The Budget U-turns - a Theory

Great outcry in all directions over the latest Budget U-turn. After the pasty tax and then some concession over static caravans - I've no idea why we don't use the tax system to drive the ghastly things over the cliffs, personally. I'd rather spend a fortnight in a pasty than a static caravan. Although, to be fair, at least they mostly stay off the road. And now we have the obviously right restoration of the abililty to claim tax relief on charity donations, no matter how large.

Now I have a theory as to how these stupid ideas got into the Budget in the first place, before public ridicule and charitable protests got them removed again.. Go with me on this.

You immediately see in these stupid, rather pointless, annoying kind of tidying-up regulations the hands of Civil Servants. I bet George Osborne has no idea what a static caravan is - anymore than he's ever consumed a cooling pasty. Some flunkey with another 20 years to go before he gets his totally undeserved "K" has come up with these tax schemes as part of the agenda of the Civil Service Committee for Tax Tidying and Paperclip Servicing.

Now let me take you back to the incomparable oeuvre of PG Wodehouse. The gormless master, Eton and Oxford educated and lacking in the chin department, is totally dependent on his manservant (not a butler) Jeeves - intelligent, wise and always right. This tendency (or dependency) is not even confined to Bertie Wooster. Lord Blandings (and an assortment of young men with large reserves of love but impoverished amounts of chin) depend upon the sagacity of Beech the Butler. 

So you see what's happpened? George and Dave have been sitting around. Some lower-middle class oik in a suit has come up to them and suggested something about pasties to them they didn't understand. They, presuming it must be Jeeves, have assumed it must be brilliant and put it in the budget - no doubt asking him to whip up one of his "specials", only last night they were at a Bullers' reunion at the Drone Club..

But we know better.  That wasn't Jeeves. That was Bernard from the Pasty Tax Office. And now that pasty taxes remain unharmonised with battered cod roe, he's seeking revenge.

Now I know my theory depends on our rulers being blithering upper-class twits who can't tell a valet from a middle-ranking Civil Servant. So can anyone else see anything wrong with it?

Clear Victories and Tight Margins

It has been remarked elsewhere, but it is an interesting phenomenon of BBC reporting.

The BBC reported Boris Johnson as having won by a "tight margin" in London.

By comparison, they reported that Francois Hollande had a "clear victory".

Boris beat Kenny Fink-Livingstone by 51.5% to 48.5% - a margin of 3%.

M Hollande beat M Sarkozy by 51.7% to 48.3% - a margin of 3.6%.

So 3% is "tight", while 3.6% is "clear".

Presumably BBC guidelines are that 3.3% would be a "respectable" or "average" margin? If so, that's a fairly narrow range from "tight" through "normal" to "clear". Or is it that Socialist margins are more emphatic than Conservative ones? I feel we should be told.

Michael Gove will Get You

Somtimes, as Freud noticed, it's the accidental slips that reveal deeper truths.

I have had it brought to my attention that, twice in 24 hours, I've referred to Michael Gove as being responsible for stupid ideas in the Exchequer when I should have placed the blame firmly with George Osborne. I have corrected the more recent posts, but I have little doubt that, should I waste the time to go through previous episodes of these Beaker annals, I've done it elsewhere.

But it's just, it seems to me, a reflection of the general mood of suspicion - of Gove-inism, if you will - around the Beaker community. We have always had a need of a bogey on which to blame misfortune, or to warn small children from straying. Thomas Hardy speaks in ROTN of the "reddleman", the wandering sheep-dye-seller whom the children of Egdon Heath feared. In the Shuck-infested, Wicked-Lady-haunted Beds/Herts borders of my childhood, it would indeed be the bogeyman himself who lurked in wait. That or the hippies. While for other generations it has been Napoleon, the fairies and - for modern readers of certain newspapers - Muslims who cause all the world's woes.

But around our community, all these bugbears seem to have been replaced. If a Beaker child in Little Pebbles is unusually borisine, they will be told "Michael Gove's going to write you a preface." If the milk is spoilt in our small Beaker dairy shed, the milkpeople will conclude "Govey's been". If the butter won't churn they get some of the local Quivering Brethren to say a prayer against "Butter Michael".

It speaks to our deepest fears - our primaevel instinct that there are dark forces, beyond our Ken*. Things we cannot control, that science is unable to measure - just waiting for our attention to slip before they bring foul, arcane darkness into our lives.

So you can call it superstition. But we will continue to hang the Gove Stones up in the Nammitting Shed. We will draw chalk circles, lest Govey should sneak in and start presenting King James Bibles with his picture on the front. And we will continue to warn the Little Beaker Children, whenever they express a desire to play in Witch's Spinney,

"Watch out and don't stray. Or Michael Gove's gonna get you!"

(*Livingstone)

A Scary Tory with a Chateauneuf-du-Pape-y ending

A bit odd, but last night we had a visit from a member of the Tingrith Conservative Association.

