An England Side With Potential

England's Rugby Union team have been beaten 3 - 0 in their test series in New Zealand.  After two apparently near misses in the first two tests, England were taken to the cleaners in the third test and lost 36 - 13.  They were hammered in the first half of this match but improved in the second half.  Nevertheless, it was not a great performance.  This was New Zealand's seventeenth successive international victory — a world record.  So, we were playing a goodish side lead by Richie McCaw, the 16st 10lb captain; one of the all time greats of rugby union with 126 caps to his name.  But, at least England looked like they were trying, seemed to understand the object of the game and they are getting better.  This is a young side, still rated 4th in the world behind — predictably — New Zealand, South Africa and Australia.  But they are not far behind Australia and on a good day they can beat either Australia or South Africa.  If they carry on making progress, they will get there in time for the World Cup in 2015.  They won in 2003 and they can do it again — and I believe that the players believe that they can do it.  

Unlike the football team, our rugby players will have to fight hard against the best teams in the world.  The footballers have to fight hard against week-end pub sides and would still be unable to guarantee a win.

Richie McCaw is one of the finest rugby players around today and he earns about £420, 000 per annum in a sport where you can expect to get knocked about a bit and will certainly take a hammering in a career as long as McCaw's.  Wayne Rooney does not need to expect to get knocked around but collects McCaw's annual salary twice in three weeks.  He is being paid at a rate over 35 times as high as McCaw.  You know it makes sense.

Do not despair England; you can still come good for the World Cup.

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Some Wonderful Moments, Some Terrible Half-Hours

Today is the longest day of the year and with it we expect to be somewhere near mid-summer.  The last few days we have enjoyed some reasonable weather; not very hot and not very sunny, but pleasant enough  For the last week or so the eyes of the male half of the world have been mainly concentrated on events in Brazil — if we ignore the lunatics in the Middle East — hosting the football World Cup for the first time. Brazil is a huge country stretching to 3,000 miles from north to south and a similar distance from east to west.  It covers an area of 3.3 million square miles and has a population of about 200 million.  Of course it is an emerging nation still escaping the legacy of military dictatorship, still with many severe problems and substantial differences in living standards.  Almost certainly they will find that they have spent too much money on putting on this World Cup — about £10 billion when the initial estimate was only £1 billion.  We have estimators like that in Britain.  But the Brazilians are trying to put on a grand carnival that everyone can enjoy.

There will be some exceptions to the universal enjoyment of the carnival  In football, the current world champions, Spain, have been knocked out in the preliminary rounds and will be leaving for home next week.  This was a great shock and surely completely unexpected.  The Spanish team may be in a period of decline — but not so soon and so rapidly.

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Less of a shock has been England's elimination.  This team left for Brazil with high hopes but low expectations.  England football teams in world tournaments is a perpetual case of hope triumphing over expectations.  But, perhaps we have now come to the state of expecting nothing and being satisfied.  As England failures go, their performance at this World Cup was up there with the worst of them.  Not since 1950 have we managed to lose both of our first two opening matches and not since 1958 have we been eliminated at the group stage..We were told by the pundits that this Group D was a modest collection of teams and that England would be sure to progress to the knock-out stages.  No.  They were beaten by a far from grand Italian team and then humiliated by Uruguay.  I say humiliated even though the studio pundits have striven to excuse this teams failings and point to the positives.  To talk of positives in this context is to hide from the truths.  The England football team is like a Wagner opera, which, said Rossini, has some wonderful moments but some terrible half-hours.  That sums up their efforts.

After losing to Italy, came the total humiliation of defeat by Uruguay.  This is a team made up of a very good player [Suarez] and many modest players existing on low wages and coming from a poorish country with a population of 3.4 million.  Our Premier League has the highest paid players in the world — Wayne Rooney is at the top of the list with his £300,000 PER WEEK salary.  I think Rooney is a good player but not a great one.  Of the top ten highest paid footballers in the world eight play in the Premier League and in a country [England] with a population of 53 million, we consistently cannot produce a top-class team of eleven players to provide serious competition at international level.

Against modest Uruguay, England were disorganised and made many amateurish errors.  Suarez, recovered from his knee injury was playing.  The England captain is also Liverpool captain and plays with Suarez week in and week out.  He knows what Suarez can do yet he was allowed to wander around the field often unwatched.  England should have had a defender welded to Suarez throughout the match.  They did not.  Their defending was abysmal — Gary Cahill had some moments but overall they were poor.  

After the loss to Uruguay it was still theoretically possible for England to qualify if Italy beat Costa Rica and England beat Costa Rica in their last game by a considerable margin.  Now even that lifeline has gone.  Costa Rica today defeated Italy 1 - 0 and go to the top of the group.  Now England cannot qualify even if they defeat Costa Rica by a huge margin — and that is surely unlikely against a team that has already defeated both teams that have defeated England.  Costa Rica is another poor country with a small population — 4.3 million — that is capable of making a decent football team — and against Italy they won in spite of being denied a certain penalty.

