The Budget - There Are No Right Decisions

There is a budget coming up.  Here is the post from Sunday 20 June 2010 shortly after the General Election when the new Coalition Government embarked on its first.  We do not seem to have made much progress, one way or another:

Quote:

One of the vanities of the human species is that because of the complexity of its brain it has come to believe that it knows what it is doing and can therefore arrive at decisions leading to actions that consequently are said to be right. 

The course of human history ought to remind us that this is not something we are very good at as we have lurched from one disaster to another of our own making.

We then often rationalise this away by coming up with notions such as creative destruction or blaming other peoples or other causes.  Sometimes the other causes may be correct such as geophysical events over which we have no control. 

Even then when we insist on building major cities and creating large communities in volatile earthquake zones or next to volcanoes or at or below sea level, in the past we have put it down to whatever passing deity happens to be around at the time.

The present budgetary crisis in the UK is one part of a much wider and deeper human crisis.  The scale and complications inherent in this are well beyond the understanding of almost anyone.  So few people actually know very much and for those who are obliged to make decisions about this or that the chances of coming to any answer that is “right” are not simply limited but highly unlikely.

The best that can be expected is that in looking at the various options somehow many of the decisions will prove to be the least worst.  The difficulty is that we cannot know which they will be and often why they might be the best available.

The outgoing government in terms of its arrogance and dogmatism may well have been the vainest in British history so the budget will literally be a bonfire of the vanities. 

Because its belief in the certainty of its knowledge and in its own spin doctoring it went on to make huge spending commitments on the basis of figures it had thought up in its own fevered imaginations.  Assumptions became doctrines and guesses plans for action with the money found by unlimited credit creation.

So what does the present government “know”?  The chaos arising from the constant reorganising and reconfiguring of policies in the recent past makes almost any of the internal information available wholly fictional. 

The manipulation of basic statistics makes them less reliable than reading the entrails of a sheep and all the target setting and management structures have created a maze where there is no way to the exit once you are in.  The mess is beyond belief and it only belief we have.

Out there the major financial organisations do not know how much toxic debt there is or where it is or what effect it will have.  They do not really know much about their own accounts continually having nasty surprises.  They cannot know what happens next.  They have lost control and just follow events. 

In terms of tax payments the amount of obfuscation and deceit means they now rarely know where their own money is or for that matter how much of it exists.  Yet we have had a government and The City preaching to us that all we have to do to have a wonderful life is to put our trust and incidentally all our money in their sticky hands.

We do not know what the oil producers will do in the coming decade, neither do they.  We cannot know what some of the big boys in world politics might or might not do.  In the EU the Europeans not only do not know what they are doing they cannot agree what it is they ought to know or why they need to know it. 

So they just cobble together some financial arrangements and place their trust in fate.  God is on sabbatical these days in Europe so this could mean anything.

This is my guide to understanding the budget.  There are no right decisions so just cross your fingers and leave sixpence for the tooth fairy.

Unquote.

Mad Frankie (Fraser) was a hood employed by 1960's London gangsters to enforce their will.  He had his own methods of interrogation which often involved tooth extraction with a pair of pliers. With so much of our economy run by crooks of one kind or another it is still appropriate.

Nowadays he would be much in demand, being a man before his time.

Music For The Ears

Within a short period two main musicians of the 1950’s to 1970’s have gone.  Today there has been the news that Kenny Ball in the UK, who with his group was at the top of the traditional jazz charts with many hits for a long while.

Just a short time ago, Harvey Van Cliburn died; a top class pianist who once had the world as his audience.  In 1958 at a point of time when the Cold War was reality he had gone to Moscow and taken the Tchaikovsky Prize for the quality of his music. 

Then little known or appreciated in his country, the USA, who regarded him as a hick Texan less worthy than any of the Europeans or Russians he was playing to small audiences in the lesser venues.  This changed and on his return to America he had a ticker tape reception.

Too early in life the pace of it and all the expectations caused him to withdraw and then almost become a recluse.  So today, it is only the older generations who can recall what he was like and the contribution he made.

There is enough material on the web for me to limit outlining their careers or to say how good they were and the following they had.  To 21^st Century audiences they may seem to be very apart and appealing to different people.

