Category: General

I propose to use my own experience of the credit crunch to show what has happened to thousands of people and thousands of businesses, because those we trusted, chose to and were allowed to steal our money, hive it off, and not only not be taken to book, the government gave them even more money to play with. When I was in my 70s, Sophie and I calculated what we would need should one or both of us been taken ill and had to go into care. At the current rate we would need £15,000 per annum just for one, and as we wanted to retain our home for the other, we saved on a regular basis for a nest egg to cover the differential, to ensure the government could not steal our house to pay for the incarceration, because we were on an income where this could happen. When the crunch came our investments in many cases were decimated. I recalled this as a microcosm of what is happening throughout the land. Careful people in industry and at home have made decisions on the assumption that any change would be minor. Now we know that that was not possible.

I have always felt from my own experience, that apprenticeship in trades, and articles to the professions produced, in many cases, far more competent people at the end of their training, than either the technical colleges or universities produced. They had hands-on experience, possibly a rough ride, but when they came out of training they were experienced. When people come out of college their experience is virtually limited. I have seen General Foremen who knew more through experience, and what they were doing, than the engineers in charge of them.

The effect of this credit crunch is that first of all the schools and colleges are under extreme financial pressure which will inevitably reduce the variety, and possibly even the quality of the education available. We have already seen that in Belfast the Queen’s University is closing its German department. There is hardly a day that passes but we see on television the cutbacks that are occurring right across the board. What is even worse is that our manufacturing and construction industries are closing down or going on short time, throughout the country. The effect of this is that the educational facilities in industry, such as apprenticeship, will be considerably reduced, and so it is the emerging generations who will suffer, and in consequence the ability and the resource of labour, particularly in industry will suffer, and it is this upon which the viability of the country depends. The future for this country will be bleak unless some strong minded leader, pulls us up by our bootlaces as Churchill did in World War II.

I have said before that I can’t understand how so much money from across the world has been hived off and clearly set aside without anybody knowing who has it and where it is. Clearly it is not being used. It must be obvious that if either some individuals, or some country that has gathered in all this money, starts to use it, and we, the nations who have lost the money, have a monitoring system cannot discover any sudden appearance of wealth, then one must assume that the money is virtually gone, and, if it were replaced purely by printing more, so that the finances of the governments that have been affected were back to where they should be, then surely the crunch would be over, or am I so ignorant I can’t imagine an obvious reason why this has not happened?

In all my life, I have never seen such insecurity as we have been subjected to in all those aspects of our lives that affect us most, created by the ever-changing mindset of a Labour Cabinet since Tony Blair came to office. It is no wonder that the educational and NHS environments are almost at a standstill because nobody knows which way it will go next, and how to accommodate these changes, many of which seem to occur on a monthly basis. For some unaccountable reason Brown wants everyone to foot the bill for broadband being introduced right across Britain, not I notice Northern Ireland, at a time when money couldn’t be shorter. I have complained before about authority feeling that it is enough to broadcast information on the Internet, when only a small proportion of the adult population has access to the Internet. This idea being broached at the moment assumes that people are going to be on the Internet on a daily basis, but why should it? It strikes me as another one of these flags being run up the pole to see who will salute it, and has been engendered as a sop to a small pressure group, interested in promulgating music, advertising which is now falling away on television, and also Brown trying to appear abreast of the times. When you consider the damage that will be done to the road’s infrastructure over the next few years, and also that the quality that he is proposing as ‘a world leader’, is below that in some of the Asian countries, it makes the whole project laughable.

In a recent broadcast Brown laid out his financial priorities for the near future, one of which was to increase overseas aid. I found this incredible when so many of our own people are being dispossessed, not necessarily for there own fault but the government’s inefficiency. Anyone who has been interested in what has happened to the money that they have donated to overseas countries to help the children and the health of those countries will know, and no longer be surprised at the fact, that very little money actually reaches its intended target. A high proportion is hived off for something called expenses, and can be as much a 60 or more percent of that donated, not to mention the fact that the military in a lot of these countries takes the imports for their own use, not that of the population generally.

In Northern Ireland we have a case where a £700,000 has been donated by the populace, towards the purchase of an air sea rescue helicopter. It transpires that in the first year £500,000 of the 700 was spent on wages and expenses. A pencil on the back of an envelope could soon indicate how fatuous this is when you start working out just how many people are needed, the size of the building and the cost of the collection boxes. Anyway as it was a charity there would have been a lot of people there to give their time to collect the money, if they haven’t already done so. The fact that nobody is quite sure whether we need another helicopter or not, nor calculated that if one is brought into service the costs will not rest merely with the purchase, there will be salaries for the flying staff, the maintenance crews, the hangar, spare parts, throughout the life of this helicopter which somebody will have to budget for.

