Back To An Imagined Future

One of the knock about corners of the web is the Tim Worstall blog's running dislike of Richard Murphy's "Tax Research" blog. Timothy does not take to Richard's view of the economic financial world and is often unkind.

But Richard with his beliefs in magic money trees and how the world's financial problems can be solved by infinite credit creation and quantitative easing without limit does lead with the chin.

Today, under the heading of "If the 1945 Labour Government represents the threat of socialism it's obvious we need more socialism", taken from a Guardian Long Read, yes, well, Richard gives high praise to Attlee's time as Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951.

But I was there and a voter by the mid 1950's. Richard does not mention the food and clothes rationing, coal allocations, the horrors of travel, and a few other things. My special nightmare was the swimming trunks made of knitted wool from an expired pullover.

It really was as bad as that. But let us take Richards claims on the threat of socialism and Attlee and examine them.

RM: Was it the creation of the NHS?

By the late 1940's a century of work after The Poor Law Act had created extensive health provision with varying structures. It had been a matter of pride for the new local authorities to provide and nurture hospitals, clinics etc. and medical education. WW2 and after meant that money needed to be spent, for Bevan etc. this meant a centralised planning and a dictatorial approach.

RM: Or a massive expansion of free education?

The crucial legislation was the 1944 Education Act, the Butler Act from the Coalition Churchill Government. Free education was already in place up to 14. The Act said 15 plus a new system of schools organisation. This was slow to implement until the 1958 White Paper, "Secondary Education For All, A New Drive". Other reports, Crowther and Beloe in 1959 and 1960 dealt with examinations and the 1962 Education Act with student grants and fees.  This was the Tories led by MacMillan.

RM: Or the creation of the welfare state?

Obviously, Lloyd George did not know Richard's grandfather.

RM: Or the biggest modernisation of British industry in a short period in this country’s history?

Eh? What had been going on between 1939 and 1945? Richard is making the mistake here of assuming cut and shift at the top and in the head offices was the reality as opposed to what was actually going in the factories and workplaces, which was limited because of post war exhaustion and lack of private capital.

RM: Or council housing?

Municipal housing had been around for some time in many ways. In the early 1920's for example, Liverpool built huge estates and many others did the same.

RM: Heaven forbid that it was full employment.

How many casualties in WW2? How many were in the Armed Services at the time, also there was conscription? Because mechanisation and modernisation was slow, capital shortages again, and there was a good deal of "under employment" in some sectors, notably the docks.

RM And rising prosperity.

A lot of women were still working. But the rates of tax began to hit hard for working couples on decent wages. My father, in a good firm on the shop floor, was of the view that Attlee and friends were crooks and thieves given where some of the state money was going, and it wasn't to the poor.

RM: Plus a fairer society.

Like hell it was, we just had a new type of aristo' the Sons of The Raj at the head of the Labour Party. The "fairness" arose such as it was from the Churchill Government's propaganda that we were all in WW2 together.

In a reply to a comment, Richard added some more:

RM;What did Labour deliver?

RM: The biggest investment in rail and road ever

The "investment" in rail was badly needed repairs and maintenance etc. after WW2. As for major roads the Preston Bypass was 1958, although some local authorities did road works, but nothing like on the scale of the 1930's. As for "ever", what about The Turnpikes and The Railway Mania?

RM: It transformed energy supply

The 1926 Central Electricity Board gave us the National Grid. A great deal of electricity and gas came from municipal providers. There were a number of companies, but working under closely defined legislation. When the "nationalised" came along they had to come up with the propaganda while they were making a botch of the transition.

RM: And delivered mass telecommunication

Not if you wanted a telephone it didn't. It took a long while for that to get going apart from important (well connected) people. Again we had the propaganda. The BBC did get a limited one channel TV started but that took a long time to deliver. It was 1954 before commercial television became possible.

RM: It built more houses than ever before or since

Relative to population size the private and charitable builders of the 19th Century did rather better. Many of their houses, with exceptions, were better built as well, notably after legislation demanded drains.

