Aagh! The Daily Mail may have good reason!

When Malcolm was going Song for song yesterday, he was missing the Big Event.

Whisper it very low: Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is, after all, foul deep-Pinko agitprop:

Dorian Lynskey has the full filth in today’s Guardian supplement:

I’ve become annoyed by the liberal fingerwaggers, solemnly telling the people who hated Thatcher the “proper” way to mark her death. She was a deliberately divisive politician who caused a great deal of suffering to sectors of society that she didn’t value and it’s absurd to insist that people should hold their tongues just because she became old and frail. That just isn’t human nature and the charts, at their most interesting, reflect the messy, visceral, impulsive side of human nature.

They are also dictated by something that Thatcher knew and loved: pounds and pence. Tasteless this campaign may be, but it’s freedom, democracy and market forces in action. Better yet, some of the royalties go to the estate of lyricist EY “Yip” Harburg, the proud leftie (“Yip” was derived from the acronym for the Young People’s Socialist League) who wrote Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and was driven out of Hollywood by the Red Scare blacklist. Ding dong to that.

Harburg was not only the lyricist for the song that epitomises the Great Depression, and for the Oscar-winning songs in Wizard of Oz, he also wrote for Finian’s Rainbow — which, in 1947, was the first time Broadway saw a racially-integrated chorus line. And Harburg smuggled in another bit of subversive socialism:

Let’s reprise that, for the benefit of Gids Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith:

When a rich man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant;
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger, he’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk.

Inevitably, as a figure on the left (Henry Wallace campaign as the Progressive Party nominee in 1948), Harburg was listed by Red Channels in the great clear-out of politically-unreliable talent during the McCarthyite purges. He was out of Hollywood, but continued to fill jobs for Broadway.

That kind of censorship is just what the Daily Mail would believe in.

Give me land, lots of land …

… under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evening breeze,
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever, but I ask you please —
Don’t fence me in.

There’s a story in how Cole Porter, of all unlikely metrosexuals, came up with that one (as wikipedia will tell you, he didn’t). Equally, there’s scope for historical sociology in why it became the hit of post-D Day 1944.

That, however, isn’t relevant now. That retort by Doubting Thomas to the earlier thing is:

Unlike you, I’m a thorough-going land reformer and if you had a spare few moments, and of course if you had not come across it before, there is a blog on http://www.andywightman.com which although scottish in emphasis is nevertheless aimed at exposing the influence of the landowners in politics.

 Well, actually no: Malcolm hadn’t encountered that before; and it was (and is) worth the trip.

So, Malcolm, are you a thorough-going land reformer?

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

A long while back, and he cannot quite recall the context, Malcolm did a spot of research on land-ownership in Norfolk. It surprised him that the number of big land-holders and the acreage they held were not greatly changed since the tithe maps of the 1840s. What was the squirearchy then is agribusiness now.

Hence a heave of Malcolmian spleen, and throttled yells of The expropriators must be expropriated!

Across the whole UK, 0.6% of the population (36,000 persons) still own some half of the rural land [Source: Country Life, 10 November 2010]. The top ten landowners named in that article were:

1. The Duke of Buccleugh;
2. The Duke of Atholl;
3. The Duke of Cornwall;
4. The Duke of Westminster;
5. The Duke of Northumberland;
6. The Laird of Invercauld, Captain Alwyne Farquharson;
7. The Earl of Seafield;
8. The Countess of Sutherland;
9. Baroness Willoughby de Eresby;
10. The Viscount Cowdray.

All good sons (and a daughter) of the soil. Of the earth, earthy. Significantly, a bare majority of those names are big in Scottish lands.

On top of that, the “State” owns vast tracts of land. The biggest single holdings are by the Ministry of Defence (241,100 hectares — over 930 square miles — across the whole UK) and the Forestry Commission (260,000-hectares in England alone — around 1,004 square miles). On the whole they have been “good” landowners: we may quibble, but … well, Malcolm recalls a sentimental summer stroll across MoD land to Lulworth Cove, with small blue butterflies aplenty, wild orchids, and a ginormous adder dozing in the sun.

Quite how the situation would be improved by delegating responsibilities down to local councils is difficult to appreciate: the continuing scandal of Cotswold Water Park and Cotswold District Council (see Private Eyes for months back) should be an awful warning. Yet that is what seems to be in Andy Wightman’s mind:

I wrote an article for the Observer at the time arguing that if folk want public forests they needed to think about ownership and consider a new model of public ownership that is removed from Government and is more local and accountable to “the public”. I cited the example of public forests in France, for example, where 20% of public forests are owned by 11,000 communes (30% of France’s 36,700 communes or municipalities).

There are local precedents, though, for small communities having democratic control of their environment. There is the Isle of Rum Community Trust, in Kinloch village, a functioning community of fewer than a score enfranchised souls. But, seemingly, flourishing. How that could be applied to urban and suburban communities, where one is ignorant of the neighbours three or four doors way, would stretch any imagination.

And none of us actually own our plots without qualification. There is, by necessity, a superior power — what in the UK is called “compulsory purchase” and in the US “eminent domain”. That, too, is right and proper — in extremis, the needs of the whole community must take precedence over any property rights of the individual. Those whose origins lie in Tyneham and the Elan Valley are entitled to differ. Similarly, nobody about to be expropriated by HS2 or a nuclear power station feels any rightness or propriety applies: suddenly it all comes down to that magic word, “compensation” — and when the compensation has been spent, all that remains is the grievance.

Now, to the practical: what can be done about next door’s creeping bamboo, which is infesting the bottom corner of the Redfellow Hovel garden? Or that damned crapping cat?

