Tuesday, 11th October, 2022 [Day 939]

Tuesdays always have a particular ‘flavour’ and today was no exception – although it was to prove quite a full day. This morning having collected our newspaper we visited the Waitrose coffee bar which is our regular haunt on a Tuesday. In it, we met with Seasoned World Traveller who is a regular attendee on Tuesdays. We also met with one of our pre-pandemic friends and discussed various family matters with her as we usually do. I was also pleasant to bump into the Politics and History teacher at Bromsgrove School with whom I used to have quite long chats in our pre-pandemic days and even off-loaded a series of my politics books for which I had no further use and I thought would be better off in her hands, or her students, or the college library rather than just being thrown away. Once we got home, I made some preparations for lunch eaten after the return fom my Pilates class and then started on my journey down the hill. En route, I met our old Italian friend who had actually called round a week ago whilst I was in Oxfordshire but nobody had told me. We are trying to organise a little tea/coffee get together in the next few days as soon as our diaries are free. On my way back from Pilates, I popped into Asda to get supplies which I know that only they happen to have and then bumped into acquaintance who lives half way down the Kidderminster Road. A few days ago, I had observed an ambulance half parked outside her house and trusted it was not my friend or her husband. The ambulance was actually calling for a neighbour who was in his 80’s and in rather a bad way wuth skin cancer so I hoped for all of the best for him. After our meal and a best of a rest, I ran off some documents that I need for our meeting at our church this evening. I need to attend these meetings only about once every three months but they seem to come around with great rapidity – tonight we are discussing our documentation and some refurbishment issues but I reckon that this must be the some all over the world in meetings of this type. Hopefully, our meeting will be over by 9.00 so there will still be some of the evening left for a bit of relaxation.

On our way back to the house at lunchtime, we bumped into our next door neighbour who gave us some wildlife news. She had found at least one hoglet (= baby hedgehog) wandering down our shared drive and had a fair idea that it had probably emerged from some of the secluded spots in our garden. Having been rescued, the hoglet was now in the care of the local vets who were going to build it up a bit before releasing it back into the wild. At some stage, the hoglet needs to put on sufficient weight to be able to hibernate but as things stand, it probably needs some assistance to gain weight before the hibernation starts. About a couple of weeks ago, we saw the (same) fox parade up and down at the bottom of our garden early in the morning so I suppose this might be a natural predator for our young hedgehog. We think that between us, our neighbours and ourselves will manage to do what it takes to allow the hedgehog to survive and to achieve maturity.

Some interesting political news is emerging this evening. The Bank of England is signalling that its support for the pensions industry will cease within a few days. On this news, the pound has collapsed again tonight, so it looks as though international investors are losing all all faith in the present government. This may be a sort of game of ‘chicken’ played with this section of the financial market. Something suspiciouslly close to a windfall tax on the profts of large scale energy companies may be on the cards as well. Of course, it would not be the first time that a governing party has taken some of the ideas of its critics and to have claimed several of them as its own. Rather than a windfall tax, the government is imposing a cap on the revenues of some oF the renewable energy utilities ‘enjoying’ the rapid rise in profits which sounds like a profits tax in all but name. The government is faced with two alternative strategies both of which are anathema to them. One is abandon the cut in taxes and in practice to increase them to fill a projected 65 billion pounds deficit in the public finances. The other alternative is a very strict reduction in budgets of most of Whitehall (i.e.a period of austerity Mark II) and this sounds equally unpalatable. A decision will have to be announced towards the end of the month, but several of the Main Street Media are also sensing that at least one ‘U’ turn and perhas more than one, is still quite possible.

Continue Reading

Monday, 10th October, 2022 [Day 938]

Today dawned as another, beautiful autumn day with quite a clear blue sky and only a modicum of wind. This will no doubt persist as long as we have some high pressure but we are trying to enjoy it whilst we can. Meg and I got going this morning changing (with my son’s assistance) the battery in the smoke alarm battery which was beginning to ‘chirp’ at us to tell us that the end of its life was nigh. After we got ourselves down into town and our newspaper collected, we made our way to our normal park bench. We were not surprised to find it unoccupied as it was very wet fom the night’s rain before. But we come prepared with an old tea towel and some wads of kitchen paper which we keep stored in one of the pockets of the rucsac for such a contingency. We never expect to see any of our park acquaintances on a Monday morning and so it proved today but nonetheless, we always feel better for a breath of fresh air and some coffee to revive us. When we got home, we updated on some of the rolling news and then I went on to prepare our midday meal. This wwas extraordinarily easy because we had quite a lot left over from the superfluity of vegetables that I had cooked yesterday so it was a simple case of heating these up and munching away. I made some routine telephone calls and sent a few emails and looked forward to a relaxing afternoon.