RM: And set up a nationalised industry that delivered Concorde

Concorde? Can you be serious? Mind boggling that this is called an achievement, one of the biggest fattest turkeys in history and strictly for the rich elite at the price of a seat. And they opted out of satellite provision to pay for it. Meanwhile the world was buying Boeings.

RM: And, I admit the Austin Allegro:

The poor old Allegro was a decent design and could have been a basic family car. It was the build quality that was bad in factories dominated by socialist union leaders. I bought an Italian car.

RM: I am not wholly blinkered, of course. The NHS laid the foundations for our pharmaceutical industry.

So nobody took pills made in factories before 1945? It was all done by the local chemist in his back room? With the chemicals coming from Unilever and ICI and a few dozen others? Is it being said that we owe antibiotics to Attlee?

RM: And of course much of this was actually delivered in the 50 but it was Butskillism that did it – and none would have happened under Chutchill. It required Attlee.

Butskellism, as in Hugh Gaitskell. 1951 to 1964 was Tory time. But looking at what happened, it was as much Stanley Baldwin as RAB Butler and consistent with some of the ideas that Churchill held early in his career.

I did not see Churchill speak, but I did Attlee, Butler, Gaitskell, Macmillan and others, even Captain Charles Waterhouse, if only because he was President of a rugger club I played for a few times.

It is worth recalling that Churchill and Attlee served together between 1940 and 1945. They were also veterans of WWI where Major Attlee gave distinguished service for which he was held in high respect, the International Brigade in Spain had a company named for him. Their opposition in politics was modified by respect for their military service.

They also had a common cause in keeping their parties together, Attlee after the fall of Ramsay Macdonald, when Labour may have split. Churchill in the 1920's as Chancellor and 1940 when the Tories had divisions.

So they are not opposites and equally they are not the same. It is a great deal more complicated than that.

Some Of My Best Friends Were Architects

As a teenager in the early fifties a couple of my school mates went to the local School of Architecture so it happened that there was a group of students moving in the same sports and social circles of that time. It wasn't the kind of fifties thing that the London media claim was the norm, life had a rather greater variety then and with real choices.

They were bright, able and ambitious and when qualified moved on to a variety of jobs in the field of architecture. They were among the young architects who found themselves supposed to be regenerating Britain's urban areas and putting up all those buildings and developments that the government were throwing money at.

So what might they have learned at their School and what did their tutors etc. bring to their attention as examples of what might be done besides the basics of their trade? There was certainly a choice among the academics at the time.

One school of thought was that housing etc. and other provisions should somehow be a network of urban villages, but with modern styles, low level and some sort of "community". This may account for those estates of the period where you never knew where you were or where or when the buses were going and are now clogged with parked cars.

There had been the concept of Garden Cities and there are a handful of them still dotted about to remind us. This was a retrospective idea, somehow a clean pretty etc. urban area with drains that worked and running water. But these were more expensive and took a long time to mature which was against the times of the mid 20th Century.

And then there was modern architecture, notably Bauhaus and Le Corbusier and others. If I go into these it would be a long post and you do not have time for that. For choice try the images of Creteil close to Paris in France, above, and other images. I have stayed in Creteil. It was very interesting but daunting. It was not a place to live.

This is the kind of work that so many architects tried their hands at and the kind of living that for many social reformers was the dream of the future. A heaven on earth made of concrete and running to timetables. Only in the UK it had to be done in a hurry, on the cheap, cutting out all the fancy arts and religion and open spaces were a maintenance cost to be avoided. There were never enough lifts and they were never big enough, especially in the brand new hospitals.

In the 60's and 70's the designs often referred to futuristic notions from the 30's etc. One underestimated issue was just how many people might have cars and how much of the movement and delivery of goods might be by motor vehicles. Then there were the contractors.

At my grandfather's knee I was taught when looking for house to go for small local builders who knew their trade and build solidly and well. I managed this with one exception. In a hurry and faced with limited choice we had a Wimpey House.

At parties with our neighbours we did enjoy capping each other's tales of what was wrong and did not work. Whose drains gurgled most, whose doors did not fit, whose windows did not fit, who had the biggest bulges and whose roof space had the most surprises. The fun item was that every outside door lock could be opened with one of three keys.