The pointless grump of a downtrodden man

There is, none too far from Redfellow Hovel, a parked car. It is big, long, black, sporty, Mercedes and a recent model. To Malcolm’s untutored, and definitely non-petrolheaded eye, it looks distinctly expensive — the kind of hardware that costs as much as a three-bed home in many parts of this fragmenting kingdom.

The Merc-monster has been there, unattended, a couple of days now.

Quite a bit transpired, yesterday, when an anonymous white van also arrived. The van contained the the heavy mob from the collections agency. They had come to chain up said Merc-monster because a string of parking tickets were outstanding.

Seeing Malcolm hard a-blog, the more elephantine of the heavy mob rang the door-bell of Redfellow Hovel. Did Malcolm know anything about Merc-monster?This Malcolm decoded as, “Is it yours? We have a tidy account for you to settle. Then we can head off to the pub.”

Most definitely no, never seen the thing before. Shouldn’t be there. etc.

While his mate was dealing with the chain on the Denver Boot, Mr Pachyderm explained why this was under way (hence the information three paragraphs previously) and then fished out one of those telephones that contain major computing power. He was then able to display in Malcolm’s face a name and address. Again Malcolm decoded, “Does this name and address chime with you?”

Well, actually, in a dim recess of the less-visited parts of Malcolm’s cortex, it did, but the synapse didn’t instantly connect.

Only later did Malcolm recognise the connection. The name waved electronically before him seemed to lack a title. Not “Mr” or “Dr”, but “Sir”. It is — perhaps by coincidence, the name of a prominent and publicly-honoured architect, of the modernist tendency, who has scattered the landscape with some exotic structures.

The gravy train

Well, Malcolm has no envy that such talent has earned so well to afford the Merc-monster, and to pay so promptly the inflated fines (by the evening, Mr Pachyderm and his mate had returned and doffed the chains).

On the contrary, such a show of wealth is part of modern Britain.

As is the lack of opportunity for others, and the failure for wealth to percolate downwards.

Consider the story by Patrick Wintour in today’s Guardian, Labour to use US research to shape election campaign. In the print edition that comes with a nice little line-graph. On-line we have to settle for:

Labour is drawing on research by the New Democrat Network (NDN) central to the Obama re-election campaign to shape its own election thinking.

The research was described by the Obama campaign as its North Star. It tracked three trends in the US economy between 1992 and 2009, showing how two – higher growth and higher productivity – had not been matched by a rise in living standards for the majority.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank, the leading voice on UK living standards, will next week produce its own State of the Nation report showing how long it will take to return to rising living standards in the UK even if growth returns. Labour will also launch its own exercise – “the condition of Britain” – next week, its policy review chief, Jon Cruddas, has revealed.

Padded out with some choice quotation, there’s also this:

It also indicates that the crisis of living standards predates the City-induced recession of 2008.

“The reason this is happening is because of rising global competition, the defining new economic challenge of our time,” Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Democrat Network, said in a recent interview.

“In the actual experience of the American economy, there has become an enormous gap between the upper one-third and everyone else.”

The chart hung in the Obama campaign office, along with a caption derived from a focus group participant: “I’m working harder and falling behind.” That same line was repeated by the president in a campaign stump speech.

So some have Merc-monsters, and can ignore parking fines, on the assumption that it’s only money (and expenses can be set against taxes). The rest of us have to obey the rules and muddle along as best as we can afford.

There are two ways of looking at this.

On one refined level we can take the research and graphics of — say — the Financial Times, to show just how dismally the ConDem government have perpetuated the Great Depression of 2008-2018 (as in the graph — Malcolm likes simple graphs — right).

Along with that, we can take the wit-and-wisdom of the Office for National Statistics, who tell us the same, with numbers attached:

Incomes squeezed more than in previous recessions

Real national and household incomes have been falling due to a combination of the recession and high inflation. That is the analysis published today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as part of the Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The data describes an economy that has been stagnating:

• In the second quarter of 2012 net national income (NNI) per head in real terms was 13.2 per cent below its pre-recession level in the first quarter of 2008; a sharper fall in economic well-being than the 7.0 per cent fall that GDP per head data indicate.
• In the second quarter of 2012, real household actual income per head was 2.9 per cent below its peak in the third quarter of 2009.
• Household incomes have generally been eroded by price inflation, for example in September 2011 inflation peaked at 5.2 per cent whereas the annual rise in household actual income per head was 1.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2011.
• At the end of 2011 national debt was in excess of one trillion pounds, the first time on record, and equivalent to 65.7 per cent of GDP.

Or we can simply look, it is hoped with compassion, at the plight of millions of Britons, trapped in falling incomes, rising costs, lower wages, poorer expectations and increasing misery.

At the start of the ConDem government, David Cameron was buoyant that we could, and should measure “well-being”. And so, at a cost of £2 million and two years later, we were treated to guff like:

Responses by 165,000 people in the annual population survey reveal the average rating of “life satisfaction” in Britain is 7.4 out of 10 and 80% of people gave a rating of seven or more when asked whether the things they did in their lives were “worthwhile”.

Any bets we’ll not be hearing comparisons this year? Even that the ONS be told, quietly, to forget the whole thing?

Or, of course, the ConDems could scatter Merc-monsters across the land, warbling up-lifting ditties (and not the kind of uplifting that Mr Pachyderm & co involve themselves in):

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no,

These pretty country folks would lie

In springtime, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding.

Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey hey-nonny-no.

“Welfare tax”?

Go to the BBC video of yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Enjoy Miliband winding up Cameron on the Bedroom Tax.

