The Bud Jet

I was going to title this one The Budget, but then I decided I wanted ‘The’ to be read ‘Thu’ as in Thud but with a silent ‘d’, and all three syllables to have equal weight, i.e. Thu Bud Jet. That’s because it sounds heavy and clumsy and odd and unbelievable, like Kwarteng’s debut (deh bew?) budget à la Trussonomics and the reactions to it.

The measure of weights

Not long ago, a post popped into my LinkedIn feed decrying the Government’s consultation on the privatisation of Channel 4 as a travesty of democracy, or some such hyperbole. I easily knocked that one on the head and moved on with my life.

Last weekend, another post appeared denigrating the Government’s consultation. on giving businesses and consumers more choice in selling and buying goods in imperial as well as metric units. According to the post’s author and various commentators, the consultation was a waste of time, a distraction from more pressing issues, and the questions were fiendishly biased. In fact, it sounded like the worst consultation ever. 

For facts’ sake!

Do you know how difficult it is to find the truth? It seems that for every fact, there’s another one that says the opposite. Even when a set of facts can be agreed upon, there’s probably 101 different interpretations and ensuing arguments that lead to 1,001 sundry conclusions.

As if that wasn’t infuriating enough, being presented with a limited selection of all available facts could sway a conclusion by a million miles either way. The Guardian is expert at such ‘economies with the truth’, but they’re not alone. Last month the Times reported that, “United Utilities, which serves northwest England, paid £296 million in dividends in the past year, the most paid by any water company.”

Four Yorkshiremen of the Apocalypse

Who doesn’t love a good Monty Python sketch? And those pre-Python sketches can be even better. In case you haven’t guessed by now, I’m referring to the "Four Yorkshiremen" classic from the 1967 TV show At Last the 1948 Show, starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman. Click here to laugh at four monied Yorkshiremen reminiscing about their childhoods, each trying to ‘out-destitute’ the other and getting increasingly ridiculous.

I was reminded of this sketch the other evening while sharing a (one? surely not) bottle of red with my like-minded neighbour, whom I shall call N to spare her blushes. We were sitting in my garden, despairing at my dead lawn, dead shrubs, dead pots and how quickly the wine was evaporating. To wind me up, N said the forthcoming hosepipe bans were all the fault of the water companies (remind yourself of this blog to see why I think the water companies are given an unfair wrap these days). I countered with a story on the news this week about a chap who was complaining about the brown colour of his water that his local supplier was blaming on “unprecedented demand”, but that the water was still ok to drink. The chap carried on complaining, saying he first noticed the discolouration after filling the kids’ paddling pool.

Catch-22 meets Franz Kafka

I’ve had the most surreal time dealing with a bank. Think Monty Python and Black Adder, or Frank Spencer on roller skates. The phrase “couldn’t make it up”, “get a grip” and “shitshow” spring to mind.

I used to work for a bank, am financially literate and married to an accountant, so you’d think if anyone could cope with banks, it would be me. Not so. I’ve lost the will to live, taken solace with my mate Tanqueray, and kicked the neighbour’s cat down the lane out of sheer frustration. 

Homes are where the money is

I did quite well with the cost-of-living crisis last week, so today I thought I’d solve the so-called housing crisis.

The frothing vitriol of the pro-development lobby was bad enough when the Government announced it was scaling back plans for 300,000 new builds a year, but when Simon Jenkins agreed that we don’t need that many new homes because the housing market isn’t in crisis, anyone would think he’d expressed his undying love for Putin.

Cost-of-living crisis? What cost-of-living crisis?

According to a Tory MP, people should learn to budget and to cook and they wouldn’t have a problem. He claims that you can cook a meal from scratch for 30p.

I was fuming on behalf of everyone who is genuinely struggling to make ends meet through no fault of their own, then I caught sight of his background. Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, is a former coal miner and ex-Labour councillor. Not your typical monied, out-of-touch Tory then. I kept digging (or mining) and learned that he has volunteered for Citizens Advice and worked in hostels for homeless care leavers. Sounds like an ok kind of guy.

