Alan's Thunks

Its the rich what gets the gravy

2012-01-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

Before I begin the main text let me recommend http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/12/welfare-cuts-cameron?INTCMP=SRCH,

There are three interesting item of news that got me going.

(i) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/13/tesco-boss-sells-shares-profits-warning

This explains how a senior director of Tesco's sold £200,000 of shares just before the announcement of the drop in profits! One of the defences of this is this only represented 5% of his shareholding. That means his shares are about £4 million pounds. It would take someone on £20,000 a year about 10 years to earn the amount that this director got by selling 5% of his shares.

(ii) http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/14/ed-balls-labour-cuts-pay

Here we have the Labour shadow chancellor of the exchequer agreeing with the freeze on public sector pay. Most people may not be aware but most public sector workers are quite badly paid. Just compare with (i) to wonder quite whose side Mr Balls is on. There are well paid public sector employees, Members of Parliament, judges, some senior civil servants and even some bosses in loacl government and the agencies like HMRC.

Balls is well in touch with the 1992 and even with the era of the Thirties but he seems to have forgotten the lessons of the Winter of Discontent That was caused by an attempt of the then Labour Government to crack down on low-paid and public sector workers. It is possible to argue that this gave rise to Thatcherism. Control pay BUT start at the top not the bottom. One very successful idea was flat rate rises, this really helped the lower paid.

(iii) http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/jan/14/tonyblair-scotland?INTCMP=SRCH

Again from the Guardian:-

£315,000
The amount of tax paid by Tony Blair's companies on estimated earnings of £12m. What a guy. What a guy.

If he paid at the rate the ordinary guy would pay that should come to about £5million.

As I said the rich seemed to live a charmed life and when sacrifices have to be made it is the poor that neck!

Bullying Bosses

2012-01-13T01:21:00.000-08:00

Mr Gove wants to get rid of badly performing teaches quickly. But all he is doing is creating plans that will enable heads to get rid of teachers they don't like. He might himself believe that all badly performing classes are caused by bad teachers but he has, as usual, produced no evidence to support his claim.

In many cases it is the head who is the cause of the problem, it is often when there is a new head who reorganises the school to fit with their prejudices that undermines teachers and their favourites get special treatment and suddenly quite successful teachers find themselves struggling.

The general problem of bosses who surround themselves with yes-people and make life difficult for the others is one of the biggest causes of bad performance in any environment. Of course there are "very bad" teachers as there are "very good" teachers but the numbers in both cases are small. Also not many bad teachers survive for that long, it is a very depressing job if you are not good at it.

A more complex problem is that some teachers are good for some children and bad for others. Recently I came across the situation of a teacher not performing particularly well but then changed the year group he was teaching and found his feet.

Enabling one individual to have that much power is always dangerous, it is always easy to see that with Mr Gove. Why the Liberals agreed to the latest education act which they rushed through parliament is a mystery to me and possibly even to them.

Fraud by the big boys

2012-01-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Did anyone notice the report from BDO about business fraud, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16471820?

I haven't heard politicians campaigning about this.Should we have an anonymous phone line to report businesses we think are cheating. To go along with benefit fraud, they would immediately banned form trading until an investigation took place.

Do you think that would stop companies cheating, I hope so!

Bankers & Politicians

2012-01-08T05:35:00.000-08:00

Mr Cameron wants shareholders to have more say in the pay of executives, but how effective would it be?

One difficulty is that large numbers of shares are owned by large pension funds and insurance companies. The bosses of these companies want the same high rewards as the companies they invest in. So why should they try to restrict the earnings of the people whose income they will use as comparators. One way to avoid this would be to allow one shareholder one vote irrespective of how many shares that individual or organisation owns. I realise that all sorts of tricks would be used to avoid this but basically it would even up the voting and would encourage small shareholders to get involved.

It might also have the advantage of discouraging irresponsible floats on the stack market where owners float a company, take out a huge profit and then watch the performance decline. If they were to lose control over their pay they might think twice.

An alternative might be to give all workers a say in the rewards that the senior staff get. Those who were doing a good job would clearly get rewarded but those who were rubbish would soon find themselves getting poor rewards for their efforts, Those at the top would not like this, they would come up with an argument that nobody would make tough decisions, of course they might have to make decisions which some people will not like. But bosses who cannot make most of their workers understand why these decision is the right one are probably not very good managers.The would never be unanimity but that is not the gaol, the purpose is to get most people behind the decision.

There is a tendency to blame workers for companies failures but this is a very rare, just look at the recent history of company failures. Note that the most successful car plant in the world, at the moment, is Nissan's factory in Sunderland. What this suggests is that British workers are as good as any, it is British management that that fails, why is a more difficult question!

Posh boys

2012-01-05T22:58:00.000-08:00

   Why are people so upset by Dianne Abbot's comments. Her earlier one describing Dave & Nick as two posh white boys was one hundred oer cent accurate.

   I never knew that calling someone white was an insult, perhaps it would be good if it was. But I think that description, especially if you include the third, George, explains their arrogance and attitudes completely.

   What has always me is what "posh" people can get away with. I remember a policeman from the East End saying that some of the vandalism that kids in the East end get sent down for would be just considered high jinks when done by "posh" kids. Despite what anyone says we are a class-ridden society still lead by the ridiculous royal family.

Do leapords chane their spots?

2011-12-30T00:50:00.000-08:00

The BBC was talking about the government papers released from 30 years ago, Riots, austerity and a royal wedding AND the Tories in power.

Note that in all the years of Labour rule there wasn't a riot. It is always the same the Tories screw those who are worse off and then claim the violence that ensues is nothing to do with them!

Why do so many people fall for their propaganda, is is just the press that keeps telling them things or is it the simple belief that things will get better. I wonder how many public sector workers voted for them or their cheerleaders, the lib-cons. They must know that the Tories are out to destroy the public sector, they firmly believe that if you work in the public sector you are useless, but still so many public sector workers vote for them. Can someone explain the contradiction? Why would turkeys vopte for Xmas.

My only conclusion is that they want to believe that leopards can change their spots but they don't, anything to get at the workers. Mrs Thatcher blamed all our problems on Trade Unions, that was why are industries were so bad. So she set about trying to strangle them. She has almost done that in the private sector and see how wonderfully British industry is now doing.

Almost everything that the Tory governments have done since Thatcher has been a failure, it often sounds good but doesn't work. The latest positive sounding move was the proposal to restrict "excessive" charges for credit and debit cards.

Of course large firms will get ground it and probably the only winners, once again, will be lawyers as firms challenge any ruling. To defeat such things the law must simply state that whatever method is used the charge is the same! Some people might lose but the cost of something will always be clear and they will be no way to challenge such a law in the courts.

The firms might be able to argue that it is unfair BUT by doing all their business over the phone or internet they save a fortune, if you operate in that way their is no way to pay other than by cards. So the argument about administrative costs is just rubbish! It is just another way to rip us off and the Tories don't really want to tackle the problem.

On last comment, don't believe the greens are any different, their leader in Norfolk has just come clean and joined the Tories, he is so impressed by them.

Xmas Presents

2011-12-17T00:43:00.000-08:00

Anyone looking for a Xmas present for a bridge playing friend? Let me recommend "The Essence of Defence" by Martin Camina.. A short but useful book to help any bridge player.

Available from m-camina@o2.c0.uk.

It will be a nice Xmas present for him, my big bruvver!

The curious case of the veto

2011-12-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

It is very odd that a right-wing politician tries to stop a very right wing piece of legislation. If one examines the plans of the treaty for fiscal rectitude the only possible descrition would be that it is anally retentive.

As Larry Elliot in the Guardian on Saturday has argued, these proposal will probably condemn Europe to 10 years of stagnation, if not of recession. It would make sense for a left wing government not to sign up or even to seriously try to halt the plans but for a right wing government being lead by Cameron & Osborne it makes no sense. The limitations on deficits will destroy any governments plans for growth or for helping the poor without massive levels of taxation.

It would be interesting to check with current members of the European Union satisfy the restrictions being planned. Perhaps a more educated reader than myself could elucidate this fact. There is also the issue of fiddling the returns, games which both accountants, politicians and economists seem to be masters of. The whole PFI fiasco, invented by John Major's government and adopted so enthusiastically by Blair & Brown is such an example. It pretsens public expenditure id prive!

Unilever

2011-12-09T10:11:00.000-08:00

I have just discovered, the guardian, where else, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/09/unilever-hardball-with-striking-workers, that there is a national strike at Unilever.

We must boycott Unilever products. Guess what the strike is about, doing away with the final salary scheme for pensions. I wonder how many directors have such a scheme.

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many things

2011-12-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

There are so many things that seem to be going wrong it is hard to focus. But let me pick one issue, what do Jeremy Clarkson, Tony Blair, George Osborne and Nick Clegg have in common, apart from being wrong most of the time. They all went to Public School. What do public schools teach people, arrogance, perhaps to put it more politely, over confidence.

It doesn.'t occur to them that they might be wrong, so they go ahead with their plans despite the fact that they are wrong and will probably lead to disaster. Remember they and their friends won't be effected, they have their inheritances to protect them. Almost certainly in nicely set up trusts which will pay no tax.

How can we break out of our love affair with the 10% who go to public schools. Why as a society can we not look behind the facade and see how empty most of these people really are. Perhaps it goes back to when rhetoric was an essential part of education. The point of rhetoric was not to be right but to win the argument, using any "rhetorical" tricks you can find. We still vote for those who present their case best not for those who have the best case.

Look at the the issues that the Tories want to claw back from the EU, they are all about workers rights. They present it as giving the UK more powers and bringing control back to the UK parliament. But that is just for show, it is is about giving employers more power. It was the EU, for example, that gave part-time employees the right to pensions, who gained, largely women who had worked part-time for some or all of their careers. Do the Tories want to give the UK power to scrap that right?

But they do not presnt the case as being about taking rights away from workers, which is what they plan, but about taking rights away from employees

On the rich man's side

2011-12-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

Once again the judiciary have shown that they support the rich against the poor. The recent decision to allow the government to cheat the public over pensions and benefits just reinforces all one's prejudices about English judges.

If you are an employee and have a contract with your employer how cam they can just change the rules. If the government wants to change a contract, let us say over PFI, I am sure the judges will find against the government. How could they possibly change a contract. It would be illegal and unfair, but who would lose out, the rich and powerful, have a change that will screw the workers and somehow that is OK.

The only times judges fin for poor people is when there are no financial consequences for the poor. The trouble is that they only mix with the rich & powerful and have the same set of prejudices as all their public school mates. Is it surprising taht they get cases like this wrong almost every time.

We need to get a system where judges no less law and more about the world and how things really happen. Are there any penalties for judges who get things wrong?

Shooting people is fun?

2011-12-02T04:01:00.000-08:00

I think Clarkson has done us all a favour! He merely reinforces the view that he and his ilk don't care for anyone. We see David Cameron and his big society supporting him. He was only joking, only in the sense that he would actually shoot them. Though I ma not so sure, he would probably enjoy a day of peasont shooting. You could just see the stuffed trophies in his hall.

Would Cameron think I was just joking if I said that we should shoot all Tories, it would be a much more useful activity. About 20% of the population voted Tory in the last election, that would cull the most useless and the most dangerous members of the population. This would leave a stronger and less populated country.

Or an even more pleasant thought, one that has often occurred to me, how about castrating anyone who went to public school. Think of the benefits this would have, do you think there is any chance of getting one of those government petitions up, we would only need 100,000 people to sign it!

Where now

2011-11-30T02:04:00.000-08:00

I have just been for a run and was horrified to see a school open. I think the unions should do a name and shame list. All those schools that have kept open, the school was Angel Road Primary, probably technically junior & infants, but let us not be pedantic. Yoy can tell it is a really up to date school, I just checked their website and this is the opening announcement
"Please note school is closed to pupils on Thursday 30th June & Friday 1st July 2011 for Professional Development days"

Don't the people who run these schools realise that they are just playing into the hands of the Tories. It has always been quite simple, the Tories are about keeping the rich rich and if possible richer. What happens to everyone else is irrelevant, if they get poorer why worry. The serious question is why they persuade so many people to vote for them. It has seemed to me that they are either stupid or greedy. Stupid is clear but greedy, well they think they will become rich if the Tories are in power.

We see them operating in this way, they have just given Mr Branson £400 million pounds. He really needs it. What will happen to that money, it will end up salted away in Mr Branson's off-shore accounts, which I think is appropriately in British Virgin Islands Of course this doesn't just mean his profits but when many of his companies go bust no one gets paid and he just salts away on money he has taken out of the company. For an old version of his antics see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/dec/12/digitalmedia.broadcasting. For a more up to date version see http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/07/virgin-enterprise-off-to-geneva-to.html

So why do people like the head of some schools want to support a right wing government which is trying to screw him, and it is a him, and most of the parent in his school?

Enterprise & the public sector

2011-11-07T22:05:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I went to see the play "War Horse". It is a totally stunning piece of theatre. a large cast, needs a big stage and it was packed, it was a Saturday evening the people next to me had booked in May and this was the first day, 6 months later, that they could get 4 seats in a row. The puppetry of the horses was brilliant and the goose was brilliant, how can you get so much expression into a flapping piece of wood. All of this to tell a moving story about the tragedy of war.

By now you might be wondering what has this got to do with enterprise and the public sector. The play began life in the National Theatre, a national subsidised enterprise. If one believes those of the right it cannot produce anything new and exciting, only the prrivate sector can do that. This is such clear ly rubbish that wonders why so many people keep repeating it as if it were true.

One of the key arguments for austerity is that if the public sector has a large share of the GDP then this will stifle innovation and new developments. The argument is invented by the rich to justify keeping rich and has very little justification. As I have argued before and will probably argue again two of the most revultionar developments in the last 25 years have been the internet and the web, neither of which had anything to do with the private sector.

Swiss Gnomes

2011-11-02T01:41:00.000-07:00

I am old enough to remember when countries were held to account by the "Gnomes of Zurich". If they weren't happy the country went bust! Now it seems to be the "markets". The investors who buy Greek or Italian bonds charge interest, presumably they charge interest because there is a risk if they underestimated the risk they is the penalty and market discipline says that you go under. But not for the lords of the finance houses, not only do they pocket the profits, they pass the losses onto the people whilst keeping the profits to themselves, a great we win you lose game.

But what are the European politicians playing at? The Greek economy is about 5% of the EC, so if the EC wants to bail Greece out there is no difficulty but of course the Greeks are the undeserving poor and they must be punished. An effective solution might be to pay off the Greek debt and then throw them out of the Euro, this would mean they could devalue and get their economy up to strength. All those form rich Europe could pour in and go on holiday. This would give the Greeks a chance to sort themselves out. One of their problems, as with Italy, is the large size of the black economy with people using cash and avoiding paying tax. That will not be changed overnight so the austerity measures might keep the "markets" happy briefly it will have no long term impact. Just remember it took the second world war to get Britain out of the effects of the great depression, not sure anyone wishes to repeat the exercise!

Bankers & Politicians

2011-10-31T04:57:00.000-07:00

The otherI was just reading the BBC News website when I saw an item about Dr Liam Fox. He says that he wants to return to the front bench, he realises he was careless but has paid the penalty.