Remember: in Cameron’s world, it’s not a “tax”, it’s a “benefit”. That was his effort, responding to Miliband’s first question. What is the “benefit” of losing £25 a week? That was enough to shock Malcolm — and got to Steve Bell as well:

Indeed the crude brutishness of Cameron’s manner made Malcolm miscue. So back to the BBC video.

The crucial moment comes about 7 minutes and 15 seconds in. Cameron is waxing loud and lyrical about Miliband’s policy deficiencies (though why Labour needs to be lumbered with detailed policy commitments this far out from a fixed election date is another matter).

Malcolm believed he heard Cameron say:

What this Government is doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. But, frankly, the question is one he has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare tax, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefit, if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending.

What the Hansard reporter heard (or was persuaded was said) is subtly different:

The Prime Minister: What this Government are doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. Frankly, the question is one that the right hon. Gentleman has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare cap, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefits and if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending?

Fair enough: on about the third hearing, Malcolm concedes Hansard is probably right, and Malcolm’s hearing is adrift. Still, the message lingers.

What is fiendishly wrong here is that people in social housing are being punished for disability, or for wanting to stay in long-established homes. They are also being caned because:

• wages are criminally low, and are being driven even lower by deliberate government policies;
• rents in the private sector are too high, and still rising.

Let’s take those in turn, and refer to two items in this current issue of Private Eye:

1. Giz a job

SURF, Scotland’s independent regeneration group, which aims to improve health and wellbeing in deprived areas, received 400 applications in response to an advert for a part-time admin job. Chief Executive Andy Milne also received an email from the folk at Liga UK, who were keen to let him know that they were a “government-funded training provider who help young people gety into the workplace”.

Liga helpfully suggested that Milne consider converting the paid job into an “apprenticeship” placement. After all, it suggested, “If you do take on an apprentice for this role, you only need to pay them £100-£270 per week.” Liga UK also offered a further inducement of the £1,500 placement fee from the government.

What Ligaq failed to mention was that if SURF agreed to shove the poor recruit out of the promised job, Liga could also claim an apprenticeship placement “success” and pick up its own fee. Milne asked Liga why on earth the government would want it to displace a real job with an apprenticeship. He is still waiting for an answer.

By no coincidence, just a week ago Channel 4′s FactCheck Blog ran the rule over:

… the latest stats on apprenticeships in England today, which show that more than half a million people began a placement in 2011/12.

That is costing the government (i.e. the tax-payer) around £1.4 billion — yes, billion — in 2011-12. Moreover, nearly a fifth of these placements run for six months or less. Such turn-over must be money in the bank for the likes of Liga. Moreover, as FactCheck adds:

… a few months spent learning how to stack shelves and a three-and-a-half year stint at Rolls-Royce both count as the same.

2. Gimme Shelter 

Welfare reforms brought in by the coalition were already bringing down rents, said a confident David Cameron in January last year. “What we have seen so far, as housing benefit has been reformed and reduced, is that rent levels have come down, so we have stopped ripping off the taxpayer.”

But have they come down? It seemed unlikely at the time, although it reflected a widespread belief in government that the local housing allowance (the form of housing benefit paid to private renters) was somehow causing rent inflation.

A year on, and with more housing benefit cuts due in April, rents are stubbornly refusing to go anywhere but up. A report from Shelter based on the government’s Valuation Office Agency figures says rents have risen 2.8 percent in the past year. That’s faster than the 1.7 percent rise in house prices and comes at a time when wages are at a standstill.

Several areas saw double-digit rises, including an eye-watering 10.8 percent in one local authority with which Cameron should be fa,iliad: West Oxfordshire, home to his Witney constituency.

This Shelter survey, The Rent Trap, is on-line. It covers only English local authority areas (as, indeed, does the Tory party’s world-view).

Three degrees of falsehood, and ten degrees of the Eighth Circle

Last summer, from the web-site of the University of York’s Department of Mathematics (of all unlikely places to find any lit.crit), there was an exhaustive history of who and how the cliché originated about “lies, damn lies and statistics”. The conclusion, if somewhat fuzzy, declared the begetter was Sir Charles Dilke, but deriving it from many earlier variants.

Somewhat conveniently, if only for regional pride, was:

A query in Notes and Queries (7th Ser. xii) (1891 Oct. 10), p. 288, reads as follows:

DEGREES OF FALSEHOOD. – Who was it who said, “There are three degrees of falsehood: the first is a fib, the second is a lie, and then come statistics”?      ST. SWITHIN

According to Folklore 41 (3) (1930), 301 and 63 (1) (1952), 4–5, “St. Swithin” was a pseudonym used by Mrs Eliza Gutch (1840–1931), of Holgate Lodge, York.

They’re still at it!

The most blackened liar is the politician who twists a statistic to support a point. Here, from the letters page of this week’s Ham&High in front of Malcolm, we have a prime specimen:

Stephen Greenhalgh, London’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, writes:

Crime has fallen, but we want to boost public confidence and make London safer. [etc., etc.]

A Google search suggests Greenhalgh issues, and re-issues press releases on this line, regurgitates similar statements on public occasions, quite indefatigably. There’ll probably be another one along in the morning. That’s why the grateful citizens of London pay him something around £100,000 a year, plus expenses and pension rights.

Let him who is without sin …

Meanwhile, Greenhalgh is himself not above suspicion, and Dave Hill has him in his sights:

As the police watchdog considers whether to investigate Boris Johnson’s policing deputy Stephen Greenhalgh over alleged illegal conduct by public officers of Hammersmith and Fulham council when he was its leader, it is instructive to consider the passion with which Greenhalgh supported the ambitious redevelopment scheme at the heart of the affair – the Earls Court project.

