Friday 11th October

Statistics never proved anything, they are more often used to distort the truth than to reveal it.  Most of the people compiling or requesting statistics are doing so from a fixed belief, which they are sure the statistics will prove to be correct.  And they usually do.  If they don’t they aren’t used.

A few mornings a week I read City AM, one of the new gospels of those who see making money as the only worthwhile enterprise.  It is beyond right wing, often criticizing Cameron for being too timid on cutting welfare and taxes etc:  It has an inherent belief in both the free market and reducing state regulation to the point that they would be happy to see no Government at all, just a completely free rabid dog eat dog world.  Yet when rogue elements are discovered fiddling rates or cheating they happily blame the watchdogs for not spotting these ‘rare’ rotten apples.

Today’s (yesterday’s) editorial was pointing up the fact that the top 1% paid a huge amount of income tax, almost a third in fact, and that the number paying the top rate had jumped substantially last year.  This proved, so they argued, that lowering the top tax rate from 50p to 45p was the right policy as it actually brought in more tax.  Well, you can’t argue with the figures, can you?  No, but you can argue with the argument.  As usual the editorial missed the blindingly obvious, and it is this.

George Osborne gave his chums in the city, and all the millionaires and high earners a nod and a wink which they simply couldn’t afford to ignore.  He announced (and it is the only time I can remember such a thing) one whole year early that the top rate would be reduced.  Now, most of these ‘high earners’ either directly or indirectly control their own salary; many own their own companies and can simply pay themselves drawings and not any taxable pay or dividends until they choose to, or they have friends on the remuneration committee who share their views and cannot see any justification for giving money to the exchequer that could remain in their paypackets.  Simply by deferring pay, dividends, bonuses etc: into the following year they saved themselves a fortune.  Which actually cost us; the ordinary taxpayer.

Consequently the year ended April 2012 brought in a much smaller amount of tax at 50p, than last year when the rate was only 45p.   Had he not pre-anounced this cut, but simply brought it in on 6^th April 2012 the tax collected at 50p rate would have been much higher.  But that is to completely miss the point of the whole exercise.  It was never about helping pay down the deficit, this was to ‘prove’ that high rates of tax are ineffective.

Thursday 10th October

What is it about these miserable Scandinavian detectives?  Why are we so fascinated by their despair, the slow disintegration of their lives?  Because, awful as we might sometimes feel, hard-worked, unappreciated, lonely and afraid; it is nothing compared to Wallander.  His life is visibly falling apart in front of him.  In the middle of a series of gruesome murders his father suddenly dies and he has no time to grieve even, just snatching occasional phone chats with his ex-wife and daughter.  He lives in a sort of ordered squalor, eats badly and mostly food grabbed on the run.  He works extraordinarily long hours, sleeps badly, and is worried about the disintegration of Sweden’s society.  And he knows he is unhappy and broods on it.

Strangely he is not really a sympathetic character.  We want to read more about him, in some ways we cannot get enough of him, and the narrative is glued to him with the other characters looming in and out of view; and yet we don’t really care for him.  We don’t want him to be happy, we aren’t even that bothered whether and how he will catch the killer, though we know that he will, we just want to enjoy his misery.  And every page or so we are reminded of the awful weather, the cold, the bleak muddy landscape, just to add to the misery our Kurt is suffering.

But when I am reading a Wallander novel I can’t put it down.  There is something about the man that just pulls you in.  It is written by a brilliant author of course, who has tapped into a basic human need; enjoying watching another human being falling apart.

Wednesday 9th October

We have long been witness to a merry-go-round in the boardrooms of large companies.  Where non-exec directors hold multiple directorships, and slip from industry to industry, and lucrative sinecure to well-paid remuneration.  And now this insidious practice has sneaked into almost every walk of life.

