Buy An Olympic Torch

Is there no end to the absurdity of the Olympic Games. High on the list is, surely, the nonsense of the Olympic Torch. The idea of parading the Olympic Torch around the host nation was dreamt up by the German government for the Berlin Olympics in 1936 in order to boost the image of the Nazis and the Master Race. This torch thing for the 2012 Olympics is being carried over 7,000 miles around Britain and, apparently, needs a team of 350 people, lots of police, several vehicles and a couple of dogs to "organize" the trip. It is an honour, we are told, to be selected to carry this torch for a few hundred yards and anyone so honoured can buy their torch at a reduced price of £250.00. Some have bought them and immediately stuck them on e-bay with prices from £500 to £150,000. The highest figures are I think, intended to be part of money raising for charities. I know that the Olympics these days is all about extracting money from ordinary punters, while the suits and the hangers on and the officials and the politicians and Sepp Blatter and his crew get complimentary tickets to all the main events, 5 star hotels and chauffeur driven cars. In fact it is so corrupt that many of the people paying for the whole shebang can't get tickets at all — unless they are bought abroad. I will be glad when the whole sickly business is over and forgotten and we just have the memory of the empty stadiums left behind and various committees trying to think of some possible future uses — in the manner of The Dome

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The Crisis Heads for the Soup Kitchens

It has not been a very good week. Even the world's great leaders will acknowledge that. And I think that we are in for a few more not very good weeks. It now looks as though we are in the depths of the worst financial crisis in our history. Things are so bad that it is almost impossible to judge just how bad. The numbers being mentioned associated with debts in Europe and the USA are huge; billions are being replaced with trillions and multipliers ease ever upwards. I have no confidence in the world's leaders to sort out the mess. They are overwhelmed by the chaos but will not admit that the mess is insoluble. Or at least it is insoluble as long as politicians continue flogging the same dead horse in order to avoid accepting that previous decisions were wrong. There are two overwhelming failures. [1] They failed to see the looming disaster as economies and governments were financed by ever increasing debts and there was a complete and utter failure to regulate the banks. And [2] the invention of the euro. The latter was like piling everyone into bus, setting off down the road, tying up the driver and then waiting to see how long it would be before the bus crashed.

This week there has been increasing evidence of an accelerating run on the Greek banks. The Greeks are withdrawing their money and transferring to German bonds. How this will pan out is difficult to judge. Presumably, if this continues the Greek Banks will have to be supported by the ECB which will be supported by the German government using the money invested in German binds by the Greeks!! And, in the meantime, Greece has no government. An interim government headed by a judge will lead a sort of administration until new elections are held in June. Does anyone think they will get a different result? Are Greek elections like Euro Referendums in which electorates are asked the same question over and over again until they come up with the right answer? The Greeks are protecting their cash in preparation for Greece leaving the euro-zone. And momentum is building in Spain as 16 Spanish banks have their credit ratings lowered. Interest rates on Spanish bonds are heading towards 7% which means they are on the brink.

Britain is also in a terrible position because we have too many very big banks with lots of rubbish loans piled up, hidden away, in the deepest of deep vaults in the hope that nobody will notice. If Spain, Portugal and Italy go down the tubes our banks will be near collapse. Our government is waffling on about cutting our debts but it is not. All it is doing — even if it succeeds — is slowing the rate of increase of debt. If all goes well, by 2015 the government will have increased government debt by no more than about £700,000,000,000, which is pretty impressive and scores a good 9 points on a scale of 0 to 10 on a chart of debt reduction failures. But bad as this is, Labour wants to abandon debts "reduction" and go for growth by borrowing even more. This even worse than back of fag packet economics. Soon, fag packets will be unobtainable and we will need a new work surface for dodgy estimating.

Greece and Spain have huge unemployment rates — which in each case increases the government debt burden — and queues are growing at soup kitchens. It is reminiscent of USA in the 1930s and it took a world war to cure that problem, in spite of the best efforts of FDR [President Roosevelt].