This was not the case over fifty years ago because there were a lot of people around who listened and hugely enjoyed many kinds of music, whatever and whoever.  We had not been segmented into marketing chunks for the benefit of the main media or the record companies in the way that had begun for teenagers. 

So I can recall being at live performances of both Kenny Ball and Van Cliburn within weeks as well as others of both the leading jazz and classical performers of the time.  In fact there were several live shows of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen seen in different places, all great and a very good night out.

For Van Cliburn, only one was managed, but that was at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 7^th June 1959.  The CD for this is available from Testament as a double disc remastered from the original recording.  It was a stunning event never to be forgotten.

Below are a couple of clips from Youtube as samples.

Kenny Ball

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeCAQmxq_Ew

Van Cliburn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9D2aHiFpdk

In May 1959 the FA Cup Final was won by Nottingham Forest who beat Luton Town 2-1.  Roy Dwight, playing for Nottingham, scored after ten minutes but was then carried off with a broken leg.  His cousin, Reginald Dwight today is better known as Elton John.  In 1959 he was still practising his scales.

Two days after the Van Cliburn concert the USA launched its first Polaris Nuclear Submarine, the “George Washington” and later that month The Queen and President Eisenhower opened the new St. Lawrence Seaway.

A month later Richard Nixon, Vice President, was in Moscow having public arguments about nuclear weapons and washing machines with Nikita Khrushchev.  Whilst it was not clear who had the best of the nuclear debate it was the USA who could field the better kitchen appliances.

On 7^th July High Carleton-Greene took over as Director-General of the BBC and began The Long March to the Left of politics for the state broadcaster.  But first it had to go “popular” because audiences were in free fall with the coming of ITV and commercial television.  This meant cosying up to the record companies.

On 17^th July, Billie Holliday, Blues singer extraordinary died aged only 44.  She left behind many recordings but precious little filmed material and a number of those had been done with poor sound.  The recordings were a rich legacy for the future.

In August the British Motor Corporation unveiled its new Mini cars, Austin and Morris.  Unluckily because of a top management decision to price it at £500 or just under despite its popularity it was a money loser and BMC soon became a liability.  At the time the average annual wage of a manual worker was £600-700 with food prices relatively higher and most people renting.

Early in October Harold Macmillan won the 1959 election against the odds and despite a substantial Labour lead not many months earlier.  He had turned opinion by budgets that increased spending and increased borrowing.  In the USA later JF Kennedy decided to run for President in 1960.

It was a world of secrets in many ways.  At Cheltenham we now know that the Colussus3 and Colussus4 computers from Bletchley, allegedly destroyed after the war were still working.  It was the UK hold on this which was a corner stone of the so called “Special Relationship”.

They were needed because the Soviets who had taken the German advanced Enigma system did not think that it had been cracked and that the West could not access their highest communications.

How much else do we not know and will we ever find out?

Rewriting The Human Script Again

A few days ago BBC1 ran a two part tale on DNA basing it on the cross dressing entertainer, Eddie Izzard; the in depth DNA analysis on the female mitochondrial chromosome specific to his mother’s female line and the male Y chromosome specific to the father’s line.

It was meant to be an outline of the human story made personal for popular and easy viewing.  Why Eddie was chosen might have been because he was born in Yemen, a location critical to the story line, he lost his mother who died when he was very young, he had blue eyes and could relate to those he met on the journey without any difficulty.

There wasn’t much to grumble about in the presentation given that it was just a story stripped down to the basic plot, there was an absence of lecturing and based on what the mainstream theory of genetics seems to be telling us.

It was going up to half way through the second part that it appeared that Eddie’s Y chromosome was the same as mine.  At that point it was still around 25,000 years ago but for some people that might have been too close.  But it became closer.

We both have blue eyes and it seems that the genetic glitch for this goes back only a few thousand years and seems to have occurred in what is now Romania, according to the article on the net dealing with this topic.  It is possible that there are people out there, many in total, some of whom would prefer not to have these connections.

But it became still closer; the next stage was that his male line cropped up around the Elbe in Saxony not so long ago.  As did mine, although it was further down the river.  The question then was when did the move occur?  This is an open question, there are options.

