushing a buggy, was being followed by a somewhat older child who, unbeknownst to her, dropped a sweet wrapper.  Suddenly, a “Littering Enforcement Officer” loomed out of the shadows and fined the mother £120, payable NOW or they’d call the police.  These people have the power to fine people from £75 to £150, so what costs £75 if a sweet wrapper costs £120 – an unexpected sneeze?  

Thus did the Jobsworth make a parent responsible for a crime they didn’t even know had been committed.  Surely this will allow:  “Good evening, sir, I’m a police officer.  You may have thought your 9-year-old was in their bedroom but they’ve just been caught setting fire to the Council offices so you’re under arrest for arson.”

Anomalies, Labour policy, tax, smoking and birds

28 June 2025

Another of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starships has exploded on the ground while its engines were being tested.  SpaceX said the rocket “experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase”.  How long before we hear traffic news warning us that traffic is being delayed by a major anomaly on the motorway?

In a recent article, the New Statesman’s editor searched for a definitive answer to questions about Keir Starmer’s ideals and finally came up with “human dignity”.  For those of us who hoped that a new Labour government would usher in a brave new world after the 14 years of depredations inflicted on us by the Conservatives, this seems a bit feeble.  And sad because Starmer seems, at heart, to be a decent man.

However, he does have the strangest ideas, last week’s being the brainwave that he could remove what dignity remains for some of the poorest in society by tightening the eligibility criteria for some benefits.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity (and therefore not allowed to lobby or take a political view), has estimated that some households would be up to £12,000 a year worse off.

Luckily, a lot of his own MPs are not supporting him and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said his proposals would “destroy the financial safety net” for millions of people.  Starmer has now watered down his proposals in the hope they’ll be passed next week but whatever gave him the idea this was a good idea in the first place while he’s spending more on nuclear weapons that are, at best, irrelevant?  Perhaps he thinks the poor should be responsible for paying for the things while the rest of us who pay income tax don’t have to contribute.

The new nuclear weapons are to be manufactured and tested at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. We’re assured that the testing will involve only tiny amounts of material, perhaps a few millimetres in size, and will be triggered in a vacuum by a set of 12 lasers which will simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion.

A scientist involved in the project has said the energy involved is “no greater than boiling a teaspoon of water” and there was “no danger of blowing up Reading”.  Why does my skin crawl when I hear this sort of stupid ‘joke’?

To maximise the chances of a nuclear ‘anomaly’, the nuclear warheads will then be manufactured at a nearby site before being taken on a lorry to Coulport in Scotland, fitted into missiles and loaded onto submarines at the Faslane naval base.  No risks there then.

Way back, I went to Aldermaston twice to take part in the annual CND marches to Trafalgar Square.  Tens of thousands of us walked behind a banner, slept in vast marquees and on hard school floors.  I still have a photograph I took of a sign inside the fence round the nuclear site saying “The taking of photographs is punishable by death” (or words to that effect).

Fat lot of good we all did.

At about the same sort of time, the top rate of income tax on ‘earned’ income was 83%, with an extra 15% taken from investment income.  (Remember the Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’:  “it’s one for you 19 for me, ‘cos I’m the taxman”?)  There were no millionaires rioting in the streets and the (Conservative) government wasn’t overturned by the rich;  I actually knew somebody back then who paid the top rates and said they got a lot of income from their business so it was fair to pay a lot of tax on it.  When did people start equating their bank balance with their personal worth?  (I know who I blame …)

Elsewhere in government, the Home Office is now refusing asylum to Ukrainians who have left their homes to find safety in Britain on the grounds it’s safe for them to go back to Ukraine.  With unbated breath, I await the Home Office’s decision to refuse asylum to Gazan refugees on the grounds it’s safe for them to go home.  It almost makes Priti Patel’s attempts to deport refugees to war-torn Rwanda look slightly less stupid – can somebody remind me what that stupid cock-up cost us?

Despite the obscenely rich forever giving hollow promises to leave the UK if they have to pay another penny in tax, another charity, the Equality Trust, has pointed out there are now 165 billionaires in the UK and that ‘private’ wealth has grown eight times faster than the wealth of governments in the last 25 years. 