While, in recent years many of our sports men and women have been achieving great things.  Andy Murray at Wimbledon; bike men and women in track and on road with Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, et al; athletes at the Olympics; the rugby team wins the Six Nations, etc.  There was the cricket disaster in Australia but with staggering consistency the football team fails again and again.  English football is awash with money but still there is no sign of a decent football team emerging.  Is the life of a footballer in England too easy?  Do they think of nothing more than WAGs and lifestyles?  Is their only worry the colour of the next Ferrari?  Wayne Rooney could buy a new Ferrari with four days pay.— something I could only achieve after a good number of years and assuming that I could cut all my other expenditures to zero. 

Mattews, Lofthouse and Finney will be rolling in their graves.

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Debts and Deficits

In these trying times almost all of us in the UK are struggling to pay the bills, to save some money or just to get by.  But it is always as well to bear in mind those wise words of Mr Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, "Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19-19s-6d, result happiness.  Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20-0s-6d, result misery."  It is a simple homily but in this modern world it is widely disregarded.  Everyone seems to be in debt.  Billions are borrowed to buy houses which become more and more over-priced.  A house is no longer a place to live but is becoming more of an investment for making money and ought to be kept in a bank vault rather than lived in.  It used to be the case that no-one could borrow money to buy a house if the price was more than four times an annual income.  That went out of the window in the years before the financial crash when liar mortgages became almost normal; ie a borrower could tell the bank or building society that they earned fabulous salaries of £80,00 or £100,000 per year or..... anything;  Just take the price of the house that you wanted to buy, divide by four and that was your declared annual salary.  No-one checked to see if it was true and soon everything collapsed.  Things are not quite that bad now but still people are borrowing too much to buy over-priced houses and hoping that interest rates will remain low.

But it is not just private debt.  The government has huge debts — and still they increase.  By the time of the election in 2015, total government current debt will be about £1,400 billion.  How are they going to pay that off?  The annual interest alone will be £40 billion+.  This debt figure does not take into account the money that will be needed to finance future public sector pensions — another vast sum.  As the government declares what a wonderful job they are doing in reducing the extra amount they need to borrow every year because they spend more than they receive in tax and duties.  They never mention these days the country's current account deficit.  In the past, the monthly current account deficit was reported in news broadcasts and in newspapers.  It was considered important — and it is.  Now nobody bothers.   The trouble is that it is BAD!

Our current account deficit is running at -£10 billion per month.  This means that our imports exceed our exports by £120 billion per year.  It is atrocious; it is absolutely incredible.  The trouble really started in the 1980s when Thatcher told us that manufacturing was of no importance.  She was wrong about that just as she was wrong about many other things.  We need to make things which other countries want to buy and we need companies that are British owned.  British owned allows us to keep control and to work for the benefit of UK Ltd.  Sell off the companies and they can move manufacturing anywhere in the world that happens to be suitable.  But until we start making things to sell, we have to sell off whole companies in order to balance the books.  Any short falls in the old days were made up by financial services.  But not any more.  The government could, of course, jack up interest rates.  This would bring down house prices, lift the value of the £ and would make our imports more expensive while encouraging our cheaper exports.  But it probably will not happen before a general election.

The chart above shows how things have deteriorated in the last 20 years.  During the days of John Major, the deficit ran around £10 billion per annum, an amount easily made up by financial transactions.  But from the moment Blair took over the trading debt went up and up until now our trading deficit is 12 times worse than the rate under Major.

You know it makes sense.  What does the government think?  Nick Clegg thinks we should give everybody free school meals.

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Changes in Europe?

I am writing this in the week following the declaration of the results in the election of members of the European Parliament. For the pro-european establishment, it was a disaster. In the UK, as was, perhaps, widely expected, the United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP] came top of the polls almost everywhere. Labour and the Tories each collected about 24% of the vote while UKIP amassed over 29%. Their result in Scotland was more limited but, nevertheless, UKIP gained their first MEP in Scotland — a fact which has much annoyed Alex Salmond who has been arguing that UKIP were an irrelevance in Scotland; now they cannot be ignored. The achievement of UKIP has been astonishing. It is the first time in well over 100years that one of the major political parties has not topped an election poll. I would include the Liberal Democrats in “major parties”; they did well until after the First World War. But the Lib-Dems have been virtually annihilated in these European elections. A few days earlier, on 22^nd May, they did badly in the local elections, losing nearly half of all of their council seats up for election.  But in the European Parliament, they have lost all but one single MEP in the whole of England and Wales.  All the major parties have areas where they are strong and others where they are weak. Labour are strong in the north of England — and, of course, in Scotland. But, apart from in London, they still have very few seats in the UK parliament anywhere south of the famous line from Bristol to the Humber. The Tories are solid in the prosperous south east but have only one seat in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats have, traditionally been strong in the Celtic fringes of Devon, Cornwall, Wales and Northern Scotland. But in these elections they have been hammered in the south west. I wonder if this absolutely, obsessively pro-Europe party will read into this anything other than the standard excuse of every party that does badly; a failure to get their message across. The reality is that people in the south west — not the richest part of England — have been profoundly Euro-sceptic for years as they have seen their industries strangled and squashed by EU legislation.