The picture, however, may have changed already.  At the beginning of each of the two programmes, Eddie was taken to the parts of Africa where the origins were thought to begin on the evidence available.  In the second part, the Y, this was a particular group of hunter gatherers.

In the last few days, there has been a report in Science Daily suggesting that on the basis of very recent evidence, the Y chromosome can now be tracked back a lot further, from around 150,000 to 370,000 years which is quite a stretch.  The story is in a short item below and has been quarried already in the press:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305145821.htm

Quite what else might turn up in the future we can only guess at, but the story is not yet over and can become more complicated.  There has already been the discovery of a different branch of humanity, the Denisovan and as the geneticists can go deeper and deeper with new techniques it could become very interesting.

It seems that already we are not quite what we thought we are and our ideas about who, what, how, where, when we emerged, moved and changed is still an ongoing project in many respects.  But this is in the deeper past.

Nearer to the present there has been the use of DNA to seek to identify the remains at Greyfriars in Leicester as those of King Richard III.  It looks very likely and I would like it to be right because once I parked my Vespa Scooter over the spot.

Along with this is the claim to Irish Ancestry of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, which is something of a giggle.  It goes back to the De Burghs of the Middle Ages.  In the male line these were the usual bunch of Norman land grabbers who in this case took their chances in Ireland and married into the families of local chieftains.

Had the newspapers that proclaimed this done their sums they would realise that the chances of Kate having other Irish ancestry somewhere relatively recent are quite high, the problem being lost traces probably around the 17^th or 18^th Centuries.  It would take some expert work and maybe DNA to run a check.

What also the press missed out on is that the De Burgh ancestry linked in to a descent from Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence and son of King Edward III.  This is the man who provided the ancestral claim to the throne of King Richard III.  That Kate might be descended from Lionel is no surprise.

If you were to check out all the possible descendants of Lionel over the last 600 years you would be hitting very large figures and all sorts of unexpected people.  Many of these would not like to be either related to each other or to have this lurking in the family tree.  It would wreck many people’s ideas about their identity.

You never know, because Eddie was told that the in depth analysis he had showed that 2.8% of his male Y DNA is derived from the Neanderthals.

Which means that so does mine.

More research is clearly needed.

Travelling Heavy Instead Of Light

There was a heavy mist in the English Channel yesterday so Europe was isolated.  The trucks were still coming however on the ferries and through the Tunnel.  In line with previous counts a great many were from destinations a thousand and more miles away bringing in both essential supplies as well as consumer goods of choice.

As the local motorway runs between the lesser used line from Dover and Folkestone and the new Eurostar line it is a source of wonder why so few freight trains are seen on them given that it is possible to route the freight across the UK rail network.  We do some rail travelling but freight trains are relatively rare.

Why has it been so impossible to put together a coherent modern method of freight delivery in this way?  To really examine this it would take a very long post and analysis of what might and what should be done.  My particular interest is that around sixty years ago I worked on the railways sometimes in the parcels department.

Then it was possible in an ordinary town to ship items across the network.  The items would be booked in, the clerk would call the destinations and the porters would put them on the relevant barrow.  Then the barrows would go up to the platform for the items to be put into the right freight wagon for the later freight train.

The trouble was the trains.  The freight wagons did not have automatic air braking.  This meant a strict limit on running speeds and also a limit to the number that could safely make up a train because of the problems when stopping and starting. 

With bulk freight, notably coal, it was even worse.  The five ton four wheeled typically ancient trucks shunted and bumped, clattered and clanked and derailed all too easily.  Between these and the other freight trains it meant a great deal of track space was needed for routine movements.

This in turn impacted on the passenger services.  With so much track space and time taken up for basic freight there were limits to the number of trains that could be run and at what speed.  So even with decent carriages and powerful locomotives not many trains could be scheduled at higher speeds.

Yet the knowledge of the freight problems and the means by which it could be dealt with were known even late in the 19^th Century.  But it took the best part of a century for the government and railway authorities to deal with it. 

By this time the railways were in serious subsidised decline and being cut back heavily.  When nationalised in 1947 it was expected that the railways would cover their costs and yield revenue to the Exchequer.