I am pleased to say that belatedly, some reporters are starting to be less craven towards our political leaders and are starting to ask the questions that are on everybody’s lips. This trend may well have been started by local journalists who gave Liz Truss a very hard time when she went on a ‘tour’ of local radio stations. Local journalists have less investment in maintaining the cosy ‘status quo’ between Westminster based policitians and metropolitan journalists – if you persist in asking challenging questions and/or insist that politicans answer the question asked then you get excluded from ‘the lobby’ and, like Channel 4, politicians will never agree to be interviewed by you. One of those Westminster based correspondents rising to the challenge is Sky New’s Beth Rigby who, in the middle of an interview with Liz Truss, listed the various ways in which the economy ‘tanked’ and then said directly to Liz Truss – ‘Did you listen to the warnings? Rishi (Sunak) was right, was he not?’ Needless to say, we got the typical, by now robotic-like response which is to reply that ‘I do not accept that analysis’ which we must have heard several times before.

I must confess that I normally skip quite quickly over the financial and business news in the newspapers but an article which I read today in The Times gave me pause for thought. A recent research report has found that more than 21,000 limited liability partnerships bear all of the hallmarks of companies used for financial crimes. More than 21,000 partnerships, some 14% of the total (i.e. one in 7) share these suspect characteristics known to be used in corruption and money laundering schemes. The report by Transparency International UK argues it is the first to expose the scale of abuse of this type of company with a conservative estimate putting the economic damage to be hundreds of billions of pounds. Almost 950 of these ‘partnerships’were registered at an address in Cardiff which alone should have been a cause of suspicion – are these things not checked at Companies House? The particular structure of limited liability partnerships is particularly favoured by those who set them up because they allow multiple levels of secrecy making it difficult to identify the true owner. A bill to regulate some of these issues is before Parliament at the moment but it may well be a case of too little, too late.

An interesting debate is taking place in the letters columns of The Times whether economic growth, particularly as measured by GDP, should be the overriding aim of government economic policy. With increasing growth, it is possible for the ‘haves’ to allow the ‘have nots’ to have a little more of the cake without damaging their own economic position. But a counter argument beuatifully expressed in a one sentence letter to The Times is that ‘if economic growth means the unsustainable consumptions of the worlds natural resources and unstoppable climate change, should we not be all in the anti-growth coalition?’ It is also argued that a completely respectable counter-proposition is to put ‘justice’ at the heart of our economic policies and that we might erect a principle that everybody has the right to a basic means of sustenance (a ‘Citizen’s Income’) and that part of the national income, for example a quarter, should be shared equally between all citizens regardless of age. Even as long as 1967 in university, our economics lecturers communicated the view that an all-our pursuit of ‘growth’ however measured, was not always to be desired.

Continue Reading

Sunday, 9th October, 2022 [Day 937]

This morning I hauled myself out of bed fairly early and made my trip down to collect the Sunday newspaper. I decided not to treat myself to my normal weekly dose of Bach and Mozart on my trusty old iPhone because instead I wanted to reflect upon a little computing project in which I had successfully engaged or rather re-engaged. I wanted to let one of my friends in the park have access to a document which I have stored securely on the web and only accessed via a password. Now passwords are normally held on a server in an encrypted form and when the user supplies a password, then this is encrypted using the same algorithm – then the two encrypted ‘hashes’ are compared and assuming a perfect match, the user is then allowed access. However, the technique that I have used for years works in a completely different but incredibly effective way. At the client end, you use a Javascript program that asks you to supply a password. Then the Javascript program looks at the (truncated) ASCII code for the first character of the password (which will generate a number between 1 and 80 – the alphanumeric characters plus some punctuation marks). Then the software takes the very first character in the file you wish to encrypt and swops it with the character calculated using the ASCII ‘positional’ number. If you think about it, no information has been gained or lost as two characters have just swopped position with each other. The program then proceeds with each succeeding character of the file you wish to encrypt swopping with the ‘positional’ character suggested by the second character of the password. If your password is 20 characters long and you file is 2000 characters long, then this means that, on average, each character in the file will have had its position swapped 200/20 which is 100 times. As you can see, you finish up with an undecipherable ‘soup’ of characters in your encrypted file – in other words, the whole file becomes its own password and vice versa. The encrypted file and associated javascript is stored like this – but when the encrypted file is run and asks you for the password, then the software ‘knows’ where the program ended and just completely reverses each of the swops that were used to encrypt the file and you end up with the original. Needless to say, you cannot afford to forget the password with this scheme but it is massively secure. I calculate that if you tried to decode this scheme using a brute force attempt to guess it and you tried 1 billion attempts per second, it would take you a million, trillion years to do it i.e. never. If you do not understand a word of this, don’t worry! A very simple analogy might be that if you had a large fish that you cut into an incredibly large number of small pieces then you could make a good fish soup. But if each piece was connected to another by an incredibly fine thread and you knew where the end was (analagous to knowing the password), then in theory all you would have do is to pull on one end and you would eventually end up with a whole fish again. It keeps my brain active thinking about such things (as well as being incredibly useful on occasion)