It used to just be senior civil servants, but now hospital administrators, the various Of’s, ofcom, ofsted, etc: and all the more senior public and private sector jobs seem to be occupied by a similar rotation of faces.  And in the public sector it is even worse, as there are usually huge pay-offs, redundancies and early retirements.  Central government is forcing councils to downsize, so these posts have to go.  But on the other side of the coin the schools, the hospitals, all need specialist help, especially with the pressure put on them by Ofsted and the Care and Quality Commission.   The solution is that these very same people who were once employed by the local authorities and left with large redundancy packages are re-employed in the ‘private’ sector as consultants, but effectively doing the same job.

Everyone wins – the Government has reduced local government costs, the councils have met their reduced budgets, the schools and hospitals get the specialist help they still need (directly funded from central government with the pupil premium, or as free schools), the private sector can boast the creation of more jobs and the individuals trouser large sums too.  The only losers are the tax-payers and the kids and the patients, as more and more resources are spent on private consultants.

It will be interesting to discover exactly how much public expenditure has actually been reduced in the wonderfully exalted austerity package announced three years ago.  I suspect that far less has been saved than they claimed would have been.  The real savings are in nurses being denied a promised pay rise, in closing hospitals and failing schools.  But of course we are all in it together.  What is IT?  Sh….(the name cannot be mentioned)

Tuesday 8th October

Type Buffy into Amazon and you get Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but for me Buffy will always be that Native North American Girl.   I first heard of her at school in the mid-sixties as part of the Greenwich Village folk scene; someone had an early album of hers, great voice but I thought the songs a bit weird –all about Reynardine and Sir Patrick Spens.

Then in the early seventies came Soldier Blue, the song of the film.   This nurtured a nascent interest I had in the red Indian movement and I rapidly bought ‘Bury my heart at wounded knee’.  I bought a few of her records including ‘She used to wanna be a Ballerina’, ‘Gonna be a country girl again’ and the brilliant ‘Illuminations’.  The first is a pretty straight-forward rock album, the second a great country album and the third is something else entirely; every sound on the record is synthesized from her voice and guitar.  It is haunting, ethereal and wonderful.  She is incredibly versatile.  Add to that a wonderful songwriter whose songs have been recorded by many artists, including a number 1 hit for Jennifer Warnes and Joe Cocker ‘Up where we belong.’

She took a few years out in the late seventies and regularly appeared on Sesame Street.  She has been involved in Indian rights all her life and her latest two albums  were full of Indian chants as well as some very good songs.  No-one has a voice quite like Buffy’s, tender and gentle and yet capable of great strength and passion.  I saw her live a few years ago and at nearly seventy she was still singing brilliantly.

Monday 7th October

No matter how tiring it might be, how long it may take, indeed how tedious it may be, there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of a job well done.   When you look back and can see an improvement, a real change – then it is all worth it.

Hoovering never gives me that feeling.  Yes, I do like to see the neat rows where the thin ended nozzle has been, but unless the carpet was filthy it doesn’t look that much different post against pre hovering.  One of the reasons I love painting is that you can see the change straight away, it literally grows behind the passage of your brush.

I have just finished the ‘annual’ Karchering at the front of our house.  It is paved with red and grey bricks and the car is usually parked there.  Gradually as the year progresses more and more weeds grow between the bricks until it is almost all weed and the bricks are almost lost to sight.  It was bright and sunny, so out came the Karcher.  After some slight confusion trying to remember how the various bits connected together it was time to switch on.  Combining pulling the larger healthier weeds and blasting the little one, and the ingrained dirt and moss it was a slow job.  Brick by wretched brick.  My jeans and old painting shoes were soaked.  I was splattered with mud from head to foot, and a wall of plant-life and mud was driven slowly in a wavering line to the gutter.  Each brick gleamed new and brighter in the sunshine.

Nearly three hours later and it was done.   And it looks great.  The bricks could have been laid yesterday.  And now a cup of tea later, the dirty clothes in the wash, a quick shower, aching fingers now clean and the immense satisfaction of completing a job that needed doing, and doing it well.