What we did have were the much trumpeted public relations business of a small number of express trains, at high cost to the passengers, being held up as the beacons of progress when the freight, local and commuter and cross country services were poor, well behind those of some other countries and in dire need of reform and investment.

So we have finished up with the expensive, complicated, highly subsidised railway system of today.  How far this can be sustained is arguable.  With the dominance of London based thinking based on the financial sector feeding the debate we are likely to have new projects that suit limited interests which when the money is tight means bad new for the greater travelling public.  Also, whatever happens to oil prices there is little hope at present of reviving fast freight as a real option.

The history of the UK in the 20^th Century and going into the 21^st is that this pattern of indecision, unwillingness to invest to deal with basic problems as opposed to high profile schemes, whether or not they paid, failures in organisation and top level management that was more about politics than provision is all to often found.

If anything, it has become progressively worse and almost the norm.  If we cannot save ourselves nobody else will and certainly neither Europe nor the USA or any from our former Empire.

Clusters Last Stand

The government has pronounced on the reductions and the nature of it in the Army over the next few years.  At last we will be pulling out of Germany.  Why we remained there after 1990 or even after 1966 is one of those questions to which there is no rational answer, except that the politicians involved could not face some of the issues that needed attention.

These issues are less impelling now because the Army is that much smaller and the equipment to be repatriated is less and will not cause inconvenience on the scale that a larger force would entail.  One way round of keeping the Army away from those who do not want the troops around is to use “clusters” in areas where their presence is already substantial.

There will be a scattering of other locations although the decisions as to which will survive as bases and which will be either run down or abandoned will no doubt change according to what lobbying will be done and by whom.  What is striking is that they seem to be kept well away from the larger urban areas as far as possible.

The interesting question is that one lot who will remain to the last gasp is 20 Armoured Brigade whose HQ is at Sennelager a large training area that I recall all too well.  This is a mixed battle group that is active and therefore engaged in high levels of the relevant training.

These are noisy, troublesome to locals and need a lot of space.  It is possible that the government might in fact be looking to disband this formation and they are being lined up for the other cuts to come.  It might be that the government cannot make up its mind.  It might be that it has become a pawn in some of the sillier debates with the Scottish National Party.

On the BBC News the figure given for the remaining troops to leave was 15,000 which it was said would take months and years to accomplish.  I can recall a time when my particular lot had that number of troops with all the clobber and we reckoned to move the lot within an hour.

That was when Hackett was GOC and before he came to us, by one those things he had been Brigadier of the 20^th Armoured Brigade.  The wheel turns.  What he would make of our present ideas of “strategy” is uncertain.  But he was sometimes of the opinion that in such matters politicians tended to make it up as they went along.

We will soon have an Army with limited capability, unsure as to its function, poorly equipped, badly housed and located as far as possible away from the population it is to defend.  In the meantime we are facing new and dangerous threats that the government cannot recognise and does not understand.

Here we go again.

Light Of The World

Yesterday there was a power outage which injected a period of reality into our everyday life.  It was just before the time for our afternoon cup of tea which was annoying.  Because of my “thing” about power surges, there was a short period of running around switching off everything leaving only one light to show when the power might return.

As the gloom gathered we began to consider the options.  One might have been to go out to a pub’, but these days Sundays means out of control kids along with parents often even more out of control.  Luckily, there is a battery radio which meant we could have had sound.

If the critics are right it may not be too long before this kind of thing becomes not a rare or short lasting event but something we need to be ready for and assume will happen on a frequent basis.  Also, the outages will be unpredictable which means making sure that foods are available.

Those who recall the longer past will know times when this was usual.  Not only were gas and electricity supplies irregular but there were the added problems of the risk of running out of cash before pay day or more annoying being short of shillings for the meter when either shops were shut or had none in the till.

In a town with a good many engineering works of all sizes there were a lot of “knock off” metal discs that might work.  But the meter inspectors were wise to those and while you might get away with the rare odd one you would not if they were found too often.  

If you were unlucky enough to use one that jammed the slot you were in real trouble.  Replacement meters cost a great deal.  During the war they were also hard to source so you could be waiting weeks.  It simply was not worth the risk, but there were always those who tried it and failed.