The chutzpah of the man is almost unbelievable, he is clearly totally corrupt politically and thinks he hasn't behaved badly. Is it the same attitude that the bankers have? Somehow they are so important and successful that they can do no wrong, when they make a mistake it is merely careless not wrong. We saw the same thing happening with MP's expenses, it was just an oversight!

What have I done wrong

2011-10-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

I got this e-mail, can someone tell me what I done wrong

"

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The Useless Lords

2011-10-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

Once again the House of Lords have failed Britain and democracy. What is their excuse this time for letting through the totally iniquitous bill about health. They cannot oppose the House of Commons, the democratically elected chamber.

The difficulty is that the members might be democratically elected but once elected they behave totally undemocratically. There was nothing about health service reform in either of the coalition parties manifestos, in fact David Cameron went so far as to promise that there would be no top-down reforms.

Clearly Clegg, over Tuition Fees, and Cameron over the health service are unreconstructed liars. Surely it is the job of the Upper Chamber to protect the public from such unsavoury behaviour. The need for a proper upper chamber which can take on the dictatorial House of Commons is greater than it has been since Lloyd George set about the early reforms.

There are two issues which need to be addressed, one is the professional MP who will do anything to claw their way up[ the ladder. This will get even worse with a smaller house since even more of the winning side will be part of the pay roll debate.

The second issue must be the role of the public school boy, it is not surprising that both Clegg & Cameron are public school boys who obviously believe that behaving honourably to the public is of no consequence, after all the lower classes are just there to be used and abused. This government shows a complete lack of interest in the poorer members of society, it is all very Victorian.

If Britain want to move into the 21st century it needs to do two thing urgently, create a proper upper chamber and get rid of the monarchy, at least the hangers on and houses they seem to have access to.

Sex or Money

2011-10-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

Reading about the Fox & Werritty affair one begins to wonder quite what the connection is between them is. They seem to have met when Werritty was a student at Edinburgh and he was studying politics and policy. So that they met was not surprising what is surprising is their continued relationship.

If it was just the case of Fox taking him under his wing as a young man with potential one would be less surprised, but by now we would expect Werritty to be a Tory MP, not apparently hanging on to Fox's coattails in the is strange way. Je could have been appointed as a special adviser. Many ministers appoint young people as their gofers. But Fox did not do that so what is going on?

My suspicious mind thinks of only two possibilities, one is that Werritty and Fox are involved in some complex financial scam and that Werritty does Fox's dirty work so that Fox can appear to be uninvolved for political purposes. The other scenario and one that seems more likely to me, is that they are lovers. It is probably still true that within the Tory party such behaviour is frowned on, at least if it is public. Fox is a darling of the right wing and that section of the Tory party is more given to homophobia that the more Liberal wing.

If this were a novel the reality would be that Werritty is the love child of Fox whom he fathered when he was 16 but that is definitely life in a novel but it would make a great story and Fox might even come out of it with some credit!

Growing old

2011-10-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

It has interesting sign of growing old is in the next few weeks I have invited the 60th birthday party at 70th birthday party and an 80th birthday party. I conclude that I am now old. To be honest I felt that when I got to my 70th birthday. It is in the recall three score years and ten that made me feel that way I certainly didn't when I was 40 or 50 or 60.

One of the problems of getting old is that politicians seem so young and innocent but I'm not sure that you can use the word innocent about politicians. Mind you it does not seem just longer young politicians arm badly behaved I was listening to the debate in the House of Lords on the housing and was just amazed at t6he dishonesty some of the Peers showed. they seem to be attending that somehow competition and the market will improve the standards of healthcare. This fails to understand how the market works, it works because those which are incompetent fail and replaced by better companies. the problem with this model in the health service is that by the time company show itself in the incompetent many would die or be mutilated by the incompetence.

To introduce such a radical changes without properly modelling what might happen is quite frightening and shows either an arrogance or ignorance which is quite frightening. When will those who rule us learn to think through the affects of their decisions and rather than jumping to ideological conclusions.

This means me back to the theme of age. Some of us as we grow older and learn to think that consequences of our decisions are often not what we expect. so we try to think more carefully about what might happen when we do something it can sometimes they want to cautious and unwilling to take risks, this can also be a serious danger but the combination of both serious considerations of decision, as well is taking considered risks should lead to much better decision making..

I am trying use the software package Dragon naturally and sometimes seems to try to tell me what I'm trying to say when not Sign anything like I am. For example does "same" sound anything like "Same"? At perhaps when you speak in the voice of an old man who programme just cannot cope.

That is an old man I'm very concerned about the health service because I live much longer when demands of anything much greater and I would not like to think that decisions were taken about my treatment by how much profit the doctor is going to make out of his advice. I believe that George Bernard Shaw considered this problem in one of his plays that perhaps someone who reads my blog and tell me which of his plays it was.

How do polticians get away with it

2011-10-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Liam Fox has not been found guilty and has not been found innocent, so there is an enquiry into his behaviour. If he was a teacher or doctor or even a policeman he would now be suspended until the decision was made. But Dr Fox as a politician and a minister so somehow he is allowed to continue carrying on his duties as a minister despite the fact that there is an enquiring into his behaviour. so the next few months whilst the enquiry takes place he can go on using his office and behaving as he wishes.

It is just interesting that MPs and politicians somehow think they can behave in the worst way than any other public servant. It's just because they recognise that they are a very unimportant people so that they cheat and behave improperly as a matter of no import. It has been the same with respect to their pensions and to their behaviour on the fiddling expenses. Perhaps we will get no one to respect politicians until they learn to behave honourably.

On a completely different note I was thinking about the governments policy on whether people who are ill can work. One of the difficulties is that the government can't really know. So why not let employers organisations make the decision, Obviously if the tax payer is footing the bill they will make more & more people unfit for work. So any funding for people who are not fit enough to work should be paid by employers from a payroll tax. That way they would have an incentive to help people get back to work. They might even find that flexible working for those with health problems would be a really good idea.

The weekend

2011-10-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me what were my plans for the weekend. Well the weekend was as planned. It involved palyng bridge on Saturday evening, driving to Peterborough at midnight. We, that is most of the family and then part in the great Eastern Run. My wife and I only did the 4k run.

I am trying to use Dragon naturally to type this blog but it does not seem to be working very well. I will persevere in the hope that it begins to learn the sort of language that I use and not writing simply random phrases. it is not like the word run and the kept typing of Ron. it seems slightly odd error but it is only a computer and we all know that they are not very bright.

I just say the word "back" and it took a has an instruction so I then have to find a draft of this blog, fortunately I did. What I was going so was was "back" the run. I managed to do the the race in 28 minutes which isn't too bad for an old man. This year I am 70 but because the race is a week later year I will be 72 I really ought to do it again.

I have been following the saga of Liam Fox with some amusement and a slight sense that we have no sense of behaviour of politicians in this country. The discussion seems to centre around whether or not he has broken the ministerial code but it seems to me that he has behaved improperly irrespective of whether or not broken the code. How can he allow a friend to use his office and then take him around the world meeting people as if he was part of the ministerial entourage when the individual had no official position. It might just have been Mr Fox being a nice to an old friend with no possible for all the advantage for himself but it is still unacceptable behaviour for a minister. If he makes such poor judgements about matters of this nature it makes it very difficult to have much faith in the quality of his decisions as a minister. It is interesting that he was recently blaming ministry of defence officials for the problems of the Armed Forces but perhaps these officials are not his friends and so he rather uses them as scapegoats to get himself off the hook. Fox should resign immediately and they do not understand how Cameron allows him to stay irrespective of any further investigation.

When I started this blog I did say that it would be rather random thoughts of an elderly mathematician I think this particular blog lives up to my byline.

Local shopping

2011-10-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I ended up chairing a meeting of the St Augustine's Community group, http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/. One of the Green councillors brought up the issue of a group who have set up a small holding just outside Norwich, http://www.norwichfarmshare.co.uk/share-our-vegetables/how-does-it-work/. You join and do a few days voluntary work and get a box delivered weekly to somewhere in Norwich, in fact quite near St Augustine's St.

It sounds very good but my wife pointed out that in the local shopping centre, Anglia Square, there is a local greengrocer. If we got our box would we stop buying stuff from them, presumably the local produce would not have oranges and bananas. We also have a good local butcher. if we want to keep the community going we need to have local shops and there will only be local shops if we all shop locally.

On the Saturday there was a celebration of Magdalen Street and many of its local shops. It was fun but the weather was probably too good, people went to the coast. instead. One difficulty was that they set up the music under the flyover, obviously a good protection against the rain but the effect of the traffic noise made it hard to hear.

All I can say is try to support your local shops, though it is hard when they aren't very good!

A bad day

2011-09-29T00:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was not a good day in a few ways.

It started in the morning when I tried to log on to my bank account, I won't say which bank as you never know who reads this sort of thing. So thought I should change my password, so did that, though that took longer than it should because I try to use some non-alphabetic characters but it didn't like that. so finished that and it said phone some number. So I did!

Then the trouble starts, you wait for a few minutes press a few numbers, give them the code and then eventually talk to someone. So she asks me for my telephone banking security number. I don't do telephone banking so I don't have one. You can't proceed without one. But I don't want one, eventually I ask for the supervisor, she is just as useless. I try to explain that it is nothing to do with security, There are other ways to check. For example if I want to set up a standing order they give me a number and then phone back to check, big deal. If you lose a credit card they ask when did you last use it etc. No I have to have a number, they will put it in the post for me and I must tell anyone. Though I suppose I would have to tell the banking people so they will know! It would seem likely that anyone who was trying to get into my account, knew my account details and was phoning from my house would know everything else!

All went reasonably well till I was trying to decide whether to go to a meeting, it is held at the most inconvenient time at a place I have to drive to and there was no agenda and the meeting had been rearranged so I wasn't sure it was happening, in the end I decided to do something else useful BUT it did involve the van. It wouldn't start and it seemed like the battery, so I called our breakdown service and they were quite prompt and we put jump leads on and it started OK. But now I am worrying will it start this morning, so I had a fretful night worrying about the van and what is wrong if it won't start this morning ! And worrying about a few other things like writing a book

Also I went into CAB , I mentioned some blogs ago that there was this new database system that was failing. Well the companies who did the work, Microsoft & Logica have admitted that it is not good enough and have put a high-powered team on the problem. We will await further developments. Sometimes people think if you go to a big private companies you will get a good service, private bad public good?

Playing Bridge?

2011-09-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

I used to waste a lot of time playing bridge during different times of my life. I blame it all on my brother who taught me when I was quite young and so when I went to university to study mathematics it seemed a natural way to waste my time. Once during my first year someone asked me if I was resitting my first year. I was a little puzzled by this so I asked why. He said that I seem to spend so much time playing bridge & poker that he thought I must have done it all before!

After graduating I didn't play much bridge for about 10 years and then started again. The trouble is that by that time I was living in Norwich. Norwich is a lovely place BUT everywhere else is a long way away so once you start playing more then just locally it involves a lot of travelling, With two young children going away for weekend seemed a little hard on both the wife, the children and me. So I stopped playing.

Also I enjoy playing but not very competitively, mu favourite form of bridge is teams of four and I perfect evening would be when the scores end of level because everyone has reached the optimal score. A bridge partner of mine was once shocked by this admission, he wanted to win.

There must have been some reason for all this rambling, well the person who sent me on my fruitless quest for perfection at the bridge table, my brother has just written a short book on defence. It is called t "The essence of defence" and I recommend it to you all. It is available only directly from him at m-camina@o2.co.uk. I expect everyone to buy a copy now!

Pensions

2011-09-26T03:37:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts I wrote in 2008., I believe nothing has changed. The politicians, pension industry and the economists just do not ant to think clearly about it.

Do we want those who are no longer economically active to live lives with dignity, if we do then these are the ideas we need to develop.

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~h320/pensions.pdf

A family weekend

2011-09-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

Just had a family weekend. It was my granddaughter's 5th birthday so we we all went camping. It could have been a nightmare and I am sure some people could have made it so but we all had a really good time.

We stayed at a good campsite run by very friendly people , Jacky & Penny. Here is its website http://www.fakenhamcampsite.co.uk/. Beware there is another campsite in Fakenham at the racecourse but that is not the one I am talking about, it might be nice but I have never stayed there no need when I already know a very good one. During the course of the weekend there were about 12 adults and 9 children which is not a bad ratio and there were no arguments and major tantrums. There may have been but I am slightly hard of hearing so if there are I didn't get to hear of them.

It also went well because the mother of the birfday girl organised it brilliantly so that the kids were kept entertained and busy. The weather helped and on the Saturday morning beach fanatics made a trip to the beach, the campsite is in easy reach, by car or bike, of the sea. My main role seem to involve making omelettes, which I must boast, I do very well, the secret it seems to me is to keep it simple. My view is that good cooking is simple but brilliant cooking is very difficult, if that sort of makes sense.

On the Saturday evening some of us watched Tangled, I thought a very clever remake of the Rapunzel story, mind you some of the adults were quite boisterous and badly behaved. This morning they did a performance of their version, the kids that is, not the adults. Anyway I think everybody enjoyed themselves but being 70 sometimes makes it hard to keep up with the kids when they are playing games involving chasing.

When I get the pictures I might even upload some especially as my wife had brought some clothes she had kept since our kids were very young and seeing the grandchildren wearing them was cute. We even had a coat that was made by an uncle of mine for my nephew when he was about 1.

Is Tolstoy right "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."? We were certainly a happy family this weekend.

How do geeks get it wrong?

2011-09-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

I have spent a few days trying to use a new software package that has been developed for a large charity in Britain. The Norwich office had been told that the system would soon be going live,. So the idea was that some of us would be trained and then train the others. All very simple, except the system is very unstable.

How have the geeks who designed the system and wrote the software screwed up so badly. One possible reason is that it is based on a Microsoft product, this is not a good sign. The other issue is always that it is test by experts in a small localised environment, when it goes live it is being used by lots of people, probably more than the system can cope with. Surely anyone working as a computer scientist know about combinatorial explosion, when things grow exponentially rather than linearly. For example with 10 people using the system that is the possibility of about 1000 subsets of people do the same things make that 100 people and the things go batty, that 2^10, which is astronomical.

Another reason is that there are three main sets of people involved, the managers, the programmers and the users and often they don't talk to each other. This is made worse by the interference of salesmen. This goes roughly like this, the managers, who probably know nothing about computing, say we want to buy this. The salesmen say we can do that for you this quickly at this price in order to get the contract. Meanwhile the computer people know that this is not possible but who cares about them, the salesman want hsi bonus.

So the project gets delayed, meanwhile the managers eventually talk to the users who naturally want all sorts of modifications. The managers have no idea what is practical and what is by now not feasible. They got back and the company, who is now worried that are going to make a loss, say we can do this but it will cost a lot. Even if the organisation has its own geeks they will be ignored because they obviously know less than the consultants from the firm who are doing the software, cause they cost so much!

In the end the software is delivered late doesn't work too well AND if you area charity a lot of volunteers walk out because they are pissed off. Mean while the salesman has pocketed his bonus and with luck the other senior managers of the software company have looked after them selves.

Finally do not forget Microsoft who will pocket the licence money whatever happens. My simple advice is don't buy Microsoft and never trust a salesman and certainly never believe an outside consultant.