Sunday 6th October

When I was much younger and an active member of the Labour Party I met, among many others, a really interesting old Socialist.  At that time there was talk of nationalising the banks (if only) and raising the higher rates of Income Tax to 75% from the measly rate of 60%.  But instead of all that stuff, my old Socialist friend said the only thing that really mattered was housing.  He insisted that this was and always had been not only the biggest problem facing poor people, but the root cause of inequality and working class crime.   If only people were assured of decent affordable housing the other problems would largely sort themselves out.  At that time councils were busy building loads of housing, but this tended to be blocks of flats on huge estates, which ended up rapidly becoming new urban slums.

Then along came Thatcher and she encouraged councils to sell all their council housing.  Great for those individuals who made a profit by buying at a discount; the problem is that every profit results in some-one else’s loss.  In this case the next generation of young couples trying to start a family.  While house prices were quite low and inflation wiped away huge chunks of your mortgage this worked.  But now we have the situation where people can languish on council waiting lists for years, or aspiring home-owners spend a fortune on ever-increasing rents and see their hopes of ever owning disappearing fast.

The Tories latest wheeze, to guarantee 20% of the property price, will not solve the problem.  For a lucky few who get in quick maybe, but long-term it will just push up prices far higher.  It also does nothing for those too poor to ever be able to buy.

The answer is to build and build and build houses.  Encourage the big housebuilders to build as there will still need to be more private houses.  Stop any further sales of council property.  Pump billions into the Housing Associations, provided they build lots of reasonable rented houses.   The down-side will be that like all interventions this will affect the price of houses.  Hopefully stopping them rising so fast, but also no great drop either.

It really isn’t fair for our (my) generation to have lots of assets at the expense of the next one.  And the practice of private landlords buying cheap and renting high should also be controlled.  After a few years of high owner-occupation we have slipped back to the sixties where only the wealthy had houses.  Only difference is there is precious little decent cheap rental property around.  Thankyou Mrs Thatcher.

Saturday 5th October

I am lamenting the demise of the briefcase.  That neat compact and usually small bag which, hard or soft, would sit in peoples laps during their tube journey.  You rarely see them now.  The current fashion seems to be for rucksacks, which individuals stick between their wide-open legs (men that is, women tend to sit with legs to one side and the bag to the other, though taking up just as much room) and consequently block up the aisles.

Or they stand with these ever bulkier bags slung over one shoulder and bumping everyone in sight as they turn to look and see which station the train is at.  Just what are they carrying around in them?  I suspect a laptop and cable, which could easily fit into a briefcase, but also clothes.  Many young people seem to combine going to work with visits to the gym, and so take trainers, towel, shampoo etc. and shorts and spare tops with them on their journey to work.  But this takes up more and more room.  Some days when I am forced to strap-hang (though it is a rail these days) there is hardly any room to stand, and when a seat eventually becomes vacant you stumble over assorted bags and splayed legs to the safety of the vacant seat.  Add to this chaos the number of travelers with cases, workmen with tool-boxes and women with outsize handbags and large carrier bags full of Primark goodies and the tube is a minefield these days.

Friday 4th October

We seem to limp from crisis to crisis.  Has the financial crash of 2008/2009 taught us nothing?   On the one hand Governments around the world are exhorting banks to build up their capital base.  No-one wants another bank to default.  And by any analysis the crash came about because the whole system became overloaded with Debt.

Money doesn’t actually exist until someone borrows it.  This is quite a hard concept to grasp, but it is true.  Central banks ‘print’ money, and allow banks to ‘borrow’ this as long as they have a plan to repay it.  This is by lending it to others, companies or banks who in turn promise to repay it.  The whole thing is built on ‘confidence’.  Even the £20 note in your pocket is an act of confidence by you, that everyone else will accept it as payment for goods or services.  But if suddenly, or even slowly, nobody really had the confidence that that £20 note was still worth £20, then we would be in trouble.

In America, the land of the brave and the free, the home of Democracy, we have an impending situation, which if unresolved will cause a far bigger crash than any seen before.  The real problem is the breakdown of Democracy itself.  We have a large section of the Republican party which simply will not accept that it lost the election for President.  They virulently hate Obama, and the very limited help he is offering to the poorest in their society.  So, even though laws have been passed, they now want them revisited or they will stop America from paying its debts.  And if that happens the whole system of confidence could collapse.