The journal Heart has summarised and published the results of an analysis of the medical records of some 200 million people and have reported that the regular use of cannabis increases the risk of acute coronary syndrome by 29% and of stroke by 20% as well as doubling the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD).  I haven’t been able to find comparable research into increases in the incidence of CVD in tobacco smokers but one American study showed they were three times more likely to die of CVD.  It would be interesting to relate these results to the relative numbers of cannabis and tobacco smokers but I would guess that tobacco smokers cost the NHS considerably more than cannabis smokers.

I’ve mentioned before the government’s failure to insist that swift bricks are installed in all new houses.  The need for them was highlighted (I always wonder if that should be ‘highlit’) by a recent survey that showed a decline in their numbers of two thirds between 1995 and 2022.  When did you last see a large flight / bunch / herd of swifts screaming around in the sky above you?  Even if they’re not occupied by swifts, other birds are happy to use them, including house martins, tits, nuthatches, house sparrows and starlings.

But there is good news:  locally ‘extinct’ birds can be reintroduced.  The bittern hadn’t been breeding in the UK since the 1870s after its natural wetlands had been drained for farming but, with habitat restoration, some 280 bitterns were spotted last year.

SureStart, cannabis, Trusk, burqas, Starling Bank and Taylor Swift

7 June 2025

The Child Poverty Task Force is recommending the government reincarnates the SureStart service, first introduced by Labour in 1998 and mostly closed down after under-funding due to George Osborne’s austerity cuts.  It used to offer child health clinics, breastfeeding support, groups for new parents, sleep and weaning workshops, speech and language therapy, drop-in physio sessions, parenting courses in child development and mental health, stay and play sessions (including specifically for dads and male carers), music therapy classes, support groups for women and children who have suffered domestic violence, a housing clinic, groups for children with SEND and cookery courses.  Bring it on!

While they’re at it, perhaps the government could have a look at the report of the independent commission that researched cannabis regulation in London.  The report finds that reclassifying cannabis as a Class B drug was disproportionate to the harm it can cause and that penalising people for possession of the drug for personal use “cannot be justified”, recommending that, while its production and supply chains should remain illegal, “natural” forms of the drug should be reclassified.

London tried this in Lambeth in 2001 when a Scotland Yard borough commander told his officers to caution rather than arrest people carrying small amounts for personal use.  The scheme was inevitably controversial but popular in the borough where, in six months, more than 2,500 hours of police time were saved on processing cannabis arrests while arrests for in connection with class A drugs rose by almost 20% and non-drug-related crime fell by almost 10%.  Almost two thirds of people thought the scheme had improved relations between the community and the police.

The experiment was ended after a year when some of the media made allegations about the commander’s private life which they later admitted were unfounded but, by then, the commander had been transferred elsewhere.

Some American states have already legalised some forms of cannabis and a recent survey showed that wrinklies have taken advantage of this:  cannabis use by the over-65s increased by nearly 50% in the two years 2021 to 2023.  The increase was mainly in wealthier groups and it has become so much more acceptable in helping people cope with chronic pain, stress and other conditions that medics have to remind users that its use is not without risks and daily use of skunk, a strain of cannabis with high levels of THC, can dramatically increase the risk of becoming psychotic.  However, they say a couple of joints at weekends are unlikely to do much harm … 

I do wonder if the increased use among older people is because they are the generation who spent much of their youth stoned, then stopped while they were working, and are now happy to enjoy cannabis once again.

I also wonder if some could be slipped into Vladimir Putin’s and Donald Trump’s favourite drinks to help them chill a bit.

Putin was so embarrassed by Ukraine’s destroying heavy bombers at an airfield in Siberia that he ordered a nighttime drone attack on Kiev, not renowned for housing Ukrainian military bases, to show what a big willy how powerful he is.

In America, the two Trusk protagonists have parted and are posting acrimonious tweets about each other.  Elon Musk has called for Trump’s impeachment because he was (Musk claims) named in the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files that are still withheld.

With his usual maturity and compassion, Trump responded by calling Musk “crazy” and saying he was “wearing thin” at the White House. This spat could prove interesting.

Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, has just published her memoirs and one critic described her style as being “gently funny” about Trump, saying he was “taller than [she] expected, his tan more pronounced”. She also describes a moment when her mike was still on and she called the ultra-right-wing New Zealand politician David Seymour, “an arrogant prick” but, when she heard that she’d been recorded, she said she was relieved to hear what she’d actually said because she thought she’d called him “a fucking prick”.