Loan sharks

2011-09-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

I am being interviewed on local radio tomorrow morning about a new collection point that Ketts Credit Union is opening. So I thought I would do some research on borrowing money. I checked that if you borrowed £250 for 12 months from us it would cost £266,48, at an interest rate of just under 7%. Provident would charge you £455 at an interest rate of 272%, that was taken from their website.

It is horrifying and the government would not do anything about it, whu not because some these companies make big donations to the Tory Party. It is funny when they complain about the influenceof the unions on the Labour Party.

Also credit unions will pay dividends but only if they make any money and their are no fat cats sitting at the top taking large salaries. It is sad that even the chief executive of the Nationwide which is still a mutual, took home over £2,000,000, who needs that to live on?

Alternatives to banks

2011-09-12T15:59:00.000-07:00

Sometime ago the Governor of the Bank of England said that we need some alternatives to banks. He is right and they exist, they are called Credit Unions and they are owned by their members. Many of them, like the one I am involved with, http://www.kettscreditunion.org.uk/, are local and have local collection points.

They help everyone because they are local and try to keep their roots in the community. If you consider our big banks like Barclays, which was once local to East Anglia, is now run by an American who just wants to make as much money as he can for himself. Of course he opposes the Vickers report, it might reduce his salary and profits. He probably thinks having to pay 50% tax is outrageous but sincehe does it by gambling with other peoples money it seems quite low to me.

So get along to your nearest credit union, http://www.findacreditunion.com/, join get involved and help.

The wonders of the web

2011-09-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

I am trying to teach myself various things about using web pages. Every time I think "How do I add a button?" I go to Google and type in "How do I add a button?" and lots of people tell you.

Most of the people tell you for nothing, are most people really good and it just the shits who get to the top so we get a distorted view of humanity.

During the recent trouble, I am not convinced they were really riots, we only saw pictures of people behaving badly BUT I am willing to bet that there were lots of kind things happening but nobody took pictures of those. Recently the police said they were looking though 20,000 hours of CTCV footage. I wonder how much of it contains absolutely nothing of anyone doing harm.

So you are trying to do something, probably quite simple, and you ask the web and lo and behold people want to help, no gain for them. Which leads me, quite naturally, on to the issue of these economists saying that if we tax rich people they will go away. Would it matter, how many of theses rich people, earning over£150,000 a year actually worth and are they contributing that much to our economy. I reckon the ones who would leave will do more good leaving than staying, perhaps they are the ones we should be sending home.

This is taken from http://www.hidden-london.com/lyrics.html

"it’s the poor what gets the blame
A traditional cockney expression of lamentation, taken from a music hall song that dates from the late 19th or early 20th century. The song’s title is rendered either as ‘It’s the Same the Whole World Over’ or ‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’. A 1930 version by Bob Weston and Bert Lee was regularly performed by the comic entertainer Billy Bennett (1887–1942). The lyric exists in varying forms, and has been lewdly adapted for drinking songs, but the gist is always of a country girl who is seduced and abandoned by a wicked squire. Fleeing to London, she receives similar treatment from gentlemen in positions of authority. Finally she throws herself from a bridge into the Thames at midnight. In one version she drowns but in others she is rescued and rises to her feet to repeat the chorus:

It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame.
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure [or ‘gravy’],
Ain’t it all a blooming [or ‘bleeding’] shame?"

I have always known the following which I feel expresses a truth and one verse I seem to recall has the lines

" The working class can kiss my arse
I have got the foreman's job at last"

That's why we can't tax the rich! Whilst most people get on with their lives the rich spend their time screwing everyone else.

Do the sums

2011-09-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

It always amazes me that people just don't do the sums.

There was an item in today's Guardian about the "broken families". Apparently there are 120,000 such families, we have to assume that this is some estimate and rounded figure. Now the government say that they are going to spend £100 million on them with a further £40 million coming form private sources. It sounds promising but how much is that per family?

It is abut £1000 per family, what can you do with that sort of money. There is an excellent charity ATD http://www.atd-uk.org/ that works with families in difficulty. One of the things that have found helps is to call on the families to help them get their kids to school every morning. Wouold this money cover someone going to call on 120,000 families every day.

Now considser the bonuses paid out the city slickers! I can't remember the exact figure but lets say £12 billion. That would give you roughly £10,000 per family. Now you could do some serios good for those "broken families".

If you do the sums you can see what is really going on. What do you expect from a Prime Minister who says there is one ket fact we have to remember the two things are.

Struggling with databases

2011-08-29T18:19:00.000-07:00

Hi

It is nearly 3am and I am trying to understand MySQL. It is odd that in one sense I an make it happen but in another I am lost.

That is I seemed to have created a baby database BUT I don't know where it is. Somewhere on my machine but what is it called and where is it. It doesn't seem to want to exist when command line client is used but when I click on a database it seems to appear. This is all very rambling cause I don't know what I am doing.

Got stuck so I was looking at the Guardian on line and reading about the Gove and free schools. He seems to have arranged for an independent charity, though I use the word with some caution, to get half a million to promote free schools. But we don't have money to pay for summer activities for kids in poorer areas.

The trouble is that I start from some very negative attitudes to the Tories and so it is hard to believe that any thing they do can possibly be good. So when I read about free schools and read that some are in poor areas my immediate thought that this must be a way for a few parents to self select themselves out of going top school with their neighbours in case they aren't very nice. And the people who do that will be Tory voters so obviously the Tories will support them.

When will people realise that the tory party is one great con trick to get money from the poor and give it to the rich!

Foreign Owners and Seb Coe

2011-08-25T14:41:00.001-07:00

Hi

I wonder how many people watched the Seb Coe programme on "Who do you think you are", http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013yx6f/Who_Do_You_Think_You_Are_Series_8_Sebastian_Coe/?

But how many of you thought about the foreign ownership of firms whilst watching it? It just shows how strange some might think I am when watching the bit about Jamaica that is what I was thinking.

At that time Jamaica was making a fortune out of sugar plantations. The profit was large because of the slave trade, but most of us knew that. However the programme made the point that the profits were all exported back to Britain and, it claimed, funded the industrial revolution.

Now turn to modern times, two profitable companies have recently been sold to the Americans, Cadbury and Automony. You always find the CEO thinks it is all great, they usually walk away with millions of pounds. In the short run money get filtered to Britain, but what happens in the long term. The profits get squirrelled away back in the home country of the owner and helps to build their economy.

It does matter who owns what, the politicians, economists and business men who say we shouldn't care are just wrong, we should care because in the end the working lives of most people are at the whim of foreign owners and British business people who want to expand will find it harder to raise funds.

Is that why we have gradually stopped be a nation of manufacturers. How many of the dragons in "Dragons Den" make anything?

All very confusing

2011-08-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

Whilst Libya burns I am worrying about how to make adsense work.

Also struggling to understand php and how to make websites behave properly. It is hard to know where to start with all these things.

perhaps some bright reader can point me in the right direction.

Credit Unions

2011-08-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

Hi

I have become quite involved with Ketts Credit Union, http://www.kettscreditunion.org.uk/. These are locally run organisations which encourage saving and sensible lending.

They are owned by their members, one person one vote. They should be the way forward for most communities. The members savings are used to help those who need loans. I know there are those who don't wish to encourage borrowing but it is better to lend people money at a sensible interest rate they can afford to pay back rather than just rely on charity.

This is particularly true, since the crash and the introduction of austerity measures people are finding it hard to cope. The banks which caused the disaster will only help those who don't need any help!

This way everyone is some sort of winner. There is a danger that if they get too big they become like banks with lots of paid employees and no local community.

Ketts cover some of the most deprived parts of Norwich, in terms of the Deprivation Index 16 out of the 25 most deprived parts of Norwich are covered by Ketts. For more information about credit unions see the ABCUL website, http://www.abcul.org/home. There was also an article in the Guardian money page this weekend.

I have tried to use adsense for my blogs, this is not to make me money but to try to help build up capital for Ketts, so please spread the word.

Why the rich should be poorer

2011-08-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

Given the riots there has been much discussion of the inequalities of wealth distribution in Britain, and the US. The rich always try to argue that it wouldn't help to make the rich poorer, but they would wouldn't they. A bit like the founder of Autonomy saying there is no problem with selling the company to the US but he has just made 60 million!

Trying to find up to date figures for the UK GDP gives slightly different figures but it is roughly 1.5 trillion pounds. that gives, also quite roughly, £25,000 for every adult and child in the country. That would suggest a family of four ought to be worth about £100,000. Let us halve that for the needs of the country, you still get a figure of £50,000. So what has gone wrong.

It is quite simple, the rich are too rich. The solution is of course not so simple. One of the arguments is that the rich have worked hard to achieve their wealth. That is rarely true, most of the really rich in this country have inherited their wealth, see David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg. Note also that many very rich families put their money onto so called charitable trusts so they do not appear to own the money but the trusts only give money to the family!

The myth of the self-made millionaire isn't quite a myth but they are very rare. Very few people start with nothing and become really rich

MP's and Rioters

2011-08-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

MP's and Rioters what' s the difference.

It is sometime since I blogged, too much time playing silly games & going on holiday but I was contemplating the smug face of David Cameron on tele yesterday and wondered what the differnce between him and the woman who was given some stolen goods. That is the one who was sentenced to prison and then released and given community service.

Then there werethe MP's who were claiming for things they shouldn't, what happened to them. They paid the money back and were forgiven, well at least by them selves. It might be argued that what they did wasn't criminal but of course they are the lawmakers so of course they decided it wasn't criminal.

It is the same with pensions, public sector pensions are too generous. Who hs the most generous public sector pensions, why the MP's but when it was suggested that they should have the same changes as everyone else, they said that would not do!

men & lawyers

2011-05-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

Are all lawyers sexist, even the female ones?

I was getting more annoyed at this rubbish about privacy, highly paid wankers claiming that they are protecting men from the consequences of their actions. The idea that stopping the truth about someones sexual relationships will damage the children so they must be protected.

If some bloke want to spend his time having sex with a person who is not their partner that is entirely up them but if they are lying about it then they should have thought about it in advance.

Probably most of the time, the women only have the affairs because they are being paid and the bloke id famous. If that is why the get the bird they they should live with the consequences, they get the benefit of the fame, they should have to live with the consequences.

It is odd that it is male judges who want to protect rich male blokes, isn't that odd. Of course all these lawyers are making a small fortune out of it so why should they want the law cleared up.

The whole thing smells and then nasty piece of work goes on Newsnight and says that those who name the footballer whose privacy he defends should have their privacy destroyed, is that only because they are not paying him. I am afraid that the legal profession, and that is a questionable expression, are only interested in money, if someone pays them enough they will say anything.

How stupid can I be?

2011-05-09T16:29:00.001-07:00

The wife is out delivering leaflets on a Sunday morning, I am busy trying to do something useful when the phone rings! It is the wife saying that she has been bitten by a dog, will I come & get her.

Of course I say yes but explain I am not dressed yet. Si I get dressed and leave the house but I walk, after all it isn't far. Obviously I was meant to get the car and take her straight to A & E . Where was I, somewhere else, so I walk at a reasonable pace but what made me not get the car.

Anyway we got home and then I drove her to A & E. She got her had grabbed by a dog when she pushed a leaflet through the door.

As a result of the bandaging she mustn't get her hand wet or bend her finger , so cooking, washing up are allactivities which she can no longer perform. I don't suppose it would have made any difference if we had got to A & E any earlier.

Might write about the election soon but past my bedtime now.

It is truly nauseating

2011-04-29T00:18:00.000-07:00

My wife wanted to look at the pictures of the wedding and all the buffoons waiting to see it. Then we were told how lucky those waiting overnight had been because Harry & William had come and talked to them!

It represents everything wrong in our society and probably in the world. It is odd that Nick Clegg has recently objected to people getting internships because of the family connection, but I bet he goes to the wedding! How else did William & Harry get to be so important, they were selected by competition, not really, they were born into a family. Their positions are entirely based on who their Daddy was!

Then there is some sort of claim that this is a private wedding, how come all the troops are parading through the streets, are the families paying for this. Since both William & Harry are supposed to be serving officers you would thinks they might be ashamed of having soldiers parading as a spectacle for the worlds foreign leaders whilst their colleagues are risking their lives in Afghanistan. I would be surprised if they have even thought of it.

Last night there was a programme about Bobby Charlton, a man we have heard of because he had real talent. He came across as a guy who appreciated his luck in being talented with perhaps not quite appreciating how talented he was. True he was born into a family of miners and footballers but he still had to do something to get where he is and the respect he now has.

It is a bun feast for the rich and well connected paid for by the poor, as usual. It represents privilege and wealth, the poor can wait overnight in the rain to watch and the BBC cannot be more grovelling and advertising this "wonderful" event. I dreamed that lightening struck the abbey and that it came tumbling down and I thought that would be a wonderful event, allthose bloodsuckers eliminated in one go! But I woke up:(

Fortunately Norwich, the city I liver in, seems to be more sensible, nobody seems to care, the shops are open and when I asked in the barbers there seemed little response, not even aware that it was a bank holiday.

Clegg- Man or Mouse

2011-04-22T02:17:00.000-07:00

Delivered to my door was the literature for the no campaign. The final page is a complete demolition of the Clegg!

This is a campaign led by, his erstwhile co-conspirator in the destruction of the British economy, David Cameron. How come Clegg accepts this abuse, if I were him I would not have responded so calmly. My assumption is that Clegg would do anything for the trappings of office, even being shat upon from a great height by his colleague. Though it is clear that the relationship is more that of lord and servant, Clegg being almost below the salt.

The paper this morning suggests that the Lin-Dems will just accept the defeat and soldier on. Their ministers just doing as their told by their Tory masters. This is not a coalition but an annihilation. I suppose we can wave goodbye the the Lib-Dems for the next 50 years as a force in British politics unless they revolt pretty soon.

His performance on morning television defending AV was pathetic, allthe wrong arguments and in no way attacking Cameron and the rest. As someone pointed out in the Guardian yesterday, Cameron would no be leader of the Tories, nor as a consequence the Prime Minister, if the Tories chose their leader by a first past the post system. It is interesting to observe the double standards that leaders are willing to use. To get me in power in my party AV is good but to get my party in to power, first past the post is best.

Is the public stupid?

2011-04-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

I was just reading the Guardian online. They has a report of the latest opinion poll about the referendum. it says that 16% are now against AV!

I found this quite depressing, the no vote literature can through my door and I thought it was clever but mostly misleading, if not downright lies. so why has it been effective.

The main point is that it is simple. One of it claims is that the first past the post is simpler and easily understood. That is true but simplicity is for the simpleton and though it sounds good it is not very good. For example, Simon Wright on the Norwich South election is 2010 despite the fact that over 70% of the electorate voted against him and that was just of those who voted. It might be simple but it gives daft results.

They also claim that only three other countries use the system, yes that is true but most use a more complex system not a simpler system. They also claim the current system is cheaper but I don't know why. We could do what the French do and if no one gets over 50% they have another election, the alternative vote is just a neater way of doing the same thing.

Another statement is that it has done us OK in the past.Is that really true, when we get huge majorities in parliament with parties have mote than 60% of the electorate voting for them. What we have in this country is elected dictatorships with a limited life span. Who voted for the Iraq war, who voted for the poll tax, how many voted for a huge rise in tuition fees. Are we really a democracy.