Years ago, as I have written on this blog before, I knew a case where a husband and wife were singing outside Woolworths in Balham High Street while they owned six houses that they rented out. I no longer subscribe to these European beggars squatting on our streets, they will probably gather more in a day than they could earn in a job.

This is not one of my serious posts, but matters that I take seriously, because they are so unfair and so absurd. Take the latest transfer fee of £80 million for a football player in the Premier League. If you take into account the unemployed, the children, the retired, the lower paid and the high-paid fans who are attending the matches, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the average daily pay packet would be approximately £80 for an eight hour day, so the working year of 200 days would amount to £16,000, and the fee would represent five thousand year’s wages of the average fan. It is these fans who are going to have to foot the bill through their purchases, and season tickets for that incredible transfer fee, at a time when so many people are on short time of losing their jobs. Of course it’s absurd! It is also obscene!

Recently we have had a spate of people being brought to book with respect to the police force and the social services, for either criminality, malfeasance, or permitting unreasonable behaviour to pass without censure. Some of these people will go to jail, quite a few will be sacked. How is it then that the far more serious and far-reaching theft of our savings and investments, because that is what it was, when our money was used to gamble with, and when success was achieved, the achievers received bonuses and even higher salaries, from the source, that was the aggrandisement of our investments, as a result of their gambling on the stock exchange. When the wheels came off, they add insult to injury by taking our taxes to actually pay these people, some with incredible salaries and pension funds. It was all beyond being absurd.

I resent very much the way in which some members of Parliament have been playing ducks and drakes with our system of government, in some cases without reference to the electorate that put them in power. The glaring case of course is the inflated ego of Mrs. Blears, who had previously put herself up as a candidate for the vice Premiership and came last. I suspect that without reference to the chairman of her constituency party, she went headlong into an assassination of the Prime Minister. It is possible to imagine that her letter, her rhetoric, and total arrogant attitude reflected her conjecture that there was going to be a leadership battle, and with this she would receive promotion. Her subsequent abject apologies, only went to bolster this assumption. She is not alone in this behaviour, that demeans our parliamentary system, to a level at which we feel we cannot trust those who are supposed to lead us, their judgement and integrity. The whole business over the last few weeks has been more than a disaster, it has cut the feet from underneath our political platform, and except for the fact that the Brits are phlegmatic, slow to anger, saves us from some terrible political upheaval. This is criminal not absurd.

I am referring to this daily diet of politics, in spite of the fact that I am also another one at it. I have already written my objection to politicians having others write their speeches, because I believe they should all be forced to write their own, if nothing else, so that what they say are their own policies. There is a good way to check, currently, with all these politicians having to stand up and reply to why they have been elected, to why they haven’t been elected, and all the other questions that they are being asked every time they put in an appearance anywhere. That is when they have to speak from the heart, or pretend to. That is also when they are passing on their own thoughts. I discovered it interesting, as a pastime rather than research, just to see how many of them are flummoxed when they suddenly find them selves faced with the woolly lump of a microphone – in some cases it’s very revealing, not only about the quality of the rhetoric, but the fact that some of them say more than they should, and suddenly realise that it will come back to haunt them.

Let’s change the subject. Are you getting inundated with hilarious stories on a daily basis? My family knows that I’m no surfer of the Internet, I use it as a tool rather than a toy. So they keep me abreast of the humour, which in a high proportion of cases is really very clever. Looking back to the days when we all listened to the radio, or should I say the Crystal Set, to the information or humour that had been carefully vetted so that nothing of a sexual nature could offend the offendable, I now realise slightly salacious jokes slipped through, and while my mother feigned disgust, my grandmother and I smiled at one another, because we knew, she because of her age and experience, and me because I was learning, that sex offered properly, can be an hilarious subject. It’s great, that at this time we can still laugh at ourselves.

This of course, caused me to surf a wee bit, with the result that unfortunately I’m finding not only the breadth of interests on the Talk-Talk opening page, but the slant of those interests, which mainly seems to trend towards the trivial. This in turn clearly indicates to me that the need of the general public is to move away from reality, into the world of the celebrities, the tittle-tattle, and pretty well anything that distracts from the mundane, which has now become so objectionable. I believe that apart from people like me who are past it, the speed of life today just to stay afloat, together with the loss of so many of our cheap and simple pleasures in the name of progress, such as kids being able to move around, play on open ground, and walk to school, and has now become dangerous, is so shackling, that the majority no longer have the time to appreciate the simple and finer things, because they strive for the sake of striving, ever upwards.