The unlucky ones were those whose property was so bad that no surveyor would pass it for resale. Worse was when their building society flatly refused to lend extra mortgage money for any needed repairs or rebuilding.

But we could console ourselves. From all reports Wimpey was not the worst, some of the other major contractors were dire. These are the men who put up the social housing of their time as well as the private housing.

It is a very long while since I last saw one of those friends of the fifties. Quite why so many went to live in the country in very old houses or emigrated did make me wonder.

Bad Business

Housing and property have been central to UK politics for long while now. As the parties have striven to out bid each other, so the promises made become more wild and the costs greater.  A couple of links will explain this.

This from the LSE is brief and succinct and explains the general history without becoming involved in much debate about all the current policies etc.. It says about them that it is evident that these measures are failing to defy structural economic gravity.

A fuller discussion comes from biased.bbc.org Nil Desperandum in "Towering Injustice" of 23 June with two videos. The first is a brief item of one minute twenty seconds saying it has been a bad business.

The second is a full fifty minute documentary from 1984 "The Great British Housing Disaster"  which tells us a great deal about the present one. What is signal in this is that the men who actually did the building tell us what they did, or rather did not do.

It is a shocker, a tale of power crazed politicians, ambitious architects, property companies seeing certain profits, contractors making empty promises and workers paid by the job cutting corners quite literally. It is not a horse that bolted, the bolts were never there or fastened.

In 1984 all this was known. We have been paying since then for it and are now going to be paying more.

For Whom The Motorway Tolls

It is in the news that the M6 Motorway Tolls have been sold to an Australian investment group.

The story is here if you want it.   My reaction was that this seems a little odd. What would any right minded Oz want with this scruffy little bit of England?

The tale was a longer one I was told by one of the family. Before it had been on the balance sheets of 27 financial operators. Quite how or why any of this had happened was lost to me as it would be to most people. You might think a toll was a simple basic operation for clear purposes but no longer.

It was December 1958 when the wonders of the Preston Bypass were revealed to the nation. It was intended to stop the notorious traffic jams on the old A6 as it wended its way through the ancient borough of Preston and across the narrow Ribble bridge.

So many went to see it that the traffic jams went from Lancaster to Wigan. As for getting to Blackpool by car, it was quicker to go to Berlin was the old soldier's joke. In time the Bypass became but one small part of the M6 motorway as it ran from Shakespeare country to the border and that of Burns.

There were the usual debates about its use and purpose. Some thought it would be a little used luxury, others recognised that Britain seemed finally to be admitting that the age of the motor had arrived. Among them was the issue of whether it should be "free" or whether a toll be made to contribute to maintenance etc. costs.

This was an age when a flow of cash was seen as just that and when intended for a particular purpose would go to the authority or agency responsible for doing the work that needed to be done. Ideally, the cash from tolls would pay for the longer term costs and improvements as well as the short term ones.

More recently under a Labour government, in 2004 the new M6 tolls gave rise to political argument but by then cash was looked on with eyes of envy by financial operators who see it not as there to pay for something to be done, that task should be loaded onto others, notably taxpayers if you could get enough politicians drunk, if only on power, to agree to it.

The cash would become an asset and a base for credit and in turn operations in the many and various markets for trading and lending and lending and trading. The M6 is not just a road from here to there it is a desirable instrument wherever the financiers operate.

So as you wave the latest edition of your credit card over the thing at the entrance you are setting in motion a flow of money movement through the world from the Caymans to Hong Kong and Sydney and incidentally letting GCHQ at Cheltenham know that you are off to see grannie again.

It is not exactly a highway to heaven but it is as good as you are ever going to get. The bell tolls for thee.

No Second Helpings

One subject that has been avoided in this blog has been diets and dieting, if only because I have a distaste for it. But Science Daily has had an article recently which was of interest.

DNA for dinner is not what the article is about, directly, but there is a school of thought that argues that man is what he or she eats, notably the DNA we have relates to the diets of our ancestors.

In the interests of diversity the farmers and the cowhands must be friends (see the musical "Oklahoma") but when it comes to eating and drinking perhaps we should be mindful of what we are in DNA terms.