He was slapped with a community protection warning for trying to block access to a local site to deter Travellers. Bravo that man!

Shortly afterwards, he defected to the Tories and was elected to Parliament in 2019.

In addition to trying to protect his community from illegal incursions, he has said and done many other ‘controversial’ things, most of which I agree with: supporting Brexit, objecting to England footballers taking the knee, and voting against Covid restrictions. Where did he go so horribly wrong? Or is he right?

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), “The Consumer Prices Index [a measure of inflation] … rose by 6.2% in the 12 months to March 2022”. In everyday parlance, that means that if something cost £10 in March 2021, it now costs £10.62. So what? If something cost £100 in March 2021, it now costs £106.20. Yeah – still not a crisis.

However, relying again on those clever people at the ONS, who assure us that the median household disposable income in the UK was £31,400 in the financial year ending (FYE) 5th April 2021, if a household’s annual bills totalled £30,000 (I like round figures, given that I have one) in the FYE 2021, then in FYE 2022 their bills would have totalled £31,860. Stating the obvious, that’s an extra £1,860, which doesn’t sound so paltry, does it? 

What’s really scary is that for the next 12 months, the extra money needed to, well, live, is projected to be even higher, for the sake of argument say another £2,500 on top of the £1,860 some had to scrimp and save for this year. Doing the maths for you, it means that an average UK household will have had to find an extra £4,360 within a two-year period. That is serious dosh and the very epitome of a cost-of-living crisis.

However…

Have you seen the horrendous queues of holiday makers at various airports trying to go abroad for a short break? Have you tried to book a table at a favourite restaurant on a Friday evening? We popped down to Somerset recently and made our usual pilgrimage to Clarks Village (outlet mall) on the hunt for essentials such as handbags, serving platters, and matching underwear. We struggled to find a parking space it was that busy with other shoppers. We picked up Covid fairly easily but that’s another story.

Plenty of people do still have plenty of money to burn. If the credit card does suddenly start to throw a wobbly, then there’s plenty of luxuries to forgo for a couple of years, such as climate-change-causing holidays, boutique gins and designer condoms. You’ll be fine. Trust me. Growing up in a farming-cum-mining village in the 1970s, with winters of discontent and hyper-inflation thanks to a failed socialist government (was it ever thus) for company, my parents ended one bleak month with just 80p in the bank. I know how to cut back, make do and mend. It’s not that difficult. Eggs, mince, offal and milk puddings kept us nourished; hand-me-down cardies from older cousins kept us warm, and staying with family in the Lake District did us proud for our one, yes one, holiday a year.

But there are plenty of other people who don’t have any luxuries to barter, and for whom 80p at the end of the month would be wonderful. They were living hand-to-mouth before Covid and Ukraine; the current situation must be terrifying. They’re the ones who really are suffering a genuine cost-of-living crisis. What’s to be done?

Despite me being, normally, very (too?) forgiving of Boris because he got Brexit done, he really hasn’t got a handle on the inflation-situation. Maybe Lee Anderson MP has ganged up with Fishy Rishi to persuade Boris and the rest of the cabinet that households need to get a grip before being given bigger handouts. Sorry, chaps, but you’re wrong. Mr Anderson MP might be right about Brexit, Covid-lockdowns, trespassers and BLM, but he’s way out of order with his views on the cost-of-living crisis.

If I were Prime Minister (I really must devote a whole blog to that title), here’s what I’d do (the list is not exhaustive):

Put more money in pockets:

• Immediately cut income tax and National Insurance for the lowest earners.

• For those on benefits who can find some / more work, don’t cut their benefits until they’re earning a proper living wage.

• Capacity-build food banks to turn food-recipients into food-bank workers.

• Increase benefits for those with known chronic health issues where working (more) is just not possible

• Incentivise banks to relax overdraft criteria and help people to budget

• ‘Incentivise’ supermarkets to buy more British food at more realistic prices without passing on the cost to the consumer. The farming community deserve our support as well!

Take less money out of pockets:

• Suspend VAT on gas and electricity bills

• Suspend the green fuel levy.