Note the Tories want bigger constituencies, thus making it more likely that we get MP's forlife with more and more of the population having no effective vote. All I can say wake up to being conned by the Conservatives and the dinosaurs of the labour party. Notice that those from the Labour side are all past it, Lord Reid, an old communist, never known for supporting democracy.

Why have two

2011-04-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

They seem to look alike both are owned by google but they are different sites

Perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Found it

2011-04-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

I seemed to have posted it to a different blog site All very distressing

Here are the missing blogs

Lamb to the sluaghter

We have had the unedifying spectacle of Norman Lamb changing his mind. Norman Lamb is the Lib-Den MP for North Norfolk and right-hand man to Nick Clegg. You might have read in the papers, or seen on tele, that he is against Lansley's plans for the NHS. My advice is do not believe a word he says.

He represents a district which is having local elections and the Lib-Dems are doing very badly. He has now worked out that the NHS is a major stumbling block for the Lib-Dems. So how he is now against the plans. As Mr Clegg's personal adviser he did not tell Mr Clegg that the plans were wrong and would be unpopular before. Also he voted for the bill in the House of Commons so how has he suddenly realised that he would be willing to resign his position over it.

Let us be clear he is really in favour, even his objections seem to be about speed not the fundamental idea. It is not even clear to me he has any views at all on the subject, he will just go along with the bosses unless it threatens his popularity with his own electorate. It is important to remember he was once a lawyer, this means that he will argue for any case his client wants, whether he believes in anything is totally irrelevant.

He voted for the rise in student fees despite having signed the pledge but argued that Simon Wright, who used to be his gopher, should vote against the rise because he had a big university in his constituency so it would be sensible to allow him to vote against. Mr Lamb who did not have many students in his constituency did not have to worry.

What we see in Norman Lamb is a many with no values and no principles, when in opposition it was easy to get away with it; he could promise anything to anyone and nobody would know what he really was going to do. My guess is that the government will tinker with Lansley's plans, make it sound a big deal and Norman Lamb will cheerfully vote for the plans without a moments hesitation. This will of course be a few months after the local elections.

Arsenal & English football

I have not blogged for some time but the takeover of Arsenal has inspired me. What is left of the English premier league except that it is played in England. How many English managers are there? How many English players are there and who owns the club? I find it odd that so-called English premier teams have any English fans. But is it not symptomatic of the English disease. We no longer own anything, manage anything are, most of the time, produce anything. We are consumers and heavily in debt, as individuals. The government and the experts keep going on about the national deficit but ignore the private debt because without it we would be totally screwed.

I am sure many of the fans will be pleased if they think the new owner will pump money into the club but does it make sense to support a team which is just an excuse form some rich man to have as his play thing. If he is lucky he will make money out of it but it will be the suckers at the turnstile and in the pubs who are paying him. We had an outcry when Krafts bought Cadbury but with football teams it doesn't seem to matter. They bring players from overseas, not giving local players a chance to develop, they employ foreign managers and still don't succeed. We wonder why we do badly at international football, well why would a foreign manager of a premiership club ever consider the needs of the national English team.

There are a number of points, do we not train enough English managers, there are not that many premiership clubs, are our footballers not good enough and why don't English billionaires want to own football clubs. We don't train people to manage things which is why so much of industry is owned by foreign companies.

There was an item on the news today about Longbridge. It is producing cars again, even one's designed here BUT and it is a big but, the only other thing we do is assemble them, everything else is done in China and the whole thing is built in China.

When is Britain going to take education and training seriously, especially with repect to manufacturing industry.

lost blogs

2011-04-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

Hi

Iam very confused, I blogged a couple of days ago and the they have just vanished. Did twoon one day and have I blogged them somewhere else.

This is all very confusing, one was about the Arsenal sell out and I expected a response from at least one charming Arsenal fan, if not a few more.

They are not even save as drafts, so where did they go :(

Why do religious sometimes irritate me?

2011-02-21T21:25:00.000-08:00

The other day I spent time at a party where there were a number of religious people! In the end I find them irritating unless we can find some other graounds for common interest. They are often nice, intelligent kind people but there is something which worries me.

Perhaps it is in the end that religion, certainly those derived from the old testament beliefs are about man's vanity. Probably man is appropriate rather than human. They exist in a world where man is humble before god BUT god created man in his likeness. What this does is to elevate man above all other creatures on earth. So the faith justifies the superiority of man above all others, so feeds mans vanity.

We have the spectacle of Anglican bishops flocking to the Church of Rome because they don';t want to have women bishops, what greater outporing of man's vanity could you expect. This is all done in the name of religion. Added to this as the wonderful claim that the chosen book, whether it be the New Testament, the Old Testament or the Koran are really the work of god so cannot be questioned. But god has only given this status to man so we can lord it over others, whether the be mice or elephants.

Perhaps the animist religions are less susceptible to this vanity of man but I must admit to some ignorance of these faiths, similarly Hinduism, but it seems to have some difficulties with caste system, creating superiority amongst humans.

Is it it related to the difficulty we have of accepting that we have no purpose and are just an accident. We just want to think that man is more important than a flea or a tree. So a belief in god who has made us makes us important and feeds our vanity. One has only to watch or listen to those who have climbed the tree of organised religions to feel the vanity they exude, even when expressing humility before god, there is very little in their attitude to their fellow man.

It is OK to believe if it makes you a better person and for some that might be true but when it turns into a crusade against others or even a belief in your own self-importance it it is the slippery slope to arrogance , which should always be avoided

Munich by mistake

2011-02-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

It is curious that David Cameron made his racist speech in Munich. Was that a mistake but did the resonance with Hitler chime with his own views.

Notice that he only attacked extremist Islamist groups not extremist, Jews, Christians or Hindus. All of whom have some views which are antagonistic to British values. Very recently some Christians were taken to court for not allowing a gay couple to share a bed. Mind you it was not so long ago that the gay couple could be sent to prison for wanting to share a bed. Not so far from some of the extreme Islamist views, there were even those advocating chemical castration of homosexuals. It was not so long ago that people like Alan Turing felt so hounded for his homosexuality by the law, he committed suicide .

Then there are the Anglican bishops who left the church and joined the papists because they oppose equal rights for women. How come the churches, of all varieties, are allowed to ignore the legislation which applies to everyone else. The real problem is not any particular religion but the inordinate respect that is given to religious views.

But somehow it is OK to criticize the brown skinned religions rather more than their white skinned varieties and that is just racist. You have to remeber who Mr Cameron has allied himself with in Europe to understand that civilisation does not run very deep in the modern Tory party.

Can't Trust the Times

2011-01-18T02:03:00.000-08:00

David Aaronvitch gave the game away on Andrew Marr's programme on Sunday morning. They were talking about the phone tapping scandal at the News of the World. It is an interesting story that goes to the heart of why the media cannot be trusted. However one would have thought this would be a big story in the Times, after all it considers itself a major reputable and reliable newspaper. Many misguided people still read it, presumably thinking that is is an honourable newspaper, forgetting that it is controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

So how did David Aaronovitch give the game away. Very simply, as a journalist working for the Times, a paper owned by the same Rupert Murdoch who owns the News of the World, admitted they could not cover the story. Might possibly cover if it goes to court but not before that.

It is quite clear that the Times is not a newspaper but a propaganda sheet for Mr Murdoch. The journalist who work for his newspapers are publicity officers not journalist. It becomes clear that cross media ownership should be outlawed, no one organisation should be allowed to own more than one daily newspaper and certainly there should be no cross ownership across media.

For example when was the last time the Sun or the Times crticised Sky television programmes, or for that matter did not attack the BBC. Remember that they are all psrt of Rupert Murdoch's empire .

Charity & Giving

2011-01-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

The Tories want us all to give more to charity. But want the public to to make up for cutting public sector spending not because they believe in being generous.

If they did we would see how much they give to charity themselves. There are lots of millionaires in the government so how much do they give individually. Surely Cameron could give a lead by not taking his salary as an MP and Prime Minister. Or at least giving it away to so a charity.

They are just a bunch of hypocrites, it would be interesting to compare the cost of raising money by charities and the cost of raising the money through taxation. but then the politicians give money away to the rich by allowing them to cheat on their taxation.

As we saw in the last parliament politicians are more interested in lining their own pockets that in looking after the interests of their electors.

House of Lords

2010-12-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have always believed that it was just a retirement home for old Tories and recent events have convinced me that it is time to get rid of it. Why what has just happened to reinforce my prejudices. Well can I recall an occasion when they have rejected Tory legislation. No, they vote loyally for the Tories and they always get their legislation through.

The recent bote on the education bill was the recent event that convinced me. We had silly old war horses like Lady Williams, she can always talk the talk BUT has never in her life done anything right. She was incompetent as a Minister of Education under Callaghan and she has got everything wrong ever since but she stills sits in the House of Lords and votes with this Tory government. She used to be against fees and academies but she manages to vote for them.

How long did it take the previous government to get he fox hunting bill through and that was in the manifesto. The nature of the house of lords is conservative. This is because people are appointed for life and many older people don't like change. They still somehow thing that the Tories represent a return to the old values which they were brought up with.

That is the trouble with the House of Lords, the idea is that because they are their for life they can vote for what they believe in but no they follow some party line. And they get older and older and as someone who is also getting older, many just think things were better before.

If we are going to have an appointed house like this then the least we could do is to only allow limited terms with no reelection. It shouldn't just be a gravy train with a title. Some of us recognize that there is a time to slow up and stop taking the Queen's shilling. Seven years would be quite long enough AND they should lose their titles afterwards.

Localism

2010-12-16T05:44:00.000-08:00

It is wonderful, Mr Pickles the man Bradford rejected preaches localism. What does he actually do! Denies Norwich the right to local government, we are now ruled by people from 50 miles away. Then he says councils can save money by sharing services, so we will be ruled by people from 100 miles away.

Back at the ranch, his erstwhile colleague, Ken Clarke, is closing local magistrates courts. So , in this area, Thetford, Swaffham and Cromer courts will go. That will make people feel that decisions are much closer to home, much more local.

Let us be clear localism only applies where it saves money, there is no great principle at stake, just the usual Tory philosophy, when you have an excuse cut, cut and cut again. What is interesting is that the Lib Dems back all these policies. The only difference seems to be that the Lib dems claim to support Europe.

The police & demonstrations

2010-12-14T09:56:00.000-08:00

The met are up to their tricks again, attacking people, klettling thenm & then baming the demonstrators.

The trouble goes back to Thatcher. this might seem an odd claim but many actions have long-term consequences, something that politicians never think about. During the miners' strike the police were politicised. It was no longer their job to protect the people but to attack them to defend those in power. Thgat is the stance that Paul Stephenson takes. remember he was appointed by that well-known nutter Boris Johnson.

You can tell Stephenson is exaggerating & lying to protect his position and those of his more thuggish allies in the police. He manaaged to say that some of those arrested were horrified at the damage they had caused, after they had been shown film of their actions. This does not sound like people going along to demonstrations to cause trouble BUT people caught up in the moment and probably very frustrated by the irresponsible behaviour of the police.

Of course for either the police commissioner or the mayor to admit this would be accepting their own incompetence. This hows the danger of elected police commissioners, they would behave in the same way, any admission of getting things wrong would be disastrous to their chances of re-election so the standards of policing will go downhill, quite slowly but steadily.

The police screwed up badly in London but the media will protect them. You can see all the fuss about the buffoon Charles. The BBC kept referring not to him, but the heir to the throne. Somehow this ought to make it more serious but of course heirs to the throne are two a penny. I am sure that those who know the rules can probably tell who is 25th in line. So there is no shortage op candidates for the throne.

How does it help?

2010-12-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

Student fees are a big topic at the moment, the LibDems are going back on their pledge. but lying to try to save their bacon.

They keep claiming that there system is fairer but how. OK you won't pay anything back till you earn over £21000, they don't make clear at what money, now or then.

But the true inconsistency of their argument is that since you only pay it back once you are earning it should not put anyone going to University. But now they are saying the poorest, and it will be the poorest, won't have to pay for the first year and that if they go to an expensive university they will get another one free. So two people with the same education, same job and earning the same will have to pay back different amounts depending on the wealth of the person's parents. The LibDems strike again.

Then we have the problem of bureaucracy, which they claim to be against. How will the scheme operate, what happens if your parental income is above the threshold when you start or below it when you finish. Will it depend on whether you had free school meals, the for the whole time you were at school or just in your last year. What about people who could have had free school meals but didn't.

If they really wanted to help those on low incomes there are two things they could do, keep the education maintenance allowance and increase for students in higher education.

But no they really are only concerned with making sure that the wealthy stay wealthy but have to provide a sop to those suckers who thought they were mildly left of centre to find that they are well to the right.

It is quite clear from this, as was well understood by those who have seen them in action in local elections, they will say anything to get elected. Normally they don't so they don't have to do anything about it

Happines

2010-11-28T15:47:00.000-08:00

Some of you will know that the British Prime Minister is spending money to find out what makes us happy, presumably not including drugs, sex & rock and roll.

My simple view was the following recipe:-

(A) Knowing what you want to do

(B) Being able to do it

There should be a third

(C) Minimizing the amount of time doing things you don't like

However my daughter replied

"you may be looking at the happiness thing all wrong - which seems likely given that it is David Cameron's idea. I think 'happiness' is momentary, or situational at least. I think the question is 'content' which I think the PM can't use because we align contentment with lack of drive and/or ambition ' content with your lot' is considered a bad thing, where as being happy is considered good.

But I think it is a more relevant question, I can be very unhappy at this moment, something sad may have happened, but I am overall content. And I agree, knowing what you want and being able to go for it is a key thing in making one content, but knowing you need food and knowing you need to go and queue at a homeless shelter to get it?

We need to think of Maslov's hierarchy of needs (unfortunately), I think there s a point at which poverty and ill health do impact on happiness, although I accept 'money doesn't buy you happiness'."

This moves the original simplistic observation onto a new level.

Tell Ireland to go hang!

2010-11-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

There is no way we should be borrowing money to bail out Ireland. Their politicians are a bunch of crooks and they bribe companies to pretend they are based there for tax avoidance.

Their corporation tax rate is 12.5%, by far the lowest in Europe, so lots of companies headquarters
are in Dublin, isn't that funny. I wonder how many of the companies who export to Ireland are based there.

I feel sorry for the Irish people who have been led up the garden path by their bankers and their politicians, let alone the bishops and priests. They do vote for them and it seems often listen to the views of the priesthood, both groups whose only concern is themselves.

Where is Mr Osborne going to find the money, presumably we will have to borrow it, surely we could could just guarantee a loan and let them borrow it! If he is willing to borrow that much let us use it for something really useful , rather than lending each Irish person about £2000.

Cables Stitch up

2010-10-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

It is clear that Vince Cable is lying through his teeth. His proposals on student fees will save the government almost nothing in the short term The claim that students will not have to find the money up front means that the taxpayer will have to find it, so no decrease in governemnet expenditure.

So this is part of a long-term Tory plan to only allow the rich to go to university, once again the desire for power is turning the Tories into cover for the right-wing Tories.