All across Europe, in many countries, Euro-sceptic parties have been elected. In the old well-established member states there has been a considerable vote against the EU and the political establishment — except perhaps in Germany, the country that gets most benefit from the union and the euro. The new EU members have, on the whole, followed instructions and voted for centrist parties that will keep the present system ticking over. This is quite understandable because many of them see the EU as a guarantee of some sort of democracy but, more important, as a bulwark against Russia. But, in contrast, the countries that have been members for many years are concerned about the undemocratic nature of EU institutions, inefficiency, waste, incompetence, corruption, immigration and the mess that is the euro. Nowhere was the Euroscepticism more intense than in France — one of the founding six members of the Common Market. The establishment parties of the government and the centre all lost seats and there were gains for all the Eurosecptic parties of left and right but particularly the fairly extreme party the National Front, lead by Marine Le Pen. Some of the elected members represent groups that wish to withdraw completely from the EU but most of the increasingly Eurosceptic countries, even if they want to keep the EU, want more national control and an ability to manage their own affairs without constant interference from Brussels — and these sentiments will only increase in resilience unless Europe changes. There is precious little sign of that. The parties elected represent all shades of political opinion from fascist parties of the extreme right that are little more or less than Nazi parties, to groups on the extreme left that want something akin to communism. What they have in common is an opposition to the EU as it exists today. The monster of the European Union has stagnated for some years, partly because of the financial crisis but also because making any changes has become an increasingly monumental task, requiring the agreement of 28 nations and precipitating certain countries to hold referendums before their governments can approve the changes. The general feeling in the European corridors of power has been that in these uncertain times, referendums result in electorates likely to keep saying “No!” In the past, it has been traditional that if any country said “No!” they should be asked the same question again and again until they said “Yes!” I think there is a belief in the corridors of Brussels that asking the same question over and over again will no longer change the answer.

About half the European Parliament is now made up of MEPs who do not want to be there at all. They will contribute little to the running of the day-to-day activities of the parliament and will oppose almost all legislation. But as things stand, it doesn't matter. The EU Parliament serves almost no purpose whatsoever and the unelected Euro politicians and bureaucrats will carry on as though nothing had happened, generating utterly pointless legislation, spending our money and providing more jobs for the boys. And, God, how they spend money. This parliament is incapable of even achieving something on matters that it does control. After all these years, they still cannot agree to stop trecking from Brussels to Strasbourg for four days every month in order to meet on French soil. Every trip involves carting juggernaut loads of paper — printed in 22 languages — on a journey of 265 miles each way, plus all the Eurocrats and MEPs that want to make the journey, to put them up in quite expensive hotels and pay all their travelling expenses. The exercise is utterly pointless and costs at least £165 million every year — or about £14 million per trip. I assume that absolutely no-one is in favour of this nonsense except the French.

I have long argued that the whole of the EU is an organisation that if it did not exist we would not need to invent it. The last time we were allowed a meaningful vote on Europe was in 1975 when I, and most other people in the UK, believed that we were voting in favour of membership of a common market, a large trading group that would operate with no obstructions to trade and would allow easy movement between countries. Our ideas were based on EFTA — the European Free Trade Association — which had worked very well for a good number of years without need for any great bureaucracy or Europe-wide useless parliament. At that time there were only nine members of the Common Market. Since then the number of member states has increased to twenty eight and steps have been taken to form an economic and political union with the parliaments of member states having less and less power. In addition there has been the formation of a currency union with Britain not a member — at least we can thank Gordon Brown for that. This euro area was always an absurd idea. It was OK for strong economies [ie Germany] but not much good for anyone else and inevitably it is now in serious trouble. Problems were triggered by Greece, approaching bankruptcy. Greece only succeeded in joining the EU when her finances proved she was ready. In reality she was not ready and the books were the result of some creative accounting by Goldmann Sachs — who were paid, I understand, a sum adjacent to $300 million for their expertise in cooking the books. But in order for Europe to get out of trouble, the ministers and eurocrats want more of the same — further integration and abrogation of powers to Brussels — and few of the voters in any country want that.