• Cut vehicle fuel tax

• Mandate housing associations and private landlords to immediately improve their properties’ fuel efficiency

• Capacity-build food banks to enable education of recipients re budgeting and cooking (which is supported by Mr Anderson!)

• Donate all edible excess food from the catering industry, including excess portions, discarded trimmings and failed attempts (soggy bottoms?) to hostels and foodbanks.

• Supermarkets to donate all (safe) ‘past-sell-by-date’ food, including wilting fruit and veg, to hostels and foodbanks

How can the Government pay for their measures?

• Windfall-tax fuel / energy companies. No it won’t stifle investment like the companies are claiming, because the current profits are higher than investor expectations so these decisions won’t be impacted.

• Windfall-tax the property industry. Gove did well to get big developers to cough up for the cladding crisis. Now how about aiming for the large land agents and investors like Bidwells and Savills who have made housing so unaffordable?

• Increase taxes for foreign property investors who are likewise major contributors to the affordability problem

• Tax aviation fuel and hike Air Passenger Duty – those who can afford to fly should help support those who can’t.

• Sell seized Oligarch assets

One final note on foodbanks. Some say they are demeaning and the Government should increase benefits / tax the rich more. That is economically and socially illiterate. Increasing taxes actually depletes Government coffers, so there’s less money to fund benefits, hospitals and the Police, etc. Very little comes from the rich, but middle-earners end up with less money in their pocket so are less likely to support charitable causes. Community foodbanks respond much more quickly and efficiently when needs arise, compared to the lumbering Government machine, restricted by its size, complexity, bureaucracy and political shenanigans. 

Trust the people to look after their own, which overlaps with what Lee Anderson MP was saying, but his other pronouncements were, in truth, economically and socially illiterate.

Pants round their ankles

Having ached a bit on Saturday evening owing to, so I thought, a day’s gardening, I tested positive for Covid on Easter Sunday morning. 

Talk about cocking everything up: I can’t visit my Mum; Hubby can’t visit his; my friend with whom I spent Thursday evening cancelled her Easter lunch with her neighbours; and friends with whom we lunched, also on Thursday, are running around like headless chickens. I feel like I swallowed a wasps’ nest, my cough is worse than any chain-smokers’, and I spend my days sleeping in bed, sleeping in the comfy armchair, or nodding off at my desk. However, my vitals (signs, not statistics) are all good so I think I’m getting off lightly. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t. Horrific stats, horrific suffering, horrific impact on loved ones and healthcare workers, horrific impact on our kids’ education, horrific mental health legacy, and so it goes on. We can’t afford to get distracted and allow the horror to return because we failed to plan for a sinister new variant. We need to stay alert, focused, prepared, not distracted or stuck down a rabbit hole. However, the country’s needs are once again playing second-fiddle to the wants of a few sanctimonious, hypocritical, own-agenda, traitorous rabbit arseholes who’d rather risk emboldening Putin with a PR coup than tolerate a democratically elected PM they despise. BoJo’s crimes, in their eyes, include getting Brexit done, going after the Northern Ireland Protocol, and caring more about saving lives at sea than being intimidated by a few Peloton-obsessed, workshy civil servants who obviously haven’t read the Rwanda policy, just the BBC take on it. Sigh. 

BoJo is also loathed because of reports he overruled the security services and got his Russian oligarch mate ennobled. Except he didn’t, did he. The Lords’ appointment chief just said so. 

Oh dear. BoJo haters been caught with their pants round their ankles.

Because I’m not fit to do much else this week, I’ve spent more time than usual reading newspapers – not exactly morale-boosting. Here’s a selection of headlines (paraphrased):

• Putin orders troops to seal civilians in steelworks and starve them to death
• Five-year-old was tortured then murdered by own family
• Cocaine gang exchanges cash in busy street while unsuspecting bystanders walk by
• 40% of households face fuel poverty
• Scholar banned from Twitter for quoting Shakespeare
• Prince Harry opens his mouth
• Labour moves for a fresh PartyGate probe

PartyGate! Down the rabbit hole the country went some months ago – I think my first blog about this was in January – and we still haven’t re-surfaced. One might expect opportunistic politicians, woke ‘civil servants’ (who are no longer civil or act like public servants so don’t deserve respect in my blog), and headline-chasing journalists to enjoy skulking where the sun don’t shine – in rabbit holes, not the other sort (oh, I dunno though) – but now the business community has joined the fray, bleating for their Brexit-revenge in group-think fashion rather than running their businesses. 