For many years over much of the country we have become used to regular and reliable power.  When during very bad weather conditions there are some losses it makes the news and we all wonder how it can happen and the utilities are expected to reconnect the systems within hours if not minutes.

But in the world of the past while we did depend a great deal on these supplies it was nothing like the extent to which we have come to rely on them at the present time.  Yet the whole system and chain of supply is far more complex and also heavily dependent itself on computer technology and associated power demands.

Over the last two decades we have had governments that have fudged and fiddled with energy policy, extra national organisations such as the EU added layers and layers of decision processes and complexity.  

Added to that we have had all the financial chancers and schemers coming up to lobby for expensive schemes publicly funded that sound good when spinned but do not deal with the major issues of the ways and means of supply nor with the need to keep costs under control for the benefit of the economy.

One quote I grew up with was that said to be by Earl Grey, the Foreign Secretary at the start of the First World War, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time.”  At the moment Europe is fixated by money and the hurly burly of elections and politics as it was in the first decade of the 20th Century.

If they are not careful the lamps may very well go out for quite long periods and the computers go down with them.

Beware Spirits From The Past

In the gathering gloom of UK politics a grey figure has emerged from the past to remind us of our errors.  It is not a ghost, although it might be to many, it is Ken Loach the determined working class and resolute Left Wing media man, educated at a good grammar school in Nuneaton and then St. Peter’s College, Oxford (see Wikipedia).

This is a college founded in 1929 to improve accessibility to less wealthy students and numbers Ken among its notable alumni along with Rex Hunt, Governor of The Falkland Islands in 1982 during the war there, Mark Carney the new Governor of the Bank of England and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, famous for his interest in organic and greenie grown foods and cooking.

Ken went in to the theatre and then became a protégé of the BBC in the early sixties and was noted for plays about social problems and the film “Kes”.  It is said that he has a particular view of realism.  The latest is that he wants the Labour Party to return to its past principles and invokes the Spirit of 1945.

But he was not an adult then, in fact just nine and so an impressionable teenager in the early 1950’s.  Then he did a couple of years in the Royal Air Force.  Quite what or where I do not know but what I do is that National Service, far from creating a citizenry obedient and loyal to current authority had the effect on very many better educated recruits of sending them in entirely the opposite direction.

Of the less well educated, many had experienced only an Elementary School education before leaving and took the view that they had been short changed in life and wanted the State to protect and ensure their jobs and incomes and to provide them with decent housing at affordable rentals.

The problem was how to do it in a state that was losing its empire, had much of its infrastructure and capital equipment in an ageing and worn condition in a world where many of its basic industries had begun to feel the effects of serious competition. 

Many of the Left looked East to Communism, a few others looked West to the USA, but most hoped for some sort of easy compromise of the politics of the centre to keep the show on the road and deliver on some of the promises made.  What too few realised, especially on the Left was that we were about to undergo radical changes in both the shape of the world and its economic structures.

One consequence of this was that whilst the fervent Left were peddling one kind of “realism” what was happening out there was far removed by any standard of reality.  What is happening today is almost a parallel to this in that the economy and society we are in bears little relationship not just to 1945 but 1985 as well.

Yet Ken and fellow followers of a long past world of the Left are still a key to the central part of the Labour Party mind, a little like the military men who in 1883 invoked the Spirit of Waterloo of 1815 when Britain took over Egypt.  This is not gook news for any of us.

There was one great success of the years of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.  The aim of the Left was to leave a scorched earth for any incoming government.  This does seem to have worked all too well as the Coalition flounders and fails.  But we are now left with shrunken political parties in a shrinking world and a corrupt electoral system which is unlikely to deliver policies that a majority of the voters want.

What may happen if we finish up with a Labour and Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2015 that in reality does not reflect the voters realities?  We do not know but can only make a guess.  It could be the break up of the United Kingdom, an unintended consequence of Scottish Labour Left Wing thinking, it could be the final wreck of the UK economy, if it is not already under way by then.

It could be more like 793 than 1945 only the ones taking over will be a lot more greedy and a lot less nice and understanding than the Vikings who raided Lindisfarne.