I think if anything, what I have just written, is probably both sad and boring, but if it is true the trend like politics should be reassessed and changed.

It seems that everybody on TV and on the Internet is advising the world how to save money in the credit crunch, so why should I be different? Some of what I write here I have probably touched on previously, but for the sake of those who have not read it, I repeat myself. My mixing and matching first started when I was making a rather good quality home-made wine, 10 gallons at a time, using liquid yeasts which are no longer available, and gave the brews the distinctive flavours of the yeasts, even if the quality was not quite the same. It was then that I discovered that almost invariably mixing two different wines could produce a drink which was better in flavour, and possibly body, than either of the ingredients. One caveat is that you must drink the mixed wines on the day they are mixed, as chemical reactions debase the flavour in time. Since then I have mixed and matched mustards to suit particular sausages, brown sauces to replace one taken off the market, that made cauliflower, chopped fresh greens, and frozen vegetables bearable, when I was on a health kick.

Now it is the turn of a cheap whisky that is to my taste and has all the merits of a good Malt. I’m very fond of malt whisky, not all, but quite a few, but they come at a price. Prior to Christmas 07, I was looking for bargains in malt whiskies in our local supermarket when I came across one at the incredible price of £14. It was called Glen Moray. When I got it home I discovered that it was very sweet as it was made partly of honey. Being frugal, I decided to experiment by blending it with an average blended whisky from a supermarket. This I did methodically, as I do when mixing, by taking rough guesses at the percentages of the different ingredients, and in this case there were only two. I had an enjoyable half hour, using small liqueur glasses, tasting and changing until I found a drink to my taste, which ultimately turned out to be, in a 24 ounce bottle, 7 ounces of Glen Moray, and 17 ounces of the blended whisky. Whether this is to your taste is something you might like to find out for yourself. A word of warning, there are some bottles of whisky in the bigger supermarkets containing a litre and a half of the blended whisky at a very reasonable price. It is my experience that combining this with Glen Moray is perfectly viable, but you cannot depend upon the flavour of each successive bottle of the blended that you buy to be similar to the previous one, and so it is wise if you’re using a litre and a half, to measure one mixed sample, as you may have to adjust the mix to taste.

I can’t spell slanta, so down the hatch, or as my Jewish friends will say ‘enjoy’.

I have seen some rabble rousing in my time, but I don’t remember anything as distorted, and engineered as this that we are suffering at this time. It is not a game, it is our political future which has been ripped apart, often unreasonably, and it will not be possible to put it together overnight. I am convinced that there is a worm in the apple with a ploy as yet unclear.

All along I have beseeched my readers to stop and think. I do so again. We have known ever since the EU was instigated that the people in Brussels were milking the gravy train hand over first to the tune of hundreds of millions. We have been aware of the fact that not all countries obey the rules in the way that our civil servants seem to need to do. So why are we so surprised that this is a similar tradition, because that is what it is, and has clearly been in vogue in Westminster for years. This holier than thou, washing of hands, sheer hypocrisy has got to stop. Over my life I have rubbed shoulders with petty crime, malfeasance, and left. Don’t tell me that you have never done anything that is on the margins of theft. For example paying a tradesman cash because he wouldn’t do the job if he had to present a bill and thus pay VAT, or something similar. In this instance you are conniving to steal money from the government, but a lot of people will condone it. Don’t tell me that you are as righteous as these people who are writing in the press, preaching on television, and who are creating this expose, would appear to be. I have seen teachers taking pencils and books from school for their children to use at home, I have known the people in sweet shops who considered it their perk to steal the odd bar of chocolate. The list is endless, and the higher you go in the value of the circumstances, so the so-called ‘perks’ get greater. If you read through my blog I cite dozens of instances of people bending the rules to their own advantage, it is nothing new, and if we were honest we would not be so surprised in this current case.

Please, just stop and think, and decide if this furore is really justified to the level it has reached, and could not have been dealt with in a more sane way, with a lot less damage to all of us.

I fear it is not only the government but the other parties as well, who have double standards. The people in charge of the banks, who through their actions orchestrated the credit crunch, and in most cases are still in office, are being paid now, presumably, by the public purse. At the same time MPs who, not necessarily through criminal intent, but by the accepted practices over years and decades, have been found to have digressed, are merely being pilloried, required to refund, and worse still, generally running around like chickens with their heads cut off, because they find the opinions in the media, generated for gain, with no concept of the damage that is being done to the whole of our political system. at a time when what we need is cool, and considered judgement, react, instead of thinking for themselves critically and with judgement before acting.