Meg and I walked to the park and made contact with Seasoned World Traveller to whom I offered access to my encrypted website complete with password. Then we made our way for home not tarrying too long in the park as the wind was getting a tad cool this morning. Then we treated ourselves to a dinner of roast beef (cooked yesterday in the slow cooker) and enhanced with some parsnips (parboiled and then roasted in the oven) accompanied with sprouts complemented with a bag of chestnuts I espied in the supermarket recently. We have our usual quiet Sunday afternoon preparing ourselves for a long musical evening tonight. It is the finals of the BBC ‘Young Musician of the Year‘ and the winners of each of the five categories (at a guess piano, strings, woodwind, brass and percussion) each perform a full concerto for the title. Past winners have included Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Nicola Benedetti (violin) and Emma Johnson (clarinet) each of whom has gone on to make sparkling international careers for themselves.

As a politics footnote the recently sacked minister, Conor Burns, has apparently been recommended for a peerage as part of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours. It is said that Liz Truss is powerless to prevent this honour (and seat in the House of Lords), but if it were actually to arise, it wuld be an enormously sad commentary on the status and values of public life in Britain today. The Commons will resume on Tuesday and that is when I assume that some of the darker plots to unseat Liz Truss might either be shown to have some substance or just be shown up as Westminster tittle-tattle.

Continue Reading

Saturday, 8th October, 2022 [Day 936]

Today when we woke up and drew back our bedroom curtains, we witnessed a beautifully clear blue sky and so it remained all of the day, with practically no wind to boot. Our adopted cat, Miggles, came around to see us this morning which was a welcome sight as we have not seen him/her over the past few wet days. We spotted the moggy out of our bedroom window as she settled down in one of her favourite sunny spots underneath our pear tree. But, true to form, she responded to the sound of the back door being opened and engaged in her usual practice of rolling all over my outdoor clogs and slippers whilst I was preparing her half portion of cat food which is her breakfast. Then Meg and I got ourselves breakfasted, washed and dressed before we went to pick up our copy of the newspaper. Then we made for our favourite park bench and in no time at all, we were joined by two of our park regulars – our University of Birmingham friend as well as Seasoned World Traveller. The latter informed me with a certain amount of glee that I was in great danger of losing my bet of a large bar of chocolate now that Liz Truss has survived one more week and there are another two weeks to go before our bet comes to fruition or not. On our way home, we knocked at the door of our Irish friends and were invited in for a cup of tea which we readily accepted. We had a little clutch of some church as well as purely domestic issues that we wished to share with our friends so we spent a very pleasant half hour or so in their company. When we got home, it was just before 2.00pm and I was particularly anxious to have a lightning fast lunch as I wanted to get out and give the lawns a mow whilst the good weather was with us and before we went to church this evening. This is where our standby of a tin of chicken pieces came into its own as I quickly prepared a chicken-and-vegetables mixture whch I served on a bed of pasta for Meg and on broken up cream crackers and rice cakes in lieu of carbohydrate rich pasta for myself. This was both quick to prepare and tasty to eat so I managed to get the washing up done and out to mow the lawns by 3.00pm. Despite being a little moisture-retaining, the grass which had been left for a couple of weeks mowed up quite nicely so I was relieved to get this job done in plenty of time without undue rush before we get ourselves for church this evening. We missed lst weeks service as we were both feeling a little under the weather as we had both had a COVID and a ‘flu jab earlier in the day.

Monday onwards is going to be interesting politically. This is because Liz Truss was only in power two days before the Queen died and then we had ten days ‘off’ normal politics, followed by a brief parliamentary return and then it was a week off for the Tory Party conference. So we have hardly had any ‘normal’ parliamentary politics until the forthcoming week. To understand the various ‘tribes’ (or ‘warring factions’ if you like) I turned to Peter Walker of The Guardian who has quite helpfully for us divided the current Tory party into several groupings. These are not really factions as such because they coalesce around particular issues and agree on some issues whilst disagreeing on others. Walker discerns the following groups of which the most influential are the ‘Free Market Ultras‘ (Brexit nd Liz Truss to a man) Then we have the ‘Red Wall Statists‘ who represent seats that have traditionally been Labour but captured by Johnson in the lest election. A third group are the ‘Country set/green‘ who are concerned with environmental issues writ large. Then we have the ‘Malcontents/Big Beasts’ epitomisd by Michael Gove, actually sacked in a fit of pique by Johnson. Finally we have the ‘Culture warriers‘ who feel that the youth of the nation has been coruupted by a liberal/woke/politically correct agenda. It is slightly difficult to find out how many MP’s actually voted ‘Remain’ as Boris Johnson kicked the majority of them out of the party before the last election. Remainers are now a very minority and I suspect the figure is approx 35% of the whole parliamentary party but they dare not make their voices heard. There are, I think, no Remainers in the Truss cabinet and certainly none in senior positions. Paradoxically, Liz Truss herself is the only prominent ‘Remainer’ in her own cabinet (because she changed her mind and became an ardent ‘Brexiteer’ although video clips exist of her in the EU Referendum campaign explaining to the Food and Drink Federation, I think, what a disaster Brexit would be for them).