To add to my gloom, Bolton Wanderers were relegated from the Football Premier League last Sunday when they failed — as they have done so many times this season — to hang onto a lead at the end of the second half. How they will get on from here, I do not know. They have eleven players out of contract this summer, have huge debts, will need to cut their wage bill and need to find some very high quality cheap players to help escape quickly from the Championship. It is a daunting prospect! Are they up for it? I hope so.

Eric's mum is practicing making vast amounts of soup at very low cost ready for the next crisis in our economy. I don't think that the inexperienced rich boys in charge understand the concept of queuing for soup.

Unfortunately, Winston Churchill is dead.

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Olympic Insanity

I ought to give up on the Olympic Games but hardly a day goes by without some new piece of nonsense that leaves me both depressed with the ludicrousness of it all, with the pathetic exaggeration of the importance of this three weeks of school sports and with the strange economics which allow the price to go up and up without the cost increasing.

This week, we are, apparently, trying out the security measures for the games. We have radar spy planes flying around, RAF fighter aircraft flying over London, very heavily armed troops and police operating in the streets from Heathrow to Barking. The police are being equipped with 2 automatic pistols each as well as sub-machine guns, gas canisters, security scrambled communication systems — all of which are unavailable for controlling ordinary crime.— and they are all masked. Why? They are not MI5 or MI6 men — are they? But most ludicrous of all: there are to be missile systems installed on the roofs of east-end flats — without the local inhabitants being consulted. Do they seriously intend to fire missiles at something over Central London? Can we expect to see a high-jacked airliner being blown out of the sky over Canary Wharf? The whole thing is utter madness. This security system will cost £1 billion+. Is this included somewhere in the unmoving Olympian Budget of £9.5 billion? I suspect not. On my reckoning we have about £2.5 billion in total to add to the £9.5 billion but I am sure that much of these cost will be lost in such add ons as road repairs, thousands of extra staff at Heathrow, etc. The final cost — if everything is included, is edging inexorably towards my budget of £15 billion. All very well worthwhile, of course and only an old miserable cynic like me would think otherwise.

The BBC has told us that they will show everything. Every run, jump, swim, throw or stand still of the whole 2½ weeks. This ignores the build-up which will drive us to suicide before August.

Oh, to be in England in September when the daises are in bloom

And no more an Olympian feat before our aching eyes doth loom.

This morning, news reaches us that Argentina has put out an advertisement on its TV stations showing one of their athletes taking part in the games but training in the Falkland Islands. Who this pathetic bit of propaganda is supposed to impress, I have no idea. It has not gone down too well in the Falkland Islands of that we can be sure. The government in Argentina is in an economic mess and the president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, has been batting on for months about her country's ownership of the Falkland Islands — which at the nearest point, are some 300 miles off the shore of Argentina and the capital, Port Stanley, is 400 miles away. And the people living in the Falkland Islands want to remain inhabitants of a British Overseas Territory. All of the 2,500 people there are of British descent and the islands have been occupied by the British since 1833. Still Argentina pursuing its claims for sovereignty fits all the criteria for the sort of logic that thinks spending billions on sports days in the east end of London makes any sense.

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Picture Post

I was going to include a picture with my last post but I forgot which one. When I remember, I will add an addendum

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Memory Loss

Some years ago, my mother's window cleaner knocked on the door of her house to tell her that he had finished cleaning the windows, up and down, back and front and to ask for his payment. As often happens to all of us as we get older, he spoke to her slowly and loudly. "There is no need to shout or to speak slowly." she said. "I am neither deaf nor suffering from dementia." After that he always addressed her as a normal human-being, even though she was in her nineties. It is a problem we all worry about; the onset of dementia. My memory is not as good as it was but it is still not too bad. I know many worse.