Following these EU elections, the heads of governments of all 28 members — plus their entourages of bureaucrats and hangers-on, all gathered in Brussels to discuss what they should do about the voters unhelpful attitude to their project. After a very short meeting — by EU standards — it was agreed that they needed to look again at their structures. The fact that they came out with this statement in a matter of hours indicates that the statement will be virtually meaningless and capable of taking on any interpretation that any eurocrat wants to put on it. This is simple euro-code for doing nothing at all or more of the same and, in the process, making the EU less susceptible to upset by electorates. Although it is difficult to see what they could do to achieve this other than removing the veneer of democracy by scrapping the European Parliament all together. In order to advance down the road examining their structures, they need, by-the-way, an extra £3.5 billion per annum. Fine! How can we fail to believe in the sincerity of their intentions.

In the last week senior members of all three major parties have come out with suggestions of how they can improve their communications with the electorate, how they can get their message across, refusing to accept that either the EU or immigration is a problem. Nigel Farage and UKIP understand now that if they are to become a serious part with a substantial number of seats in the Westminster parliament and the potential power to ease us out of the EU, they need to come out with a proper manifesto and policies on the major issues that trouble people in this country. On Thursday, 5^th June, UKIP will attempt to wrest Newark from the Tories in a parliamentary by-election. I think the Tories will win because they have an existing 16,000 majority and that will need some overturning. Dave Cameron has visited the constituency four times and sent many cabinet ministers up there to help. But Nigel Farage needs to do well if UKIP are to look like a serious contender to build up a potential for next year's general election.

Europe has serious problems but it is so atrociously undemocratic yet politicians will do everything possible to keep it as it is in order to keep open an unending supply of highly paid non-jobs for them when their political careers come to an end. Look at Neil Kinnock and his wife, who between them as a commissioner [Neil] and an MEP [Glynis] collected about £400,000 per annum for many years. I have nothing against either of them but if they had disappeared in a puff of smoke on their way to or from Brussels it would have mattered, in political terms, not one jot.

As if things in Europe were not bad enough, we have had the spectre of Tony Blair telling us that the EU has to proceed and it is unacceptable to think of Britain leaving. Blair was an appalling prime minister, whose sanctimonious whining and arrogance we thought we had lost but now it is suggested that he wants the job of President of the European Council — a post currently filled by Mr Herman van Rumpuy. Could there be anything more likely to persuade that Britain would be better outs die the EU, than Tony Blair appointed to a high office — I will not say an important office.

David Cameron is talking of re-negotiating the terms of Britain's membership of the EU and then putting his proposals to the electorate via a simple In/Out referendum. I don't think he will get very far in changing the terms of our membership unless another large country like France or Italy starts pressing for serious changes on the same basis. It may have some effect if Cameron makes it clear that without changes he will recommend withdrawing. This will be welcomed by large sections of the Tory Party and UKIP.

I don't know what will come of these election results but I suspect that I and many others will remain supremely pessimistic that anything will change. Europeis short of great leaders in every country; everywhere we have political apparatchiks who are staggeringly unimpressive. Where is there a Churchill or an Attlee to take us into a prosperous and independent future?

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The Way Ahead

Politicians are not held in very high regard these days.  But, then, I suppose that has always been the case.  When I look at those governing us — and other countries as well — it is not surprising that we are in such a mess.  At present, the House of Commons is on Easter holiday so we are provided only with news about holiday jaunts or background stories — number one at the moment is the revelations about the sordid activities of the Liberal MP, the late Cyril Smith.  I always found his huge size revolting enough in itself but to discover on top of that that he was a serial paedophile makes it all a lot worse; and then to find that his activities were covered up time and again over many years by police and.local and national politicians is sickening.  It makes the odd behaviour of the former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe seem quite benign.and normal even.  Yet, even so, there are many other countries where the behaviour of politicians is worse, many wallowing in corruption.  I have worries that some of our politicians are deteriorating in competence and moral fibre; not all of them; but too many are rather obviously working entirely in the best interests of themselves.  This coalition government has been in office for four years and yet they have done nothing to tackle major issues that concern the people.  Bankers are still paying themselves ridiculous amounts of money and nothing is done.  Are they really serious in suggesting that no one will do those investment banker jobs unless they are paid millions every year?  Do they really think that directors at the Co-op need to be paid millions — even as the organisation chalks up the biggest annual losses in its entire history and almost sinks to the virge of collapse?  Do CEOs need to be paid one hundred times [or more] than the average employee?

There is a European election for MEPs next month and there is a wide assumption that the polls may be topped by UKIP, a party that, with few local councillors and no MPs, whatever their faults, is committed to withdrawing from the EU.  David Cameron promises us an In/Out referendum, following renegotiation of our membership terms — a referendum which he seems to be trying to avoid.  Ed Miliband and Ed Balls seem to have no policies, lack credibility and are anxious to avoid even a suggestion of an EU referendum.  The 100% pro-EU Lib-Dems will be annihilated.   How the nationalist parties will get on is still a mystery — although they will probably do OK because they are "none of the above".