Over here, the chair of the Reform UK party, Zia Yusuf, has resigned because the party’s newest MP asked the government to ban the burka.  Yusuf, a Muslim, said this was a “dumb” thing to have done, even after Nigel Farage had said on GB News that it was time for a debate about the burqa.

All Farage really needs is the chutzpah of somebody like Raman Bhatia, chief executive of Starling Bank.  The bank was fined £29m by the Financial Conduct Authority in October after the watchdog discovered “shockingly lax” financial crime controls at the bank (which the bank admitted were inadequate).  It also admitted it had to write off £28m on injudicious loans to businesses made without proper checks which, in the words of the FCA, “left the financial system wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions”.

So Starling’s board of directors increased its staff bonus payments from £5.3m last year to £24.6m this year, including £6m to themselves, to reward their incompetence.

Another rip-off is apparently practised by record labels who do not let unknown artists own their recordings and then, if the artist becomes famous, sell these rights to a third party for a large profit.  Until they encounter someone like Taylor Swift;  she re-recorded all six of the albums whose rights she didn’t own, calling them “Taylor’s Version”, thereby devaluing the original recordings and becoming huge hits in their own right.

She has now bought back her rights to the early albums from Shamrock Capital, who had bought them from Big Machine Records who first recorded her, and thanked the private equity firm for being “honest, fair, and respectful”.

I haven’t heard much of her music, which seems pleasant enough though it doesn’t seem to justify the (to me) incomprehensible fame and adulation she’s achieved worldwide;  but I have to admit I admire her determination to recover what she should surely have owned in the first place, perhaps opening a door for less powerful artists.

Censored media, George Clooney, Tom Lehrer, Donald Trump and Hargreaves Lansdown

29 March 2025

Last year, for the first time, neither the Washington Post nor the LA Times published an editorial supporting one of the candidates in the presidential elections.  The break with tradition was caused by their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, who instructed their teams to abandon the editorial independence they’d demonstrated for many elections by not publishing an editorial endorsement of the one of the candidates.  Even after the election, the latter asked the newspaper’s editorial board in December to “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump.

This seems very unfair to those of us who want to hear independent views which are untainted by the prejudices of plutocrat owners.  It’s even less fair to those who read and watch only reports that support their own prejudices and then believe everything they’re told by them (yes, fans of [redacted], I’m talking about you).

In the UK, all the national newspapers except the Guardian are owned by very rich individuals or groups of investors such as hedge funds and, apart from the BBC, the major radio and TV broadcasters are similarly controlled.  The BBC built its reputation for impartiality over the decades and gained worldwide respect through its BBC World Service (introduced in 1932) and a survey in September 2024 showed that two out of three viewers still rely on BBC One for news reports.

But the BBC’s share of the market is falling as the world political scene is drifting to the far right and people are now seeking less balanced media that tell them what they want to hear.

This is encouraged by the shameless agendas of people with axes to grind and a lot of money or political clout, who influence their media for their own purposes.  I wonder if, taking a completely random example, Bezos wouldn’t have spiked a pre-election editorial on the presidential candidates if he thought it was going to say how wonderful a president Donald Trump would be this time?

The actor and Democrat activist George Clooney said recently in an interview on the US TV news programme 60 Minutes that the battle between the press and the government is a “fight for the ages” and referred to both the Washington Post and the LA Times.

Trump, as thin-skinned as ever, immediately responded by Tweeting (Xing?) that Clooney is a “fake movie actor” who “never came close to making a great movie”.  Trump obviously hasn’t seen “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” but he probably disapproves of the Coen Brothers anyway.

“What does Clooney know about anything?” the fake TV ‘personality’ continued. “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television.  Movies never really worked for him!!!”

In the 1950s, Tom Lehrer was a maths teacher at various American colleges, including Harvard, who interrupted the day job to write and perform satirical songs such as “I Got It From Agnes”, “The Old Dope Peddler” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.

His musical career was comparatively brief and he’s been quoted as saying he went back to maths because “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”  His songs remain acute (and very funny) in a world where the American President unwittingly parodies himself every time he opens his mouth.