Loss of memory is becoming quite a problem these days. The Leveson Enquiry has turned up some awesome memory losses. It is not just one or two individuals forgetting the odd detail. It is the massive collective loss of memory of almost everybody being interviewed. Is it catching? Is it a virus that has spread unseen through the corridors of power? James Murdoch can't remember anything about phone hacking at the News of the World. He doesn't remember reading various incriminating e-mails. Rupert Murdoch similarly can't remember things. Although he has been in out of Downing Street for years — via the back entrance — why? — he can't remember meeting several prime ministers and he does not remember ever asking them for anything. Nor does he remember anyone telling him about the problems at the News of the World..

James Murdoch can't remember the close exchange of e-mails between News International and BSkyB and the government and Jeremy Hunt can't remember any of the e-mails either. All 163 pages are a closed book to all concerned. Extraordinary! In fact Jeremy Hunt seems to have been entirely unaware of what his specially appointed adviser — the surely free-rolling Adam Smith — was doing any of the time. The memories of members of the Murdoch family may be a bit selectively shaky but it defies credibility to suggest that a special adviser to a minister is operating entirely without the ministers knowledge. I don't like Jeremy Hunt and I expect that sooner rather than later his ministerial career will bite the dust — and we can forget all about him!

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Corruption or Incompetence?

I told you yesterday that I was depressed. There is more depressing news today. Yesterday, James Murdoch was giving evidence — under oath — to the Leveson Enquiry and it was revealed that, when News International were negotiating to buy control of BSkyB — with considerable misgivings in Parliament, the media and the public — the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was colluding with News International and providing James Murdoch with considerable data about what the government — ie Jeremy Hunt — was likely to do. Hunt should have been totally impartial. He was given the job of over-seeing the negotiations because Vince Cable had indicated that he was far from enthusiastic about News International — ie Murdoch — owning BSkyB. The appointment of Hunt was viewed with some dismay by many because it was widely thought — correctly as it now turns out — that he was in the pocket of this Machiavellian family. This morning Hunt's special adviser has resigned and surely. Hunt cannot be far behind — although this man is so far away from reality that he will only leave if Cameron sacks him. Last night Call me Dave said that Hunt had his full support — such an announcement is usually made up to 48 hours before a minister is sacked.

Jeremy Hunt is the sort of man who should not be in modern politics — even if, two years ago, there were some loonies in the press who thought he could be the next Tory leader — God help us! He always comes across as slightly slimy and totally unable to understand what is right and what is wrong. Throughout the time when discussions were taking place Hunt did not appear to be anything like impartial. On this issue, the BBC's business correspondent, Robert Peston, says that in all his years in journalism he has never seen anything so damming as the 160+ pages of letters, texts and e-mails between the Department of Culture and News International. It is difficult to see how the Culture Secretary can talk his way out of this one. The reality is that it was only the phone hacking scandal and the demise of the News of the World that changed the public atmosphere to an extent that News International were never going to be allowed full ownership of BSkyB whatever happened — and they withdrew their bid. Without that BSkyB would now be under the total control the Murdoch family — and every day that passes tells us just how bad that would have been.

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A Question of Priorities

I am still feeling depressed. It is what is going on around me that makes me feel depressed. Some of it has impressed itself on me personally but this is just a small part of the overall picture. I have not posted anything for nearly 2 months because there was so much that seemed to be wrong that I knew not to what I should direct my attention. But I cannot remain in a state of depressed silence for ever. So I will try to get back on track.

What more can I say about the Olympic Games? Very little that I have not said already. This absurd escapade carries on racking up more and more costs as its absurdity becomes mind numbing. Recently, it has been revealed that there will be a collection of cars supplied to drive the army of officials and hangers-on between hotels and venues. The decision to assemble a fleet of 4,000 BMWs has been criticized by green campaigners — and the rest of us — who point out that spectators with tickets for Olympic events have been urged to reach venues using trains and buses. At least 250 of the highest-ranking officials and politicians are expected to be assigned a chauffeur-driven car for their exclusive use for the entire two weeks of the Games. I don't know if the organizers have got a special deal but the normal price for 4,000 vehicles must be above £100 million. Still, it is probably included in the overall budget and bus drivers, taxi drivers and Joe Public will not mind special lanes being provided for important people like Sepp Blatter et al.