And then, lest we forget, there was the City Hall groping:

Boris Johnson‘s deputy mayor for policing has apologised “unreservedly” following an allegation that he molested a female member of staff in a city hall lift.

Stephen Greenhalgh, the former Tory leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, who now holds day-to-day responsibility in the mayor’s office for policing and crime, allegedly patted a female member of staff on the bottom while in a lift last month.

Last seen above Lenin’s tomb

Put Greenhalgh into an ill-cut Soviet era suit, and one instantly lines him up alongside the Bulganins,  Malenkovs and Berias for a Red Square May Day parade:

So, for the occasion, let’s adapt a Stalinite apothegm:

It’s not the crimes that count, it’s how, and by whom they are counted.

In the exact case of crime statistics, the Guardian‘s Datablog, Facts are sacred, ran the slide-rule over the official numbers a while ago. It noted all kinds of jiggery-pokery:

• A concurrent but separate ONS publication shows that the rate of police recorded crime has fallen more quickly than the rate of reported crime found in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).
• It’s important to bear in mind that today’s release focuses on police recorded crimes. These are provided to the Home Office by police authorities and forces, not all of whom collect data with the same precision according to a 2007 audit. This is problematic because it means that a higher number in a given area may indicate an improvement in reporting by police rather than a rise in criminality.
• … crimes recorded by police are unlikely to represent the total number of crimes that take place. To understand this better, it’s useful to also consider the CSEW which asks people face-to-face about their experiences of, attitudes about and perceptions of a range of crimes.
• The gap between police-recorded and survey-reported crime has always been significant, but the distance between the two has widened. In 2004/05, there was an effective recording rate of 52.8%, while in the latest statistical release, this figure has dropped to 42.4%

And even this:

• Another of the more interesting figures is that of the perception of crime. The CSEW asks people whether they think crime is getting worse where they live and nationally. So, people think crime is getting worse – but not where they live. It’s the gap between what we know is going on and what we think is going on.

That last one, where Malcolm is sitting, means that the propaganda of stooges like Greenhalgh may be working.

Put the whole shebang together, and the only reasonable conclusion is:

Crime figures aren’t worth the ink used to print them.

Conjugation: I’m usually a law-abiding citizen, you’re a bit dodgy: that bloke ought to go down for a long stretch.

Meanwhile the really big crimes — Harry-the-Horse and  the multinationals who don’t pay taxes, the fraudsters who exploit concessions for charity to rip us all off — are officially not crimes at all.

Then there’s the little stuff:

It’s illegal to ride a motorcycle or drive using hand-held phones or similar devices.

The rules are the same if you’re stopped at traffic lights or queuing in traffic.

It’s also illegal to use a hand-held phone or similar device when supervising a learner driver or rider.

Malcolm would give fair odds that at least the second of those requirements is not known to the average driver. Yet — note — all are “illegal”, which means “against the law”. And Malcolm, waiting for a few minutes at bus-stops in north London, counts five, six or more drivers quite blatantly disregarding the law, frequently in full view of that CCTV camera that collect fines if you pause for thirty seconds to allow a passenger to get out (£50 free and for nothing to the local authority).

Here’s a writ that goes unenforced on a daily basis:

Bernard Hogan-Howe [the Met's Commissioner] indicated that he believed the current punishment of three penalty points and a £60 fine was not a strong enough deterrent for drivers.

By increasing the punishment to six points, drivers would be banned from the road if they were caught twice for the offence within three years.

Writing on the Met’s website, the commissioner said this would make drivers take the law on driving while on the phone more seriously and improve road safety.

That interprets as we don’t bother to enforce the law. We expect you, the potential offenders to understand and obey the law. But if we’re forced to apply the law, we expect it to have teeth. If only because it makes us look as though we’re doing our job. And, if the offence was significantly up-graded, we’d have more motivation, and look even better. Oh, and by the way, if you’re phoning and driving, don’t mow down that child, because — if you do — we have to check your phone records, which is a real fag.

That makes all the more remarkable the coincidence, nay the the assiduity of the Met Police, in catching (and so banning) Chris Huhne for driving the Old Kent Road while phoning. And that, by coincidence, within weeks of him avoiding a ban for speeding by having his wife take the points.

Where does this place the Office of National Statistics, Deputy Mayor Greenhalge, and others? —

Destination: Malebolge

1% of austerity. 99% of low calculation

The British Sundays know what — pending a major disaster — next week’s stories should be.

It’s all about The Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs bill, as Andrew Rawnsley explains:

This is the legislation that will put a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits over the next three years. Nominally, this is being done in the name of collective national belt-tightening and fairness. The country is brassic. Working people, in both the private and public sectors, will have been very fortunate if their incomes have kept pace with price rises over recent years. Many have seen their living standards badly corroded. It is therefore only just that those drawing benefits should also suffer a period of retrenchment. That was the argument rolled out by Iain Duncan Smith last week as he prepared the pitch for the vote. But there has always been a partisan purpose to this measure, which has never really been disguised since George Osborne announced it in his financial statement last month. The state pension is excluded from the squeeze, even though the elderly have generally done relatively better than any other group over recent years. But, then, there are more pensioners than there are unemployed and pensioners are much more likely to vote.

It is doubtful that legislation was actually necessary. Putting it to a parliamentary vote was a cunning device to create a dividing line – or so the chancellor hoped – that would put the Tories on the side of hard-working “strivers” and force Labour to choose between endorsing a benefits squeeze that many in its ranks would see as a betrayal of its core values or looking like the defenders of idle “scroungers”.