Meanwhile, the newspapers tell us that David Cameron is wearing the wrong shoes — on holiday in the Canaries.  And in addition to the sartorial faux pas, he ignored advice not to swim in the seas and has been stung by an aggressive jelly fish. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are touring down-under with Baby George who appears to be getting very podgy and it has been noted that William has had to relax his belt a notch as he too gains weight.

The present government is claiming credit for the improving the British economy.  This is fair enough, I suppose, but there are still many things wrong and the recovery is financed with yet more debt — private and public.  Interest rates are held artificially low so that the government can borrow money at low interest rates to finance payment of the interest charges on its own every increasing debts.  House prices are rising again — particularly in London and the south-east — and this is made worse with the government's Right to Buy scheme that helps people borrow more.  

I despair of the situation of young people who go to university — in many cases studying useless subjects — and come away with huge debts, then struggle to find a job, cannot afford to buy a house and pay high rents to live in a house or flat that has been removed from the house purchasing market by someone relatively well-off who needs to become rich.  We need to build at least 250,000 new houses/flats every year.  Why is this apparently impossible?  

Why will it take 26 years to build a high speed railway to Manchester?  It is a distance of 200 miles.  In 25 years, the Victorians built 10,000 miles!!  Is such  railway the best use of £50 billion of public money?  And if this railway does ever get built, who will build it and supply the rolling stock?  I sincerely hope that the country that was the birthplace of railways can manage to do it without foreign suppliers and contractors.  Soon, we will go ahead with fracking and release the vast gas reserves under our country — but now, apparently, we lack the expertise to exploit these deposits and will need foreign assistance.  What is wrong with this country?  I suppose everything started with Margaret Thatcher and her execution of our manufacturing industries.  We need to make things that the world wants to buy.  We are quite capable of doing it if we have the necessary leadership.  Only then will we be able to balance the books and provide the services which we require.

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New Rail Service York to Blackpool

One of the many acts of vandalism attributable to Margaret Thatcher was the abandonment of the railway line from Burnley through to Leeds, Bradford and York.  It has to be admitted that when the old bat was feeling proud of her activities in The Falklands, the odd few trains every day rambling their way through the Holme Tunnel near Todmorden was of little consequence in her grand vision.  The line had been used for tanker trains but when they stopped in 1982, only one train per day wended its way through the tunnel.  But then, the Burnley Building Society and the Bradford and Bingley Building Society decided to merge their activities and the joint company sponsored extra trains between the east and west of the Pennines.

The tunnel was built in 1849 at the height of the Victorian railway boom when hundreds of navvies blasted and shovelled their way through 265 yards of faulted sandstone, mudstone and five coal seams to cut a tunnel for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway under the unstable spur of a hill known as Thievely Scout. Network Rail have been patching up the tunnel for years as the surrounding hill and rocks have moved constantly causing severe distortion in the tunnel. There has been a 20 mph speed restriction in the tunnel to minimize vibrations and shocks but ultimately there had to be a long-term solution or line closure. The rocks under the mountain shifted along the Cliviger Valley Fault, probably aggravated by a hundred years of mining in the area for lead and coal. Network Rail closed the line for 20 weeks. During that time, the tunnel has had supporting steel arches installed which much increase the ability of the tunnel to withstand land movements. At the same time they have improved other parts of the line near Todmorden to allow the through route to be suitable for speeds up to 75 mph.With new track installed, today’s privatized operators, Northern Rail, will be able to offer a 40-minute transit from Burnley to Manchester Victoria, using the tunnel and the re-opened curve at Todmorden, as soon as civil servants in London have located some rolling stock for the new service!! Such are the vagaries of privatized railways.

The new line was opened this week and will allow services from York direct to Blackpool. It is encouraging to see construction and improvement of railway lines which can contribute so much to our economy. Railways in Britain took Britain to the top of the industrial league in the 19th century and with government action they can do so again. Re-building railway lines shut down in the era of Beeching and then Thatcher, who just did not like railways, can be achieved quite easily in some areas. Just one year ago, the Bluebell Railway re-established a rail link with the main line third rail electric system at East Grinstead, with the enthusiastic support of the town. If such can be achieved by a volunteer railway, surely commercial railways can achieve as much or more. It is encouraging as well to hear that Hitachi will open a railway manufacturing facility employing up to 4,000 people in the north-east as railways return to their birthplace.Perhaps with HS2 coming through South Lancashire in 50 years or so, we will re-build some more of the Lancashire and Yorkshire as well as the London and North Western?