Now, we hear that loads of unsold tickets for Olympic events — including the opening and closing ceremonies and the 100 metre final — have turned up in Spain because not many people over there want to or can afford to come to London in August. No doubt some new and tortured scheme will be devised to allow the tickets to be sold — or they could, I suppose, be given to some totally undeserving men in suits.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, must be uneasy about the cost of the Olympic Games — among his many other worries. This coalition government has been in office now fro 2 years and things are not looking good. The last month or so has been very bad with government showing many signs of incompetence. It started with Osborne's budget which started rows about VAT on hot food — the pasty tax — about the cut in the top rate of income tax from 50p in the £ to 45p in the £ and the slow abolition of the pensioners age related tax relief — the granny tax. These last two were widely condemned because it seemed that tax relief was being given to Osborne's mates — the rich — while penalizing the pensioners — the poor. The 50p rate of tax was counter-productive, the chancellor told us, because it was widely evaded — and, as he told us, he was against evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. Since evasion involves criminality, we would expect him to be against it. But what does he mean by "aggressive avoidance?" If the rich have been escaping payment of the 50p rate, why should we believe that they will not avoid paying the 45p rate? Of course, next year, he will drop the 45p rate to 40p and then we will not have the slightest clue who avoids the tax completely.

The slow erosion of the pensioners age related tax relief will affect me, of course andI I have never been troubled by the tax rate on annual incomes above £150,000. This destruction of an age related tax relief comes after 90 years. It was introduced by Winston Churchill when he was chancellor in Stanley Baldwin's government from 1924 to 1929. It was wrong, Churchill argued, to penalize pensioners by taxing interest on the savings which they had made for their retirement and on which they had already paid tax. Is it being done now for reasons of high principle? No, it is not. It has being done — as I expected it to be done — to placate Nick Clegg's waffling on about making the income tax threshold £10,000 for everyone. "We, the pensioners," I said to myself, "are going to pay for that." And so it has come to pass. You are doing a grand job, Nick.

His latest bee-in-bonnet grand plan is reform of the House of Lords. On the whole, Nick, the House of Lords is not doing a bad job and when the government is lumbered with vast debts and an economy on its back, we do not need to spend any time buggering about with the House of Lords. The government has made very little progress in getting the deficit down; it may have slowed the rate at which it is going up, but it is not coming down. The economy is not expanding and the infrastructure — roads, railways, airports and services, water electricity and gas — are falling apart. That is where energy and effort should be concentrated and forget about most of these vast schemes for messing about with things that can carry on functioning in the meantime. What about a national water grid? It is not a new idea but it is more essential than ever — as we sit here watching the rain fall during the wettest drought since records began.

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Depression and Water Shortages

I have been a bit quiet in recent weeks because I have been feeling very depressed. Not in the personal and medical sense, you understand, but in my view of what is happening in the world. There are the monumental disasters that carry on day after day with little sign of intelligent resolution — things like the Euro crisis, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. — but in addition there are the homegrown problems in the UK.