On the other hand, as the Observer‘s front page headline story (by Daniel Boffey) notes:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

Which suggests that Cameron and Osborne are betting the farm on casual opinions from focus groups being more viable than righteous anger among millions of ripped-off middle-class voters. Hmmm … could make 2015 tricky.

In the shrubbery, something very nasty stirs …

The Sunday Times [£] goes even further. The editorial shrieks:

2013: THE YEAR WE CRACK THE WELFARE STATE

If that seems grotesquely and Murdochian neoCon, the content equally suggests such a superficial impression is not unfair:

The coalition’s record, as it will new presented tomorrow, is not bad. Financial storm clouds have not gone away and the risk is of a loss of Britain’s triple-A credit rating, but the country has moved away from the fiscal edge. Michael Gove’s school reforms are welcome and have further to run. A different health secretary has taken the heat out of changes to the National Health Service. Crime has fallen by 10% over the past two years despite spending cuts and tension between ministers and police. Yet this is also a government prone to drift and bouts of incompetence, as we saw last year.

Fortunately the Sunday Times, even at the expense of  half-a-dozen tired  clichés and the odd very partial statistic, is ever-present to insert anally a poker alongside any missing backbone. Let’s not pause to think:

• Have Gove’s “reforms” worked? Is education really on the up?
• Is the “heat” out of the NHS?
• Has real crime (and opposed to “reported crime” — reported and recorded, that is, to fewer desk-sergeants and closed police stations) actually declined by such a conveniently measurable amount?

No, let’s be swept along by the Sunday Times editorialist’s flow:

British people are not averse to change and know that the size of the state in general, and the welfare state in particular, has to be reined back. Welfare changes should be simple and fair. When the chancellor decided to take away child benefit from most higher-rate tax-payers, he thought this ticked both boxes. But while HM Revenue & Customs has made the best of a bad job, the change is anything but simple. Some of those who are losing out would also question its fairness.

Of course, had those “losing out” read Saturday’s Times, avoiding any unfairness would have been made pellucid clear (cut your hours, up your pension contributions, do a fiddle with your partner …). Note, too, no blame can — in this definition — fall on the putative 18th baronet Osborne of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon — he of the “omnishambles” budget. He was merely “ticking boxes”. The devil is in the detail, and HMRC’s implementation.

Onward and … err … upward?

The mid-term review will signal the government’s intent of implementing the Dilnot commission’s recommendation of a cap on individual liability for care costs, although Treasury worries about the long-term bill mean the cap is likely to be set at more than double the £35,000 that the commission had recommended. A white paper on pensions will pledge a new single-tier pension but is already setting hares running about big increases in the retirement age in decades to come.

Gosh: isn’t all that positive inducement to vote Tory in 2015? Particularly when the ST‘s front page (and page 2) has it that:

Elderly people will have to pay £75,000 towards their care home bills before the government steps in to provide financial help.

Lest we forget: the essential issue at stake in care of the elderly is that homes have to be sold to pay care bills. £75,000? Just lift it out of the bank? Well, perhaps not:

On average, a Brit has the grand total of just £2,205 sitting in the bank. This is peanuts – it equates to just 1.7 times the average monthly take-home pay…

There are, of course, some people who save lots. They’re called the rich. ING has a model of the distribution of savings across the UK population, and after about the 95th percentile, it starts to really take off. It was ever thus, of course, but I’d bet my cash Isa that just as income inequality has grown markedly in the past decade, so has savings inequality.

When unemployment is so high (although the jobless figures are becoming meaningless these days), when wage growth is zero or falling, when inflation is at 2%-3% (and with VAT rising), then the idea that the ordinary ­person could or will be saving more was ­always a stretch of the imagination.

We can, but naturally, skim lightly over such pinko propaganda (it was Patrick Collinson in the Guardian, and as far back as those cliff-edge days of January 2010).

For the sake of brevity, the ST‘s paragraph on Duncan Smith’s universal credit can be passed: it’s going to be a total cock-up, we all appreciate, but provided we keep the perpetrator’s name in the frame, we also know whom to blame — and it’s not going to be Dave or Ozzie if the ST can help it! And so, to a happy conclusion:

The public mood has shifted on welfare but will still become impatient with a government that displays incompetence, let alone presides over a disaster. It is important to get this right. Indeed, it must be one of the biggest priorities this year.

As opposed to a priority of government being not getting it right? And, of course, we well recognise that, this last Leveson year, the whole Murdoch Empire has been shown to be admirably competent, on the side of the angels, disaster-proof, and “right” — as here, far right. After all, across the water, the WSJ, on Rupert’s order, picked Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, and then spent the campaign ignoring all the polling evidence. Not to mention Fox News.

Austerity: economy, parsimony, and judgment

Malcolm doubts it one of the best-known or quoted (or, as more often, misquoted) bit of Edmund Burke, though it deserves to be. It’s Burke at his vituperative and vitriolic best.

Malcolm hat-tips Hugh Dalton’s Principles of Public Finance, all the way from 1922. And that, hardly coincidentally, from very early in the text, page 7 of volume 1: — Dalton, like most economists and moralists, like Marx and Joyce in their different spheres, being one of those many authors of whom it is easy to tire, even in the first chapter.

Therefore, a well-composed word to the wise (and a dearth of cliché) from Edmund Burke, Collected Works, volume V, page 229. Burke has it in for his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Bedford had criticised the payment of a state pension to Burke — and Burke had no compunction is contrasting his public service to those of the Russell family, who had become great and good by pandering to Henry VIII.

Burke saw an overgrown Duke of Bedford machinating to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense and great expense may be an essential part in true economy. Economy is a distributive virtue and consists not in saving but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment and a firm sagacious mind.

