You are a UK business

You can’t borrow from the bank to expand your business, but the government’s consultant asset stripper, equity manager Beecroft recommends that if you can summarily fire your most hated employee tomorrow, growth is bound to follow.

Errrrmmmm.

Seriously, every day I wonder where Gordon Brown has got to. At least the man would not be found wildly celebrating a Chelsea penalty at a G8 summit.

We are run by idiots with iPads. If only they had gone into advertising.

Outerer Klang

I figured, if we experience Kandinsky’s innerer klang (see yesterday’s post), we must definitely experience its opposite. And then I reflected, why should these concepts be confined to the art world, after all is not life, art. Or as the American writer and politician John Gardner put it, “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”

It seems, to me, that we are now suffering from life with a surfeit of, what I will call, outerer klang and not enough of the innerer variety. A world where appearances matter, more than much else as far as I can tell. Where the magic of a child’s world is redacted to a list of functional levels at school and where spin and smoke and mirrors make us so dizzy and sick we just don’t have the energy to care about the things we might anymore.

I could go on, but I won’t, otherwise I would be klanging too much as well!

Outerer Klanger

You decide

Van Gogh drawing

#Pastygate & Jerrycans

I really try to catch myself if I start indulging in a bit of schadenfraude because, like sarcasm, it’s a largely distasteful practice. The last day or so then has been a real effort of will for me, as we have been bombarded with images of MPs eating hot pasties, sausage rolls and pies, talking about hot pasties, sausages rolls and pies and visiting purveyors of same.

I am not sure when I cracked the most. Perhaps it was when George Gideon Osborne was asked in a Select Committee when he had last entered the hallowed portals of a Greggs, or whether it was when Newsnight devoted time to the debate, or indeed was it when our own, dear pasty-faced, spam-headed PM was pictured (with crumbs down his front) eating some pastry product in 2010, albeit not the hot pasty he mendaciously claimed he had once purchased at Leeds station.

When a spokesperson for Downing Street is forced to clarify the Prime Minister’s pie-purchasing habits, then we can only surmise that the world is indeed an absurd place, in all the classifications of the word. When our much-vaunted democracy is employed by the government of the day to place piddling taxes on hot baked products, to bring a high street bakery in line with a global industry such as McDonalds, what else can you think but hmmmmm.

The Conservative Party carry on like a bunch of repressed Billy Bunters at heart, given the way they perpetually get themselves into trouble over their high-handed attitude to the foodstuffs of the rest of us. Who can forget John Gummer force-feeding his daughter a burger at the height of the mad cow outbreak, or Edwina Currie who, despite trying to laugh off Pastygate this morning on the radio – hahaha, has a public persona that will always be synonymous with salmonella in eggs. The only food-related hoo haa I can recall in the Labour Party was when Blair and Brown dined at Granita. It’s hardly the same thing.

The Sun: caption competition?

And then there is the language of the Conservatives, mentioned in the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning. Whilst the Labour contingent Eds Miliband and Balls hot-footed it down to Greggs to by a bag of sausage rolls, Francis Maude from the Conservatives was suggesting we fill up our jerrycans before we had supper in our kitchen thus painting a vivid picture of a landed gentry snacking on quails eggs and still holding a grudge against the *Germans.

To be honest, I am not in shock about that which their language purportedly reveals, most of us had worked it out anyway without an analysis of the Cabinet’s lexicon. They are what they are, the Conservatives. Yes, the big sticky clue is in the name. To conserve means to protect from loss or harm, to use carefully or sparingly, to avoid waste. It also means to make jam, chutney and pickles. Of course our Prime Minister shouldn’t bother to tell us whether he eats a hot pastry product, and he shouldn’t really need to avuncularly advise us to ‘top-up’ our cars in the face of a fuel tanker drivers’ strike. But the thing is the Conservatives just can’t help it, it’s in their DNA to protect us nitwitted ones from harm, to avoid us wasting their jam and petrol. As much as they want to shrink the state locally, when it comes to their own fiddling at a national level with the very fabric of our lives, down to what we might want to eat for lunch, or at a football game; or telling us when we should be prepared for things we could easily deduce for ourselves, well they just can’t help themselves.

And finally, aside from the nannying and the language, my more serious point is: how has it come to this? The absurdity of last week’s tinkering with the tax system resulting in VAT on hot pies on one hand, whilst with the other they hand back money to millionaires. And, we pay them to do it to us.

