Category: General

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph had a headline ‘Death of the traditional family.’ I have been writing about the fact for three years. They were quoting the national statistics, which have recently been published. I won’t bore you with them all, just say that the extended family died in the 70s, and they’re only waking up to it now. I blame the governments since then, firstly, for allowing youngsters, wet behind the ears, disillusioned, or in a fit of pique as a result of a falling out in the family, to get pregnant, and then be given and supported in a small flat. Other causes are the drop in religious adherence, affluence which is a route to self-indulgence, and places the responsibilities of marriage, parenthood and a more restrictive life, as the brake on freedom of enjoyment, whether it is in fact, real or imagined.

The Nanny Society is partly to blame. The level of help offered by the various government, local government and charitable outlets, is incredible today, compared with the post-war era. Since I have been injured, and are not as independent as I was, I have found it amazing how many different functions are on offer to the aged the handicapped, and presumably the unemployed and single parents, than there were all those years ago, from allowances right up to cheap taxi fares. When I was demobbed from the Navy, I was skint, unemployed, and had a daughter seriously ill. Not only the family, but neighbours and friends clubbed together and helped us at a time when we really needed it, and the family stood by us while I was being educated, until I was earning, and then later I was able to repay this in-kind. You notice that I included neighbours and friends in the list. We have very kind neighbours where we now live, who would help us at the drop of a hat, but we have outlived our friends, and our family is scattered to the four winds. We are naturally independent, but when illness takes over this isn’t sufficient.

The world is much more sophisticated, and in consequence the young, if they are able, have higher expectations, to achieve this they leave home and can travel halfway round the world to find it. When I was young a lot of the people in our street would have known me by my Christian name, my antecedents, and our family history, because people tended to remain in the vicinity where they were born because life then was rather like a rubber stamp, what was good enough for dad was good enough for the son, and as this applied right across the board, extended families were common.

There’s been a lot of talk by the government, prior to the crunch, about building houses, and criticism of the multi-storey flat. The flats do not have to be multi-storey, but when young people are starting out, they need simple, affordable, rented accommodation, until they can build their future. In the case of the elderly, presupposing that they are still in that old mode of frugality and saving for the future, they want to reserve their assets for the benefit of the children and their grandchildren, and are conscious of the fact that they could be forced to pay for care if they have more than a certain amount of savings. They too, in many cases, would be happy living in a small flat, in a well-designed complex, either bought or rented, but mainly easy to maintain, thus avoiding the problems that detached or semi-detached properties derive. I believe it is time the government reassesses its housing programme, for the sake of green fields, those starting an adult life, and those who are elderly, infirm or handicapped. We can’t put the clock back, but I think we should step back, reassess where we are, and try and predict the future, and act accordingly. The environment, those fields and pleasant hills, are essential to our well-being, both for pleasure and psychologically. We must stop taking the easy solution of digging up Greenfield sites, and start utilising Brownfield areas and renovation, imaginatively, and with an eye to the future. We can no longer go back to the extended family as a rule, but rather as a pleasant accident, and must cater accordingly.

I never watched Big Brother because the whole basic principle of the thing seemed forced, it was putting people, who were stupid enough, and egotistical enough, to put themselves under stress, in the hope of some financial profit. Recently a programme entitled The Apprentices has been shown on a weekly basis on BBC television. This programme has all the hallmarks of Big Brother, the sniping, the boasting, the ill manners, and the hype. For a start, I believe most of these people have a university education. In my day an apprentice was someone with a certain amount of talent who was sent, on leaving school, to serve his time under the guidance of a journeyman, in one of the many skills of tradesmen, not managers. Managers were articled to a profession. These people put themselves forward as potential managers. The whole programme is allegedly under the guidance of Sir Alan Sugar. This is a man who is allegedly running a large number of companies, successfully. In this role he is irascible, critical to a level of ill manners, and making decisions that no sane manager of his standing would dream of making, unless there is the guiding hand of a BBC producer behind him. For a long time I was a manager, with a reasonably large workforce, a design budget and construction budget in millions, and if there was one thing I discovered early on, was that if you are going to get the best out of the staff, you treated them with dignity. What you never did was correct them or praise them in front of their contemporaries. In consequence of this, I find the whole project nothing but angst for the sake of angst. I have only watched snippets, but the general consensus must be that what these people are asked to do, in two days, is something that in industry will be done in two months. What they are asked to do is also tantamount to asking the pilot of a jumbo jet to compose a requiem. Anyone who has sat on a business boardroom will know that people talking over one another is counterproductive, and provides an atmosphere where there is an underlying dislike. In most circumstances it would not be tolerated.