Corduroy

A while back Malcolm took time out to extol the writing of Ronald Blythe. Even further back a Blythe essay, The Salutary Tale of Jix, got a mention. Both came to mind because of yet another of those synchronicities.

First, Ferdinand Mount (who provoked that thought of Blythe last February) was at it again: this time in last week’s Spectator:

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran.

The essay on former Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks came to mind when Theresa May went political over the non-extradition of young Master McKinnon:

Speaking in Parliament this afternoon, Home Secretary Theresa May confirmed that she would halt Mr McKinnon’s extradition because it would be “incompatible with his human rights”. The 46-year-old suffers from Aspergers Syndrome and depression and his supporters have warned that he would be at risk of suicide if he was held overseas. After seeking medical and legal advice, the Mrs May has concluded that Mr McKinnon would not be fit to stand trial in the United States. Instead it will be up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether a trial should be conducted in the UK.

Mrs May’s decision is controversial because only two weeks earlier the government approved the extradition of Talha Ahsan, a south Londoner accused of running a jihadi website who also suffered Aspergers. Mr Ahsan’s family believe the decision on Mr McKinnon was deliberately delayed until after Talha had been extradited.

While all pale-pink liberals might feel that McKinnon deserved this amount of absolution, Mrs May is not out of the woods yet. Indeed she has made political what ought to have been purely-and-simply a judicial matter. She shot; she scored:

Betfair has slashed the odds of the Home Secretary becoming the next Conservative leader from 23/1 to 14/1.

In the bad old days, Tory Home Secretaries sent men to the gallows in search of applause from the Tory back-benches. Now, in these softer times, it merely involves cocking snooks at the US system of true “separation of powers”. Oh, and kicking at Europe does no harm either (except to UK citizens who might find themselves in a Bulgarian prison cell, or worse, with no hope of extradition).

However, back to more pleasant topics.

There was yet another reason why Malcolm felt affinity with Ferdy Mount’s enthusiasm for Blythe. It was the Suffolk connection, and a direct link from Blythe’s cottage to its former occupant.

Let’s start in the Fulham Road

Last Friday morning, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm had taken a dander down to Chelsea, to view Thomas Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row. The Carlyle’s moved here in 1834, and it became a focal point of the literary and cultural scene.

It is quite extraordinary to walk into the parlour and see it authentically reproducing Robert Tait’s painting from 1857:

From there we climb up this modest home, through domestic intimacies, all the way to Carlyle’s remarkable study in the attic (complete with Victorian sliding roof-light). Two hours well-spent, not excluding the basement kitchen and walled-garden.

Then to lunch.

A few days back a columnist responded to the question of what long-married couples still find to talk about on holiday. The answer was “Where shall we lunch?” followed by “Where shall we have dinner?”. Malcolm sadly acknowledges a germ of truth in that.

Friday’s lunch was in the Fulham Road, very pleasantly but virtually in solitary state.

That, however, wasn’t the point to which Malcolm is driving. It is that the restaurant was only a few doors away from the branch of Daunt Books. And, finally, we have reached Malcolm’s point. The Lady took away a worthy novel in hardback. Malcolm’s single purchase was more modest: a delicious reprint of Adrian Bell’s Corduroy from 1930.

Once upon a long-gone time Malcolm had the trilogy: Corduroy, Silver Ley (1931), and  The Cherry Tree (1932) — moreover, they were Faber hardbacks (though not, sadly, first edition). One or more may still be lurking in the attic of Redfellow Hovel — however, when Malcolm re-shelved his books some years back the ‘non-fiction’ (i.e. everything that wasn’t a novel) went on the end-wall. History was the middle five shelves. Poetry below that. Drama the next two. Guide-books et al. on the bottom. Sorted alphabetically, and reaching high above this lot, was everything else. So Bell, Adrian would be right at the top: in the very apex of the attic, sixteen shelves high. It seemed a good idea at the time.

The guilt-pile by-passed

At midnight last night, after relishing and digesting every paragraph, Malcolm reached page 287, and last. That chimed well with Bell ensconced in his ‘Silverly Farm’, acquired — as is traditional for these exchanges — at Michaelmas, just the day before:

I walked with a lantern to my small farm across the fields. Darky and Dewdrop [his two recently-acquired horses] peered at me over the wall of the yard. The night air refreshed me, and I felt far from sleep. I lit my lamp and opened my new account-book at the first page.

A grounding in Suffolk

The story (really a simple, but beautifully-linked chain of reminiscence) involves the author’s year of apprenticeship at ‘Farley Hall, Benfield St George’, Mr Colville’s farm in Suffolk. This is the faintest fictionalising of Mr Savage of Bradfield St George, just outside Bury St Edmunds (which Bell renders as ‘Stambury’).

In the course of the year, the young Bell experiences the whole cycle of the farming year, growing physically, mentally and constitutionally away from the sophistication and “elegance” of his family home in Battersea and into the boots and corduroy (a subtle motif throughout) of rural Suffolk. At Christmas (Bell went to Suffolk only in October) he is already conscious of the distance he has travelled:

I returned home to London, to a world of narrow sky and no darkness, to find the old life half strange already. My brown Sunday boots, in which I motorcycled home, once again seemed uncouth there, and I was asked to change them, as they would ruin the carpets. These ‘gentleman’s’ boots!

I re-entered a world of nervous significance, where the very furniture was a complex language, and a piece placed so had, to some perceptions acute as Bob’s for weather signs, the subtle rightness of a mot juste. This world fearful of mud splashes, that yet breathed grimy air ( remembered the threshing-men grappling muddy iron while they breathed air like well-water); a world of hurtful probing into personality.