From www.ianbone.wordpress.com

*Wehrmachtskanister is the German word for their invention that we call the jerrycan – literally translated as a canister that makes a dam or a weir. Who of us has one, or indeed the garage to put it in? My linguistic objection m’lud is: what would we be calling it in the Conservative Party today if it had been invented in Italy or Spain or anywhere else for which we could coin a derogatory nationalistic term as a prefix?

On the unemployment figures, cognitive dissonance and spam

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato

David Cameron was asked about the new increase in the employment figures today at Prime Minister’s Questions. Here are some ‘facts’.

• Today’s announced rise takes UK unemployment to 8.4% (the highest since 1996).
• The UK has the second fastest rising rate of unemployment in Europe. The fastest is Greece.
• The UK Employment Minister has made no commitment to getting the percentage down (the message there is that it’s not going to, and anyway it’s a price we are prepared to pay to keep shrinking the state).
• Ed Miliband says youth unemployment is up an incredible 102% in the last year alone – the official figures are that unemployment for 16-24 year olds runs at 22.3%
• Yet the government say the number of people in employment has increased – they say that’s the reality – check here for their ‘reality’.
• That’s partly because more women and students are in work. And that means part-time jobs. Yes folks if you can support yourself, and your family on a part-time wage, you’ve no worries.

 
In Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron insists that youth unemployment is going down. He also said that the government takes full responsibility for unemployment and is doing it all it can to tackle it. He also says that this government’s back to work programme is better value for money than the last government’s was. Evidenced by what, I ask myself? It is at about this point in reading the PMQ transcript that I want to just shout, ‘Spamhead, Spamhead, Spamhead’ at him.

Do you know what the government have done to tackle unemployment? I can’t lay it all out right here because it would make the post too long, but let’s take it gently and start with the square window (when my blood pressure returns to normal we can look through the circle and the arch windows too…).

They axed the last government’s funding streams to support people into employment: The New Deal, The Flexible New Deal and Pathways to Work and replaced them with The Work Programme. This funding is administered for the government by private companies like Pertemps and Reed *shudders*. I will tell you why I shudder. Those companies are monolithic 1980s throwbacks of recruitment agencies that operate for profit and not for the benefit of jobseekers. Every jobseeker comes with £££ on their head.

I’m not against profit, and I’m not against value for public money, but I am against redistribution of our resources amongst companies with little experience of getting the long-term unemployed back to work, whilst simultaneously cutting out those providers that had the experience and expertise of doing exactly that. The facts are that those big companies administering the funding are casting about for the providers that were doing the work in the first place, although some will have gone to the wall already and some are struggling to survive because the funding comes with impossible strings attached.

Like, the quick turnaround some of the funding comes with. What chance do you have of getting someone with skills and experience gaps, perhaps with mental health barriers into a job in less than six months? This is the timescale for some real cases I have come across. And if you do manage that feat, what are the chances of every individual sustaining that new work for 6 months, which is when the 20% performance-related funding kicks in?

What is happening is that the organisations doing this work are, for issues of survival, prioritising those clients who are nearer ‘job-readiness’ than not. And those people won’t be the very long-term unemployed with health issues, or indeed the very young with few qualifications and little, to no, work experience.

There is a flourishing scrap heap in this country and our government is prepared to turn a blind eye to it in private, whilst shooting their mouths off in a froth of PR spin on the other sides of their faces, in public.

Reality check required people: that’s you, me, everybody! Otherwise we are lumbered with the current brass-neckery of those who tell us that whilst we see unemployment going up, in their distorted reality, all is not quite as it seems.

Confused? I am. This government should come with a cognitive dissonance warning stamped on their collective spamhead. And they should be forced to agree the interpretation of the stats with the opposition before wasting a proportion of Prime Ministers Questions on a pantomime disagreement over figures, wasting everyone’s time & money.

*ceremonial

British films: politicians should put up and shut up

I have resigned myself to the coalition government being a cabinet of cupboard clearer outers. A pinny-wearing brigade who pull on their rubber gloves and wipe out the darkest corners of the pantry, exterminating spiders and destroying cobwebs. They hang sticky fly paper traps up and throw out the odd past sell-by date item, but mainly concern themselves with rearranging an ancient tin collection and filing spices alphabetically in a rack. Then they pour a liberal and publicly-subsidised glass of Burgundy (on only 5 out of 7 days a week, obviously) before doing an online shop.