In the first few episodes the contestants were divided into two groups, male and female, they were told to choose their own project leader, and each group was given the same task. It was then discovered that the same people were being picked as leader, not necessarily for the right reasons, and in the fourth episode Sir Alan chose the leaders, not in a random fashion, because he chose for one team, a man who was clearly overawed by the whole atmosphere, was reclusive and would never have made team leader. On the other team he nominated a woman who was intelligent, constructive, and within the choice available, would have been thought suitable. It was a policy of the programme to give the people a project and then send them off in taxis to some point, and during the journey, with the teams split into two taxis for each group, communicating on mobile phones, were expected to start forming a strategy. It might have been easy to photograph the people, but the whole concept was unfair, it was difficult for them to see one another, when in the same taxi, they were distracted by being in a taxi in traffic, and communication between the two vehicles was absurd.

I found the backbiting, the boasting, and constant jumble of a number of people all talking at once, and then the savage criticism when the project was completed and examined, to be nothing more than a rude hype. I believe Sir Alan is enjoying his role, perhaps a little cynically, because I am naive enough to believe he could never have arrived where he is if he had always behaved in this manner. I think what this programme says, more than anything, is the quality and format demanded by the audience, and the BBC is happy to pander to that. For me, it is another symptom of what is wrong in our society today, people taking dross for gems.

I am banging on again about the paucity of quality light entertainment that is also humorous. Light entertainment today is more a matter of hysteria, shouting and waving, and poor quality scripting. From the dawn of the cinema, entertainment has been, right up until the 60s, both here and across the pond, in periods when the masses were under stress due to slumps, wars, and post wars. In consequence the films and radio plays tended to be light-hearted, with a very large number of comedians and entertainers, such as Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Ronnie Barker. Today we have products like the Bourne series, where impossible technology is at the forefront, the story is dark, and there is little or no humour.

Writing, in my experience, can be a means of solving a problem, and often it is a subconscious urge that cannot be denied. Not all writers write for publication, only for their own amusement and to solve problems. I have written 15 novels, copious short stories, doggerel, and poetry, together with these posts, but when I tried to write humour, that was a stumbling block. Setting aside the technicalities of writing, whodunnits are probably the easiest to write, stories about relationships need to have a problem that requires solving, and then they tend to write themselves. I once started a pantomime, and found it easy, but didn’t finish it. Writing humour of the quality of some of our better television series, such as Open All Hours, is not only difficult, it needs a background of the music halls, that long gone university of the comedian where every other line is a joke. The response to comedy for the individual has not changed, how could it, it is a reflex action? What has changed I believe is the writers, their personal humour, and a background, that is different from the old time comedian. John Cleese and his little band and their own offbeat humour, which most of us learned to appreciate, was a case in point. There are also other gems, like Blackadder, but these are far and few between. Writing for a joke every few minutes, for a weekly half hour series, was mostly founded on a music hall training. Recently, there was a repeat of Love Actually that made me realise that amid all the humour, and drama, there were some interesting social questions being posed to our subconscious. There was however, a level of love in its simplest universal terms that constantly lifted this film out of the ordinary. About five minutes into the story there was a scene at a wedding, within which it raised a social reaction, but above all was of a level that had me not smiling but grinning, and when I looked across at Sophie, she was grinning as well.

What I have quoted here is not a one-off, there are other very clever and funny films, such as Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5, the problem really is that there doesn’t seem to be enough light-hearted humour and amusing stories to go round. Television today seems to be dredging the bottom of the barrel, producing films from as far back as the 30s, few of which have stood the test of time. We are drowned in dark murder and criminality, at a time when the country as a whole could do with a lift.

Currently, there is an upsurge in interest in the two world wars, and hardly a day passes that there is some event celebrating the past. This caused me to think about those generals and their cohorts who planned those incredible massacres, like Ypres and the Somme. With hindsight we can censure their level of personal inhumanity, stupidity, lack of reason, and an inability to learn by experience. Prior to 1914 a high proportion of the officers obtain their rank by purchase, and came from wealthy families whose lifestyle placed them outside the realms of the rest of the public, to some extent one can say they were detached from reality.

The fact that when I was demobilised, in spite of the fact that the law stated that as I had volunteered my job was sacrosanct, I didn’t get it back, because, as I have said before, not enough of us were killed in the five years during which we served, and natural progression had overtaken us. The officers during that war came from all walks of life, they had a better understanding, and probably a quicker mentality. They weren’t hidebound by archaic rules which some quoted as being ‘ Not cricket old chap!’ War is a dirty business, and takes many forms.