What is it that these people want?  A return to Slavery?  No Government at all, just dog eat dog?  So they are turning the screw on Obama.  All we on the sidelines can hope is that President Obama is indeed the man we believed when he was first elected.  He must stand up to these undemocratic elements, and even if that means himself acting undemocratically in order to save America, and the rest of the world by the way, so be it.

Thursday 3rd October

The Daily Vile has gone too far this time.  And it knows it has.  It cannot quite bring itself to apologise, but has even been implicitly criticized by both Clegg and Cameron.  We are quite used to politicians being attacked, smeared, ridiculed and lied about.  But at least those politicians are still alive and can answer back.  The Daily Vile (Mail for those of you who know it under its former name) has attacked Ed and David Milliband’s father Ralph, saying that he hated Britain.  Ed was furious and demanded a right to reply.  The Vile did allow that, but responded by repeating their original allegations and today are having a four-page spread about the whole row, which they have caused in the first place.

As it happens Ralph Milliband ran away from the Nazis and served in the Royal Navy.  He was a left-winger, almost or possibly a Communist, and he did criticise many British institutions and attitudes.  So what?  There is much to still criticise.  I do it myself.  But in no way do I hate my country.  The main allegations stem from the diary entries Ralph made when he was just seventeen years old.  They then argued that this man ‘who hated Britain’ had also indoctrinated his sons with the same beliefs.

This is the Politics of Absolute Hatred and incidentally of Fear.   In fact Ed Milliband is far more centrist than Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and Michael Foot, and no-one would argue that they hated Britain.

Why does the right wing just get more and more extreme?  Is this some sort of bunker mentality?  Will they come out next and be completely anti-Semitic because Milliband’s family were Jews?  And what about Chuka Umuna, has no-one noticed that he is black, maybe the public need this pointing out to them?    All I can conclude is that they are really running scared, and will do anything to stop Labour winning again.  The silly thing is that by picking this row, they are squeezing out all the ‘good’ press the Tories might get from their conference.   This reminds me of the row about Gordon Brown’s poor writing and how that back-fired; even the rabid racists who read the Vile may be disgusted this time.

Wednesday 2nd October

The Tories are getting pretty desperate.  Despite indications of a recovery on the economy they aren’t recovering in the polls.  They blame UKIP who are polling about 14%.  And wishfully think that if these UKIP voters returned to the Tory fold then they would be back in the mid forties – Thatcher territory at least.  My analysis is somewhat different.  I think that the three main parties have a core vote which will vote for them no matter what, and is roughly Labour 27%, Conservative 30% Lib Dem 10%.  These core voters vote the same way every election and in good times and bad the main parties can rely on this sort of a vote.   The Tories at the moment are on not much more than that, 33- 34% in most polls.  This is its core vote and a few who probably voted for them in 2010 and may vote Tory again.  I think there will be some increase and Cameron will end up with roughly the same vote as last time.  The collapse of the LibDems won’t be quite as dramatic as predicted either and they may end up a few MPs down but with about 15% of the vote.  UKIP will be very lucky to break through anywhere but will upset the apple cart in quite a few places.  Contrary to popular view I think they take quite a few votes from Labour too, but mostly in places where Labour is strong enough to win anyway.

The Tories know this, and their only hope of retaining power is to turn yet again to the Politics of Division.  Their slogan for this party conference says it all.  “For Hardworking People”.   As if anyone would possibly describe themselves as not hardworking.  Inherited millionaires like Osborne of course consider themselves as particularly hardworking.  But it of course automatically creates a fortress mentality.  We are the good guys, fighting against all these lazy people who don’t (won’t) work, and taking all our taxes to feed their drug and drink habits.  And then there are the immigrants, coming over here and skiving on the dole.  It is the politics of division and shows the Tories are really rattled.

But Labour must be very careful, it is a powerful if evil message, and might just work.