Last week, it was announced with some fanfare — after our PM had had a sort of love-in and renewal of marriage vows with French President, Nicholas Sarkozy — that Rolls-Royce would be working with French contractors in building two nuclear power stations in the UK. This was lauded as a triumph. It's not. This contract worth several billion pounds will be built 90% by French companies. We built the first nuclear power stations in the world just as we built the first railways in the world, yet now in the 21st century we have to buy these things from abroad. Further, the government is intent on building a high-speed railway system — albeit, very slowly — but we have had no indication that this will be built by UK companies. Can we expect more big orders handed to the Germans and the Japanese? I suspect he answer is, yes. Why aren't MPs kicking up a fuss now, not after it is all done and dusted? Does David Cameron and his collection of Old Etonian ministers have any idea how depressing it is to have government ministers not one of whom has any technical qualifications whatsoever? Can we feel confident that ministers who have progressed from wealthy families, via Eton, Harrow and Westminster schools to Oxford or Cambridge to obtain degrees in PPE will somehow be particularly well-suited to driving us forth into becoming a manufacturing nation again, making products that the world wants to buy? We have vast numbers of poorly educated, untrained, unemployed people — from all age groups — and we are trying to do something about the debts — both government and private — yet we have no plan to regenerate our economy to get people working. We are fiddling about re-organising the NHS — no doubt at great expense, with little likelihood that there will be any improvements and the bureaucracy will expand, as it always does — yet for stimulating growth, there is nothing. Michael Gove is a bright light in this government, trying to do something about improving education. He will be resisted at every step, of course, by the teaching unions who seems to have a strange obsession with anti-intellectualism. But I wish the minister luck in his endeavours.

Yesterday, there was a meeting with the prime minister and interested parties about the impending water shortages this summer. We have had two comparatively dry winters in the south east and all the storage facilities [reservoirs] are at low levels. Unless there is a seriously wet summer, we are in trouble. I would argue that we are in trouble because [a] we sold off the water companies to foreigners who have no interest in maintaining supplies; only in making profits. And [b] we have failed miserably to build sufficient new reservoirs to increase our storage capacity. It is ludicrous to blame global warming for water shortages in a country that is famed for wetness. The government should directly or indirectly instigate a programme of improving out water supplies by constructing a national grid and building more storage capacity. This should be done using UK contractors and creating thousands of new jobs. Will it happen? I doubt it. So, I am depressed.

Let me, nevertheless, end on a more optimistic note. I mentioned Rolls-Royce above. They are a very successful company and show Britain at its best. They are profitable and they have £60 billion worth of orders on their books. McLaren are building superb cars for the super-rich and good luck to them as well. More modestly, Jaguar-Land-Rover are prospering and look like they will continue to do so — even if they are Indian owned. Some of their success has to be down to Ford who invested quite heavily and then were forced to sell to bail out the parent company in the USA. There are other areas of manufacturing success and we should be doing everything possible to extend this into so many other fields. Why is it that almost all the F1 racing teams are based in the UK — at the side of the M40? It's because we are good at engineering. But various governments from Margaret Thatcher onwards have courted the City of London at the expense of our manufacturing. The financiers, the money dealers, the gamblers, they are the cynic's who really do know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Who Is Paid Too Much?

In a week when one England football manager has quit in a huff — he was very expensive but not very good — and a potential new one has ended his decade long struggle with HMR&C, I have observed a number of other pleasing signs of progress in our society. Ridiculously high salaries and bonuses in all walks of life are being increasingly questioned. Inevitably the bankers are at the top of the list of those subjected to public opprobrium but the leaders of Network Rail and directors of FTSE100 companies have also been made to give up their bonuses for failure. We are a long way from getting the right results overall but we seem to be moving down the right road at last. I use still the basic premise that if we think that the British Prime Minister is worth only £142,500 plus his MP's salary of £65,738 plus a few perks — like free cars, Chequers for the weekends, etc — say £250,000 all told, why does anyone feel that it is right to pay £1m or £2m or £10m [Bob Diamond at Barclay's] for various leaders of private companies that may not even be successful? It is suggested that if we object too much banks will up and move to more favourable climes. It seems that banks in Germany and the USA are saying similar things. We can only view with amazement the prospect of juggernaut lorries and air freighting companies shifting all the paperwork and the staff from one country to another in order to avoid a few percentage points on their operating costs. In some cases they will be queuing up at the airports as they pass each other in the departure and arrivals lounges.