If asked what you have been doing, the answer is Nutrigenomics; that is Nutritional Genomics.

Time to send out for the fish and chips.

Grenfell Tower Questions

It is difficult to avoid the disaster of Grenfell Towers and the tragedies that have ensued. To debate or comment needs care given the rapidity at which the story unfolds in both the media and on the web. Sometimes too rapidly for the editors. The Mirror online had a story on the question of sprinkler systems at Grenfell Towers along with an advert' about "Stinging funeral costs avoided by savvy over 65's".

Of necessity, the Prime Minister has stated an inquiry will be held if only to claim that something should be done and will be done. The key problem with inquiries of this kind is that they take years, become an expensive battlefield for armies of lawyers, confuse every issue and then report too late to be effective.

In the late second decade of the 21st Century with worldwide media, communication and information systems, let alone numbers of experts instantly on tap, the right method is to set up a capable team to pull it together to produce an analysis document of the key elements within weeks or even days.

The majority of our tower blocks date from the second half of the 20th Century. It had become fashionable for local authorities to have Chief Architects with large departments for whom big projects defined status and masculinity. Councillors liked them for much the same reasons. They proved that "something was being done" by virtue of the their physical impact.

What was worrying in the 1970's was that proposals often defied rationality, notably in mining districts riddled with subsidence going back centuries. To look at the alternative ways of meeting housing needs could mean a lot more time and trouble and attention to detail, despite being much less costly to both provide and maintain. In committee a chest beating chairman was all too likely to want a tower block.

In the case of Grenfell, the reports I have seen say the Kensington and Chelsea Council is the "owner", that is the freeholder. On the web property pages there have been flats for sale as leaseholds. The variations in price suggest large variations in condition and location within the block.

These leasehold prices seem to be way beyond the resources of many of the occupants who necessarily will be renting. Three questions then, what are the typical rentals and what are the ground rents payable by leaseholders to the freeholder and what are the annual service charges payable to the property management service?

There seems to be a Resident's Association, but does this represent all of the leaseholders, or only the rentals, or just those who are there? In terms of the current legislation is this Association a voluntary group or does it have the legal standing of a limited company?

It is claimed by the Council/Freeholder that the question of sprinkler systems had divided views among the residents some of whom feeling that the disruption and cost of installation was not needed. I believe it is often the case that when it comes to spending money in flat developments many residents want low cost as a priority.

A good deal of comment at present is saying this is the result of poverty for many of the residents who are low income and of deprived families. But how can they afford then to live there? The answer is the benefits to which they are entitled. What is that total? Say somewhere between half and a million a year for the block?

Which brings us back to the question of who owns the leases. 120 flats mean 120 leases and if the residents of most or many are rentals someone somewhere could be making a great deal of profit on the system. Just who might we be looking for in that area with the kind of money and incentive to invest in this kind of property?

This is something I suspect that will not be covered by the government inquiry. But then that might be because they will never really find out because the leaseholds might be owned by a chain of companies located offshore or else used as security for credits for borrowing for financial dealing.

Only their cladding will be a lot more protective than the kind used at Grenfell Towers.

Magic Money Trees

One of the great works of the past is the Rev. Gilbert White's "Natural History And Antiquities Of Selborne". He lived from 1720 to 1793, in rural seclusion in Hampshire but noted and commented on the immediate life about him, notably plants. His book has a web site and you are welcome to read it.

Yet he lived at a time when there was a magic money tree, MMT, and could not fail to be aware of what happened. If asked he might have advised that trees are fine when in full growth. But they can be chopped down, catch diseases, through their seeds create dense and impenetrable forests and be costly to maintain. Also, sooner or later their fruits run out.

In the Middle Ages the monasteries became the MMT's of their time. Then King Henry VIII, advised by Thomas Cromwell, and needing serious money to build, decorate, run and maintain his new 34 palaces; he might have called it infrastructure and job creation, nationalised them.

This induced a collapse in the economy. The monasteries etc. were at the centre of the wool trade, a major part of the economy, and critical to the foreign trade at that time. Also, they were the medical centres, education providers and retirement homes.