Trump’s latest blunder is to excuse his administration’s embarrassing security breach after a journalist from Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal meeting discussing specific operational details of plans to bomb Yemen, including details of US bombings, drone launches, targeting information of the assault, timings for the attack, descriptions of weather conditions and the specific weapons to be used to kill a “target terrorist”.

When questioned about the leak, Trump said: “It wasn’t classified information,” and it was “the only glitch in two months” both of which claims were palpably incorrect.

In just two months, Trump has already antagonised the only two countries that share land borders with America.  One curious result of this is that Canadians now need a passport to visit a library which was deliberately built to straddle the border between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, as a symbol of cooperation and friendship between the two countries.  However, the entrance is in Vermont so Canadian readers have to take ID to walk down the side of the building into America to reach the door.  It’s a library for heavens’ sakes.  (“Anything to declare?” / “Just a book, look, Das Kapital.” / “Up against the wall, Canuck.”)

(In the south, rumour has it that groups of Mexicans have been chanting “tear down the wall”, and Roger Waters will be doing a gig in Juarez before leading a conga dance across the bridge into El Paso.)

Trump’s latest economic triumphs include the imposition of tariffs rising to 25% on imported cars and a trade war with China. 

What a good job he’s got Elon Musk’s social graces to help smooth his way forward.

Over here, research by the financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown (which obviously has a vested interest in the results) has shown that people should increase their ‘rainy day funds’ to cover three to six months’ essential expenditure as April price increases hit them, and said six months’ emergency savings should average £12,669.

What sort of world does Hargreaves Lansdown live in?  How many of us have this much set aside to cover price increases, household emergencies etc?  Have people on state benefits got any savings or have they already spent it on food?  I know a single parent with two small children who can’t even manage on universal credit and child allowances, and probably doesn’t even know what savings are.  This is just one family who I happen to know;  how many hundreds of thousands of other families I don’t know are similarly over-stretched?

(Remember Hargreaves Lansdown?  They pushed Neil Woodford’s funds at investors until his luck ran out and then they suddenly went completely silent – no apologies or anything.  More than 8,000 people whose money was lost by Woodford are now backing a legal claim against Hargreaves Lansdown which could total £200m.)

Black moons and comets, rockets and aircraft, and an old journalist

4 January 2025

I think Donald Trump’s make-up artist is losing it.  We seem to be seeing more pictures of him with the demarcation line between the orange dye and the natural pasty grey colour of his face clearly visible round his eyes and chin. 

Did you all take advantage of the black moon on Monday night, when the stargazing would have been much more impressive than usual if it hadn’t been cloudy?  (As any fule kno, a black moon is the second new moon in a calendar month, which happens about once every 29 months.)  And if you missed the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night, try again tonight if the sky is clear;  they’ll be streaking across our skies until 12 January at a peak rate of approximately 100 per hour or, on average, one every 36 seconds.

The shower’s radiant point is in the constellation Boötes but the flashes can appear anywhere in the sky.  The gently sloping graveyard behind our local church has a good dark sky and is a perfect spot to lie in comfort as you stare in exactly the wrong direction.

In 1997, I was staying at the head of Wasdale (which doesn’t even get TV or phone signals, let alone streetlights) under a clear sky, admiring Comet Hale-Bopp and took some stunning photographs.  Unfortunately, this was back in the days when we had to send our films off to Agfa to be developed – guess which film never came back.

One of my cousins has updated me on the new spaceport in Unst, Shetland.  It’s owned by Frank Strang who was an officer in the RAF, where he met his wife Debbie and worked as a PE teacher for 12 years before getting involved in various businesses, some of which were more successful than others, leaving him with a questionable reputation.

Rocket Factory Augsburg is a German company founded in 2018 with the aim of mass-producing high-performance, low-cost rockets to make space more accessible than ever before.  It was one of their rockets that exploded on the ground in August while its engines were being tested, due to “an anomaly”.  Nobody was hurt but you have to be really clever to think up an excuse like that for such a huge and expensive explosion.

The site itself doesn’t yet have piped water or mainline electricity and I treasure the thought that, when the rocket went up in flames, people were lowering buckets over the cliffs to collect seawater to dowse the fire.

The spaceport keeps itself apart from the island’s population and one of Strang’s other companies provides accommodation for RFA employees.  Locals are curious to know what Strang charges RFA staff for accommodation on an island where there’s nowhere else they could stay.