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Come To Hebden Bridge

This evening I watched, on BBC 2, Evan Davis's second programme about the divide between London and everywhere else in Britain.  It was a useful guide to some of the problems faced by this country.  So much is now concentrated in the south east — and, in particular, in London — that it is having a seriously detrimental effect on the rest of us.  I have argued previously that the problems have been generated not so much by forces of immigration, globalisation and wealth concentration as by the in-competences of various governments.  Back in the days of Margaret Thatcher we had an economic guru in the shape of Sir Keith Joseph who believed totally that everything needed to be privatised because such businesses are so much more efficient — even though there was never the slightest bit of evidence to support such a proposition. On top of this there was a belief that we did not need to have any manufacturing — we could leave that to countries with cheap labour.  The consequence has been an abandonment of almost all manufacturing industry and an increasing migration of people and business to the south east.  Now it is being realised that to have a balanced economy we have to have both services and manufacturing.

Evan Davis was arguing that for any system to work there has to be substantial centres of business activity.  London succeeds because it has these centres and they draw in more people with expertise in specific areas and that encourages more companies to move in. This makes sense.  It was true in Victorian times when Lancashire was the workshop of the world.  The county had coal mines — an essential raw material — a major port that connected us to the Atlantic and America — Liverpool — and railways and canals that connected us to all other parts of the country.  We sometimes forget the magnitude of the achievement of the Stephensons in building a railway between Liverpool and Manchester that could carry goods and people between the two major cities in one hour.  It was an engineering achievement that not only led to the transformation of Britain, but of the world.  Evan Davis visited Liverpool, Manchester and Wigan — among other places and showed us the left-overs from the achievements of bygone ages — empty buildings in a Liverpool that has lost half its population and most of its factories . And a local council in Liverpool that tries to get to grips with old housing — probably no longer needed — and grand buildings — like St George's Hall, grade I listed yet devoid of a purpose and the empty palaces along the waterfront.  These are impressive structures by any standards and it is tragic that we do not make full use of them.  What we need is a big second city much bigger than these places like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, etc to provide a hub away from London that could pull in people and businesses.  Of those cities I have listed, Manchester offers the best hope and was already pulling media companies and their satellites into the Salford Quays area as a result of the BBC moving there.

He visited also the small town of Hebden Bridge in the Pennines because a new and vibrant town was growing at the centre of a collection of undersize cities that had Hebden Bridge at the approximate centre and offered an attractive environment for people to live, while commuting to and from Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Preston and other towns in the area.  There is much that can be done but it needs a major culture change in government — among London based politicians and bureaucrats.  Local people can do much to build their communities but more and more central government has not trusted them to do the right things while still being ignorant themselves. 

I look forward to England's second city being centred on Hebden Bridge.  If it is such a good idea, perhaps we should just get on with it — without ten years of public enquiries, etc.

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Immigration

Last Sunday, in The Observer, Will Hutton was arguing about the pros and cons of immigration.  As we would expect he is very much in favour of immigration but he was arguing for a scheme to charge the super rich up to £2½ million for each of 100 fast track visas issued every year — the revenue to be used for improving infra-structure and for good causes.  He was very critical of Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, for being a tub-thumping anti-immigration, anti-EU, right-wing politician anxious to exploit a root unease about the levels of immigration.  Last year net immigration into Britain was about 220,000.  This is a staggering figure almost enough for another city the size of Bradford [290,000].  Where do we put them?  If they live in a fairly normal housing environment of four per dwelling, then we need another 55,000 houses or apartments just to get them in.  And then we need the back-up services of water, gas, electricity, etc for them to live normal lives.  At present we are building new homes at the rate of about 120,000 per year; so half are needed for the new immigrants.  House prices nationally are rising again, even though they are already too expensive — especially in the south-east.  The government needs to double the rate of building — at least.  In the 1950s, when Harold Macmillan was Housing Minister, he achieved house building rates up to 500,000 per year.  Sure, conditions today are very different but the present rate of house building is rather pathetic.  House building is a good creator of new jobs — they can't export jobs to China.  House building boosts the economy in many ways because it creates so many demands for products manufactured in the UK — from bricks, concrete, drain pipes and roofing tiles to plasterboard, wallpaper, paint and fitted kitchens.  It will tend to lower property prices until the government starts charging the correct interest rates and makes mortgages easier to obtain.  It should be possible to buy a first house for less than 4x the average wage — that is completely impossible in many parts of the country.

A fundamental problem and a cause of much unease about immigration is population density.  England , particularly, is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.  We have 1054 people/square mile; Poland is 319 people/square mile; Belarus is 120 people/square mile and Kazakhstan — a place almost as big as Western Europe [excluding Scandinavia] — is down at 15.39 people/square mile.  It is not surprising that we have problems.  We cannot carry on with net immigration levels that will add 1 million people to our population every five years. 