The ensuing land grab created new magnates and landowners and in the next century absolute monarchy went as well. This was because King Charles I, following the example of his father, King James I, subsidised the arts and spent heavily, only to lose his head.

It is possible to see MMT's in money economies as long ago as the Emperors of Rome and in other parts of the world, the Chinese Empires and those of say, the Mughals. There is always the question, what happened next?

This ten minute cartoon tells the tale of John Law in France at the beginning of the 18th Century in simple fun terms.

This three minutes of satire deals nicely with our very own British South Sea Bubble that enriched so few and impoverished so many. When the question arises about the 17th Century Tulip Mania the answer was it could never happen again.

The 19th Century was a period of one crash after another across the world all involving the search or believed findings of MMT's. See Wikipedia on "Long Depression" and "Baring crisis". This was central to the imperial policies of the European countries as well as both the militarism and nationalisms of their time. My posts on "Gold Fever" of 4 January and 2 May 2016 refer to these.

But my favourite MMT for personal reasons, I am proud to be Nesbitt, goes to that of the 1770's. The man was Arnold Nesbitt and there is a telling biography of him here read down  on the History of Parliament web site, Research, Members, as he was an M.P. along with his close colleague Sir George Colebrooke. It is strange how so many M.P.'s are involved in so many financial crashes.

It is my view that the Colebrooke and Nesbitt crash of The City in the 1770's cost us the American colonies. There are differences of view about this being a good or bad thing. It involved in particular the East India Company which meant that the effects hit almost everyone with wealth. It leads us inevitably to Jane Austen.

Jane, who lived at Steventon along the road from Selborne, had a close friend with a shared interest in exotic plants. She was Emma Colebrooke who had married Charles Bennet, Earl of Tankerville. Emma was the daughter of James Colebrooke, brother of George above.

One of the features then of the interests in plants was not simply as ornaments but in an age before synthetic chemicals their potential for profit as medicines or colourings or flavours. These Nesbitt's were family and close connections with the Sneyd's that Jane did know. Jane was certainly interested in money and how much men were worth, in any case a brother was a banker.

Coming to the present via a complicated story of family histories we end up in the Liverpool of the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell, a recent convert to the idea of planting an MMT to save us all from inconveniences, such as paying rents, repaying loans or counting the pennies. His Marxist beliefs would seem to contradict this, but there have been a number of nations recently who married Marxism with an MMT only to collapse into poverty and social breakdown.

There has been a row over John's education, he was at the De La Salle secondary school, whose alumni include Wayne Rooney but before that alleged to be at a high fee paying "prep school". This is a nonsense. The place he was at was then an RC seminary where many were called for the priesthood but few were chosen. It would only take a forbidden trip or two to the cinema etc. to miss the cut.

But it is possible that the Parish Priest who first recommended John was of a family linked to the McDonnell of McDonnell Earls of Antrim.  Also, John's grandfather at one time lived a couple of hundred yards away and in the same parish as the grandchildren of a Kavanagh of Carlow. In 1851 Morgan Kavanagh of Carlow was sharing a house with Karl Marx.

So when John changed from one faith to another the leap was not as long as you might expect. Moreover the connections go back to people close to and related to Arnold Nesbitt, creator of one of the great MMT's of modern times and the one which arguably went most spectacularly bust.

But John's MMT for the huddled masses and students also depends on rich people paying their taxes, admitting their liabilities and eschewing the off shore and other schemes.

In fact, he will have to persuade his fellow alumni Wayne Rooney and his associates, who recently lost a court case to the HMRC, to pay more tax than in the past.

Comparisons Are Odd

The Tories are now in troubled times.

Worse, with what is out there to be dealt with in the immediate future is far from promising.

But let us allow Ms. May and her much maligned advisers some credit.

They have managed to make Edward Heath, 1970-1974, look good.

Would You Believe It?

During the time of the Cameron coalition government the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg refused to allow the redrawing of constituency boundaries that were due; and which are now long overdue.

Ms. May did not attempt this as she might not have been able to get the majorities needed.

Now, we have another fine mess, Nick Clegg has lost his seat and the Liberal Democrats are a minor and divided party.

Meanwhile the constituency boundaries are becoming more and more out of date; and are likely to remain the same for years to come.