The RFA rockets are comparatively small and, after my recent reference to avian wingspans, it got me wondering which aeroplane has (or had) the longest wingspan.  The answer is that, of ‘real’ planes, the Airbus 380 800 has a wingspan of almost 80 metres.  The Ukrainian Antonov 225 Mriya, which used to piggyback Russian shuttles into the upper atmosphere on their way to the International Space Station, had a wingspan of 88m until the Russians destroyed it shortly after they invaded Ukraine in 2022.

However, the record is still held by the Spruce Goose (known to anoraks as the H-4 Hercules) which had a wingspan of 98m.  It had eight engines and was built by Howard Hughes during the Second World War with wings and body made of – you guessed it – wood.  It only flew once, for about a mile, on 2 November 1947, with Howard Hughes in the driving seat.  It was airborne for under a minute and flew for less than a mile, reaching a height of about 20m above the water;  it now lives in the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville in Oregon.

Actually, the record for the longest wingspan is held by the Scaled Composites Model 351 Stratolaunch with a wingspan of 117m but this doesn’t really count because it has a twin-fuselage (a catamaran in nautical terms) and is built solely to carry satellites into the upper atmosphere so they still have full fuel tanks when they get there.

Another curiosity of aviation history is the ‘flying wing’, an aeroplane that was all wing and no fuselage, leaving no room for people to fight over which overhead locker is theirs.  The lack of a body gave it aerodynamic advantages and the military advantage of being less visible to radar.  Northrop developed one that first flew in the late 1940s but a German, Hugo Junkers, had originally patented the idea in 1910.

In due course, these things developed into delta-winged aircraft, including the sadly-lamented Concorde (or the wholly unlamented Concorde if you lived on its flight path) and ‘stealth’ bombers that are still in use.  I thought Concorde was beautiful.  I flew on it once.  From Manchester to London.  It’s a long story. On another occasion, I watched it break the sound barrier but that’s a rather shorter story.

So let’s start the new year with something from one of my heroes, one whose reputation has remained untarnished in the 40 years since he died:  James Cameron (the journalist, not the film director).  He combined a gentle humour with a real anger at some of the world’s injustices and retained his slightly eccentric integrity to the end, writing and presenting beautifully crafted reports. 

In a 1984 BBC documentary, he said of Dundee (where he had worked on the local paper) “I knew little about politics in those days;  all I could grasp then – or, more accurately, assume – was that this sort of thing was bloody awful, that there should be well-off merchants at one end of town and an aching economic emptiness at the other.  It was obviously an unnatural state of affairs … and therefore to be rejected.” 

Interestingly, his write-up in Wikipedia is fairly basic but he would have smiled wryly to read the bit that says “Having worked for several Scottish newspapers and for the Daily Express in Fleet Street, he was rejected for military service in World War II.”  What better reason to be rejected for military service.

Pardons, Wills, films, children and kindness

28 December 2024

A quick update: Joe Biden obviously read my comment that he hadn’t pardoned any federal prisoners on death row because he’s just commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 of them to life imprisonment without parole. In doing so, he said “I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss … but, guided by my conscience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” You see the influence I have with American presidents. (Incidentally, have you noticed people are beginning to use ‘trumpy’ as an insult?)

Thinking about death, have you written your Will? In the UK, a frightening number of people haven’t and die ‘intestate’ so, if you’re one of them and superstitious, I can reassure you it doesn’t hasten your death. I wrote my first Will when I was in my twenties and I’m still alive.

I wonder if eunuchs die intesticulate?

Of course, if you really want to piss off your family, don’t do a Will and leave them to spend your money on lawyers to fight through the Courts to get probate (permission to deal with your stuff) before telling your survivors what the law says about who gets what. Does anybody know who got Shakespeare’s best bed?

Remember to allow for contingencies: if you’re leaving everything to your partner and you’re both killed in the same accident, it’ll be assumed the older one died first so their estate will then go to their partner and then, in the absence of a Will, to the partner’s beneficiaries. So why not leave stuff to people on condition they survive you by a set period – 3 months? or until probate is granted? – and, if they don’t, it goes to your children, or your favourite charity?