He'd mis-understood about our day of prayer for Pedants, and thought it was for peasants. Very good idea, he said. He hoped, in line with Tory policy, that we were praying that the peasants stayed off the booze. Apparently when he heard that Lidl cider was cheaper than water, he had his chauffeur wash the car in it. Made a shocking mess, the paintwork went all sticky. He had to hose it off with Evian, same as normal.
He was very keen to emphasise that he'd used French water to wash the car - after all, there's a drought on.
Then having stressed again that the lower orders - and especially people from Newcastle - cannot be trusted with cheap alcohol - he went off. Apparently his drink supply had run short, but the tanker had arrived. Last time, two servants drowned in the storage tank, he said. They gave a nasty tang to the port, but he'd drunk worse when he was in the Bullers.

Now there was an organisation that was prone to drink-fuelled escapades. If they'd only raised the price per unit to £100 in 1985, there would be restaurants in Thame that still had the original windows.

George Giveth, George Taketh Away

I sent Burton off to do some analysis on the Budget, and his overall conclusion was that it was a bag of bits. However, I note that the Budget has come in just as we hear about the Government's plan to bring in minimum alcohol pricing. No co-incidence, I reckon, that he's lifted the lower-rate tax threshold while planning to up the price of cheap booze.

Let's just accept as self-evident. that drinking too much on a regular basis - or far too much as a one-off - is silly and potentially harmful. And let's ignore the likelihood that what little George and his friends come up with is against EU law, and look at whom he's planning to target.

So the proposed minimum price for alcoholic drinks is 40p per unit. If we reckon the average bottle of decent wine is about 9 units, that would be £3.60. Frankly, I don't buy wine for £3.60 a bottle so the good news is that this is unlikely to affect me in any way.

In the same way, Burton bought a half of Imperial Stout in the Euston Tap yesterday afternoon while he was in Town. OK it was 9pc alcohol, but still that's 3 units. It was £4.50. Under the Government's plans the minimum price would be £1.20. So no impact on Burton's way of life.

So if the wine-drinking middle classes and real-ale consuming accountants are unaffected by the Government's plans then who are? That's right. The poor. The people who maybe can't afford my taste in wine, or Burton's in real ale. Not that encouraging people to drink Thatcher's Katy or Tring Brewery's products is not a noble aim - but why are poor people's livers needing more protection than rich people's? I thought we were all in this together.

It'd be enough to make poor people cry into their beer, but they won't be able to afford it. And they won't even be able to have a pasty from Gregg's to cheer themselves up - because there's VAT going on that. I never imagined anyone could invent a regressive alcohol policy, but I reckon the government's done it.

5-stage dictator removal

A programme about Libya on the telly reminds me of my post a year ago where I remarked that Col Gaddafi was transitioning between Dictator Stage 2 and 3. The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, is currently hovering between those two stages himself - sometimes offering concessions, sometimes crushing revolt by killing innocent people.

I can only advise him (he is a keen follower of this blog, but likes to lurk rather than comment) to remember that I was right last time. And I'll probably be right again. The only question really to be settled is whether what comes after him will be better or worse.

Ἐποίησεν κράτος ἐν βραχίονι αὐτοῦ,

διεσκόρπισεν ὑπερηφάνους διανοίᾳ καρδίας αὐτῶν·

καθεῖλεν δυνάστας ἀπὸ θρόνων

καὶ ὕψωσεν ταπεινούς,

πεινῶντας ἐνέπλησεν ἀγαθῶν

καὶ πλουτοῦντας ἐξαπέστειλεν κενούς.

Quick Chris Huhne Joke

Obviously I can't comment on his upcoming court case. But I would say Chris Huhne's a rubbish Climate Change Secretary.

He's been in the job for nearly 2 years, and the climate's barely changed at all. What's he been doing?

Vaclav Havel - an alternative view

I've been trying to bring Thomas Leaf up to date with life and current affairs in the 21st Century.

Now Tommy grew up in 19th Century Wessex, has worked all his life as a manual labourer, can't read and actually has trouble working out which side is up. However he asked a few intelligent questions about which way people defected on the whole in the 20th century (East to West, natch), the conditions in Siberian prison camps, and the ability to speak your mind (or what there is of it) without fear of arrest. He's googled some stuff about the Prague Spring, the oppression of Hungary and the Stalinist massacres. And he's come to the conclusion that, village idiot born and bred as he is, he wouldn't write this article in the Guardian.

Wasting Money on Ceremonies

Local hero Paula Radcliffe criticises the Conservative Government for wasting money on medal ceremonies, the BBC tells us.

And she's right. For goodness' sake, we're British after all. Not for us the American-style 5-hour speech in which we thank everyone from God to our life coach and the great-great-auntie we never knew we had for what we still manage to make clear is our own, unaided success.