Continue Reading

Friday, 7th October, 2022 [Day 935]

Today was a day without too many commitments but it seemed to be set fair but with the expectation of some showers late on in the day. When I collected my newspaper from my normal newsagent this morning, I received the comment that now I was wearing my normal and somewhat ‘lived in’ leather hat, I had returned to the world of the normal. The newsagent, his wife and I all had a little giggle about this and then we proceeded to the park to have our coffee. Several dogs came to befriend us (or in search of food) but we are quite well used to this by now and one particularly friendly collie sat down near to us implying that we were to be friends for life. We then made tracks for home but on the way back up the hill espied one of our church friends assiduously pruning and weeding whilst the weather was set fair. We commiserated with the slight accident that she had had which left a cut on her face, fortunately missing her eye region but it was close (I think whilst she was engaged in some of the preparation of the flowers for the altar in the church, something heavy had fallen on her but thank goodness her injury was comparatively slight) We also received the not very pleasant news that the French widow who is a near neighbour of hers had been rushed into hospital with chest pains but she had been given a thorough check in hospital and all seemed to be well, for which we were all extremely thankful. Then we prepared our typical Friday midday meal which was sea bass served on a bed of lettuce and this week I had managed to find some tartare sauce which added that little touch of piquancy. I looked again at my emails and one of my Hampshire friends was going through a stressful time as he coped with the upheavals of adapting and updating his bathroom. Of course, this involved plumbing and electricals and always seems to be a longish and complicated job but when the rush is over, we will look forward to having a videochat to update each other.

There are two political stories this evening. The first concerns the Trade Secretary, Conor Burns, a close confident of Boris Johnson but still a member of the Truss administration. He has apparently been sacked ‘on the spot’ for allegations made against him during the Tory Party conference. All of the news media, including Twitter, are not indicating what they may know of the allegations but what do you think that Tory politicians get up to away from home and with lots of available booze? Liz Truss has acted with commendable speed in sharp comparison with Boris Johnson who often delayed and prevaricated when faced with similar scenarios. The second story running throughout the day is incredulity that No 10 has banned any public information campaign indicating to the public at large how they might save energy (and money) and also assist in the fuel crisis. The word from No. 10 is that such a campaign would be seen as ‘nanny state’ The Business Secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is understood to have backed a £15m ‘light touch’ initiative, according to The Times, encouraging households to reduce their use of gas and electricity by taking a series of simple measures. However, Liz Truss is said to be ‘ideologically opposed’ to such an approach as it could be too interventionist. Needless to say, less ideological and more pragmatic countries like Germany already have their campaigns well underway, which surely is sensible. Other European countries seem to be converging upon very similar measures. There seems to a growing consensus to keep the temperature at 19 degreees, reduce heating and lighting in all corrdors and unused rooms, cut the temperature of swimming pools plus a whole range of measures to reduce public lighting. Of course, this is just on a limited basis to get us through the winter – but will it indirectly help to keep European growth rates above ours?

Before the start of the colder weather in the autumn and the winter, Meg and are starting to review our stores of clothing and are working out what needs to make the ultimate journey to the charity shop(s). Anything has not been worn for a year or so or is looking incredibly dated, then we are taking the opportunity to ‘let it go’ Of course, some clothes that used to fit a year or so ago are now somewhat on the tight side but we will not go down that road. On the other hand, sometimes you find an absolute gem from which you are not willing to be parted. In my own case, I have a very ‘late 1960’s tie that absolutely screams ‘pychedelic’ at you and I still wear it when the occasion demands such as I did the other day when I went by train to visit my friends in South Oxfordshire.