And do it properly. It needn’t be difficult but it is absolutely vital to get some very precise formalities right, like getting it witnessed. Handwritten notes saying “All to Chris” don’t work unless you’re dying on a battlefield. Many solicitors now do Wills free and larger charities offer support in writing them.

This is the season of films which gives us nitpickers the chance to spot continuity and bad editing. A few years ago, we watched a recorded Christmas special edition of Sherlock. Not having seen any of the original series, we got a bit lost about characters and plot but I did enjoy the interchange between Holmes and Watson in a coach when Watson’s wearing a hat, then he isn’t, then he is again. Mind you, not everybody notices these things and I had to replay that bit to show my wife ‘The Case of the Disappearing Hat’.

There are websites devoted to such errors, including famous ones like a Fiat 500 in the distance in a Roman chariot racing scene, a Viking wearing a wristwatch in another film and contrails in the skies of Westerns. And, in the 1964 Western ‘Cheyenne Autumn’, members of the Navajo nation spoke their own language but, instead of the scripted words, said things like “this man has no penis”.

Which inevitably reminds me of the monologues Joyce Grenfell gave in the role of a primary school teacher, before she went to the big kennel in the sky. Here’s one that, as far as I know, she didn’t write about a teacher explaining metaphors.

“Metaphor, George – that’s very good! Do you know what it means? / It’s a more picturesque way of saying something. / What? / Yes, pictureskew, it’s the same word, but you pronounce it ‘picture-esk’, not ‘picture-skew’. / Well most people do. / It’s like when you’re grown-up and play a game called ‘Hide the Sausage’ but there isn’t a sausage. / Because ‘Hide the Teddy’ wouldn’t … / Teddy bears don’t smell … / You did what on it? / Yes, Amanda, it would be easier for a dog to find a sausage but we’re not talking about dogs. / Well, I wasn’t talking about dogs, I was talking about metaphor, which is a figure of speech. / No, not that sort of figure. / No, not eight either. / No, not even a million, oh gosh, look at the time, it’s nearly time for break so let’s all tidy our desks shall we, spit spot.”

As inspiration for the new year – and thank you to the friend who told me about this – let’s remember the spirit of the beautiful Kindred Spirits sculpture near Cork in Ireland that was ‘opened’ in 2017 by the artist Alex Pentek and a 20-strong delegation from the American Choctaw Nation. Planned to mark its 170th anniversary, it commemorates the 1847 gift of $170 given by the Choctaw people to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger caused by misgovernment and the repeated failure of potato crops.

The value of the gift in today’s terms is about £5,000 and was given by people who were themselves still suffering after being ‘relocated’ 500 miles from their 11m acres in the deep south of America to Oklahoma in the 1830s by the white occupiers who wanted to grow cotton on their original homelands.

In 2020, when the Covid pandemic badly affected the Choctaw, Navajo and Hopi communities, the Irish people raised an estimated €1m to help them out, many donors each giving €170 in recognition of the original gift.

Gary Batton, the 47th Chief of the Choctaw Nation, said “Adversity often brings out the best in people. We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish Potato Famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”

Let’s all practise ‘iyyikowa’ in the future, starting now.

Love and peace to you all in 2025.

£100,000 a year, social care costs and the ethics of electioneering

30 March 2024

The vast gulf between the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s beliefs and his grasp of reality was terrifyingly illustrated in a recent tweet in which he said £100,000 is “not a huge salary” for people in South West Surrey.  He was even stupid enough to repeat this fantasy to Laura Kuenssberg in an interview last weekend when he said £100,000 a year “doesn’t go as far as you might think” and added that “even on those higher salaries, people are feeling under pressure” because of housing costs, childcare and taxes (oh, come on, all of us whose income is high enough pay taxes).  And childcare?  What about the helicopter?

This is the sort of “pressure” many millions of people would sell their soul for. 

The median pay for a full-time worker last year was £34,963, which means that half of all full-time workers were paid less than that. 

I have a friend, a single parent of a 6-year old, who only gets Income Support and Child Benefit totalling just over £13,000 a year.  They live in a tiny housing association property paying rent of £6,000 a year plus energy bills, car insurance, phone etc, which leaves almost exactly nothing for food, clothing and treats such as a sandwich from Greggs.  I give them what I can to help but, according to a recent survey, there are 4,300,000 children in the UK below the official poverty line;  sadly I can’t help them and the government won’t. 