I noticed most keenly the brilliance of electric light after oil lamps, and the absence of anything worn, or uneven, or over-grown. Interiors had the illusory quality of flashed scenes of midnight storm. In fact, the whole Christmas sojourn had a flashed effect, flat and unrooted, with people gesturing and smiling as in a charade. I was called with ‘Giles’ or ‘Hodge’ , and treated to enquiries of ‘Ow be thou mangel wurzels?’ Either that or I was a courageous self-emancipator, the wind whistling through my hair.

Said one, ‘How splendid to be free of dress formalities; hats, for instance.’

‘But I always wear a hat,’ I replied.

Malcolm recalls — just barely — north Norfolk before electricity arrived, and with it mains drainage (try the latter without the former to power sewer pumps). Even then, out of the towns, darkness could be absolute: he also recalls a terrifying moment, circa 1961, frost-bitten, near Sutton Bridge in the Fens. The persistent sleeting drizzle had shorted out the electrics of his aged Lambretta. The only glimmers in the entire universe were the faintly-red-glowing fuse-cover on the handlebars, a horizon smudged with the lights of King’s Lynn far away across the tundra, and a car’s headlamps approaching out of the far distance.

Bury St Edmunds? I didn’t know he was dead!

To a younger generation, who have never fully known such dark, such silence, Adrian Bell’s memories — where sweated and frozen human strength and dexterity still mastered the yet-to-be-mechanised land — must be totally alien. Even so, his description of ‘Stambury’, is instantly recognisable:

At the end of the town opposite to that at which the cattle-market was situated were the ruins of a great abbey, a memory of old ecclesiastical significance. Public gardens had been laid out within the walls. They were deserted today. I walked the lawns under bare boughs tranced to the stillness of stone in the frosty air. Shattered arches stood yup lonely from the grass. A door stood open in an enclosure of ruined wall. I looked in, and found a gardener there sweeping up the last leaves. It had been a family burial-place, he said. ‘The mossyleum, they call it.’ He looked around. ‘There ain’t much moss here now, but doubt less there was at one time.’

At the end of the garden a river ran, and a monk’s bridge spanned it. All this was in grave contrast to the bustle of market-day beyond the walls.

The tufted abbey walls flanked one side of a sloping space, called (on account of the inn that stood opposite) Angel Hill. As I passed out of the gardens a traction-engine stood fuming before the gate-tower, with a timber-drug sent to deal with a fallen tree within. here was a dragon which the blunt-nosed saints in the niches confronted with holy calm.

That, in the late 1960s, was Malcolm’s daily walk to his teaching, at the Grammar School, just across that monk’s bridge.

Number One daughter now regularly flies, business class, from New York to Houston, India, Hong Kong and places east and west, in her daily profession. Once, though, she was perambulated, to be christened at St Mary’s, on Honey Hill, which turns left at the end of Angel Hill. She nearly got born in the bar of the Suffolk Hotel (but that’s another story), which stood on the corner of the Buttermarket:

The chief shopping-place of the day was the Old Butter Market. Here beef and pork and poultry were turned by the alchemy of the coin to feminine adornments, tobacco, silks, and scents. here wives and daughters strolled.

So, you see, Malcolm has unfinished business. He needs the other volumes of Adrian Bell’s trilogy. Can he scale those attic heights? Were he to do so, would he find Bell, Adrian?

Only then can he tackle Carlyle and Sartor Resartus  — which for those denied a classical education means, The tailor re-tailored, and might bring us back to Bell’s problems with  ‘gentleman’s’ boots and unfashionable, sturdy, agricultural corduroy.

“Plebs” revisited, revisited …

Nick Robinson, on his BBC political blog, reads between the lines of Danny “Ginger Rodent” Alexander’s LibDem conference speech:

If you thought the cuts were bad, stand by for more bad news – £16bn of cuts to be precise.

The Treasury Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, has just declared at the Lib Dem conference that the government will soon have to set out “specific plans for the £16bn of savings that are needed” in 2015 — after, that is, the current spending round ends.

What the Liberal Democrats have been doing this week is setting out their negotiating position with the Tories for the next spending round — their red lines if you like on “who pays”.

What they wanted voters to hear is that they will veto Tory proposals for a benefit freeze and cuts of £10bn to the welfare budget. However, listen hard and you’ll hear that they are not ruling out ending the link between benefit rises and inflation or other cuts in the benefit bill.

This is what Danny Alexander said: “At £220bn, welfare is one third of all public spending — and despite our painful reforms it is still rising. We will have to look at it.”

It’s going to be the middle class, the elderly, the weak, the sick, the disabled, the already- underprivileged — and the unemployed who will pay.

School-age students already are, because the much-vaunted “pupil premium” simply  does not work.  The £560 million which went to Educational Maintenance Allowances was cut to £180 million for subsidy to “low-income learners”. At the same time the “learner support fund” was rolled into this cut-price new scheme. Disabled children — including the little autistic so close to Malcolm’s own heart — are left behind, helplessly, in this Goveian rat-race.

The hike in university fees (the promise which Nick Clegg regretted and apologised for) has succeeded. It has ensured:

the largest fall in applications for over 30 years as new figures show an approximate 10% decline for the first year of entrants.

And done it a second year in succession.

Despite the “generous” pensions rise last autumn (actually it was no more than the established policy demanded, and then paid a year in arrears of rampant inflation) the basis of pensions calculation was changed — to the disadvantage of pensioners. Other subtle cuts are already happening: “free” bus passes are now being compromised (as in Norfolk); cataract treatments are being rationed; hospitals are being over-crowded and waiting times increased dramatically. And when your semi-privatised GP service lets you down, the provider can lie about it (as Serco did in Cornwall).