What I’m leading up to is the fact that most of us realise that the man in the street is too busy with living to want to go to war, and that it is the politicians, for reasons of their own, who instigate these atrocities. Russia, since the revolution, has shown a level of aggression in every field of law enforcement and war, that probably is equal to the Nazi regime. So why we allowed ourselves to go to war in Afghanistan, to subdue the rebels who were supplying poppy juice to the rest of the world, when the Russians hadn’t achieved it, was something I could never figure, except it was a rash ego trip by a small group of politicians. Mainly the Americans and the Brits, are fighting in Afghanistan, and therefore acting aggressively, possibly bombing, certainly shooting, and to a certain extent innocents are being caught up. My simple, uncomplicated reasoning makes me wonder why, when all you want to get rid of is the poppy fields, and we have the means of doing that, and that we could warn in advance of the fact that we propose to do it, we are not just wiping out the poppy fields, from the air, and giving money, a pittance to what the war is costing, without loss of life, to repay the growers of the poppies.

I know I’m whistling in the wind, but am I really a simpleton as well? Sitting in this chair and thinking about it, it seems a simple, safe, and above all sensible solution. Some would say that this war is to get rid of Al Qaeda’s base, but it would appear that this is no longer the prime target, as Al Qaeda seems to have shifted to PaKistan. I suppose there is a profound reason why I am wrong? Certainly, a lot of British and American soldiers aggressively stumbling about in Afghanistan is feeding Al Qaeda with propaganda.

The problem of wrecking yourself to the point where you are chair bound is that you get progressively bored as time goes and are more thrown back on cerebral problems. Yesterday it was taxation. I was thinking about the cost of fuel, and that the far-reaching effects of the swingeing changing in price for fuel can have right across the board. It is the government who puts on a tax levee on petrol and diesel oil, commensurate with the cost. It suddenly dawned on me, that I had forgotten over all these years, that when commerce purchases something, upon which there is a tax, that tax is passed on to the consumer as part of the overheads. If one thinks of all the processes involved in producing a product the number of times that the raw materials, the packaging and the product itself, are transported, and the fuel costs alone involved, there is a constant dribble of tax being added to the final overheads of the product.

Hence, when we purchase a product for which the cost includes it and all the other taxes which are involved, including VAT, the amount of tax that we are actually paying is incredible. I’m not saying that the Exchequer doesn’t necessarily need this amount of money, what I don’t understand is why there are so many government departments involved in getting it in different taxes, when what it boils down to it is that the individual is footing the bill blindfold. I suppose there is a good reason, other than keeping us in the dark, but as this is a gut reaction, rather than educated knowledge, I nonetheless do think of all the printing that has to go on, all the leaflets that are sent out informing of changes in tax levels, postage, changes in legislation, the problems for the individual with so many offices to deal with, and so on for so many different taxes, when the whole lot could be done very simply, probably a lot cheaper.

What I write here is a cryptic account of what I’ve posted before concerning life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I do so because now there is an upsurge of terror yet again, but this time denounced by the greater majority of the Catholics and all of the Protestants. I am an Englishman who was sent off to Belfast by the Navy during the war and on demobilisation returned to live here. When I came home I looked upon the Orange order as an outfit similar to the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army, how wrong I was. In the 60s Northern Ireland had a flourishing economy to the extent that it was contributing to the national exchequer, not as now, holding out a begging bowl.. At that time a large proportion of the Catholic population looked upon themselves as second-class citizens, and were aggrieved. I had a close friend who was a Roman Catholic and felt this way, and many a night we argued till the small hours, and the fact that he had a good job, a nice home and a comfortable life, made no difference, it was ingrained.

Living for 30 years in a reign of terror is debilitating in every aspect of life, there is tangible fear, irritation, frustration and immense hatred. There are threats, abuses, gang warfare and even collusion between the two opposition parties when it comes to criminal activities. There is serious structural damage, incredible expense for security reasons, and the whole population is subjected daily, even hourly, to body searches when going in and out of offices and shops, which alone is degrading and has a psychological effect . Something like the sacking of someone for criminal actions, can result in the sacker being subjected to some form of revenge, either personally physical, or to their property. I personally was threatened to be shot by the Royal Marines, even though I was a senior civil servant, English and ex-Navy. Criminal activities were rife, building contractors of every sort were paying protection money. Burglary was a daily event, my house was burgled five times and my cars stolen on four occasions, once by the IRA who put up 1000 miles in 10 days. I was held up by Republicans, by the UDA, and children with Molotov cocktails in the hands and a cigarette lighter to fire them up. Evening entertainment in the town was almost non-existent, and this is what a small proportion of The Republican movement wants to take us back to.