There are some of us who wonder, as well, why some chief executives of local authorities are earning — or at least, getting paid — as much or more than the Prime Minister? These people used to be called town clerks but with the elevation of their titles their wages have spiralled into the stratosphere. Now the taxpayers of Bristol are demanding that their chief executive takes a £50,000 per annum pay cut to bring her into line with the pay level at neighbouring Bath. The bureaucrat in question is, of course, resisting this proposal on the grounds that she is good value for money. The good citizens of Bristol are being asked to sign a petition demanding that the councillors cut the salary of the said bureaucrat. I think she is unlikely to get much support in the city and councillors will have to address this demand. It will not do to suggest that there is a contract agreement. Everyone in the country is suffering from reduced income and job security, apparently except many in the public sector and among the bankers who caused all the problems in the first place. The government and the people in this country have massive debts and although the Governor of the Bank of England seems quite happy to carry on printing money in order to inflate away the debts, some efforts must be made to slash the public debts which are demanding that we borrow £42 billion of extra money every year in order to pay the interest on the debts we have already. This is simple madness. It has to be corrected and bringing salaries and bonuses into line is an essential part of the mechanism of correction.

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A Royal Jubilee

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the accession to the throne of Queen Elizabeth II. She is already the oldest monarch in history from William I to the present day and the second longest reigning monarch behind Queen Victoria. She is only the 6th monarch since 1837 and the 5th if we exclude the uncrowned and unsuitable Edward VIII. I am no ardent supporter of royalty but I do think this archaic system still has advantages over a presidential system. And with a head of state committed to performing her duties as the Queen has done provides a stability and continuity that is entirely absent from most democratic republics. For most presidents the most important event in their lives is winning the next election.

It has been common among people of my generation to be able to remember precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard of the assassination of President Kennedy. For what it is worth, I was in a guest house in Eastbourne, staying the night before an interview for a job the next day — in Terminus Road, it was. But I can remember also where I was when I heard of the death of King George VI. I was in the school dining room at Leigh Grammar School. February 6th 1952. I had been at this school only since the autumn of 1951 and we were packed into that dining room for our collective lunch. It was about 12.30 pm and we were chattering away making the usual racket that ensued in this place. It was quieter upstairs but only older boys were allowed upstairs. Did they worry about us falling down the steps? Surely not in those politically very incorrect days. We sat at quite solid wooden tables with benches on each side that were regularly knocked over. In one corner of the dining hall, near the kitchen, was a separate table where a dozen or so teachers ate their lunches. On this particular day, one of those teachers was Mr. "Claude" Langley, the senior languages master. Why he had the nickname of "Claude" I am not quite sure but I always supposed it was because it was vaguely French. Claude was quite a big man with a large head and thick locks of grey hair with a centre parting. Without his glasses he looked a bit like Beethoven. Claude was my languages master in both my second and fifth years at Leigh Grammar School. Apart from his efforts to teach us languages — with only limited success in my case, it has to be said — he also organised productions of Gilbert& Sullivan operas with boys of the school; a procedure complicated somewhat by our lack of girls. Young boys whose voices had not broken had to take on all the female roles while tenors and basses were generally from the 5th and 6th forms. This did produce some odd pairings at times, when a 6ft 2in Frederic stood alongside a 4ft 10in Mabel. One year we were planning a production of Pirates of Penzance after a production some months earlier of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. That production had almost hit the rocks when, at the eleventh hour, the boy playing Mark Anthony had broken his leg playing rugby. The master in charge of the production, John Cassidy, had taken on the role himself with great aplomb. For the Pirates, following the auditions and selection of the best singers for the lead parts, Claude instructed that no-one was to play rugby until the production was finished, since, he told us, "I don't want to end up playing Mable!" I could never push from my mind the picture of Claude Langley as a drag artist playing Mable.

However, on the 6th February 1952, Claude was having lunch with other masters when they were given the news of the death of the King. Claude got up from his place walked into the middle of the hall and grabbing a desert spoon from one of the tables, hammered on the table with it to grab attention and suppress the noise. He then told us of the death of the king at Sandringham and that the new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II. It is all as clear in my mind now as if it were yesterday. But why?

Nevertheless, I wish Her Majesty the very best on this anniversary and hope she will remain with us for many years to come.

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