In a feeble attempt at self-defence, Jeremy Hunt* did say the UK had been through a “very very tough patch”, caused primarily by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Excuse me!  How long have you people been in power?  And whose austerity policies started the decay?

It’s no better in America where, according to research by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, senior management at 35 of the largest companies were given more than their companies paid in federal taxes between 2018 and 2022; and, in the UK, Chris O’Shea, Centrica’s boss, will be getting £8.2m this year, nearly double what he got last year when he said his pay was “impossible to justify”.    No doubt he’ll trouser it anyway.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, this makes me very angry, and what makes it worse is that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it …

At the other end of life, the problems are just as great when someone becomes unable to take care of themselves, even if they’ve paid their taxes all their lives.

A series of three programmes shown recently on TV told the story of a well-known broadcaster, Kate Garroway, as she watched her husband, Derek Draper, decline and die, needing increasing care as he weakened.  The trilogy started in May 2023 with her husband saying he wants to be on camera and “I want to be heard” even though he already needed intensive, round-the-clock care.

Since only people with very low incomes and high needs qualify for state-funded care, care for his basic needs cost £4,000 a week before the additional costs of therapeutic support.  Needing care is an expensive business because, in the absence of government funding, capitalists have pounced on care services and make themselves huge profits by bankrupting the needy. 

After being told Draper wasn’t ill enough to qualify for state support, Garroway appealed against the decision three years ago but is still awaiting a reply even though Draper died in January.

She has admitted she gets a generous salary but even this wasn’t enough and unofficial reports, not mentioned in the programme, say she’s now some £800,000 in debt.

For those of us who are full-time carers for a family member who is physically disabled and entirely reliant on a wheelchair and hoists as well as suffering from dementia, the costs are still terrifying.  Our ¾ hour of care per day costs more than £10,000 a year and respite breaks in residential care home cost about £1,500 a week;  even full-time care costs about £70,000 a year.  So, for respite care, we’ve chosen a (lovely) care home run by a charity, knowing that greedy owners won’t take a third of our payments straight into their piggy banks (emphasis on piggy, not banks).  It’s also why I’m giving money to friends and other charities now because I won’t be able to afford to when our savings run out.

And, sooner or later, the money will run out and we’ll have to sell the house, claim utterly inadequate benefits and then take the pills.

This makes me more sad than angry.  I paid every penny of tax and national insurance contributions due while I was working and it’s being given to Jeremy Hunt and people running companies on government contracts who believe £100,000 a year doesn’t go as far as you think it might.  Well, mush, it would keep us out of the workhouse for the rest of our lives and we are (or were) relatively comfortable;  just think what it would do to people who are not as fortunate as we are.

And, heaven help us all, the Conservative want to get themselves back into the power they’ve abused so appallingly over the last 14 years.  Since they’ve achieved so little so far, they’re desperate enough to produce ‘knocking copy’ to support the Conservative who’s standing as their candidate to become the next mayor of London. 

Sadiq Khan may not be perfect but does London need a Conservative who produces an advertisement showing scenes of people running away from suspected gunshots through a crowded underground station, captioned “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world”?  Apart from the caption being bollocks, the pictures were actually taken in New York’s Penn station.

Yes, I know the pictures were removed from the ads after thousands of horrified complaints, but they’re the sort of people who thought it was OK in the first place.

And Shamima Begum remains stateless after latest appeal against the removal of her perfectly legal British passport was removed.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

*          This Jeremy Hunt is of course the same person who screwed the NHS when he was Health Minister all those years ago. 

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.

Not-poverty, autism and littering

3 February 2024

Having written about poverty last week, I discovered this week that not everyone agrees with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s definition of poverty.  George Freeman, Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk since 2010, resigned last November from his post as Minister of State for Science, Research, Technology and Innovation claiming that, on his ministerial salary of about £118,000, he couldn’t afford to pay his mortgage when his payments increased from £800 to £2,000 this month. 

So he’s now a backbench MP getting only £86,584 but able to moonlight in some second jobs to top up his income to a level that will cover his modest outgoings.  I thought MPs were paid to work full-time on behalf of their constituencies and digging the country out of the hole it’s made for itself.  If you now listen very carefully, you’ll hear complete silence, which is the sound of blood not dripping from my bleeding heart.