This country has many problems caused not only by immigration and globalisation but more than anything by incompetent governments.  Labour government of the 60s and 70s ignored the chaos caused by union militancy and out-dated industries.  Tory governments of the 80s and 90s became obsessed by privatisation and persuaded themselves that we did not need to manufacture anything — we could leave that to countries where labour was cheap.  And, worse still, we allowed the financial services sector to run riot, allowing them to pay themselves obscene salaries and bonuses.  The governments of Blair and Brown allowed this to continue until, in the traditions of 1929, the whole edifice collapsed and we, the taxpayers of the western world had to bail them out.  Yet, even now as our government struggles to balance its books and the debt gets bigger and bigger, the financial institutions pay themselves the same obscene salaries and bonuses as before while being fined for various forms of misrepresentation, corruption and incompetence.

The bowing of our leaders to finance and speculation while neglecting our ability to make things has moved the concentration of population and jobs towards the south east, has made property impossibly expensive and left vast tracts of the UK semi-abandoned.  With proper support and directing of investment, this country is capable of competing with any country in the world.  We built the railways that transformed civilisation in the 19th century yet now we are almost incapable of making railways, ships and large civil engineering structures.  We can make cars — with proper investment as at Jaguar and Nissan — and we do reasonably well in supplying the aviation business but there is so much more that we could do. 

British attitude the EU is ambivalent at best and increasing numbers would like us to get out.  This may not be the right thing to do but the Eu does little to persuade us that setting ourselves free would be detrimental.  The EU needs to either [a] form a proper economic union — unlikely or [b] abandon the euro — also unlikely.  Will Hutton tells us that net immigration into Britain from the original 15 member states was about 30,000 but the net influx including all the new members for Eastern Europe is very much higher.  Nevertheless, the likelihood is that over the years immigrants form the EU will often return to their home countries.  Consequently, net EU immigration is not likely to be a problem in the long term.  It is net immigration from non-EU countries that will be a continuing problem and I will address that issue in a separate posting.

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Chartwell

At present I am reading one of Michael Dobbs' novels set around the life of Winston Churchill before and during World War II.  These are impressive books that really do, as the late Anthony Howard said in The Times, "bring historical happenings so vitally back to life."  The author describes Churchill's home at Chartwell with some affection.  It is a place I visited many times. when I lived in Sussex.  There was nothing I enjoyed more than to go down to Chartwell on a sunny summer day and spend many hours walking around the house and gardens and visiting the gallery in the garden where the great man's paintings were displayed.  Mrs Churchill never really liked Chartwell but the couple lived there from 1922 until Winston died in 1965.  Winston Churchill was never a very rich man and relied for the most part on his writings to make a living.  After his defeat in the General Election of 1945 it rapidly became clear that they could not afford the upkeep on this far from cheap to run rambling mansion..  Although they still owned the property they did so only because newspaper magnate, Viscount Camrose — owner of the Daily Telegraph — and nine other wealthy well-wishers gave Churchill £5,000 [equivalent to about £160,000 today] each, to help pay for the upkeep of the building, on the understanding that they paid a nominal rent and after they were both dead the house would be handed to the National Trust. In fact after the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, Clementine Churchill handed the house to the National Trust, immediately.

But problems with debt and the cost of running the house were not new.  Back in 1938, when Churchill had been out of office for nearly a decade and living on his MP's salary and his journalism, he was pressed to put Chartwell up for sale.  It was said in the agent's description that Chartwell had 5 reception rooms, 19 bed rooms — with dressing rooms — 8 bathrooms, had three cottages set in an estate of 80 acres and included a swimming pool.  Sir Henry Strakosch bailed out Churchill by taking over his share portfolio for three years and paid off heavy debts so the house did not need to be sold.

Clemintine's objections to the house were mainly practical ones; it was big and rambling, prone to being drafty and cost a small fortune to keep warm — no double glazing, loft insulation or cavity wall insulation here.  But Winston Churchill's love for the house was that of a romantic.  Its location affords panoramic views across the Weald of Kent and Churchill was prone to waxing lyrical about the countryside that "we are fighting for."  Its location is truly splendid; to stand on the terrace and look out across Kent to the English Channel always sent shivers down my spine and made me proud to be an Englishman.

The house exudes Churchill in every room; all of which have been restored to the condition they would have been in during the years when Churchill lived there.  Being able to see his library, his work-room, the stand-up desk where he worked and the dining room with its seating for about ten people, it is easy to imagine Churchill leaning over your shoulder, pointing out many of the small mementos of his many visitors from Charlie Chaplin to President Eisenhower.

The gardens complete with Winston's brick walls are charming and relaxing and it was always a pleasure to look at his collection of paintings.  He was a competent artist rather than a great one but I suspect the he was a better artist than Claude Monet would have been a statesman. 

Now that I am living in the North of England, I don't suppose I will ever visit Chartwell again but I will always retain fond memories of this wonderful and very historic house.