Disability allowances are being salami-sliced. Atos, the agency commissioned to review disability payments (or, as Simon Hoggart precisely defined it: tells disabled people on behalf of the government to stop whingeing and get back to work) shambles from cock-up to disaster.

Don’t say Neil Kinnock didn’t warn you:

It’s just that he was understating things. This lot are even nastier than Thatcher.

If all of this seems a little tired, a trifle repetitive, there’s a very good reason.

We have been here many times before. James Francis Horrabin was telling it the way it repeatedly is, for (now here’s a laugh in itself) Plebs, and deployed by Labour tat the 1929 Election:

A faint hurrah for the Tory squire?

It’s not the flavour of the week, thanks to Chief Whip Mitchell and his “fucking plebs”; but at some time we’d need to unscramble the Cameroon nouveau-riche from the Old Tory decayed gentry.

It’s implicit, indeed endemic, in some of the strained relations within the ConDem coalition. Was “Gids” Osborne really known as “Oik” in the Bullingdon Club, because he was not an Old Etonian, and as a wallpaper-heir didn’t have quite the same depth of pockets?

Mitchell, son of a wine merchant and minor Tory politico, has definite roots in “trade”. His rise to affluence was through Lazards and lobbying for overseas contracts. Definitively “new money”.

Pritt-y neat

Mitchell, let us remember, came out of the Great Commons Expenses row with some aplomb, but the claim for a glue-stick (all of 13p) stuck to him. He was a beneficiary of a DV3 tax scam: the Dickens and Jones building in regent Street was bought for £65 million, and sold to a subsidiary of the same lot for a thousandth of the amount, thus avoiding 4% (over £2.5 million) in stamp duty — the resale of the lease a year later, at a 300% profit, must have greased the Mitchell wheels, too. He also got away with a sordid bit of lobbying for a cocoa company which, by no coincidence, contributed to his constituency office and to central Tory funds.

Forelock-tugging time

Some time back there was a rather tasty piece by Peter Oborne on the Telegraph site.

His major premiss is that the Cameroons have lost touch with the natural Tory base. He sadly never got round to the Turnip Taliban, who featured the September before the General Election:

White men are the only group left in our society about whom it is safe to be offensive. There is, however, a subset about whom it is not just safe to be rude, but whose humiliation is actively encouraged. We had a prime example this week in Sir Jeremy Bagge, 7th Bt, Old Etonian, Norfolk landowner and leader of the so-called “Turnip Taliban”. Sir Jeremy was depicted as the would-be nemesis of Liz Truss, selected for South West Norfolk despite her adultery with a Tory MP. In these guises he was ripe for savaging, to give the Tory party another fatuous chance to yell: “We’ve changed!”

For some years, people like me have been telling people like Sir Jeremy, with sincere regret, that they are not welcome in the Conservative Party. It exists now principally for people who used to vote Labour. The Conservative Party positively encourages the persecution of such types as Sir Jeremy. How dare he be rich, live in a big house, speak with a plum in his mouth and expect to participate in politics in this day and age? Doesn’t he understand that democracy now excludes people like him?

Surely there’s no great need to identify that as Simon Heffer in mid-froth. The little tizz in South-West Norfolk was merely a sortie in the war that the Cameroonies played over the deselection of a swathe of second-homers and moat dredgers, neatly replacing them with A-listers and media-friendly types. While the “flippers” (Gove, Lansley, Osborne …) escaped the Cameron axe (unlike Cameron’s wisteria on expenses), Sir Peter Viggars went down in hoots of derision for his £1,645 duck-house.

Back to Oborne

This was the bit Malcolm particularly liked:

Tory activists are for the most part virtuous and decent people who have not been drawn into political activity by dogma, ideology or personal interest. More often than not, their party membership is just one facet of a wider engagement with their local community, whether as church wardens, charity workers or presidents of the rugby club.

To be sure, they tend to be relentlessly provincial, but they are the backbone of Britain, the hard workers and strivers who pick up the pieces and make sure their communities work. For New Labour and its cohort of media admirers in the BBC and elsewhere, they have long been an easy target for satire and misrepresentation.

OK let’s ignore the “dogma, ideology” conceit — we are, after all, speaking of the Stupid Party. The gybe against the Beeb has to be passed over as standard operating practice when catering for the “Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells” who buy the Torygraph. The rest of that stands up quite nicely. And such folk, in the raw, are quite admirable. Without them Women’s Institutes and church roof appeals would be lost-and-gone-forever.

And people of quality know better than to scorn “plebs”.

Nicely put 3

This is definitely becoming a habit …

The whole of Matthew Norman’s Telegraph piece, Coming through … the arrogance of power, piquing the woebegone Andrew Mitchell bears reading and enjoying. And the accompanying image of Mitchell behind bars adds an extra delight.

We are all well aware that the Telegraph doesn’t have the hots for the Cameroons. As a result individual columnists are licensed to roam freely. It’s a long, long time since the old rag was the loyalist Torygraph: it and the Spectator seem increasingly to be UKIP-lite.

Malcolm heartily recommends the whole of the article. For a sampler, though:

… this has of course been a week of barely precedented horror for the British police. A more sensitive man, even when forced to dismount and wheel his bike a few yards, would have had in mind the murders of two WPcs in Manchester, and the grief felt by their colleagues. Such a man may even had been aware, within a week of the Hillsborough report’s publication, that more tragic things than an affront to monstrous arrogance have flowed from the police refusal to open a gate.