Continue Reading

Thursday, 6th October, 2022 [Day 934]

Today is my shopping day so it is a case of getting up early, getting some money out of an ATM and then proceeding to the supermarket before it opens at 8.00am. I joined a small queue of 2-3 people and shopping was quite a breeze so as soon as this was done, it was a case of collecting the newspaper and then heading for home. We did a slow unpack but did not rush around unduly because our hairdresser calls around today so this rather puts paid to any plans that we might have for a walk this morning. There were two items that caught my idea as I went round the supermarket this morning. The first of these was a new line in ‘meatless bacon’ which is made essentially with a pea protein. I might try this at some time but instead my attention was attracted to some beetroot burgers which I used to buy when I shopped in the larger Aldi but has escaped my attention in the smaller store in which I shop. I thought it would be good to try these today, which I did and we had them for our lunch, complemented by some baked potato and broccoli. I felt, though, as some sort of sauce or gravy was called for so I made a sort of intense ‘jus’ as the French might called it out together with one of those jelly like stockpots, a bit of extra gravy granules and then a shot of regular brown, fruity sauce. This was then whisked together and given a quick microwave blast and I must say that it did everything intended of it, so I shall certainly try this again for next week. I always treat myself to an extra peregrination up and down the middle isles in Aldi to see if any of their hardware or household goods caught my eye but none did today so I was not tempted to spend any extra money. Meg and I had a fairly early and tasty lunch because this afternoon we were going to get a call from our financial adviser to discuss one or two things with her. In the event, it was a bit of a non-conversation as we decided to carry on with the ‘steady as she goes’ plans we drew up some time ago and do not need to take any actions before we have a scheduled meeting in December.

Needless to say, the increases in the cost of living is worrying millions of people and animating much discussion in the MSM (Main Street Media). The highly regarded Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) believe that for every £1 awarded to workers by cutting main tax rates – such as National Insurance contributions – £2 will be taken away by the government. It explains: ‘In every income decile, the average impact of gradual roll-outs and freezes outweighs the impact of the explicit discretionary policy changes.’ The think tank points out that Truss’s headline tax changes, new policies and the ongoing freeze for taxes and benefits work out to be ‘broadly regressive’. The root of the problem here in these inflationary times is that if the allowances given in the tax system do not rise with inflation, then more and more people get dragged into the higher tax brackets, a phenomenon known as ‘fiscal drag’ In more normal times, Chancellors of the Exchequeur uprate these allowances in line with the rate of inflation but there is a massive temptation, to which many modern Chancellors have succumbed, not to appear to do ‘anything’ and the actual tax take goes up without having to increase rates at all. So the IFS calculates that the average worker may still be worse off and claims that £2 will be taken because of tax and benefit threshold pauses for every £1 gained through the government’s personal tax cuts.

The other interesting bit of news today is the forward planning by the National Grid for the forthcoming cold winter months. If we have an incredibly mild winter, then collectively we might be OK whereas if we were have a harsh and prolonged winter than some power shortages and disconnections are becoming inevitable. I was surprised to see that even some right wing commentators (who say they despise the ‘nanny state’) would not be hostile for a call to the nation as a whole to save power. One practical suggestion is that domestic washing machines and dryers be run during the night when demand for power is generally low and there may well be some monetary rewards forthcoming for those who postpone their laundry activities until the wee small hours of the morning. I personally will be very interested to see how these plans are formulated and disseminated so I will scour the newspaper in the days ahead to see what concrete plans are being laid before us. I wonder as well,for example, what would be the effect of having a winter long temporary speed limit of 60mph on the motorways to save petrol. After all, some of us have lived though the economic disruptions of the three day week in the 1970’s when we had many dislocations to energy supplies. The Conservative goverment of the time urged us all to ‘bath or shower withn a friend’ to save power which is about the only time I have ever enthusiastically followed the advice of a Conservative government.

Continue Reading

Wednesday, 5th October, 2022 [Day 933]

Today was one of those days when you wake up and are glad that there is nothing of any real import that we have to do today. Instead, we look forward to our domestic help coming because we always have a nice chat and do litte things for each other. Today, for example, I have some excess soup that I have put by on one side for her. I also buy large 5L containers of rapeseed oil which is locally grown and produced in Staffordshire so after we have bottled this which is a job I did later on in the morning our domestic help assists in consuming this. We collected our newspaper as usual this morning and though it was ‘touch and go’ whether a walk in the park would be viable this morning, we managed to squeeze one in before the more persistent showers set in. There was quite a blustery wind blowing that was pretty mild so we had a fairly pleasant sojourn in the park to have our elevenses. Late yesterday afternoon, when I was hanging up one of my coats, I thought I espied something that had been lost. In the space under the stairs, we have two clothes rails of outdoor clothing, some of which we use occasionally if the weather happens to be very bad and some of which is lighter outerwear where we hang the more frequently used anoraks and outerwear. Now my beloved and much used leather hat had a few days ago unexpectedly got lost and I had absolutely no idea where it might be. It transpired that the hat had slipped down between the two rails but had not fallen to the floor and therefore was all extents completely hidden and therefore ‘lost’. Even our domestic help who had a good hunt around it a couple of weeks ago had not managed to find it so I was very pleased to locate it and bring it into use once again. Now on its second life, as it were, I ws pleased to give it a careful waxing with the shoe polish in an applicator that I purchased recently and it now has an appearance which looks somewhat restored but complete with a slightly ‘lived in’ look. Now that this is resurrected, I managed to put its replacement which I had been using for the last week or so back in its box and the newly purchased ‘reserve’ hat was also put in a safe place so that it can quickly be located when required (hopefully, years hence).