During the troubles if there were disturbances in many areas, children were at the forefront stoning the police, the ambulancemen, or hijacking vehicles and setting them alight. These youngsters came, in the main, from depressed areas which themselves were under the control of the combattants.. Some of those areas were no go areas to the police and the army for the obvious strategic reasons, and so knee capping, shooting and punishment beatings were the order of the day. In America the Irish lobby had a vicarious interest in supplying the Republicans with finances and arms, I assume it made them feel that they were part of this glorious war, which was not a war at all, but just a lot of young man treating other people, as they put it, as ‘soft targets’ . It is my firm conviction because youngsters are still stoning, is that what is happening here with this new outrage, is that some people want to maintain a steady influx of youngsters to the cause,.

I am constantly writing that the government makes legislation with a broad brush which affects almost everyone, in circumstances where the need is only with respect to a small minority. What is also evident is that instead of a calm, reasoned approach to matters, they are dancing instead to the media tune, rushing to sound-bites, being subjected to unreasonable and belligerent questioning, instead of ignoring it. The press themselves are not beyond reproach, muck raking at every opportunity, using their great finances to importune information more for sensationalism than because there has been a serious breach of protocol.

The business about the Home Secretary being unaware that a minor charge against the permissible account, just a few quid, for programmes on television, has been blown totally out of proportion, to the level of a witch hunt, and the Prime Minister of all people, has been wasting his valuable time, which should have been spent at this worrying period, on more serious matters, by giving sound-bites, and worse still acknowledgement that there was something wrong just by answering the question which should have been ignored. Indeed in those circumstances I would have thought either the Deputy Prime Minister, or some senior minister should have made a statement, thus giving the matter its due value. At a time when the whole country, from the most wealthy to the poorest, have suffered minor or really serious effects from something which should have been recognized and stamped out by the government, is not the time to start putting its private house in order, something which will take considerable time and distraction, when there are other more pressing issues, which we all know about.

My regular readers will know that I have been against Britain hosting the Olympic Games from the outset. My reason was that only a very small proportion of the United Kingdom will have the opportunity of being at the arenas, at considerable expense, and the rest of us watching it on television, but footing the bill nonetheless. We know originally it was an ego trip for Tony Blair, who then walked away leaving Brown holding the baby. The ones who are most likely to profit from it are the media, the advertisers, and those personally involved. As to the rest, this is just another burden. It has since transpired that we can’t really afford pay for it. Currently we are being asked to foot the bill for the GE 20 bandwagon, in many millions of pounds, when according to the league table of countries suffering from the credit crunch, Britain is alleged to be at the bottom of the heap. Because so many foreign countries are involved, I would have thought that the whole thing should have been under the cloak of the United Nations and consequently paid for universally. I just wonder if this is an ego trip for Brown.

What started this train of thought, was the BBC programme, The Politics Show, unusually a complete waste of time, because all the politicians were ducking and weaving. Alistair Darling, at one point, stated that all the major countries were borrowing large quantities of money to plough into the world economy, thus justifying the fact that we were doing the same. What he didn’t tell us was where this large amount of borrowed money which nobody else seemed to have, was in fact coming from, unless it was the Arabs, or was it those offshore banks that all that money had disappeared into?

Practically all of you who are reading this will not have known the 30s and the 40s. The latter part of the 30s was a period of contentment for a high proportion of the population, because at last we had come out of those depressing years post WW1. Then we had WW2 breaking up this idyllic condition, and were promised our jobs back if we survived. The problem was not enough of us were killed, and our jobs had been filled in the meantime, and we came back to unemployment, war damaged houses, and a very low standard of living. In other words something like what is going on today, only much worse. Then we had the extended family, which so few have today, and in consequence people who recently had thought they were secure, discover that they are now dependent on the nanny state. The recovery took until the 50s, during which time little changed in most respects. In the 50s, there was considerable expansion, people started buying cars, albeit second-hand ones, and jobs became more plentiful as the manufacturing industries expanded as a result of new designs, new inventions and the more buoyant economy.

Have we something to learn from this? We have airfields paved with new cars, and the car industry falling apart and attempting to bring out new versions, when they have not sold the old. We are paying farmers for fields on which nothing is being grown, while at the same time importing items that are not fresh, but chemically engineered so that the ripening process is delayed until they are on the shop shelves, and starting to rot. A lot of our more tedious labours have been transferred abroad, such as telephone enquiries, garment manufacture, and worse still, a lot of the manufacture of electronic equipment. We were told that everything in the garden was lovely, and the fact of not having manufacturing didn’t matter because our main income came from the financial industry. Practically everything we buy seems to have a foreign label, so the question I would ask is, ‘have we enough skilled people to start manufacturing again?’ If the educational system for training tradesmen and engineers has been downgraded in the way that so much of our education has in recent years, will we ever be able to start up again and supply our own needs?