At the other end of the scale, a Delaware judge has ruled against a $56bn pay package ‘awarded’ to Elon Musk saying it is “an unfathomable sum” and is unfair to shareholders.  She also ruled that Musk had “dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan”.

Musk has, predictably, objected and said he’ll move Tesla to Texas where they don’t mind that sort of thing.  He hasn’t made any public comment about how many people will lose their jobs in Delaware or whether he’ll expect them to take a 3-hour flight each way to commute to the new site.

Equilar, an American pay research firm, has calculated that the combined pay of the 200 highest-paid executives in 2021 together were paid one sixth of what Musk is trying to grab, which puts his greed into perspective. 

Regular readers will know I have trouble with big numbers so I tried to get a sense of just how big $56bn is by imagining each dollar was equivalent to one inch (about 2.5 cm for younger readers).  I then piled 56,000,000,000 inches up on top of each other to see how high they would reach.

What I discovered was that the pile would reach the moon, and come back again to earth, and then go back to the moon, and then come back about two thirds of the way to earth.

He’s a strange man, Musk:  obviously very bright within limits, with the money to indulge even the daftest of his whims, he’s far enough along the spectrum to have no contact with reality outside these limits.  However, he does do some interesting things and his neurotechnology company Neuralink, has announced that the first human brain has been given a surgical implant of a brain-chip to help improve the neurological functions that were not working properly;   the patient is said to be recovering well.  It’s been formally approved for human use and sounds like the next generation of the Deep Brain Stimulation implants that have been around for years and ease the pain suffered by people with movement disorders like Parkinson’s Disease and Dystonia.

A cross-party group of MPs reported this week that the financial crisis facing so many local authorities could drag even more councils into bankruptcy, threatening local services, and urged the government to inject an extra £4bn into town hall budgets. 

After a decade of repeated reductions in support from central government and devolving expensive services from central to local government, some of them are now scrabbling around to find assets they can sell on the basis that tomorrow may never come and they won’t need the income these currently bring in or the expenditure they reduce.  In the meantime, of course, our council tax bills go up and up to plug gaps and central government claims it wants to reduce taxes, trying to conceal the fact that they’re already taxing us more heavily at a local level.

In Hertfordshire, Dacorum Borough Council has come up with a novel way to make a little money on the side:  they issue Fixed Penalty Notices to men urinating in rural lay-bys.  Their website proudly confirms they fined 785 people in 2023 for pee-stops, bunching these ‘offences’ along with fly-tipping and other littering.

This raises two interesting questions in my mind, the first of which is “who reports them and what evidence do they provide?”.  Do they arm people with cameras and station them in lay-bys to wait for men with full bladders?  What defence would they offer against a counter-claim of invasion of privacy?  What do these guardians of public order tell people?  (“What do you do at work, mummy?” / “I take pictures of men peeing, dear.”) 

Now deepfake pictures are becoming common, it can only be a matter of time before there’s a picture of Taylor Swift standing at the roadside practising her new-found skill of doing it standing up.  Apparently Virginia Woolf could do it so why not Taylor Swift?

The other question is how one defines ‘littering’.  Most normal people believe that the litter is visible and, in hard-surfaced alleyways and backstreets of urban areas, abandoned urine is obvious to at least two of our senses or, if you slip in it, three, but offenders used to be charged with a ‘public nuisance’ offence, not littering.

Gardeners are told that peeing onto the compost heap adds all sorts of useful nutrients to the soil and the same must be true of roadside verges.  It also leaves no trace and I challenge anybody without a dog to visit a lay-by where somebody relieved themselves an hour ago and show me where the offence took place.

Wouldn’t it raise more money if they fined people who leave their dogs’ droppings on pavements and footpaths?  Some people even bag the dog poo and then cast the bag aside or, even more weirdly, hang it from a bush – I often come home with a plastic bag containing more than our dog produced.

Anyway, normal drivers keep an empty plastic bottle in the car, and a ‘She-Wee’ if appropriate, so they don’t even have to get out.

On a somewhat related theme, a Rhode Island animal charity has promised that, for Valentine’s day, you can write the name of someone you don’t like on a paper heart and send it to them with a $5 donation and they’ll put it in a cat’s litter tray.

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.