Today was the day when Liz Truss gave her conference speech and this was duly delivered with little gaps put in after every sentence or so that the party faithful can applaud. One of the rhetorical devices used today was to say that she had three priorities for her premiership which were ‘growth, growth and growth’ This rhetorical device sounded quite good when Tony Blair used it years ago to say his priorities were ‘education, education and education’ but by now seems an incredibly tired rhetorical device which has lost its effectiveness. I also learnt from the Liz Truss speech that when an economy grows, everybody benefits from this. This is logically and demonstrably untrue but once you start to enter into a debate wih ideologues, then evidence is unimportant compared with the place taken in the value system of ‘belief’. I have been followed Twitter quite closely in the last few days and two particular contributions caught my attention. One of these was to suggest that Liz Truss, as an ex-Liberal Democrat, had really entered the Conservative Party to destroy it from within – and had succeeded. Another contribution that made me chuckle was that the robot that had been programmed wih the same twenty sentences and which came out with the same utterances time after time (e.g. Putin’s war, 45 tax rate was a ‘distraction’ and so on) needed to be reprogrammed with a more up-to-date set of responses. A letter in yesterday’s Times from Peter Kellner, the founder of YouGov public opinion polling, made the interesting observation that as it was argued that the 45% tax rate was necessary to achieve the target 2.5% growth rate, now that the 45% tax rate had been abandoned, should the aspiration of a growth rate of 2.5% be correspondingly reduced (which of course it has not, by the way). Sky News has invited viewers to submit questions for a special program tomorrow afternoon, so I have submitted a question on similar lines and wonder whether or not it will be one of those selected for answer and discussion. Research conducted by J.L. Partners showed the word people thought of the most when asked about Liz Truss was ‘incompetent’ and this is to contrasted with the word most commonly said to describe Keir Starmer which was ‘boring’ Other words that were commonly used were to describe Liz Truss were ‘useless’, ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘clueless’.‘Unreliable’ and ‘dangerous’ were also among the more common answers.

Continue Reading

Tuesday, 4th October, 2022 [Day 932]

Meg and I always look forward to Tuesdays if only because it is the day when we typically meet with our friends in the Waitrose coffee bar. Today, having collected our newspaper, we popped round to Waitrose where we met up with Seasoned World Traveller, as we expected, and also one of our pre-pandemic Waitrose coffee bar friends. We also caught sight of one of our Irish friends from down the road so Meg popped out to thank her for the birthday presents left outside our front door last night. I also fleetingly made contact with the teacher of politics at Bromsgrove school with whom we used to share political stories. In particular, I wanted to convey to her what I had discovered and blogged a week or so ago, the story of how the Queen, perhaps through inexperience acceded to the illegitimate request of her recently resigned Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, that the leading candidates from the Commons be ignored and that an aristocratic Scottish landowner, Alec Dougls Home, known to her mother, be ‘sent for’ to form the next Conservative administration. So we had our merry little chats, did a spot of shopping nd then returned home after which I walked down into town to attend my normal Pilates session.

Tonight, a Scottish solicitor has died who was one of the last of group of students who in 1950 succesfully removed the ‘Stone of Scone’ from under the Coronation chair and transported it back to Scotland, admittedly in two pieces into which it had been broken. Then it stayed in Arbroath for 130 days after which it was successfully located and then returned to England. The full and fascinating story of the theft has been made into a film and is fully documented in Wikipedia but there are some twists to the story. One rumour is that a local stone mason made several copies of the stone, one of which was substituted for the stolen stone so the ‘Stone of Scone’ now residing again in the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey could be a copy. There are even further twists to this story. After some good detctive work, the perpetrators and location of the stone were discovered but although the police interviewed the four students, none of them was actually charged. This is because by the time it was judged to be too politically sensitive to go ahead with a prosecution. In another twist, the ‘original’ stone was actually returned to the Scots in 1996 on indefinite loan, on the understanding that when it is required again (which it will be for the coronation of Charles III), it is returned temporarily to London. There are two stories of a similar ilk that I have come across. One of them is caught inadvertently on the soundtrack of the film that was shot of the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. Towards the end of the film, there is a muffled ‘crumple’ sound which the Welsh police have identified as the home-made bomb of a Welsh anarchist/nationalist. The police had this well known character under close surveillance and made sure he and his device were kept well away from the ceremony – hence they were not surprised when the home-made device exploded prematurely but whether the anarchist died or not is not known. The oher Welsh event that I happen to know about is when the TV transmitter serving South Wales and adjudged to be an English propaganda tool was bombed and destroyed. I was at a small and rather exclusive dinner party provided by the Director of the Open University in Wales and certainly a man of nationalist convictions. He reckoned that the entire Welsh police and judiciary knew the identities of those responsible but they all chose to look the other way. Hence no-one was arrested, let alone prosecuted.