Yes, the great and the good on LinkedIn, setting themselves up (for a fall) as ‘Leadership Consultants’, ‘Ethics Advisers’ and ‘Risk Assessors’, have picked up the ‘lied to Parliament’ baton as proof that BoJo has no integrity, and integrity is a key characteristic of a good leader, so BoJo has to go. Sounds as if integrity is the only attribute, doesn’t it? Bugger ‘perspective’, ‘empathy’, ‘perspective’, ‘free-thinking’, ‘perspective’, ‘personable’, ‘perspective’ and so many more. Choose one that Boris hasn’t got and the others don’t matter.

The problem with such group-think is it puts off potential clients. I mean, it’s not exactly conducive to projecting a Unique Selling Point, is it; and it limits the way problems are analysed and solutions are developed. Overall, bigotry clouds judgment and compromises skillsets. Would you hire a leadership consultant who thought integrity was the only attribute? What about an ethics adviser who felt that not telling the whole truth about eating cake was a bigger crime than marching at a terrorist’s funeral à la Sinn Fein’s Miss-step O’Neill? Would you trust a risk assessor who advocates the (avoidable) creation of a power vacuum for a dubious gain that would in any event destabilise the country? 

Pants round their business ankles, indeed.

There are so many pants round ankles with PartyGate that it’s beginning to look a lot like a Carry On film – full of immaturity, crudeness, naivety, clichés, corn, has-beens, wannabees, closed minds, and open goals. The three most apt titles that spring to mind are: Carry On Regardless, Carry On Screaming and, all I can do is hope and pray, Carry On England.

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Shit Happens

The FT appears to have joined forces with the Guardian to bring down the privatised water industry because of untreated sewage polluting our rivers and coasts [i]^,[ii]. Basic journalistic principles of factual and balanced reporting are being sacrificed in favour of sensationalism, political bias and pandering to ill-informed public hysteria. Because shit sells; balance doesn’t.

Don’t blame Brexit or Covid.

Well we are in a dreadful pickle aren’t we. Christmas is going to be the worst ever. No cheap, plastic, Chinese here-today-gone-tomorrow toys under a non-existent Christmas tree. No factory-farmed turkey. No smashed avocado for breakfast. THE HORRORRRRRRRRRRR!

Oh, strap on a pair. What’s wrong with a jar of homemade marmalade from the mother-in-law (best in the world – the marmalade, not the in-law), paper chains made from discarded colour-magazines, a whole poached wild salmon, and my home-made, home-grown plum compote. Compared to Afghan women, Chinese Uyghurs, and white working-class northerners applying to university, what’s to complain about?

Marketeers vs. Musketeers

A headline in today’s Daily Mail Online reads, “Supermarkets are ALREADY selling festive products with shoppers urged to buy now and 'stock up' amid fears over Christmas food shortage due to gas crisis”. Another one reads, “Alok Sharma [Business Secretary] insists there is 'no immediate concern' … the supplies will be there for Christmas…”

I know what you’re thinking; you’d rather trust a supermarket than a politician, so there must be an imminent shortage and you must shop for Christmas without delay.

Nah. Let’s think this through, shall we?

The Ox-Cam ARC Love-in

Yesterday the Government published its “Planning for sustainable growth in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc An introduction to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc Spatial Framework”. Trips off the tongue, dunt it.