I can nearly put up with it, nearly; until they start pontificating about the film industry. Today, we are told, the British film industry should concern itself with making ‘commercially successful’ films. The quotes are because the words are from the Prime Minister’s lips – except he said ‘commercially successful pictures‘, a choice of word that reveals him to be the anachronism his carefully constructed I’m alright really mate posh Tory boy act pretends not to be.

So Dave, you want commercially successful pictures do you? Like, say The King’s Speech?

Here’s what happened with the King’s Speech, Dave. Actor Geoffrey Rush, who played the unorthodox speech therapist Lionel Logue, picked it up off his doormat as the unsolicited script of an unproduced play by writer David Seidler. Rush liked the piece, but he didn’t want to do a play. He called his agent in LA – if it became a film, he was in. Perfect David Cameron might think. Except there’s a story behind that. It took nearly three decades for the writer David Seidler to get to the point where he could get the story out there. He had written and asked for the Queen Mother’s permission to tell the story of her husband’s, King George VI, stammer, in the mid 1970s. She had said no, not in my lifetime. 28 years later she died.

And wait, there’s another story, the film maker, Tom Hooper, read the script, because his mother saw a reading of the play in Islington and recommended it to him.

And there’s another story: the writer David Seidler also had treatment for a childhood stammer.

That’s a lot of stories (they’re here if you want them), a lot more intervening years and a great whacking dose of serendipity that got that ‘commercially successful picture’ made.

And that is art. It’s not a production line. There is no sell-by date on an inspirational idea. Demanding more of the same betrays ignorance and rampant mercantilism. I swear David Cameron is no wiser than Roald Dahl’s fictional Veruca Salt, who visited Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, and wanted it all. Now!

Damp Squib: David ‘Outrageous’ Cameron

‘Twas thus our Prime Minister described the strike action of an estimated 2 million public sector workers today.

According to him, who is wont to label anything that deviates from the conservative ‘norms’ of behaviour as ‘outrageous’, the pension offer is ‘fair’.

Define fair, David. Define fair?

I am resisting the strong urge to degrade the public discourse with foul language at this point.

Lady Justice

Why Cameron is wrong

• Because his ideology is getting in the way of rational thinking and action contingent on circumstances.
• Because he refuses to admit that without a real strategy for growth, there will be no growth.
• Because he insists the world economy is in trouble which is simply not true (last time I looked Asia and the Far East were doing fine).
• Because he suspects he might be wrong, but he doesn’t know what to do about it; he has painted himself into a corner and he can’t find a way out without leaving telltale footprints.
• Because even if he is right, he has a way of making it feel wrong.

The whole coalition government shebang seems to be predicated on one enormous gamble: cut fast and hard, shrink the state to fit the Tory persuasion and cross your fingers hoping that, in the full term before the next election, unemployment falls and business flourishes to fill the gap. 
It’s a hopelessly optimistic strategy given the fundamental trouble with the European and US economies, the increase in inflation partly as a direct result of the one tax hits all increase in VAT, and the fact that the pound in your pocket is now worth about 80p (pay freezes, inflation again, cost of fuel and knock on costs).

Cameron cut out the bit referring to personal households reducing their own debts in his conference speech the other week, but the fact that he had it in there at all betrays his deep lack of understanding of the hole capitalism has put us all in: people, business and nations.  The whole damn shooting match runs on debt you prat.  Shuffling notional money around so someone, somewhere can cream off the full fat. 

I heard it put very well on the radio a while ago in relation to the Chinese economy, which is doing ok.  The commentator remarked that they had played the capitalist West at its own game, and beat it hands down: by making tat cheaper than we could make our own tat and selling it to us by lending us money we don’t have.

The system is creaking like rackety ship and what we need is some proper intellectual rigour brought to bear on the economy; not half-baked schemes, total inflexibility and antiquated economic policy. I wonder if Ed Miliband can get that creative. On all evidence so far we can be sure Osborne and Cameron cannot.

The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright

Dr William Davies

Resist, reject, recycle. Make-do, muddle, mend, & don’t buy crap you don’t need.

Walk a mile in these shoes?

Dear David Cameron

Instead of holidaying in Tuscany, imagine your children sleeping next to this mould in a flat in inner-city London.

Someone's home: London 2011

Instead of having Michelle Obama round for coffee on the sofa in your kitchen, why not knock on this door and ask for a cuppa and a chat.

Someone's home: London 2011

Just imagine living with this mould in your house everyday. How’s it going to make you feel – happy, healthy, hopeful? I lived with mould like this in a flat once. It made the walls crumble and the windows rot. It made the ceiling black. It turns your freshly laundered clothes mouldy and it infests your baby’s push chair and cot. Think about it for a moment and sing along with Elvis (via songwriter Joe South).

