There was a news item this morning which was an interesting reflection of how life is changing on how High Streets and this was a story about banking. Some Banks (such as Halifax, Barclays, HSBC) are losing customers at an enormous rate whilst the biggest gainer has been the building society, Nationwide, who are even offering a £100 bonus to their loyal customers this year. Lloyds Banking Group has announced it is axing the Halifax brand, scrubbing the 173-year-old former building society’s name from UK high streets and we are facing a situation in which some rural communities and the elderly are finding it more and more difficult to get access to their own money. To some extent there is a vicious circle in play here because as a response to falling customer numbers, banks withdraw their High Street presence and this further depresses the available demand. The government are sufficiently worried by this change to the High Streets that they, together with the banking industry, are actively considering banking ‘hubs’ to provide basic services to customers. By the time we factor in the effects of climate change, oil price rises following the unresolved Ukrainian and Iran conflicts and the absence of long term growth, then the prospects for our High Streets remain quite bleak. Returning to the issue of social care costs, I noticed yesterday that ‘The Times’ had published a detailed analysis of how this problem is tackled in many countries across the world. So other mature industrial democracies, including those with a very rapidly ageing population such as Japan, have managed to come up with solutions and Britain does not fare at all well compared with many other countries. The author of one of the most authoritative reports on this subject some fifteen years ago, Andrew Dilnot, was interviewed and he was singing the praises of the Australian model in which individuals do make a contribution but it is capped at a level which does not wipe out life time savings. In our own country, we had a proposal several years ago for a social care levy to raise money specifically. for the care costs of the elderly and I think this is surely the only practicable solution to the funding problem. To try to fund social care directly from taxation would withdraw money from other avenues where it is desperately needed so, in my mind, the raising of money from all of us from middle age onwards is the only sensible long-term solution and it is to the credit of other countries that this has been realised and schemes have been in place for years. I am increasingly led to the view that we in the UK are incredibly short term in our thinking and do not adequately plan for the future. We could exemplify these across a range of institutions (oil storage facilities, transport infrastructure, our National Grid, water storage etc, etc) and we just seem to bundle along from one short term crisis to the next. Perhaps there is a case for a National Infrastructure Commission to designate some long term projects to which all of the major political parties should be committed and have a ‘buy in’.
In the morning, I attended my Tai Chi class as normal, but we are all bereft of the coffee bar area which used to be our refuge after the class but is now closed for its summer refurbishment. So together with my ex-bank manager friend, we strolled the short distance into town, and we enjoyed a coffee in my favourite ‘Horse Sanctuary’ outlet. Afterwards I strolled back along the High Street and popped into the Oxfam charity shop to see if they had anything upon which my eye might alight. But today was my lucky day because I espied a rail with some long-sleeved men’s shirts and was delighted to find a couple that exactly my size and style and were originally Marks and Spencer regular fit and which claimed to be non-iron. At £3 each, they were evidently a bargain and now I need to go along my rail and dispense with these where the collar and/or cuffs are so worn that they either have to be thrown away or kept in a special place where I put shirts that I use for particularly dirty jobs such as gardening or painting where frankly their condition is unimportant. Walking along he High Street, it actually started raining and although I was without a coat, the cool breeze and very gentle rain were a real pleasure through which to walk. Apart from one night time shower, this must be one of the first rainfalls we have experienced for what seems like a couple of months now. When I got home and restored myself with a ‘proper’ coffee, I made myself some lunch in what turned out to be vegetarian affair with a portion of quiche alongside which I stir-fried some onions, peppers, tomatoes, and even enhanced with some par-boiled broccoli. After lunch, I amused myself listening to Mary Trump who is Donald Trump’s niece who is not only a trained psychologist but is also party to other members pf the Trump family, including her own grandfather who suffered from Alzheimer’s. Mary Trump is one of her uncle’s sternest critics and is regularly invited onto the media to give an opinion on the up-to-date nature of Trump’s decline. One illustration which Trump has posted is himself in a Superman type pose on the crags of Mount Rushmore where he appears to be offering a helping hand to George Washington which I suppose indicates his megalomania allied with narcissism. During the course of the afternoon, I came across an interesting bit of video explaining how at some point in the future, sodium ion technology might take over from the lithium which has powered so many of our devices for the past decade or so. Sodium ion has the advantage that sodium (salt) is so abundant and readily available and works much better at low temperatures but less charge is delivered per cell. But lithium technology benefits from the advantage of being manufactured at an enormous scale and with some clever software is managing to overcome some of its disadvantages. So we will shall not be seeing sodium ion technology in our electric vehicles just yet but it remains a technology whose time is yet to come. One manufacturer has put both lithium and sodium ion technology in the battery pack with software to switch between them. China decisively leads America in battery technology, dominating manufacturing scale, raw material processing, and supply chain control. China commands 70% to 90% of the global lithium-ion battery value chain and produces battery packs at prices over 40% cheaper than in the U.S.