When reading this, you may disagree with what I say, or you might think I am wired to the moon, but at least I have made you think. Today in politics, when things go very wrong, those responsible no longer resign, they talk their way out of trouble in sound-bites. The press and I, three years ago were warning that the burgeoning national internal debt would lead to trouble, yet the government did nothing about it, for whatever reason. If they got us into this mess, why should we believe they will get us out of it? I give here, a simplistic, and personal, not professional, assessment of the development of banking and in Part 2, suggest how the credit crunch should have been tackled. Historically there were individuals who travelled the world lending money to kings, emperors, etc, to enable them to carry out huge projects such as wars, on the strength of a promissory note for repayment with interest within a time limit. The borrowers couldn’t afford to welsh as they would need to be borrowing money again. The lenders, like bookmakers, shared the risk, in case the borrower was unsuccessful and had been killed in the meantime. The average citizen possibly borrowed from a pawnbroker in a similar manner, but saving probably started for the man in the street in the Victorian era, where people put away money for a rainy day, to pay for a funeral, and healthcare. After WW2 building societies really opened up, virtually allowing people to lend money to them at a small interest rate. This was seen as a safe haven as it was supported by tangible assets. Then the sudden switch by the building societies to become banks, where the assets were now dependent upon the state of the financial market, was a worrying trend, and the writing was on the wall.

The pension funds are a different kettle of fish to savings, and a lot of them are conducted by investment in the stock exchange, and therefore do not fit into my definition of savings. I have always believed, ever since the pension fund of the newspaper workers in London was raided, that pensions for all should be a matter of government responsibility on the same principle, where the employer makes a contribution as well as the worker. The paperwork is virtually done through the Inland Revenue. If you take the pensions system over all, once the balance has been built up between savings and outgoings, the differential will be minuscule as a percentage, while the government will have the benefit of the capital. In this way it is possible for workers to shift from one job to another and carry the pension with them. I lost eight years of pension through working for the government in the Navy and several other government departments, because my pension was not contributed to by me. This situation would then be avoided. Pension funds are raided now on a regular basis, and this is a scandal. If the government takes over the pension funding system, the outgoings, initially, will be greater than the income, but will not be crippling, because it is paid on a weekly or monthly basis, while at the same time a commensurate amount of money is building up the fund. For five or six years there might be a deficit as a result of our generation living longer, but I believe that longevity will return to a lower level as a result of the lifestyle currently enjoyed

The majority of people saving their money either used the building societies, or were of an older generation, as we are, and saved at a low interest rate in the bank. People with large sums of money tended to invest in the stock exchange, which is a different kettle of fish, and I am not suggesting that this money should be repaid. Operating on the stock exchange was always a risky business and never more so than now.

It seems that every time I get up in the morning some other part of our heritage has been sold off or handed over to people abroad. The merger of Bradford & Bingley into Santander is a case in point, where a perfectly reliable firm is allowed to be taken over to its detriment. According to the BBC News yesterday, the 16th of December, Gordon Brown is alleged to have stated that the Royal Mail is to be partially taken over by a Dutch firm. Sometimes I wonder who is actually steering our ship, is it Brown, Mandelson, or some other adviser without portfolio? The pound has dropped somewhere around 20% compared with the Euro, so if we are importing materials or services, their cost will have risen in the last few months by 20%. The labour charges will be the same in the case of the Post Office, but I suspect the overheads will be in Euros. Why is it we can’t run our own businesses and apparently need help from outside, we used to be the best in the world?

When you start thinking along these lines it suddenly dawns on you that a lot of the foreign produce that has been groaning on the shelves of our supermarkets, and in many cases thrown away, will be a thing of the past, because the profit margins will have gone. We have been allowing vast tracts of our farmland to lie fallow, and the farmers have been finding their labours in many cases unrewarding. If we can’t afford to buy from abroad, it would seem that our eating and buying habits will change radically, and we shall be more dependent on our own produce and products to satisfy our needs. Some of the countries that are going to suffer yet again will be those in Africa and elsewhere, set up for the benefit of the indigenous population to have a wage, no matter how meagre. One thing is certain, when an industry of any sort, is allowed to degenerate in the way that manufacturing and farming in this country have been bypassed, I strongly suspect that there are not the resources of skilled labour and skilled management to make up the shortfall caused be the fallout of the reduction in the value of the pound, and in consequence the need to have our own resources. Recovery could take some time.