Vlegg & Cable the game is up, you have sold out hook, line & sinker to the Tories for your 15 minutes of fame. Sad but true

History and the lessons no one learns

2010-09-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

This is getting boring, the commentators keep going on about the deficit. It isn't surprising the public thinks it is important BUT it isn't.

Keynes realised that there were many lessons to learn from the twenties and thirties of the last century and the lessons still hold true. The first and perhaps, the most important, is that an economy can run in a stable manner with high levels of unemployment. The market does not mean efficiency. The difficulty is that once it has reached such a level it needs something to get it onto a different level. In the past it has often been war but not a solution to be recommended.

The other lesson is that cut public expenditure merely reinforces the situation and the economy can be stuck at an even lower level of efficiency with even higher levels of unemployment. This will depress wages and many people think that this will lead to greater employment. It seems obvious but like many such obvious comments it isn't true, wages might get lowered but so does the economy and so there are no more jobs. It is the same argument with the claim that public expenditure absorbs resources that the private sector can use. This again might make some sense in a booming economy but when the economy is depressed there is little need form the private sector for investment.

In time it would probably be good to bring the levels down but not in the short term. There are much more pressing problems, inequality being the major one. There could be two ways to tackle this, bring down the rich or promote the poor! The difficulty is the rich don't want either and will fight to stop anything happening. Adding to this is the observation that it is the rich who seem to represent us in the media. Listening to Andrew Marr worrying about the deficit is quite funny in an odd way. How much is he going to suffer, perhaps the privately owned media will get the BBC to cut wages. Of course the more you can suppress public sector wages the better. Mr Marr is supposed to be educated, independent school and Cambridge but it was only a degree in English. You would think he would be aware of the myths about the deficit, or at least his researchers would.

No, he just trots out the Tory line as if it were true, it would be interesting to know as he says he was a raving leftie at university. Perhaps at Cambridge it means he was opposed to hunting! His not exactly known for accuracy, how much did he have to pay Erin Pizzey

I am sure that Rupert Murdoch would like to see wages at the BBC cut because then he can pick up staff on the cheap. Perhaps that is what Andrew Marr is hoping for, a nice little contract with Rupert Murdoch

Private Fraud?

2010-09-08T22:44:00.000-07:00

I get more & more incensed by the lies and petty deciets of those in the private sector & their political supporters. Note the recent support for Bob Diamond and a man who has managed to make a fortune by gambling with other peoples money. Then somehow claiming that he is clever & able, rather than just lucky. Then there is the neat claim that he helped Barclays avoid the government bail out but people seem to forget that they were bailed out by a middle eastern government.

I quote from The Independent of the 1st November 2008
"Barclays faces the possibility of an investor revolt after announcing it is taking cash from Middle-Eastern investors, at a hefty cost, as an alternative to accepting the UK government bailout which its rivals HBOS, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland are benefiting from. The bank, which last month turned down the Government bailout offered to the sector, announced yesterday that it will raise £7.3bn from investors in Qatar and Abu Dhabi"

Further quotes
"

The reason the future of Barclays is in the spotlight is that no one believes a word a banker says, writes The Evening Standard's Robert Lea...

But Barclays' major investors, the Abu Dhabi royal family, have released documentation which reveals that if the UK Government were to make a move it would trigger a clause which would not only deliver the bank into the hands of the Middle Easterners, it would also stipulate that the taxpayer would have to pay way over the current price for the shares.

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/markets/article.html?in_article_id=469329&in_page_id=3#ixzz0z0dyTSaY"

So let the commentators tell the whole truth and not pretend that there is something wonderful about the way Barclays Bank has been managed and the Mr Diamond is nothing less than an old time spiv.

Here is another example,
"Transocean dismissed BP's report, accusing the oil giant of having designed a "fatally flawed" well and making "cost-saving decisions that increased risk - in some cases, severely"."

How come if the rig was so badly designed were they willing to run the rig and risk the lives of their workers. It would seem obvious that the owners of Transocean should be charges with negligence at least and homicide at worst.

Myths and political lies

2010-08-13T23:55:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to speculate on the difference between a myth and a political lie. The current government is trying to pretend that the reason for their current policies is the failure of the previous government to bring the the deficit under control and that it is all much worse than they thought. This is clearly a lie, the deficit is slightly better than predicted by the previous government.

By telling this lie and by keep repeating they hope to persuade people that there vicious attack on the sate is not their fault. Of course it is and it is part of the right-wing philosophy of the Tories. The Lib-Dems are like rabbits in car headlights, they are totally fascinated by the appearance of power and can't resist. So we have a new myth that will arise, how the Labour Government wasted the countries resources recklessly. The fact that the country would be in a sever depression by now without those measures is totally lost.

This is just another myth to add to a list of lies and myths that the right-wing like to spread. Usually with the support of a right-wing media. One of the earlier ones is the idea that the 60's was a creation of a free & easy moral permissiveness of the Labour Government under Harold Wilson. There is a glimmer of truth in that but the beginning of the trend was the government of that other Harold, Harold Macmillan. I can remember the election campaign of October 1959,
“Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good.” This was a government which ended in 1964, half-way through the 60's, with scandals of a sexual nature. That was the beginning of the moral permissiveness. As was his decision to legalise gambling and create betting shops.

These were good things to do, it took gambling out of the criminal classes and made it easier for people to gamble legally. It was Harold Wilson's government which went on to legalise homosexuality and make abortions legal. These were following on from the previous Tory government but the seeds for the liberalisation of our laws had been set in motion. There are important lessons for today in relation to drugs. We just have to accept that the criminalisation of drugs has failed to stop people using them so we must move to decriminalise their use.

To my final example of myths about the Labour party and lies told by the Tories. It was a Tory government that came back from Munich waving a piece of paper in the air and claiming peace in our time. It was the leader of the opposition, Clement Atlee who opposed the treaty! Yet Mrs Thatcher. for one, always seemed to claim that the Labour party wasthe party of appeasement when it was the Tories, remember they were in power for the whole time that Hitler was in power in Germany.

The Tories learned a lot of lessons from the Nazis, one of which is to tell big lies and keep repeating them. Truth is something which many politicians find a difficult concept but I am afraid that the Tories seem to find it harder than most.

politicians and lies

2010-07-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to note how easily politicians tell lies. A recent example has been Mr Cameron who has said how difficult it was to cancel the building programme for schools. Of course it was difficult it was one of the easiest things that the government could have done and save a lot of money very quickly, there is no thought involved and you simply playing the previous government are having set the program up badly. What he means by difficult is that it might become popular this is a very different proposition from signing it was difficult.

A difficult decision is one where there are many possibilities and one is unclear as to which is the correct policy decision. It might be that one is unclear as the outcome of different decisions though one is a clear about what objective. This has become a common and abusive language, to say that something is difficult when you mean it might be unpopular. Many businessmen use this when they are trying to sack people or to reduce the service is being provided, that is to claim it was difficult rather than they'll get criticised for making the decision.

Another interesting example of politicians telling lies is our local MP one Simon Wright. I have just received the local " Liberal Focus" which claims to tell us what a good job as our new MP is doing. How what they are promised is being achieved by the new government which is now a supporter. What he doesn't tell us is all the things that are being done it didn't promise to do like cutting the school building programme sacking thousands of public sector workers, reducing housing benefit, making it harder for disabled to get benefits etc. Perhaps he wasn't lying publication being economical with the truth. Of course he blames the previous government and says that the situation is much worse than predicted this of course is a public sector borrowing requirement is less than had been predicted by the previous government's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It is interesting to me to note that this Tory government, make no mistake this is the Tory government, is using the Liberals to hide behind one of the most aggressive and nasty governments we have seen for a very long.

it's the poor that gets the blame

2010-07-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

I was reading the article in Saturday's Guardian about Jack Straw. It struck me that when we talk about benefits and lowly paid workers we always talk in terms of penalties, of punishments but when we talk about the wealthy and the well-qualified we always talk about rewards.

To get good MPs we have to pay them well, when we talk about chief executives and city slickers it is all about rewards and if we control the they will leave the country, as if that is the problem. however when we talk about the poor they must be punished but turning up late at work missing a day through ill health or having to look after their children when they are not well. people on benefits have their benefits cut if they earn money even on a part time basis however when we look at MP's they are allowed to earn as much as they like in other activities yet they claim that their job deserves a full time salary.

Surely it is time we changed the way we think and start to believe that rewarding lowly paid people and people on benefits is a better way to encourage them to work harder and to be more responsible than trying all the time to threaten them and punish them. I have always believed the carrot is better than a stick, I know that there are many who think that shouting at people and punishing them is a good way to behave, but it always seemed to me cruel and an inhumane way to behave.

Now is a good time to change the way we think since the government is so keen to cut and if we wish to cut without huge social damage to our society we must find ways to encourage people to change their way of living so that we are all happier, perhaps the best way to do this is to control the excessive wages and rewards at the top to stop thinking that those who were well paid somehow superior to those who not so well off.

Teaching?

2010-05-01T08:52:00.000-07:00

The other day I was with a group of colleagues, though I should explain that I retired sometime ago but still go in and hang about. We were discussing how to explain what we do when asked by by someone. Well person just dais he taught and I commented that I never said that because I didn't feel that I was a teacher and I just said that I am a mathematician. But people are not very clear what mathematicians do so we often just avoid the question.

This caused me to speculate as to why I don't describe myself as a teacher. Partly because as a university lecturer I didn't feel responsible for the students learning. The role was to assist in the learning process, to guide the students through material, some of which is quite hard to understand by yourself, but in the end it was the student's responsibility to learn. After all they are adults and should by the age of 18 be taking care of themselves, not depending on an authoritarian figure to tel them what to do. In some ways I am happy to show them what they need to do to learn but am not willing to hold their hand whilst they do it.

There is also the difference between training and education. One like all dichotomies which gets blurred around the middle. To simplify, training is showing someone how to do something without learning how whilst, in a parody, learning is why something works without learning how. Of course all good education is a mixture of both learning how and why. An example from maths is when students can solve a problem that involves finding an answer given certain data BUT when given the answer and some of the data cannot work out the rest. That is they can't reverse the process because they don't fully understand what is going on.

Camerons & the world of privilege

2010-05-01T02:53:00.000-07:00

When David Cameron talks about inheritance, it all sound very plausible and reasonable. But read the small print and you see it is about wealth & privilege. What is says is if daddy is rich then so are you and hard luck if you are born poor.

If you are born rich you have to work hard to get to be poor, if you start poor you have to work hard to get rich. So David Cameron's Tories are just that, the party of wealth and privilege. Please don't be fooled into thinking that it is anything else. That is why he wants to cut public expenditure, it help the poorest in society not the rich; he should know, both he and his wife were born to rich , privileged families. Why should people like him want to be taxed and help the poor.

Don't Vote Liberal

2010-04-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

Clegg has shown his true colours, he wants a Tory government. Or he isn't very bright.

On TV this morning he said that if Labour is third in the popular vote he would no support them. He does not understand the British electoral system. Because many Labour supporters in seats where Labour is third might want to vote tactically, as Compass has suggested. But in doing that the popular vote for Labour would go down so if Clegg wants Labour voters to support the Liberals in marginal seats he had better change his tune.

The difficulty is that in the British system the popular vote has very little meaning. So remember a vote for the liberals is now a vote for the Tories in government!

A better voting system

2010-04-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

There has been much discussion of voting systems in the past and given the current state of the parties there will be a lot more after the general election. So here is a simplistic proposal.

In each constituency the will be an alternative vote, that is each elector lists the candidates in order and the votes get transferred until one candidate has a majority. This will elect the lower house. The upper house will be chosen by proportional representation based on the first votes of each elector.

To avoid to many small parties there would be a limit that for a party to count towards the upper house they would need at least 10% of the national vote.

To ensure that the constituency MP's were genuinely representative they would need to have been resident in the constituency for at least 5 continuous years before the election. Residency for a year would mean having spent at least 250 nights in the years in the constituency. An almost simple rule but it would stop rich carpetbaggers just buying a house in an area and never living there. It would also mean tha the lower house would have to organise its affairs much more efficiently, it could only meet for 115 days a year! Given that many MP's seem to think it is only a part-time job what would be the problem with that. I am sure some would resent that argument that it is aprt-time but if an MP can be a minister as well as an MP, both jobs must be part-time.

Also ministers would have to come from the upper house or work from home. Wouldn't that set a good example.

Cameron's Contricks

2010-04-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Hi,

The "Big Society" should be called the "Big Trick". It is just the old right wing Tory philosophy dressed up to sound good. With a bit of thought it can been seen through. Notice that people will have the right to cut the council tax NOT to increase it. Surely if the people are to be given power why can't it go both ways. If your local council cuts too many things, as most will if Cameron gets into power. why shouldn't we be able to make them spend more if that is what we want.

Locally a bunch of redneck Tories from the backwoods want to turn the street lights of in Norwich where I live. Very few people in Norwich want to do that but hey we don't count, lets save a few pennies even if we are happy to spend that money.

Again we see the hypocrisy over unitary status for Norwich, at last the present government has given Norwich some local autonomy but Mr Cameron has said that he would take it away even though the people of Norwich want it. He wants us to be ruled by hicks from 50 miles away, so much for people power in their communities.

Cameron had a disabled child so he understood the importance of the NHS. Perhaps if he had a child who needed the benefit system who we see the need for it to be protected and supported. He is meant to be clever but one of the signs of an educated person should be the ability to see how decisions affect people not just yourself. It makes we wonder whether a first class degree from Oxford just means that you are a highly qualified con artists!

hospital incomptence at the N & N

2010-03-29T01:49:00.000-07:00

A friend was delighted that the N & N had contacted him to say that they could do the operation he needed. get ready to come in at 7am and all will be done. The day before he get home to find a message to say that it has been cancelled because of an emergency.

He had organised things so that he could go in and now it was off, the day before. It shows, once again, that the N & N is badly managed, there simple are not enough beds to cope with the varying demand for the hospital. The problem is that the board is made up of lawyers and accountants, people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Even their modelling of needs takes no account of variations in demand, when I asked whether the modelling they use had a stochastic component the chair of the board had no idea what I was talking about. Mr Prior who one once a Tory politician, being paid over £50,000 a year for a part-time job, does not have any idea how the hospital should be planning its workload. It is not surprising that they cannot even keep appointments.

Benefit Simplification

2010-03-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

For sometime now I have been worrying about why the benefit system is so complicated. For anyone trying to find their way through the complexities it is like a sophisticated puzzle. The more you learn about the various rules and variations the more puzzled any rational person becomes.

But now we get to todays budget and all becomes clear, well at least slightly less muddled. The chancellor anounced two things which will have some effect is that people over 60 will not have to work as many hours to get tax credit, a new wrinkle has to be added. Secondly there is to be more money in child tax credit for children under 2. Further there are proposals to limit the amount of housing benefit. All adds to the nightmare of complexity!

Some Random Thought from the news

2010-02-21T07:24:00.000-08:00

Hi

This is going to have three parts about the odd things I read or hear in the news.

The first is really to do with management but about schools. Recently the Tories said that they want to give Heads more power. I wonder why? Do they think that it is bad teachers that make bad schools? It is true that a bad teacher can slow you up, if they are subject teachers they can ruin that subject for you. If they are a class teacher they can make a year miserable BUT they don't make a school bad unless most of the teachers are bad.