Someone's home: London 2011

If I could be you, if you could be me
For just one hour, if we could find a way
To get inside each other’s mind
If you could see you through my eyes
Instead your own ego I believe you’d be
I believe you’d be surprised to see
That you’ve been blind

Walk a mile in my shoes
just walk a mile in my shoes
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Then walk a mile in my shoes

Now if we spend the day
Throwin’ stones at one another
‘Cause I don’t think, ’cause I don’t think
Or wear my hair the same way you do
Well, I may be common people
But I’m your brother
And when you strike out
You’re tryin’ to hurt me
It’s hurtin’ you, Lord HAVE mercy

Walk a mile in my shoes
just walk a mile in my shoes
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Then walk a mile in my shoes

Now there are people on reservations
And out in the ghetto
And brother there, but, for the grace of God
Go you and I,
If I only had wings of a little angel
Don’t you know, I’d fly
To the top of a mountain
And then I’d cry, cry, cry

Walk a mile in my shoes
just walk a mile in my shoes
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Then walk a mile in my shoes

The strange case of Cameron

When David finally managed to get his head round the gravity of the situation and tear himself away from his second summer holiday in Tuscany he called a meeting of the Cobra committee yesterday (another this morning too) at 9 a.m.

The first thing I thought was: why so late? What’s wrong with 8 a.m. surely a bit of alacrity won’t go amiss after all the heel-dragging that’s gone on. Then I thought something along the lines of: well he’ll want time for his kedgeree and toast and a fresh orange juice before going next-door for his important meeting.

And that’s the problem you see, Cameron acts like what he is. A bit of a nob. But then I thought, let’s give the guy the benefit of the doubt, let’s see what he’s got to say about it all when he’s had his 9 a.m. meeting. After all he’s probably a bit tired what with all the rushing back from Italy on Ryanair or whatever…

This is what he said in full. Apparently he looked a bit cross whilst he said it and I can read in the content of his speech plenty of the old Tory wall-to-wall finger-wagging we’ve been deluged with in the last few days. But what interested me most was this bit:

I am determined, the government is determined that justice will be done and these people will see the consequences of their actions.

And I have this very clear message to those people who are responsible for this wrongdoing and criminality: you will feel the full force of the law, and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment.

And to these people I would say this: you are not only wrecking the lives of others, you’re not only wrecking your own communities – you are potentially wrecking your own life, too.

These people? What you would say?

When the Prime Minister of a country in extremis cannot communicate directly with all sections of the community we are in very great danger indeed. When budgets for community cohesion are derided and cut and replaced with abstract concepts like the Big Society (not sure where these people fit into that) we are in massive trouble. When the Prime Minister makes a statement like that and turns on his heel in apparent high dudgeon back to his gilded office to get on with his ‘important work’ we should all put our heads in hands…

A Mirror

*Pulls sorry face*

I watched this programme on BBC Four the other day about the link between emotions and the brain; a preoccupation that acted as a diversion a few weeks ago, as I went through nearly every emotion trying to produce those wretched assignments.

One of the things they demonstrated with an experiment involving a brain scan was that people have different levels of empathy – nothing you didn’t already know if you ever looked at David Cameron’s fake sympatico face. In the experiment, people are first asked to fill out a questionnaire about how empathetic they think they are and then they have a brain scan to test their empathetic response. Turns out many people think they are super empathetic but the brain scans show otherwise – there is no corresponding brain activity. So we can surmise that humans learn to respond and pull a sorry-looking face as appropriate in certain situations: like when one cuts budgets, but it is not always a truly empathetic response.

And the key to empathy. Well it is experience. If you have experienced something yourself and someone else then experiences it and tells you all about it, all the same parts of the brain light up as did when you were actually having your own experience. So without suffering yourself, you can’t properly empathise with another person’s pain. Don’t worry though *David, you can carry on practising your face in the mirror.

Re the surtitle: from the way the Memphis Mafia walk I am pretty sure they’ve all got more than one shoe *crosses finger*

*Just in case I come off as an non-empathetic old cow with my recent bellyaching about our PM I would like to add this footnote. I know Mr Cameron has known his own personal pain and tragedy and I am sure I do feel sorry for him in that regard; this post is purely to do with his political role and the faces he concocts when trying to feel your pain in economic hardship, usually combined in a deadly cocktail with long-term unemployment, garnished with lack of opportunity.