What Is It All About Again

 In May 2010, I had something to say about the election of that year. It would bear repeating.

Quote:

At the time of the general election in 1945 everyone knew the scale of the mess and the nature of the disasters that the war had wreaked.  In most places we could see it, smell it and it affected almost every aspect of our lives.  The politicians then admitted most of it but even then we were not told the whole story by any of them.

Too many Conservatives retained illusions of imperial grandeur, too many Labourites wilder illusions that the centralised state could cure all and too many Liberals all the vague notions and muddled thinking left over from 19^th Century theories.  We were given a United Nations but what we got was the Atom Bomb and forty years of Cold War.

At least then we had a relatively coherent system of government.  It might have looked like a patchwork and certainly had many variables but we did know who did what and why and where they worked from.

It is striking to think that the Counties of Rutland, Radnor, Clackmannan and Fermanagh and for that matter County Boroughs such as Oldham had a greater measure of independent responsibility and scope of action than does the United Kingdom at the present time.

What do we have now?  In the world of law there is a Supreme Court whose function seems to be to agree to a collection of supreme idiocies pronounced by others.  We have a set of courts where most of us have lost sight of who does what or why.

What we do know is that absent minded pensioners who sell a goldfish will be severely punished but serial violent burglars will be able to chalk up hundreds of offences before recognition and murdering drug dealing gangsters are protected.

Libel law allows the rich and powerful to defame anyone they like, break laws, stop criticism even if they are killing people and punish and ruin the innocent, especially anyone devoted to the idea of scientific debate.

There is a House of Lords which meets and deliberates at huge expense for very little reason or rhyme.  These hundreds of appointed cronies, time served politicians, party political subscribers and occasional nods to a limited number of minority interests with an effect on marginal constituencies occasionally gather to mutter into their microphones words that nobody listens to.

The House of Commons is the Deserted Village of representative government.  Once a busy place on screens now it usually appears a sea of green (benches) with very little activity that is either productive or makes any sense.

The administration rams through ramshackle, badly drafted, damaging laws in which the only certainty is that the unintended (expensive and damaging) consequences will outweigh by far any real benefits.

Each of these laws will impose great extra burdens on the taxpayer.  Most of these laws give the administration vast uncontrolled and unchecked power to do what they will through agencies and non-government organisations that each has a life of its own, largely free from any legal or other controls.

We do not have a “government” as such at any level.  We have a confusing collection of entities that rarely act either in concert or with any logic.  I have not even mentioned Europe that real controller of our destinies.

Despite “Freedom of Information” finding out what is going on is very difficult and the media have given up the job, now relying on interns reworking the output of all the public relations staff now employed and trawling the internet to pick up odd items.

So all these “campaigns” going on are a lot of clatter by power seekers hoping to get hold of the levers of finance and means of “added shareholder value”.  What they are not telling us is how little either the House of Commons or the House of Lords do, the way in which they have lost or surrendered authority and power, the scale of the mess, the spread of corruption, the extent of the destruction, or the kind of world or future we face.

What is it all about?  We are not being told and we are not going to be told.  But we will have to pay.

Unquote.

Here we go again.

The Rights And Wrongs Of Man

It is reported that Mr. Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, has demanded that the state visit of President Trump be cancelled.

He disagrees with most, if not all, of the President's recent views, notably on security matters and says that he is unwelcome in the UK.

The first funeral of a victim from the Westminster terrorist attack has just been held.

She was a lovely girl, a Scot from the Isle of Barra and a MacLeod.

Donald Trump's mother was a MacLeod from the nearby Isle of Lewis, also a Scot.

Mr. Khan was a solicitor who specialised in the law of human rights.

Weather Report

It is the sixth of June.

Wet and windy.

Again.

The Great Reset

Our leaders are telling us that all will be well because they are going to spend a lot more.

You do not have to worry because the money will be created and not taken from anyone, indeed the government will only have to give and keep on giving.

That there are other opinions might surprise you but Mauldin Economics is talking about a great reset.

If he is right someone will have to suffer.

Probably it will be you.

Closing Down Christianity?