However a bad head can ruin a school and so the whole of your education. So why give them more power, so they can do even more damage. That is not the thinking, what is behind this management idea is that managers, that is heads, are all good and it is only the workers, that is the teachers, who make things hard for the bosses. It is is a sloppy and easy attitude that those inpower blame their juniors when things go wrong but what to claim success as their own.

If we want to improve education management we need robust structures in place that stop bah heads ruining schools, not spend all our time worrying about bad teachers. getting rid of one bad head will be more useful that getting rid of forty bad teachers.

The other recent headline has been about the so-called "death tax". Personally I am happy with this idea but their is much emotion attached to the concept, even by people who would call themselves rational. Peter Wilby wrote a good article in the Guardian about it on Tuesday, which I recommend. This is a theme I have returned to before, why do we value property so highly, he argues that for many people they have invested their lives in their house & garden. Thus it becomes much more than a house or a property but a representative of their life and what they are and have been. But this leaves us with a difficult decision, whan someone has put their life into a house and then reach the situation that their income no longer supports this life style why should the rest of us pay for it.

As I have argued before, and will probably argue again, it seems unreasonable that someone owning a propert worth a quarter of a million pounds should be treated as poor. If they sell and rent they will be seen as rich, we have to think very clearly to see how to resolve the issue. One p[ossibility is that an costs become a charge on the property BUT that is seen as a "death tax". The alternative is a tax on the living, surely the former is better. It is clear taht as people live longer the costs of maintaining older people will get higher. One argument is that people should work for longer. As someone who is approaching 70 it is not clear to me that I could hold down a full-time job. I know that there are many examples but very few of them actually work full-time at a job where someone else tells them when to work. I can still work quite hard for periods, but if I had to go and work all day every day that is all I would be able to do.

I promised three parts and I like to keep my promises as well as my threats. It has always been true that society values the rich and if someone has made a lot of money then they have some talent for making money. It makes them in no way a better person or someone whose advice on anything other than making money valuable as of right. If we take the example of Mr Hands a rich private equity financier., who has decided it would be better to be resident of the Channel Islands and not see his wife or kids than to pay tax. He sounds a rather unpleasant character whose advice on anything other than tax evasion would be of little value.

As a teenager I had plenty of diputes with my father, which teenage son doesn't. With age my admiration for my father grew and I realised what a good man he was. But he spent most of his life being poor. But as a man and a thinker better than most. He had a hard life with no opportunities for an education. Not a man with the talents to make him rich but able and talented at a time when someone from his background had little chance to make the most of his abilities.

So should we admire the rich, certainly not those who have inherited ut and dome nothing with it. Take Mr Cameron what has he done but swan around pretending he cares. Yes he cares about the NHS because it has touched his life but the rest he has no understanding. It strikes me that to be a credible politician someone has to understand the needs of those whose position in life you have never experienced. It is interesting that many who have recently been sacked have suddenly discovered how mean the benefit system really is. And that it is just layabouts who lose their jobs.

Religious Hypocrites

2010-02-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

Hi

I don't think it includes all of them but most at the top. We have the edifying sight of the Pope and the Bishops of the Church of England claiming the right to be homophobic.

Why is it OK to say that I don't like gays or transexuals or any other group if I say it is "gods" word. We have some of the bishops in the House of Lords, do they come to protect the poor and the underpriviliged, of course not. They turn up to protect the right of the church to be prejudiced. All the government wants to do is to stop people using prejudice in their employment of people.

Isn't it amazing that some people think it is the right of others to use their power to victimise people, as long as it is religion. It is not just the christian churches who think like this, jews & muslims are no better, some of them are probably worse.

Surely in the 21st century we should have stopped people behaving badly and using religion as an excuse.

Blair does it again

2010-01-29T15:51:00.000-08:00

Hi,

It is a long time since I did any blogging, somehow life seems to short to put my feeble thoughts down on paper.

Still the Chilcott Inquiry and Blair's performance made me think. One is what a waste of time lawyers are and that Blair goes on deceiving himself. Let me address the first issue.

Many lawyers and like-minded individuals have complained that the interviewing needs tough forensic attacks of the sort barristers enjoy. But lawyers aren't interested in the truth, trying either to prosecute or defend. The idea of trying to establish a nuanced version of what actually happened is not part of their brief. So we see with the Chilcott Inquiry gentle prodding and the truth emerges, no aggressive trying to point the finger or lay blame, just what they did. Maybe those inside the Westminster bubble knew but most of us didn't. A good lesson if you want the truth don't use judicial inquiries, they cost a fortune, go on forever and nobody is any wieser at the end of them.

Now we come to Blair's evidence. One thing we learned was that he wanted to go to war as Bush's sidekick whatever happened. One way or the other he wanted to send the troops in and see himself as the great saviour of the world. My instant thought is "What a prat!" but more worrying was that almost evertung he thought was true wasn't and the events that followed he had no idea about.

He seems to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that they didn't have any and that as soon as the west went away they would suddenly appear. At no point did he understand that the Coalition forces were seen to be an occupying army or that in the chaos that followed Iran would seize the opportunity to cause trouble. Given that a majority of the population were Shia and that many of their leaders had taken refuge in Iran this seems to be a lamentable failure of Blair's understanding of the situation. What comes across most forcibly is that of a man with almost no ability to see anything that he didn't want to see. This might be his religious fervour or his training as a barrister. After all his ability to see only the arguments that supported his view is precisly waht lawyers do when presenting a case, recall they are professional liars, as unfortunately are a significant number of politicians.

The other point he keeps making is that 9/11 changed the world, it didn't, but it changed peoples' perception. Many seem to have forgotten that their was an earlier attempt to blow up the twin towers. Perhaps if that thraet and the causes of it were taken seriously the successful attempt might have failed. So the threat of a terrorist attack on the US in the US was clearly a possibility, yet they seemed so shocked when it happened.

Another worrying feature of the Blair analysis is the belief that he can decide who is a rogue state and decide to invade them. One of the arguments that those supporting the war seem to make is about democracy and supporting the rule of law. But Blair & Bush behaved like vigilantes with no respect for the law, I could imagine them as members of the Klu Klax Kan stringing up a negro because he got uppity. And as in the south usuing tame lawyers to give a veneer of respectability to their behaviour. It is clear that Goldsmith really changed his mind because he know Blair was going to go to war and, to give him credit, he wanted to protect the armed forces from prosecution as war criminals.

A load of Balls

2009-09-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Have all the main party politicians lost their senses. Now Ed Balls has joined the list. The last thing we need to do is to cut jobs and reawaken the slumbering recession. Part of the increase in borrowing is caused by the recession, a drop in tax revenues and an increase in benefits payments. Both of these will come down as the recession recedes, trying to force it down artificially would just make the situation worse.

If Ed Balls really wants to cut costs here is one simple proposal from an educational manager, do not introduce any new or changed plans! Perhaps closing down his department and returning power to local government. One final thought on this, when I was first a school governor financial control was with the local authority but then the Tories devolved many activities. So now each school has to have someone to run the finances, someone to worry about employment practices etc. So there has been a vast increase in bureaucracy in schools with jobs that were done in local authorities.

Another way to cut expenditure would be to significantly increase the minimum wage. The taxpayer subsidies firms that pay badly through benefits and and tax. If the minimum wage was made up to a decent level this government subsidy would vanish and so cut public exppenditure. Of course the bosses would oppose this but why would they give up their share of public expenditure.

Waste: an essential

2009-09-16T22:10:00.001-07:00

At the moment many people are demanding the elimination of "waste". We can all save money by cutting out waste. Politicians are very fond of this mantra because they claim that this method will enable them to save public expenditure and maintain services. But is this really feasible?

I am reminded of the story of Shylock who only wanted his "pound of flesh" but could not get just his pound of flesh. Perhaps it is the same with waste. Is waste the oil that stops the engine overheating, does it provide the flexibility when things go wrong? If there was no waste everything would have to work perfectly all the time. Systems would be designed to work at the limits of their capabilities at all times.

It would be dangerous for planes to fly with no waste, extra back up facilities, exactly the amount of fuel if the everything went according to plan. So why do we expect organizations to work up to their maximum capacity all the time without back-up facilities. If we could eliminate waste from all systems would they just become arthritic and seize up.

The question is how much waste, or spare capacity, do we need?

selfish nimbies

2009-09-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

I am probably returning to a topic I have discussed before but it gets me down. It is especially true of wealthy people who live in beautiful isolated places.

They expect roads so they can drive there and electricity and probably fast broadband connections BUT they don't want to have anything spoiling their beautiful surroundings, let the peasants suffer, seems to be the attitude.

The same things happen when there are campaigns against airports and airport extensions. The only people who should be allowed to complain are those who never fly! Otherwise all toy are saying is that other people should suffer!

We have to take responsibility for our actions, we can't just say let others suffer!

More on the "expenses" of MP,s

2009-05-22T01:07:00.000-07:00

Most of the MP's have missed the crucial point. It is not just that they are clearly working the system but that the system is fundamentally flawed.

When we pay their mortgage repayments, when we buy their furniture, they end up owning it. That is why renting is a more satisfactory option, their is no financial gain for the MP.

It is not as complicated as they wish to pretend and flipping is clearly fraudulent if there is no change in circumstances. Charles Clarke changed when he became a minister, the point being that he now felt that he was spending more time in London. That is probably genuine. It is also plausible that if an MP has children and when they leave home they might well change their main place of residence. However the number of times that that will occur will be rare.

Again the issue with Ian Gibson, he probably felt he owned the flat so letting his daughter stay there was no problem. If you had a flat in London most parents would not feel they had done anything wrong by letting family members use it at no cost. The converse would be true, if you charged them that would seem very unkind as a parent.

Clearly legitimate & reasonable expenses should be allowed but funding the purchase of property is not reasonable.

Another important point is that what is reasonable for a "second" home. No one needs a house with a moat or a duck island for their "second" home. In my view that is also fraudulent. But is all part of a culture of greed and mutual support. Most communities stick together, doctors don't like reporting on other doctors, lawyers are reluctant to admit that their colleagues are cheating. It is the same with MPs, that is why we need an outside group BUT they must not be part of the "great & good" because they are part of the same community.

more on why public expenditur is good!

2009-05-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

One of the more stupid arguments gong around, like many common arguments it sounds good but but with a moments thought is obviously rubbish, is that it is wrong becuase our children will be paying for it and that is wrong,

Why is it wrong, simply because that will still be getting the benefit. As I commented in my eralier note, we still enjoy the parks built 80 years ago so even the great-grandchildren are getting benefit from that public expenditure.

So if we spend money on a cross-rail link now, hopefully people will still benefit from it in 100 years time. So if they are still benefiting from it does it matter. In times of crisis we spend to preserve the future and often the future ends up paying but that seems fair.

Public Expenditure and the depression

2009-05-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

I have just been reading Sidelski's one volume biography of Keynes and have read the stuff about the great crash & depression that followed. Listening to the right wing commentators nobody seems to have learned anything, I suppose it was nearly 80 years ago and all the young people writing don't know any proper history.

The whole point is that in times like this it is essential that the government keeps spending or the situation will spiral down and down. Many think that the unemployment after the great crash went on until the WWII and that was a great bout of public expenditure.

Economies depend on money circulating and when things get bad, people stop spending, so less goods are sold and more people are out of work and the situation just gets worse. It becomes imperative for governments to borrow to spend. There is an argument that says that if the government is borrowing to fund public expenditure that takes money away from the private sector. That might well be true in the good years but not now. How many businesses are going to be borrowing millions for major works at the moment.

Those like David Cameron and the Liberals and, I am afraid, some in the government who are going on about cutting public expenditure are condemning millions of people to unemployment. It is essential to maintain public expenditure over the next few years. Those in what should be secure jobs need to feel they are secure so that they will not cut their expenditure.

It will lead to an increase in public debt and the government will owe money but it can be paid back over time. Even 40 years ago it was normal to borrow up to two or three times income to buy a house. My calculation that would be equivalent to a public sector debt requirement of 200% and we were not too worried. The current debt of the government is far to low to sustain the economy when the private sector has let us down so badly. It would also seem unfair to attack the wages and pensions of public sector workers for the failure of the private sector.

Expatriates & the Rich

2009-05-03T00:47:00.000-07:00

Should people who live abroad have a right to vote and be considered as citizens? My answer is no! Part of the duties of citizens is to be active members of the community and pay the taxes which their wealth & income would entitle them to. The word entitle is good in this context as we should all want to contribute what we can to the community.

The recent rise in higher rates of tax on those earning over £150,000 to promise to leave the country. If people like Michael Caine and Andrew Lloyd-Webber resent paying tax why do they wish to be citizens of the UK, they are rich enough to leave the country and live anywhere they like and I am sure many countries would welcome them with open arms and offer them citizenship, so why not just go. If they want to stay in the club they should be play by the rules. Another of these so-called citizens is Sean Connery, a sort of honorary Scot, I say honorary Scot since he chooses to live in Switzerland for tax purposes. This does not seem to me to be very loyal but claims to be a Scottish nationalist, I would be ashamed of his support, but then the SNP is keen on Donald Trump.

The USA expects its citizens to pay tax to the USA wherever they live and so should the UK. Peoples feel that they can go and live anywhere in the world, not pay UK taxes and then come back when they feel they want and use all the facilities that those of us who stayed have been paying for for years. If you want to keep your citizenship then you should have to pay UK taxes.

Such ruling should also apply to people who move their companies to tax haven to avoid tax, that great British entrepreneur who has moved his companies to some off-shore island in order to reduce tax. In the meantime people suffer on his Virgin train lines.

Mp's Underpaid?

2009-03-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

On the Today programme today, March23rd, there seem to be a feeling that British MP's were not paid enough. Whilst they might well be paid less than a number of politicians in other countries surely we should be more rational. After all, they aren't going to rush off and do the job soemwhere else.

What is the job description, get elected seems to be the only requirement and if we are honest, they don't get elected, their party does. If they lose office they get get rather generous payments, if all redundancy schemes were as generous that might be fair.

But what do they have to do once they have the job, as far as I can tell they hjave to turn up once and be sworn in. Do they have to attend a place of work, meet targets, even live in their constituencies. Let us be honest there are no constraints on MP's, apart from breaking the law, I suppose. So let us be honest it is the cushiest job going, free housing, no bosses, no targets, work if you want to.

Perhaps they should have to pay to have the job?

The media and politicians

2009-03-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about why politicians jump at the request of the media to make daft statements about which they clearly know very little and haven't had a chance to think clearly about. The, what n the idea came to me that pundits and media experts are paid to give instant opinions, nobody really cares whether waht they say is true because if two days everyone has forgotten what they said. However politicians, especially those in power have to get things right. This is not always easy.

Consider the example of a plane crash, the reporters are always asking what caused the problem the "experts" come up with many and varied explanations, one of which might be right. However when they ask the real experts who have to examine the evidence they tend to say they don't know till they have examined all the evidence. What a serious and considered answer. However many politicians seem to think they know before doing this task of examining the evidence or at least waiting till their civil servants have done so.

