4 March 2023
NEVER buy a present from Marks & Spencer for a friend.
I had a present at Christmas, bought at M&S, which looked good but was the wrong size so I drove 12 miles to the nearest store to exchange it, explaining it was a present. “Can’t do it because the barcode’s missing and I don’t know how much it was” said a particularly grumpy sales assistant. I explained the barcode had probably been removed because it showed the price and offered to get an identical pair off the rack so they could read the barcode. “Can’t do it – NEXT!” was their friendly ‘customer services’ response as they looked at the person behind me in the queue.
I emailed ‘customer services’ and the answer was that the stores can’t change things without barcodes and I’d have to buy a new one the right size and return the old ones for a refund.
So I bought a new one and returned the original (still in its pristine packing) to the store where I thought it had probably been bought, explaining the situation and, guess what, they posted it back again (!!) with a standard form of words that I précised as “Bugger off”.
I then wrote to Stuart Machin, their chief executive, explaining the problem again and got a letter from one of his people that I précised as “Bugger off, not even the CEO can override the system”. So I now have to write back and say I didn’t think the CEO needed to override the system but I’d assumed he had the power to authorise an ex gratia refund and/or compensation when his people had been rude and stupid and wasted my time.
If that doesn’t work, it’s the small claims court. If some of us don’t stand up for our rights, big companies just get away with it. All this for a [expletive deleted] pack of socks.
(Check their reputation on Trustpilot – I was shocked to see that 66% of 4,800 customers only gave them 1 star and another 9% only gave them two stars.)
Sadly, we all know what motivates chief executives. The latest affront is BP’s CEO who could get a special bonus of up to £11.4m on top of the measly £1.4m salary and 2022 annual bonus he gets. One leading shareholder has said the payment would be “a blatant grab”. The only sliver of good news is the nominative determinism involved: his name is Bernard Looney.
Which reminds me, I recently heard of a carpenter called Richard Wood and a local doctor called Katharine Gurney. How glad I am that my family name isn’t something like Greedybastard or Draincleaner.
“Blatant grab” is a phrase that could also describe what the European Central Bank fears is happening – the unions are calling it “greedflation” (what a lovely word) – as companies that are keeping wage levels in the sub-basement increase prices by more than their costs increase so they can hide an increase in the profit margin.
As the minutes of the ECB’s February meeting are reported to have said: “Profit growth remained very strong, which suggested that the pass-through of higher costs to higher selling prices remained robust” and they will therefore be monitoring “profits and mark-up” as well as wages. Let me know if you’d like that translated into plain English.
But some big businesses are motivated by power. Take Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire which influences millions of people all over the world. His News of the World hacked phones and some of his Fox News presenters repeatedly lied about the 2020 election having been stolen from Donald Trump. Murdoch himself has admitted in his submission to the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News that he knew Fox News was spreading lies and allowed them to continue. By sheer coincidence, this wasn’t reported in the Times, which he also owns.
The only body that can control this sort of thing is the government and we all know where they’re at. ‘That Woman’ started it all when she started to sell the family silver because she was too stupid to realise that, when you’ve sold it all, you have to eat with your fingers, if you can still afford food.
The most heinous example was her 1980 Housing Act that allowed local authorities to sell council properties to their occupants so we now have a desperate shortage of state-owned properties, huge waiting lists and property developers straining at the leash to build overpriced and overcrowded estates in the green belt. Meanwhile, council houses that were bought by their tenants are now contributing to the shortage of cheap accommodation as today’s owners let them out at inflated rents. This week brought news that Foxtons, the estate agents, are advertising an ex-council flat in Pimlico for £3,900 a month, or £47,000 a year. How many of our incomes are more than £47,000, even before tax?
This short-termism is of course another argument for proportional representation which would give much greater continuity in policies compared with our current electoral system in which policies are based on what’s most likely to get a government re-elected at the next election and policies get shorter-sighted as an election approaches.
Earlier this week, I was talking to a medic who was injecting botox into the back of my neck and she said that the government’s closure of cottage hospitals and rehab unit beds made her “really angry”. More family silver into the capitalists’ smelters. You’ll just have to guess if I agreed with her.
A retired supreme court judge, Jonathan Sumption, once defended his “puny £1.6 million a year” by referring to the much larger amounts paid to comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment – and this was way back in 2001. Anyway, he has commented on last week’s decision about Shamima Begum’s British citizenship. He agreed that, because the law requires the home secretary’s approval to deprive someone of their citizenship, the commission couldn’t override this, but nor was it able to consider what he describes as “the real scandal” of Begum’s exclusion.
Sumption points out that a person cannot be deprived of “British citizenship if it would render them stateless” and reminds us that, although she was 19 when this was done, her theoretical ability to claim citizenship of Bangladesh (because her parents were born there) was provisional and lapsed when she was 21. She never even visited Bangladesh which has now disowned her anyway, so she is now 23 and “As a result of the home secretary’s decision, she is stuck in a camp in Syria, with no citizenship anywhere and no prospect of one.”
He adds “Children who make a terrible mistake are surely redeemable. But statelessness is for ever.”
I feel shamed by what I’m supposed to consider ‘my’ country. Why can’t another home secretary return her passport? What sort of country has Britain become? I’d be perfectly happy to let her stay in our spare room.
I didn’t know that some farms and warehouses use remotely-controlled vehicles but there’s apparently thought of delivering rental cars to their destinations on public roads by remote control. The Law Commission of England and Wales foresees “difficulties in enforcement” which could ban remote driving in the UK from overseas “until appropriate international agreements are in place”. I foresee difficulties, whatever appropriate agreements are in place, caused by the time lag in getting a signal from the car to the driver plus the driver’s response time plus the time taken to get the signal back to the car.
You see the delay when UK-based TV interviewers are talking to reporters in remote countries and the delay can be up about 5 seconds. (Have you noticed the producers tend to switch the picture from the studio to the OB unit about half way through the gap to distract viewers from the delay?)
I reckon this means that two cars heading towards each other, each travelling at 60 mph, will get nearly 300 yards (270 metres) closer, still at a combined speed of 120 mph, in the 5 seconds before the remote-controlled car starts braking, and if there’s a bend or a dip in the road, the cars could be less than 300 yards apart before they can even see each other. Ho hum.
Lesser Mutterings 