No, we're British. In a truly British medal ceremony, the winner would shamble, shame-faced, up to the podium. There would be no national anthems as we don't like to make a song and dance about things. Embarrassed by having won without at any point having had to face insuperable odds, they would mumble shyly as they refused to accept the medal on the grounds that "I don't really deserve it. Give it to that plucky Swede who came fourth." Then, shocked by being thrust into the limelight, they would retire from public view and spend the rest of their lives doing good works or running a pub in Tarporley.

The exception of course would be in 2016 if one of the British nations won the Rugby 7s. In which case the captain of the winning team would exultantly celebrate their love of their native country. Probably New Zealand.

News at the Occupy Protest

Much outrage down at St Paul's.

Apparently among the tent sales people, flash-mob choristers, unemployed canons, plain-clothes police and undercover reporters, they've found a genuine protester. Everyone's livid.

Jeremy Clarkson

I missed Jeremy Clarkson on telly, although I heard recordings of it later. He said some buffoonish things on telly and people got very angry. But it sounds, from the clip that I heard, that he was being deliberately and obviously buffoonish - the words "But this is the BBC and I'd better be balanced..." or thereabouts were a bit of a clue.

And I heard the leader of a union that had been wanting to bring legal action on "PM" last night, saying that she had spoken to her lawyers but since Jeremy had said sorry, they'd take it no further. The questioner on PM was quite kind, but even under that light questioning it sounded like the "advice from the lawyers" to the union was "don't you think you're being a bit silly?"

So to summarise Jeremy Clarkson acted like an idiot and the unions jumped up and down making a fuss and attracting attention to themselves. Jeremy Clarkson - a man known for saying ludicrously right-wing things in an "ironic" manner - was invited on a programme on the day of a strike, and said something right-wing and ludicrous intended to be ironic. And was deliberately misunderstood for political effect.

Strikes me we didn't learn much here. I wonder what would have happened if it had been Jimmy Carr saying it?

Growth

It's probably a bit late now, but.

The concept of "growth" has become an idol. I heard someone expressing shock that by 2015 the income of British families will be about the same as in 2001. And I thought to myself - wasn't it going to happen one day? Constantly improving conditions couldn't go on forever.

The greatest lie of the 1990s in British politics - "Things can only get better". Things were already getting worse before the last election, as the boom days of cheap money driving bank profits, and bank bonuses providing copious tax income, went - and the debt racked up.

But there's no reason why things should always get better. As the resources of the world become scarcer, and the population grows, the days of constant expansion have to end. Yes, that's Malthusian and Malthus has always been wrong in the past, but we're pushing some of the limits now - until we can start to exploit Mars. The oil is running out, coal fills the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and renewables are rubbish.

And Europe has lived on a dream for too long - governments pumping in money to keep the idol of "growth" going. Like the companies who, only a few years ago, would be told by those who claimed to be experts that they weren't borrowing enough money.

Goodness knows, I'm no fan of the current government. But maybe they just can't tell the real truth. The day's going to have to come when we realise that the old way doesn't work any more. The world is running out of stuff, and we can't consume it forever. It's been a long party for the West. But now it's gonna be a nasty hangover. And "hair of the dog" may sound enticing, but it's never a long-term solution. It's gonna be bad, and it's gonna last a long while.

Still, mustn't grumble.

Middle-aged Punk Rockers Service

Today's devotions are dedicated to the realisation that we didn't like the glimpse this week of the sort of England we thought we wanted 33 years ago. It turns out, in the words of St Jarvis, that the future that we'd got mapped out was nothing much to shout about.

And so the hymns will be:

Anarchy in the UK (to the tune "Anathemata")
White Riot (I don't really want a riot)
I'd quite like to go to Chelsea (because it's quieter there)
Babylon's Calmed Down Now
God Save the Queen (the real version - please all stand)

And we shall pray for a land [switches on stirring music] where the young are respectful. Where maiden aunts can cycle safely through the Great Smog to church. Where coppers aren't afraid to give teenagers a clip round the ear. Without using a baton. Where you can leave your back door unlocked, because there's nothin worth stealing.

A land free from unlikely piercings.  A land with fewer tattoos. Where instead of Carlsberg Special Brew and cheap pear cider, people will drink gin & tonic. A land where nobody can speak about their "rights" because they will be labelled a trouble maker. A place where the Daily Mail is recognised as the supreme arbiter of right and wrong, and Melanie Phillips is elected Queen.

Where everyone will have to do National Service. From the age of 11 to 35. Where, to simplify the legal processs, the number of prescribed sentences will be reduced to two: hanging or flogging.

Hang on. You see what happened there.  I started off musing about the fact that fings ain't what they used to be, and ended up a raving demagogue. Scrub all that. Let's just pray things get better and leave it at that. It may or may not be effective, but at least it won't be my fault.