Two recent examples come to mind, one was the outburst by David Milliband about the Russian activities in South Ossetia. He made an early pronouncement on the subject without being aware of any of the sensibilities that might be involved. You might think an English politician who is aware of the problems of Northern Ireland might think that problems are not always as easy as they might seem from a distance.

We have recently had Ed Balls and the Haringey saga. I have no idea what is the right answer but an initial
look at what happened seems to imply that he was hasty. He might be a speed reader, as might be his civil servants but given a long report there are often many odd words floating around that qualify somke of the statements, missing them can cause unwary managers to leap to the wrong conclusion. To sack someone without giving them a chance to defend themselves was stupid, though I am sure that all the pundits in the press were calling for blood. They however will not be sued for getting it wrong.

Remember H. L Mencken

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat,
plausible, and wrong."

Davis Cameron's Apology?

2009-03-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

Was it really an apology or just a piece of political maneuvering? He did not seem to get to grips with the real issues of the failure of the market, just some mealy mouthed words about admitting that tthey didn't spot what the banks were up to. Of course they didn't , why should they, the banks weren't going to tell them and they
were making nice big fat profits, apparently, so who is going to shout look out there is something wrong.

The whole of the media were conspiring to build up the myth, we can show you how to get a better deal, on your house , your finance, you name it it the press, the tele and the radio all played their part in adding to the bubble. It is always the same, and when the troubles start they are always surprised and continue to give advice, probably just as wrong as their previous advice.

No Mr Cameron and the rest of them, politicians and pundits have to come clean and admit that they really did not know what they were talking about.

An apology for Gordon Brown

2009-03-11T14:02:00.001-07:00

It is clear that Gordon Brown will not apologise for his mistakes. In fact none of the polticians who have been in power for last few years are likely to apologise for their mistakes over the economy so I thought I would write one for them, it will do for most of them.

Dear Public,

I would like to say sorry for what has happened to the economy over the last 18 months or so. Something went wrong and some of the blame must fall on me. Naively I thought that all those clever people in the financial sector and in the banks and insurance companies were doing their best to make us all wealthier and better off. But I was wrong all these years, they were not using the super intellects to help us but themselves. They fooled many of us into believing that if we left them alone and didn't enquire to carefully it would be good, they were creating wealth for us all, we just had to trust them. This was my big mistake and I am sorry.

Now I know that the lessons of the previous two centuries should have been heeded, whenever clever greedy people get together and are not watched they will line their own pockets.

Yours

Gordon Brown

Justice & Tribunals

2008-10-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I went to a talk at the AGM of Norwich CAB by Mr Rosser who chairs Norfolk Tribunals of some sort. He was talking about appeals about benefits. He commented that when he first got involved many of those involved were no even lawyers, as if that is a bad thing. But now there were lots of lawyers so it seems justice goes out of the window.

For example he wants a duty roster of people to represent those who come before the tribunal to help them. He actually said that there were people who wopuld win their cases if they had been represented. If one thinks about this statement carefully it shows that the tribunal is not interested in justice or doing its job properly. How could the tribunal find against someone and yet say that they would have won if represented. It means that the members of the tribunal had realised from the evidence that the claimant had a justified case BUT found against them. I do not ubderstand how this can happen. Surely if the tribunal is interested in the truth and justice they must have found for the claimant.

Perhaps someone can explain.

Crooks & Charlatans; The Financiers

2008-10-11T01:03:00.000-07:00

There are people who are very highly paid and who get huge bonuses and have claimed that they were worth it! How did they justify this, well they told us that they were very clever and that they had invested other peoples money very cleverly and they were only taking a small percentage as a fee. And if their company had made 100 billion then their bonus of 1o million was small beer really.

Now the truth emerges they were no more than crooks & charlatans stealing other peoples money. The whole edifice of their ability to make money was not much better than pyramid selling, as long as people believed that they were worth a lot of money and were investing in real assets the trick worked but once it was seen through the whole edifice has tumbled down. However the tricksters will walk away with billions, perhaps not as many as before but still a lot. Moreover the people that they have tricked will end up bailing them out.

It will keep happening unless people realize that making money and being greedy are not values which should not be admired. But when some people seem to be getting rich others get jealous and want to join in not realizing that they are being conned. The difficulties we are now facing go back to deregulation and Mrs Thatcher's government. When the banks that are most in trouble are examined it is easy to see that they were the old building societies, these were heavily regulated and owned by the savers. Many were very solid institutions, perhaps a little old-fashioned but safe. Many then demutualized and the savers took out there pots of gold, the directors paid themselves lavishly and now some years later they are in trouble. The regulation kept them being cautious and and hence they were safe, as houses?

But many were responsible for this, those who were greedy who did not see that the money came from somewhere at this point and it course came from themselves, they were just taking their own money in a lump sum, most then blew it! If the ex-building societies were small thay had to get money from somewhere and having lost their niche as well-regulated safe institutions they had to sell themselves some other way. That is where they began to go wrong.

Again there is a but, we the people were taken in, ably helped by the media. They published the "best deals" never with any warnings as to how the various companies could offer higher rates than others. It is all down to competition we were told, those offering a higher rate must be more efficient and so all will be well. Of course in modern days this is all a myth, there are very few things that can be done to be more efficient, apart from giving a worse service or paying lower grade employees very badly. Most companies have access to the latest developments and they are probably as competent (or incompetent) as each other. You only have to note how quickly they all turned to automated telephone services to see that there were very few benefits for one company over another.

So we were conned into believing that we could all get richer quicker but the only people who were were the city wide boys, creaming off their small percentage. Remember that their percentage depended on their being lots of activity, take overs, lots of selling and buying of shares stocks and anything else they could invent to con people with. In the end that is what it is all about, conning people out of their money, they used to say a fool and his money are soon parted but it is not just the fool, it is the greedy. When we have a society where pwoplw are measuer by their apparent wealth, the politicians and the media fawn over those who are wealthy this encourages everyone to want to make a fast buck. But everyone can't, just do the sums.

Wealthy Philanthropist?

2008-06-22T02:37:00.000-07:00

An article in the Observer about how wealthy peopel have made lots of money got me thinking. How did they get to be so rich. Some city guy has just given away 500 million and my thought is how did he get so rich., like where did the money come from.

So perhaps he just gave it away becuase of a bad conscience or is there something deeper going on. So hwo do you get to be rich, gambling, though in the city it is called somewthing else, or charging too much or paying workers badly. One alternative might be to give the business to the staff, an alternative chosen by the original John Lewis. It would be fair to say that most of the money came because of the work of their employees. So why not give the money back to them. That would mean no credit and no control of the money so that would not boost their egos in quite the same way. Of course they could just have paid the staff better earlier so they wouldn't have got so rich in the first place, but then they couldn't hav egiven it away later and looked so good.

The people in the City are even worse, they gamble but cleverly with other peoples money. Really clever borrow some money and gamble if you make lots great and when things are going well that is easy. When things go bad you make sure it is other peoples money you lose. the government is worrying about pensions, where is the money going to fund pensions, into the back pockets of the wonderful city gents, who of course make sure their money is safe and well away from any tax regime. Somewhere I read that City bonuses have been about 10 billion despite the almighty disasters, but where did the money come from and where has it gone. Certianly not tot he needy in Britain or into pension funds, which the taxpayer will have to subsidise. No it will vansih from Britain into tax havens to enable the rich to have a life style which depends on poor people working for them for miserable pay.

There are a few ricj people who have done something idetifiable which one understands but most are very good at having sticky fingers, footballers are more honest than most rich business men, at least you can see waht they do for their money.

Are MP's useless

2008-06-11T00:27:00.000-07:00

Try to understand the debate about the proposal for detention for up to 42 days without charge one begins to feel that MP's do not know or understand what they are doing. It is clearly a matter of conscience, nothing to do with political parties much as the debate about embryology was taken away from the childish behaviour of political gangs.

Why if something is religious it is called a matter of conscience but if something is an ethical or moral issue is it not a matter of conscience. Surely to lock innocent people up for 42 days without being able to defend themselves is surely a serious matter but it is being discussed as if it is some sort of game. Why is it not seen like this, largely because those proposing the plans always present the case that the person being held will prove to be guilty but of course in practice that will not be the case.

We are constantly being told that after 11 September the world has changed. This is like most statements mostly false. There was at least one previous attempt to blow the twin towers up and even in Europe the IRA and ETA cheerfully blew up bombs which killed innocent civilians. The British government even tried internal exile, prison with trial to stop the IRA but that was not the solution.

Imprisoning people for 42 days will have no positive benefit and will clearly damage our human rights. Legislation to take away peoples rights almost never get reversed and the use will spread as as happened with other many such pieces of legislation. We have recently seen local authorities using anti-terrorist legislation to spy on families about school places, even a story of DWP using heat sensors to try to prove someone was cohabiting, 42 days will not become common but the prrsent maximum will soon become the norm and many innocent people will be locked up for a month merely because the police suspect them.

What is going on in Parliament, horse-trading up to the last minute, hardly a rational considered debate. The members of parliament should be ashamed of themselves and their collective behaviour.

Political Donations

2007-12-01T23:02:00.000-08:00

Why is eveyone getting so excited about the issue of political donatons to the Labour Party and the idea that by pretending the money came from different people the donor was avoiding publicity?

The problem was that the Labour Party knew, at some level, that he was the donor. There are usually two reasons that people give money to political parties, one is because they believe in what the party stands for and the second is to try to influence the party's policies. Neither of these is necessarily wrong but the idea that very rich people can influence political parties for their own benefit is undemocratic. However given that in modern times parties need large sums of money to run, especially at election time they need donations. We don't want to discourage giving to political parties but we need to avoid the feeling that making large donations is a way of buying influence available only to the rich.

My proposal would be to make the donations secret so that donor would be unkown both to the public and the party. So there would have to be a mechanism by which money could be given but at one remove. It would seem that the best way to do this would be to use the Electoral Commission. So donors would give the money to the Commission, indicating who they wished to support and every three months the Commission would hand cheques to the various political parties saying this much was received during the previous three months.

With such a system there would also need to be some punishment if the donation was made either public or leaked to the political party. What would stop a generous donor mentioning to the party of their choice that of the donation they received last quarter, a significant part of it was from them. The only way to try to stop this happening would be to introduce a penalty if this were to be found out, which is probably quite likely. The best one might be that the money is forfeited and used to defray the expenses of the Electoral Commission though one would have to be sure that the Commission was impartial and honest. An alternative would be to give it to some charity on a rota system. None of this can apply to public companies and trade unions since their activities have to be publicly reported.

One consequence would ceratinly be a dimunition of gifts to political parties but if this is equally true for all parties no harm would be done!

Are all politicians hypocrites?

2007-10-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

How come that Brown & Bush, funny still two B's. can onbject to Turkey invading Iraq.

I thought that is what they did, invade Iraq. Is it only the west who can invade other peoples countries. After all the British stole it from the Turks in 1918, I am not sure who the Turks stole it from before that.

It is all very odd, perhaps someone can make some sense of ot.

Directors lack of repsonsibilty

2007-10-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

A few months ago Cadbury's was fined about one million pounds for Health & Safety failures. This seems like a lot of money but to a company the size of Cadbury's it is chicken feed. The trouble is that it costs those who are responsible nothing. Somebody took decisions which cuased the salmonella outbreak but they are not fined. In a company the size of Cadbury's the difficulty of identfying the individuals and the cahin of command that cuased the errors is far to complex and would for anyone outside the company would be far too difficult. We saw a similar sitaution many years ago when the Herald of Free Enterprise sank.

One proposal would be to make the directors responsible for paying any fines, ultimately they run the company and when it does well they like to take the praise, however when things go wrong it is never their fault. Thus by giving them this responsibility they might take their duty of care more seriously, especially non-executive directors who just seem to be on a gravy train. When things go wrong they never seem to know what was going on and were misled. Surely they are their to make sure that they know what is going on and keep the executive directors on their toes.

To keep things in perspective, a fine of one million pounds share amongst the directors, given their pay levels, would not hurt them too much but might make them think twice about what goes on in their companies and not see them just as a gravy train to be milked for money till they go bust or can be sold.

We do seem to live in a world where people are more & more unwilling to take respnsibilty for their decisions and perhaps we need as a society to reimpose the idea that when you get top jobs with top pay then a lot of respnsibility goes with it and when you screw up you take the pain and accept that it was your fault.

Politicians and how to improve their performance

2007-10-15T22:44:00.000-07:00

I have oftem wondered whu politicians, especially MP's, are so incompetent. Perhaps it is drugs. If you think for a while, they spend their time in house of commons drinking, and passing laws. Should anyone under the influence of alchohol, or any other drug for that matter, be allowed to vote on changes to laws. You can't drive or do most responsible jobs whilst under the influence so why should MP's be allowed to vote. My first proposal is that no MP is allowed to vote if they fail a breathalyser test at the same level as required for driving a car.

Similar arguments apply to tiredness, there is no doubt that ones judgement if often wrong when tired, as a mathematician many neat arguments fall apart after a good nights sleep. So as truck and coach drivers are not permitted to work more than 8 hours without a proper break the same should apply to politicians, and probably doctors, nurses and other workers whose decisions cannot be changed after a good nights rest.

We then come to the issue of pay, MP's despite their views are still overpaid. Remeber it is a job with involves no training, no skills and no assessment. However on of the problems is that most MP's are amateurs and if they do not get some sort of government job try to pick up further work. To sort this out I propose taht all income received by MP's should paid to the state, whether as ministers or from outside earnings. It is emant to be a full time job, the only group which is allowed to earn money outside are academics and very few paople care what they do, they certainly have no influence on anything.

So there are three proposals to improve the performance of MP's

(i) no voting whilst under the influence of drugs,
(ii) enforced rest so no voting when judgement is likely to be affected by tiredness and
(iii) earnings to be deducted from salary as MP.

man's stupidity

2007-09-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

Listening to the radio this morning I heard that the government is thinking of extending the proposal which enables statement by vitims to be read out in court, in particlar to cases of death cuased by dangerous driving.

It is daft to have different sentences for dangerous driving or drunken driving based on whether some gets injured or not. Surely it is a matter of luck, good or bad, whether the result of bad driving causes death or not. Let me illustrate with two recent examples taken from a television programme.

This was a TV programme about Humberside police and was a fly-on-the wall type documentary. This particular episode was following the traffic police. There were two cases of drunken driving. In one the man had driven into a tree and was found slumped unconscious at the wheel. The second the car had creered off the road into a house, the person who lived in the house was in the next room, shcoked but unhurt.

In both these cases the sentences were quite mild fined a few hundred pounds and banned from driving for a year or so. However if someone had been killed there would have been a clamour for much stiffer penalties, but why. Surely the fact that bo one was injured was entirely a matter of luck, if some one had been by the tree or the householder had been in the room where the car had been was not some rational decision by the driver, simply luck.

The trouble is that this leads to a completely random justice system, do something and one day you get a £500 fune and banned for driving for a year, on a different day you get 5 years in prison and banned for life. Surely the sensible, rational thing is to have a fixed penalty for drunken or dangerous driving irrespective of what happens, but is thet too much to ask, probably.

Do they understand science?