I sat through an hour-long webinar ‘launch’ of said document today, hosted by property consultants Bidwells, who are making and will make a mint out of downing trees, digging up pasture and throwing concrete around like confetti, which is what the ARC is all about. They say not. They say it’s about beautiful, sustainable development in the “knowledge-based” economy that will make the ARC a great place to live. The fact that it’s already a great place to live because it’s green and rural and tranquil in many places seems to have escaped their notice.

I'm proud of my Scottish heritage, but ...

A few blogs ago I wrote about women leaders and listed a few “turkeys – either incompetent or dangerous.” I missed one out. How, I really don’t know because she’s the biggest turkey of the lot.

Scotland’s First Minster, Nicola Sturgeon.

2020 ended on a high

Firstly for Hubby, who exchanged his too-small gilet for one that fitted nicely, thus meaning I officially bought him a successful Xmas pressie (see previous blogpost).

And also for me, who had a letter published in The Times on New Years Eve. Always an ego-boost!

The muse this time was Brexit – no surprise there then – in response to the slew of Remoaner letters in The Times on the 30th. I know “Remonaner” is an insulting term and that we Brexiteers should be magnanimous in victory, but these letters were undeserving of anyone’s magnanimity, which is a polite way of saying they were pathetic.

Want to feed children?

Had another letter published in the Bucks Herald this week:

Want to feed children? Local is the best way

I support our local MPs, Greg Smith and Rob Butler, for voting against the proposed food vouchers during the school holidays. 

Earlier this year, provision of such vouchers was far from universally successful, being slow to deliver, expensive to administer, and target recipients were missed more often than an English soccer penalty. As a more viable alternative, in many communities local foodbanks instantaneously materialised, and established foodbanks stepped up a notch. The result was that more kids were fed more quickly locally than nationally.

Boris is playing God

Maybe if one or more of my loved ones had succumbed to Covid-19 or were suffering with it in intensive care, I too would want a national lockdown. But they’re not, so I can think coolly, rationally and unemotionally, albeit after two strong coffees.

According to the Daily Mail (yeah, I know), the PM was told that if he didn’t lockdown us all then he would be forcing “doctors to choose between saving Covid sufferers and those with other illnesses.” 

So Boris has made the decision himself to favour Covid patients. 

Excuse me, but I would rather doctors take such decisions on a case-by-case basis, not politicians in a panicked pronouncement.

John Lewis really has lost its way

The go-to store of the British middle class can’t blame Covid or deserted High Streets or Russian hackers for their current woes. I came to that conclusion after 54 minutes trying to buy something very ordinary.

It all started earlier today, at 9:31am, while delivering the Stewkley Grapevine, our brilliant-if-I-say-so-myself village newsletter. Since the lockdown in spring, as opposed to the lockdown coming up, or the mandatory quarantine currently experienced by my sister in Barnsley (Barnsley. Yes. I know) because one of her work colleagues tested positive, I’ve taken a black plastic sack with me and litter-picked the verges and hedgerows. If I were Prime Minister (which is the title of a future blog), I would bring back capital punishment for litter louts. As fast as I clean everything up, more yobs, slags and low-lifes desecrate the countryside rather than take their detritus back to the cesspits they call home.

It’s Supply AND, not OR, Demand

Boris Johnson’s prime ‘primeministerial’ mission is to ‘level up’ the UK economy. By that, he means improving the lot of the ‘left-behind’ areas. Can’t argue with him there. A secondary, but not-too-far-behind, mission is to build more homes and make them more affordable. He’s not alone in wanting to see that happen.

Specifically, he wants to build more homes in areas where people want to live. Very considerate of him, but how does he know where people want to live? Has he undertaken a nationwide survey to ask them? Course not. He’s using an algorithm. Oh no – the dreaded “A” word!

From Elland Road to Corporate Alley

Sob sob. Where’s me ‘anky? Former Leeds United great Jack Charlton has joined his recently departed teammates Norman “Bites yer Legs” Hunter and Trevor Cherry to play in that great football stadium in the sky.

Tributes are flooding in again, not just for Jack, but for the Leeds team of 50-or-so years ago and their manager Don Revie, who took a very ordinary club and turned it into the most revered (derived from Revied? Or reviled?) team in Europe.