After I returned home and had a delayed lunch, we tuned into the rolling news programmes to see the latest civil war erupting in the Tory party. The latest dilemma is whether to uprate benefits, such as Universal Credit, in line with inflation which is of the order of 10% But were this to happen, the benefit recipients would have had a greater increase than those in work which is of the order of 6-7%. The dilemma for the Tories is that the small print of the agreement to abolish the 45% tax rate is a commitment to find £18 billion in public service funding. Leaving aside the NHS and the Ministry of Defence and pensioners protected by the triple lock, this only leaves the recipients of UC (Universal Credit) to go after. The Tory dilemma is that the rank and file and many of the Cabinet have a feeling that UC recipients are nearly always ‘undeserving’ or ‘feckless’ and hate providing any more money that is necessary. On the other hand, not to upgrade UC in line with inflation will mean a real cut which will be the largest real-time cut that UC recipients, some of the poorest and most handicapped in our society, have ever had. The arguments are raging back and forth and Liz Truss is saying that they are not ready to take a decision yet. But ultimately the decision might be made on the calculation of whatever benefit increases are chosen will pass a vote in the House of Commons. Interesting times!

Continue Reading

Monday, 3rd October, 2022 [Day 931]

Today is Meg’s 76th birthday so we were determined to make it a pleasant day. But the whole of the news was dominated both at the start of the day, and throughout, with the announcement that the proposed abolition of the 45% tax rate was now indefinitely shelved – in other words the 45% tax rate would remain and the government would now be £2 billion to the good. But more of this later. After Meg and I had breakfasted at our leisure, we had in mind to visit Droitwich just some 7 miles down the road. However, we got to a roundabout to the south of Bromsgrove and we noticed that there was a queue of cars already in existence and apparently, there was a traffic jam of cars along the entire length of the road. So we decided to abandon this plan and to adopt ‘Plan B’. We filled up the car with petrol and then doubled back to treat ourselves to some goodies in our local Waitrose coffee bar. We had an enjoyable little repast there, made even more by a beautiful present of some fifteen roses, very kindly presented to us by some of the regular staff in Waitrose who know us well. Needless to say, this is one of many reasons why we are loyal to Waitrose and to its café. When we got home, we had two wonderful presents left for Meg on the doorstep. One of these was chocolates and wine, given to Meg by our friends down the road whilst the other was even more wonderful chocolates to keep us well and truly addicted. We have also received through the day a couple of telephone calls, one from one of Meg’s cousins and one from my sister, to convey their birthday greetings to Meg and this was highly appreciated.

During the morning, I could not resist consulting Twitter to which I do not contribute but which I like to follow when political events are moving very rapidly, as they are today. I liked the comment made apparently to Robert Peston from a wealthy banker who had stated that ‘we did not want the extra money, we do not need the extra money and all of this is just bringing us all in disrepute’ What is undoubtedly the case is that whilst there is a very widespread hardship across the country, coping with a 10% inflation rate, falling real wages, mortgages going up from about 2.5% to over 5%, there is a truly widespread revulsion about shovelling money to the already extremely wealthy. Of course, it is not just the policy which is extreme and obnoxious in itself, but it is the fact that the present Prime Minister and Chancellor have tried to avoid any real scrutiny of their plans by a triple attack on the institutions that have given Britain a degree of financial credibility. For a start they sacked the respected and immensely experienced senior civil servant at the Treasury the day after they were appointed to office. Before becoming prime minister, Truss railed repeatedly against what she called ‘Treasury orthodoxy’, notably the predictions that her plan to make large and unfunded cut taxes could raise inflation and increase interest rates. Therefore, in their eyes Scholar had to go. Secondly, they threatened to undermine the independence of the Bank of England who they also suspected of undue caution and financial orthodoxy. But finally, and most heinous in the eyes of many Tory MP’s, is that they sidelined the offer of the Office for Budget Responsibility but not accepted their offer of an analysis, saying that the rest of the country would have to wait until end of November to receive an analysis. Naturally, the wider financial markets are not impressed by all of this, sensing an incompetent and reckless government, throwing over all of the traces in a mad ‘dash for growth’ and this reckless behaviour is responsible for lowering the credibility of the government as a whole. There has been been an interview by Liz Burley of Sky News of Chris Philp, a junior minister pushed into the front line to defend the government policy and the adjective most used is ‘eviscerating’ as the minister gave the most abysmal defence, at several points saying he was not prepared to admit whether or not he had any part on the formulation of the policy to abolish the 45% tax rate. Language is of considerable importance in politics so government spokesmen in great variety have all day been saying that they wished to remove the ‘distraction’ of the 45% tax cut. So no spokesman will admit that the policy was a ‘mistake’ or even a ‘miscalculation’ or an ‘error’ and are seeking to minimise the enormity of the mistake they have made but constantly calling it a distraction. Some parts of the Twittersphere are suggesting that many Tory MPs are now going to exert pressure to ensure that benefit are uprated in line with inflation because the Truss team has hinted that this is one way they are going to fund the £43 billion ‘gap’. As this means that those on benefits are going to fund the tax rises of the rich, if not the super-rich, then this is also being judged as equally toxic and politically unacceptable so some Tories, lead by Michael Gove, may carry on trying to reverse elements of this mini-budget.