2007-07-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

Very recently a number of books attacking religion have been published, I must admit I have read none of them. But I have read a number of articles attacking them, the most recent was by John Gray in the Guardian. In all of the attacks including that one, there is a fundamental misundersting of science, whether wilfull or just ignorance is hard to determine. It is also a phenomenon that I have noticed quite geenrally in conversations, especially about global warming. Those who wish to deny it do so with a frevour which is close to religious, hanging on to any thread of doubt they can to hang on to their beliefs.

So what is this big misunderstanding. The attackers seem to argue that science is the same as religion and that people just have faith in science. This just shows up the failure to understand that in science theories are only believed until they are proved false whereas religion is never proved false. Christians still believe in the second coming, 2000 years later. When will they give up. Never I assume since there is no way to faslify their claims, only to prove them true!

The key point about science is that it begins by collecting data, at least historically, it then tries to formulate a theory which explains the data and then makes predictions. If the predictions and any new data fits the theory people accept the theory. But two things happen, new data is found which does not fit or predictions are made which turn out to be false. At that point the original theory has to be given up and a revised, or sometimes, a completely new theory developed.

One of the ways that new facts emerge is thorugh more accurate measurements. If we consider Boyle's Law for gases, PV=RT, very neat and quite simplistic. But it was quite effective and a reasonable approximation for many purposes, especially in the early stages of the steam age. As we could get higher pressues, tempratures and could measure things more accurately it was realised that it was correct and had to be modified, this was done and helped create the Kinetic Theory of gases. As far as I know, nobody had their heads chopped off or were burnt at the stake for these new theories and Boyle's Law was still taught in schools as the first approximation. It is still true that if you heat gas in a fixed tank enough it will blow up! That is the way of science, experiment, predict and keep going and when it goes wrong think again.

It is true that sometimes people expound theories which are rejected but turn out to be true, orthodoxy triumphs over rationality but not often and the cases one thinks of there are often weaknesses in the new theory which enable people to cling on to the old ones. It is rather like those who don't want to believe in climate change, they don't want to believe is so they try to hang on to every weakness in the theory, perhaps you could say the same for those who deny evolution.

The essence of a good life is willing to admit you might have been wrong!

Blair's Going--First Thoughts

2007-05-10T22:34:00.001-07:00

He has taken a long time to announce his going and now he has said when. The media will be full of an analysis of his "legacy" and how he has changed Britain. Probably not at all in reality, the vanity of politicians to think they change things is not surprising but much overated. Most ride the feelings of the time, Thatcher in apparent opposition to the sixties and Blair to Thatcherism. They had the wind with them and both claimed to be "conviction" politicians.

Blair has done some good things, the most recent is in Northern Ireland and that has taken all of his ten years and about five of John Major's. Devolution and electoral reform and the reform of the House of Lords. Seriosly trying to do something abut child poverty and increasing funding into both education and housing. Perhaps the decision with the most long-term impact is the Bill of Rights and Freedom of Information, though sometimes I think they regret them, and one should not forget civil partnerships.

This always sounds good when one compares the idea of a "conviction" politician to one who merely wants power for their own selfish ends. However the problem with conviction politicians is what happens when their convictions are wrong., I am sure many members of the BNP are convinced of their beliefs. So if we really want to examine Blair's legacy, which it is much too sonn to do, one has to look at his convictions and then examine how succesfully he has implemented them. The problem is that his convictions are not that clear to me. In a famous speech when asked what his priorities were he said "Education, education and education". But was that just a sound bite or was that his conviction.

Again he has reiterated his belief in "choice" and certainly Anthony Giddens has tried to explain why it should work and I thought have written an earlier one on this but can't find it now! But was this part of Blair's conviction or just a way to persuade the middle classes to vote for him. Tell that they have choice in the public sector and they will not buy their way out! The problem is that it doesn't make sense and is almost cetainly not possible to implement it. There I think lies the problem of Blair, not that many of his goals are not admirable but that he has no coherent programme to implement them.

He seems to have no time or patience with the process of implementation and seems to want everything to happen now. This seems to be part of the review by those close to him, that they didn't reform things quickly enough and in some sense that might be true. But Blair and those close to him had spent, or so it appears, little time thinking about implementation and so had no idea how to make things work. One of the first acts in education was to do away with grant maintained schools but then in the next term of office they reintroduced them as academies. This looks very much like the man is for turning, even has a reverse gear. Here we see at it's worst the problem of conviction politicians, the only evidence which is taken seriously is that which supports the decision to impose Academies and ignore the critical evidence. Here choice has had a corrosive effect on education and schools because the choice is not for parents but for popular schools and so we get schools reinforcing their popularity by selecting pupils who will improve their popularity ratings. In the first term this whole process was exaggerated by hanging on the Chris Woodhead against all sensible advice which managed to antogonise the teachers.

This is the greatest weakness of Blair and many politicains who have no expertise in managing, especially professionals. The delivery of any improvements in public service will come from those providing it and especially from those on the front line. If they are just presented with reforms they may not deliver them with the enthusiasm that makes them work. This is not to deny that there is often a lot of conservatism amongst professionals which leads them to oppose change BUT that makes it much more important that time is taken to discuss, persaude and to bring on side the professionals. It will never be possible to bring all of those over to the reforms you want but you must take the time to listen and not just to hear. People delivering a service often do know what happens and might realise that some proposals will not work as you want them to.

When I have more energy the second part might follow!
Of course this idea is an anathema to many politicains as they want instant solutions to problems and immediate action on their political agenda, even if they have had no experience. The difficulty for educational professionals is that everyone went to school and so knows how to make it work better but very few have any practical experience of teaching. Some things which need to be done just take time and are boring, the devil is in the details, this is true in all areas of human endeavour, and it is true with reforms. It is not helped by the huge turn around of top politicians, John Ried has had nine jobs in ten years, that is just bad management

Children

2007-02-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

Once again I react to a report, http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/report/report.php, with surprise caused by my own naivety. This time about the way the British treat their children and an apparent attempt to blame this on the poor. "It's the poor what get the blame" and old song but true, the probelm is much older and more superficial than many writers would give us to believe. I am sure it goes back to the aristocarcy and upper middle classes who have never given a cuss for their kids.

Just stop and think about it for a bit, what did these people do.

(a) When they were born, get a Nanny.
(b) Lock them in the nursery and allowed down before bedtime to give Mummy a kiss on the cheek and possibly shake hands with Papa.
(c) if boy send off to boarding school at 6.

That was that, never show emotion never even think of cuddling the chidren and allowing them anywhere near adults, apart from the servants of course. It is hardly surprising that they were great at being sent abroad and fighting wars. The idea that you would show any normal human emotions were clearly extinguished at an early stage. One old Etonian I did happy to know admitted that he only ever saw his father across a boardroom table!

Dysfunctional family life is the norm amongst people trained in such a way. Thjere advantage over the poor is that they can afford to buy themselves out of the mess they get themselves into, the rich young girl could always afford a proper abortion, the poor lived with the consequences.

So is it surprising that British policy makes, many who were drwan for this miseducated elite fail to get anywhere near solving the problems of children in Britain. We are still a society where beating children is still considered acceptable. The British have never had much time for children, seen and not heard was the view. Even if they were allowed to eat with the gown ups, any social interaction was almost certainly not allowed.

I realise that films often exaggerate but having just seen "Miss Potter" one get a very clear idea of the relationship between upper class parents and their children, it is not one to inspire any confidence in those people to have any understanding of children and to know how to cope with their needs. We see that even if the current governements policies, send the mothers out to work and pack the kids off to nursery. Not necessarily a bad thing but unless it is a good nursery wth lots of high quality care it will not work. A teacher from Norway expressed surprise at how "serious" infant schooling was in Britain, "they need to go out and run around".

We need to let children grow up in a warm, loving and financially secure environment. The attitude in Britain always seem to have been that the first two don't matter, a good beating is all that they need. A slight exaggeration, I know, but untill we see children as important people with their own needs and respect them we will go on repeating all these errors.

Nick Cohen

2007-01-21T23:47:00.000-08:00

In a piece from his new book published in the Observer this Sunday, 21 Jan 2007 he does the classic propogandist trick of creating a false picture of those he wishes to attack and ignores reality. He discusses the left who oppose the war as being pro Saddam Hussein and anti American. This seems to me to be a parody, certainly of my own position.

So why did I oppose the war? Not because I supported Saddam Hussein nor because I am anti American. The reasons are much simpler and just ignored by Cohen. Do we want to live a world where there is no law except the law of military power. Bush & Blair behaved like war lords. I am strong, I don't like you so I will eliminate you, end of story. If Cohen believes that is the correct way to behave OK, but do not pretend it is a moral position.

There is no doubt that Saddam was a dictator who murdered people on a grand scale but whilst Britain & USA thought he was on their side they cheerfully helped him. Once he was seen to be against them, and that only seemed to happen when he invaded Kuwait, invading Iran was OK, did we feel the need to protect the world and Iraqi citizens from this man. He didn't change from being a goody to a baddy overnight, from being a man Rumsfeld could do business with one day to an evil dictator the next.

Overthrowing Saddam was not necessarily a bad thing but most often the means will corrupt the ends, that has been clearly illustrated in Iraq. The invasion had very legal support, individual acts of revenge rarely do. In oredre to occupy the country with minimum losses to American & British troops we have to destroy the infrastructure but we had no serious plans to rebuild it.

We are now left with a country, much of whose infrastrure was destroyed, which is occupied by foreign troops. The power lies with those troops and not with the elected government. If the governments of the UK and the USA were genuinely concerned with establishing the power of the Iraqi elected government they would place their troops under the command of the Iraqi government rather than their own governments. Then they would be seen to be supporting the Iraqi people rather than pursuing their own interests.

To criticise those who opposed the war by pretending we suported Saddam is like criticising those who supporeted the war for being in favour of torture and the construction of Guatanamo Bay!

Broken Toe

2006-12-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

I seem to have broken my toe, it is only a small one on my left foot BUT it hurts. When I complained to my daughter she just said that you men are soft, if you had ever had a baby you wouldn't be such a cry baby. Perhaps not but it is a real pain that whenever I walk it is just painful and I get most of my exercise that way.

Blair is trying to screw up education now he has buggered up Iraq, you would think that by now he should have realised that he is just an incompetent nitwit. Why do politicians think they can run things, OK they pass laws and they sometimes get things right but actually running things is a complete disaster. They pass a law then don't implement properly, so guess what they pass a new law that just makes things even more of a mess than it was before. Fortunately most of the time people just get on with things.

We are now going to encourage IB for 18 year olds. When the Higginson report suggetsed something like that Mrs Thatcher, the silly old bag, immediately rubbsihed it and promosed to keep the "gold standard" of A' levels. Come another Prime Minister and another report with a similar suggestion, Tomlinson, and what does Blair do, ignore it, now on the road to Sedgefield he has discovered the International Baccalaureate, will they ever learn, politicians that is.

Unintelligent Design

2006-11-30T20:52:00.000-08:00

Every time I see someone who purports to be a scientist trying to argue that "Creationism" or "Intelligent Dersign" should be taught in science I feel a sense of despair.

It simply isn't science it is myth. It is the "Primary Cause" justification for "God" dressed up. If the universe is too complex to have occurred by accident then how come the the "intelligence" was there. Surely that needed an "intelligence" to have created that and so on ad infinitum. What can we predict from the existence of intelligent design, nothing, how can we faslify it, no way. It is simply not a scientific theory. The only reason it even pretends to be is that it seems to contradict somehting in the bible!

However I have never seen an argument attacking the Theory of Graviation, no antigravity theory yet there are interesting questions about it and it ceratinly contradiscts at least one story in the bible, Joshua 10: 8-14. This is where "God" holds up the sun so Joshua can finish his dats destruction. This completely contradicts anything we know about Newtonian mechanics, perhaps we need a Christian alternative to mechanics but perhaps the "Creationists" don't believe.

In Brtian you cannot train and become a teacher unless you can oass an appropriate test in Mathematics, I don't think people who don't beleive in Science, and I include Creationists and believers in "Intelligent Design" should not be allowed to teach.

East Enders and .....

2006-11-26T21:32:00.000-08:00

I was watching a programme about Vera Lynn last night on tele. The number of times references were made to her just being a girl from the East End eventually pissed me of.

I am from the East End, it is no big deal, there are lots of us who were brought up in the east end of London so why is it something to remark about. Perhaps it is the bias of the media and "posh" people who think that those not born to the middle classes are thick and isn't it amazing that some of us do well. Though I do get fed up with those from poorer backgrounds who want us to be forgiving of them for this, Michael Caine goes on about it, but he is from south of the river. There is also that stupid columnist from Bristol who goes on about it and how terrible people who went to university are. Like there are none of us from poor (and I mean financially) backgrounds who went to university. Certain;y for me going to university has enable me to spend my life doimg what I like best so I think when people knock it they should be careful. The press don't help much, I have never seen a headline "University educated person does well" but plenty of the type "I left school at 16 and now I am a bad write for newspapers" type of thing. I enjoyed university and I have enjoyed my career since so don't be put of ny those witha chip on their shoulders about not going, but also if you don't want to go don't.

What it really shows is perhaps how easy it is is for the thick children who get sent to posh private schools to do well. They get protected by the family and their schoolmates who already have power and influence and so get on. Reecently ther ahd been crtiticism of the behaviour of the Foreign Office people in the wake of the tsunami. My only experience of such officials was in Paris over 40 years ago and I would guess nothing has changed. The sort of chinless wonders with terribler accents who have no idea about 90% of the population and probably feel that these oiks ought not to be abroad at all. Probably nothing much has changed, a few token women and people who didn't go to public schools but only on sufference.

It is much the same in the Army, just listen to the accents of the officer class and the real soldiers to hear who is in charge, I recall an interview with an officer who didn't sound loke he went to a public school but it turen out he was an engineer and so was allowed, after all the upper classes aren't allowed to do anything useful.

From this you maight think I am biased and perhaps you are right but I have met some quite able people who have been to publich school but in nothing like the numbers one should expect given the high percentage in top jobs. Remember that only 10% go to private schools. What they seem to train their students in is confidence, irrespective of ability. And to make sure they look after each other and usually they are quite loyal. Interseting how Mark Thatcher let down his Harrow & Eton mates but he is his mother's son.

Not so busy

2006-10-14T01:21:00.000-07:00

I seem to have been really busy lateley so no chance to sit and rant in peace. It is very therapeutic to write dowm what is bugging me. It must be great to be one of those newspaper columnists or radio jocks wh are allowed to expand on every prejudice they have, and they get paid for it.

Everytime I read a newspaper or listen to some "expert" they say something ill-informed or ignorant it makes me feel irritated or angry. However my youngest daughter has just given birth to a baby daughter and just looking at this little baby human makes me think that there are wonderful things. The toes and fingers always amazing, so perfectly formed and so small, it is like one bit that is complete at birth, as they grow older other things change but the fingers and toes are the same.

If there is optimiusm it is in science and our understanding of the things around us. Children have a natural fascination for wonder which vansihed for many as they grow older. Is that because the reasons are not obvious and so make us think. I recall talking to an economist and saying that it is interesting to understand what makes thunder and lightning, his response was that if it didn't help him avoid getting wet what was the point. That is a very sad response, reducing everything to a utilitarian view and having no joy in life. One presumes there were things that gave him pleasure but not understanding why things happen clearly wasn't one of them.

Perhaps more thoughts later today!