I wonder if I, just an ordinary citizen, had been discovered by my employers to take company money and use it for my own purposes, I would be allowed to refund it, get a smack on the wrist, a nod and a wink, and get a job somewhere else, or would I find myself in front of the Beak, trying to justify my actions so that I wouldn’t be sent to jail. Interesting?

The fact that almost daily young men and women in our Armed Forces are being killed or maimed in wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with us, and for reasons which could be thought spurious, brought this plea to the fore. If the world requires policing then the world should supply the policeman, not have it fall on our plate in the way it seems to.

I have been injured, housebound, and in considerable discomfort for the last five months. I’m not complaining because compared with many, rightly or wrongly I think I shall get better, and I’m lucky to have a comfortable home, a reasonable standard of living, and a number of interests to stimulate my day. I have to admit that in the past I might have occasionally thought about the plight of those people who are permanently in hospital, in care homes, or as I am, having limited range, companionship, and opportunities to do all the things that one used to do, but I didn’t give it the level of thought that my own experience would generate. I remember being told by a friend who was incarcerated in a ‘home’, of the tremendous joy of the inmates, purely by the visit of a woman with a dog. Life in a home is rather like life on a working ship. You have a circle of friends, if you’re lucky, you have your work, and the accommodation and the boundaries are very limiting. The one thing about being at sea is that the journey will end and you can go and enter a new existence for a short time. It is an activity that you have chosen fully knowing the limitations and accepting them without rancour. In the case of the injured, the handicapped, the geriatric and the hospitalised, in most cases they had no choice, there is no shore leave, and companionship is comparable or worse. Those with wider interests, who enjoy reading, the radio, even if they don’t get visitors, can stimulate themselves to some extent.

My concern therefore, is that those who through their education, the type of life they have a led in the past which might have been limited, find themselves totally bored out of their minds, after a few weeks, when the routine becomes heavily repetitive, and unrelieved. I feel that this is particularly sad for the young and the middle-aged, who through either war, sport, misadventure or ill-health are trapped in a sterile environment. I feel that there should be some mechanism, which enables them to find a new outlet for their imagination, and what little skills they might have retained, to stimulate them. There is no shadow of doubt that the social services are highly organised, certainly in my case gave valuable information, and sufficient help to make life bearable, if not stimulated. Inevitably, when you are first taken ill, you will have visits from all and sundry, but today life is no longer casual, it is urgent and with copious demands on time, and so the companionship must dwindle to those who are helping you, living with you, and have the time to visit. For the young and not so young this condition is a terrible change in lifestyle, and I am sure, hard to accommodate. Is there a remedy?

I have been thinking about the amount of work, the cost, the vast number of people, the complication, and the amount of paperwork or computer storage that will be required to bring about these changes that is being bruited aboard with such energy and theatre. This is not to say that change would not be admirable, merely to question whether this is the time, or indeed if it is possible? The electorate is bemused, the parties are pressing for an election, and we are up to our ears in debt, and clearly on the brink of an election with all that implies itself, in change. Is it sensible, economic, and even possible, at this time to make a proper job of such a complex operation? I have previously written my own experience of how, what appears to be a sweeping change for all those valid reasons, turned out to be a total disaster, because the parameters were changed without test. The current system was moulded by attrition over generations, and we can all give copious examples where a change that has been rushed has produced chaos. Let us take a few parameters, the greatest of which will be the thorny one of the Lords, its function, the method of selection – will it be easy or take for ever?

They are talking about changing the number of MPs. Both from an economic point of view and logistically, this seems logical. But just think of the furore that is going to erupt in various parts of the country, where there have been several different MPs representing the variations in traditional allegiances to different parties, possibly being reduced to one or two members. Consider the changes that are being proposed in the procedures of Parliament, such as the sticky question of members’ allowances, the role of the speaker, just to mention two. If it takes them months to create and pass a bill, even ignoring the input of the Lords, how long is it going to take to arrive at an agreeable answer, requiring a horde of people involved, considerable cost, and how is it going to be tested before becoming acceptable policy?

What is vital is that Government must continue during the changes and their implementation, so I believe that change will not be anywhere as sweeping as people are making out, and I also believe that the sponsors of these changes are fully aware of all these facts, apparently ignoring them for the purposes of publicity and to appease public anger. When Hardy comes to Hardy, we shall find that this is as much a storm in a teacup as the fuss over the expenses. Already it is being suggested that there is a two-tier system, whereby those politicians who have digressed from the path of righteousness will be served differentially.

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