I put up the post on Nationalisation before looking at the media and news and learning of the terrorist attack in London.

Another horror and tragedy for so many.

Had we been at a performance in London, perhaps at The Barbican or in the area we could have been heading for London Bridge station at the time.

What is omitted from most reports is that today is The Feast of Pentecost, or Whitsunday and the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Saviour and St. Mary Overie, Southwark, by Borough Market and London Bridge has been closed by the authorities.

The only comment I will make is that it is not enough simply to put more police on the streets, they can act only when and after an attack occurs.

The issue is preventing the attacks by whatever means necessary.

Nationalising The Back Yard

In the late 1940's I was around when the new Labour Government put in hand the nationalisations it had promised. So the age of nationalised industries up until the 1980's were integral to my life.

Until cars came along and coach travel expanded if we travelled it was by rail. Until the impossible dream of central heating came true with choices of fuel we had to use coal. The railways used coal to power the great majority of their traction units. Iron and steel needed coal and coal needed iron and steel.

Etc. So what did it mean to the people living very ordinary lives? The answer is not much. The Second World War had meant extensive state control over almost all aspects of our lives. Beer was weak, spirits for the rich and what exactly was wine? Would our neighbour swap eggs for some of our sugar?

When travelling by rail we did not notice the difference except for the some of the paintwork at stations and on the locomotives. The engine drivers and firemen, guards, porters, station masters, district superintendents etc. were all the same people with just some shuffling around senior managers at the top and the legal imposition of politicians making the key decisions.

This appeared to be much the same in other industries. It took decades before real changes began to be made and then not by internal decision or progressive political thinking. It was the impact of economic change, world trade, new commodities, methods and science.

For the most part by the time the centralised control of these industries had managed to persuade itself and the trade unions that it was impossible to deny that real change was needed they were already out of date. So vast sums of government spending went on yesterday's men and their ideas about production, service and management.

At the time in the 1940's it was claimed that profits, that is the surpluses needed to cover interest charges and debt liabilities along with saving for the major future investments that were going to be needed after the ravages of war, would cease and the money would go to the people, or rather the  trade unionists. So who were the greedy profiteers?

Most of them were insurance companies and other UK companies, notably those with pension funds. In the last analysis many of the greedy profiteers were in fact widows and orphans and pensioners invested in funded schemes. Given the compensation paid by Labour they were well and truly screwed. They paid the real price.

Anyone in The City with their head the right way on and the really wealthy had long since ditched railway shares, avoided iron and steel and too many of the coal mines were coming to the end of their profitable lives. We had taken the best and easiest coal in the previous two centuries.

To return to rail, the increasing shortages of good steam coal was one of the problems. Going deeper into thinner seams was very costly and the issues arising from the increasing sulphur levels in the seams of ordinary coals being mined all added to this. A lot of the coal coming up needed expensive "cleaning".

As ever, the whole story is far more complicated that the simpleton statements of 21st politicians suggest. Nationalisation in the late 1940's may have seemed the logical next step from the central controls of the war years.

In fact 1940 to 1950 were lost years when radical reforms and technical change was deferred and delayed and in some cases forgotten because of the war and aftermath. The politics and industrial relations of the next two decades hampered progress.

What is most worrying is that none of the political parties or their leaders have the faintest clue about the realities of the relevant industries and their future beyond 2020.

Heimat Is On TV

A couple of days ago Sky Arts ran the first part of "Heimat" and it is being repeated on Monday and again. For those who watched the wilder shores of TV in the 80's this appeared, I think on Channel 4, and for many made absorbing viewing.

It is German and about the experience of life of a family and community in the south of Germany between 1919 and 1982. They are ordinary people caught up in events etc. that happened beyond their powers and often understanding. Later the series was extended to 2000.

The reasons why I watched in the 80's was that in dating and the events it matched those in my own family over that period. The opening scene has a lead character walking across the fields to his village in his return from WW1. I could imagine my grandfather returning to his village in the same year.

Then there was my service in Germany in the 50's when I marched out of the Army of Occupation and later visits in the 1970's during camping holidays. Germany now is another place in another time and I do not think I would like it.

But I think I will still watch the series again, at least the first parts.