Today, Churchill is remembered as a giant of British politics and a great man.  He was.  Although not always consistent, his politics came from the heart and he stood up for what he believed in and above all he believed in Great Britain.  In comparison, most of today's British politicians are mere pygmies wandering aimlessly, without ideas or principles, around the corridors of power.

But Chartweel, go there if ever you have the chance.

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What Is Anything Worth?

How do you measure the value of anything?  It is an easy question but one with a far from easy answer.  Do we measure value on the basis of price?  Very often, we do.  Some years ago, the City of Liverpool offered some land for sale for redevelopment [housing] in the city centre for £33,000 per acre.  Nobody showed the slightest interest so they opened the sale to offers.  A local builder offered £1.00 per acre.  Ridiculous said the city bureaucrats; it is worth £33,000 per acre.  But how can it be worth that if no-one will buy it?  The value [price] that something commands is what someone will pay.  Oscar Wilde, famously, defined a cynic as someone who knew the price of everything but the value of nothing — and there's the clue.  Small contributions to a variety of charities can create funds sufficient to achieve great things — the cost is small but the value is high.  

And then there is football.  Yesterday, it was announced that Wayne Rooney had agreed a new five year contract to play football at Manchester United on pay of £300,000 per week.  This makes him the highest paid player in the Premier League and raises the bar for future pay demands of footballers and new levels of obscenity.  Wayne Rooney has had his ups and downs with David Moyes [the manager] when they were both at Everton but now, it seems, Wayne and David are bosom buddies.  Hmmm, it is surprising what a few hundred thousand pounds per week can do to a relationship!.  What is the value of Wayne Rooney as a footballer.  Manchester United plainly feel he is worth this absurd sum and who am I to criticise Wayne Rooney for getting such pay if someone is prepared to hand it out.  But it is still absurd.  Wayne Rooney is a good footballer but not a great one — in my view.  To be great you have to have that something special like Pele, Best, Matthews, Finney and of today's players Messi and possibly Ronaldo.  I have already written about Finney — and he had to get by on £20 per week.  But if Finney wasn't playing football, he could d a bit of plumbing.  Even allowing for inflation, is Rooney 15,000 times better?  I think not!  

Rooney style pay deals are possible only as long as TV channels are prepared to pay for the exclusive rights to broadcast the matches live.  They then sell the rights to watch these matches via quite expensive cable and satellite TV deals to ordinary punters on ordinary wages.  I have never had the slightest interest in signing up to Sky or other channels in order to buy these packages.  I pay my £145.50 for the annual TV licence to finance the BBC — which, with all its faults, is still one of the best broadcasters in the world and provides lots of services for this money.  They do not have the possibility of bidding at the highest levels to buy the rights to live broadcasting of Premier League football — the licence fee is always a source of arguments when it comes up for re-negotiation.  But if I want to watch live football I need the full package at something like £50 per month — difficult to be specific; there are too many packages including phones and broadband.  It is 4 x the BBC cost and mainly to watch football.  

These highly paid footballers derive most of their incomes — directly or indirectly — from ordinary workers on modest wages; not from investment bankers who can afford it.  Watching football matches live is also expensive with Arsenal charging over £100 for some seats at some games.  Drive to a Premier League ground with your two sons, park the car, watch the match and have a half-time snack and expect to be £150 worse off.  

I have lost all interest in the Premier League because, in general there are half-a-dozen team who sit up at the top of the league, have lots of expensive players, while most other clubs struggle to find the money to pay even half-decent players and fight each other for the right to be relegated.  Once relegated, the team has parachute money for a year but after that they have to fend for themselves.  With smaller crowds, much less TV money they cannot pay the expensive players they acquired in the Premier League and either go bust or cut their costs and sink further down the drainage system that is the Football League.

At this moment, Saturday, 22nd February 2014, Chelsea are in No 1 spot in Premier League with 57 points. Newcastle are 9th with 37 points.  Swansea are 10th with 28 points.  Fulham are bottom, in 20th spot with 20 points.  Any club in the bottom half of the table is in with a chance of relegation.  Many of these clubs, strapped for cash, have small squads of players and it only needs a couple of red cards and a few injuries for the clubs to be struggling  It is not a level playing field.

In order to illustrate this blog, I searched for images of Wayne Rooney actually playing football.  They are few and far between.  The ones that seem to exist are not up to much.  Have they all been collected and filed away in some deep bank vault?  There are thousands of pictures of the man clapping his hands, smiling, scowling, grimacing,. laughing, signing his latest contract, showing off his replanted hair, celebrating goals [by whom, I know not], getting hugs from Alec Ferguson, hugging his baby, having a laugh with Steven Gerrard, having his physique compared with Christiano Ronaldo — Wayne lost — and so on,  But few of him actually playing.  So I have used a picture from The Guardian of Wayne with his hew best friend, David.

Makes you think!

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