Continue Reading

Sunday, 2nd October, 2022 [Day 930]

Today is the eve of Meg’s birthday so we have things planned for later on in the afternoon. But first, I dragged myself out of bed and walked down to pick up my copy of the Sunday Times. After I returned home and made Meg and I some breakfast, I was settling down to watch the Laura Kuennsberg Sunday show into which I tuned at 9.00am as per usual. But it was half way through an interview with Liz Truss and I realised, a little too late, that the programme must have started at 8.30 to take into account the London Marathon. However, I was in time to get a Liz Truss ‘gaff’ in the interview which is already going viral on Twitter and, no doubt, elsewhere. Liz Trus was asked a simple question of who had voted for the present package of measures which is causing so much economic and political chaos. After a few seconds of seeming incomprehension, she replied ‘I do not know what you mean’ whereupon Lura Kuennsberg then repeated exactly the same questions. Liz Truss dared not say it was only Tory members out in the constituencies (who had voted her in) and instead argued that the whole of the population when they voted in a Conservative governmnt in the last election had actually voted for this package of measures. This answer as well as being ridiculous and inaccurate will no doubt be played over and over again in opposition parties campaign broadcasts to expose Liz Truss persuing an agenda with no popular support. After breakfast, Meg and I slowly got our act together although, in truth, neither of us are feeling particulary bright and sparky after the vaccinations we received in each arm yesterday. To make us feel a little better though, we did make contact with our University of Birmingham friend shortly to be joined by Seasoned World Traveller. As always, the conversation turned to politics and Seasoned World Traveller and I made a made a bet with each (in chocolate bars) as to how long Liz Truss could survive as Prime Minister. I was exceedingly rash and thought (and bet) that she might be gone within three weeks. I actually think this is unlikely but quite possible because Tory MPs are apt to panic when they think they are shortly to be wiped out so there will be some feverish days at Westminster once the Tory party conference is over. The Chancellor of the Exchequeur, Kwasi Kwarteng, is not covering himself in glory by immediately the mini-budet statement had been given, attending a champagne cocktail party thrown by wealthy Tory donors, many if not most of whom would benefit enormously from the abolition of the 45% tax rate. At this cocktail party, he was overheard to ‘badmouth’ the present governor of the Bank of England whilst at the same cocktail party one of those assembled referred to Kwasi Kwateng in less than complimemtary terms. Two hedge fund managers at the event reportedly called the chancellor a ‘useful idiot’ and a senior Tory who advises business leaders said the phrase was in widespread circulation. For her part, Liz Truss is already preparing to throw her Chancellor under a passing bus by saying that the abolition of the 45% rate was his idea in the first place. As we sitting chatting, we were overtaken by Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker who was busy getting his circuits done. As we were leaving, we also chatted with a couple of church friends sitting on the adjacent bench. We explained that we were both still feeling a little rough afer our injections yesterday and our friends told us that quite a number of people known to them had felt the same after the latest virus vaccination. In the past, Meg and I have had the AstroZeneca and Pfizer vaccines but today we had the ‘Moderna’ version which is designed to be effectve against both the original strains of COVID and also the Omicron variant.

After Meg and I returned home, we had a very simple lunch of yesterday’s homemade soup because we knew that we were going to have a meal later on in the day at a local restaurant. We met with our son and daughter-in-law and had an enormous meal that we could not completely finish. We requested a doggy bag from the restaurant which they were happy to supply and got in home in time to watch the Andrew Neil political show which is generally quite penetrating, needless to say, The Prime Minister was invited but knew she would only receive a mauling and so declined, sending the Conservative party chairman along in her stead. By this stage in the day, we are both feeling a little worse for wear so Meg retreated to bed early and I will join her in due course. We managed to get Bach’s tremendous B-Minor Mass playing in the background which is nice if you just want the music to ‘wash over you’ Although tomorrow is Meg’s birthday, we are going to have play things by ear and see how we feel.

Continue Reading