25th September 2012

This is a celebratory blog for me as according to the statistics published by google I have now passed my 10000th viewing.

As a friend of mine, a fund raising expert once commented, to raise a million pounds you either need one person to give you the million pounds or a million people to give you one pound.

Well I know that the indoor critic reads it, but not 10000 times, so I guess whilst some people must have read each of the 220 or so blogs at least once it still means that my thinking aloud is of wider interest than my immediate circle of friends.

My grandfather was foreman of a council tip.

Before the First World War he had been a miner, but having being gassed in the trenches, when he returned home he was not allowed to go back below ground where he had worked as a farrier tending to the pit ponies.

So he found a job as a dustman and was then made foreman of the council refuse tip.

It was amazing what people threw away, obvious things like pots and pans and kettles and old clothes and rubbish but on one occasion he found a dog tied to the handle of the dustbin which when he got back to the tip became the official office dog my grandmother not wanting it at home.

He often told my mother that the surest way to get your dustbins emptied was to leave something like a bit of metal sticking out of the top of the bin so the bin men would see it and know that there was something that they could weigh in for a few coppers to supplement their wages.

One of the great privileges of my life has been the opportunity to travel.

One of my most memorable trips was to Mexico.

Mexico City is huge some sixty miles across and on the edge of the City their are enormous refuse dumps where people, the poorest of the poor, live and scavenge.

Essentially they recycle the City´s waste.

For some that means finding what can be reused, and carrying it into the City and selling it, and you see folk sitting on the pavement with a few things at their feet trying to raise a few pesetas to get by.

The more creative might re-use what they scavenge to make things and I saw all sorts of beautiful ornaments and jewellery for sale which had been fashioned from the paper and tin and glass that other people had thrown away.

More recently in Genoa we saw the same phenomenon, some people selling things they had made from recycled goods they had found but also other people with a few scraps of torn clothes and broken things at their feet sitting or standing on the pavement.

Often the street vendors were immigrants often from North Africa but occasionally from Eastern Europe and sometimes in the evening if we looked out of our apartment window we would see the same people sorting through the rubbish bins in the street outside for anything that they could use or sell.

Now we are in Spain and the same phenomenon can be seen.

However here it seems it is more organised, the rubbish bins are on the street outside the security gates of the apartment block, shortly after we arrived, out for a walk in the evening, I saw two people arrive by car and using a series of tools which I assume they had made themselves for the specific purpose, they were searching through the bins and retrieving anything that they could possibly reuse or sell.

It is it seems a regular way for people to earn a living when I enquired however I was told that at one time it would be migrants who would pursue this kind of work but increasingly Spanish people are resorting to the practise, a sign, so my informant told me, of the economic times in which we find ourselves.

As far as I know my dustbins at home are still being emptied by the refuse collectors employed by the Council and the recycling we are encouraged to practise is officially condoned, which is why the plastic and paper and glass have to be separated and washed before being placed in the correct box or bag or bin.

What we have instead is the agencies, usually claiming to be working for charities raising funds for children or the elderly, who deliver a plastic bag for our unwanted clothes and then return to collect the bags.

Some of these collection agencies have been exposed as simply commercial enterprises making money out of the unwanted and donated goods.

But as the depression deepens and the poor are forced to bear the burden of economic mismanagement by seeing their benefits cut, to encourage them, whilst seeing the rich rewarded with tax cuts to encourage them, doubtless they will find new and imaginative strategies for survival.

Just leave that bit of metal sticking out of the top your dustbin ..............

20th September 2012

Life is, at times, very strange.

It throws up difficulties and challenges as well as opportunities and gifts.

Living with a chronic, life limiting condition, as the indoor critic has to, is not easy. But between us we manage to get about and on the whole find people to be helpful and supportive.

We always give easyjet five stars in feedback, because our experience of flying with them, between Newcastle and Malaga and Edinburgh and Milan, has been unfailingly excellent.

Equally, Virgin trains assistance service has also been excellent providing ramps and assistance on and off trains.

And these difficulties and challenges are almost always compensated for by the opportunities and gifts that come by way of the Locum Chaplaincies that I have been offered in the Diocese of Europe.

Not only a chance to assist on Sundays but also an opportunity to engage with the life of busy ex pat communities and the individuals that make them up.

They are not all tax exiles in Monaco.

Folk move away from the UK for a wide variety of reasons, the weather, the cafe society, the golf, the language or the culture.

Some remain within the relative safety of the English speaking community and some go native.

But all report the same sense that they have found in their new home something of a wider, deeper, more relaxed way of living that reflects something of the big society, in Spanish ´Gran sociedad` which sounds as though it is something for the older generation; but which is held up as the ideal to strive for both in Spain and in the UK.

Of course once established in a new country people fall in love, marry, have children and become so established in their new lives that distinctions of nationality become lost.

I am still very English but I am starting to enjoy the Spanish language.

Recently I had to officiate at the funeral of an elderly lady whose partner was in his nineties, they had met in Spain having both been widowed in their sixties, Gran sociedad!

When I was offered the paperwork to sign I noticed that their relationship was noted as: Companero Sentimentale, I remarked to the Funeral Director that I thought that was a lovely way to describe a relationship that had lasted over twenty five years.

It is, he replied, how we say it in Spain.

There are things said and described in Spanish that the language make to seem altogether more poetic.

However I am still learning.

Indeed if I was a stand up comedian I  would by now have a great new routine. 

The thing is that I had to buy an electric kettle.

My first attempts resulted in no kettle.

So I turned to my translation app on my iphone.

So I tried again in Spanish: hervidor electrico, por favor.

After a conversation with one shopkeeper, each with our iphone translators speaking to each other,  I managed to buy a milk heater, i.e. hervidor leche, not a hervidor agua.

When I got home I realised my mistake, because  a) there was no automatic off switch and b) it only heated to 90 degress.

After a restless night wondering how I was going to deal with my mistake I decided that I had to gather my courage in both hands and take it back.

Pointing to the box I said: este hervidor de leche? hervidor agua, por favor?

So with a smile and a shrug he changed it for a kettle and wrote out a new receipt.

Then I got home to find the kettle in the box, which was good, but with no base or plug, which was of course bad.

So I had to return for the missing base unit: la base es que faltan? I proffered.




Again he smiled and reaching behind him picked the missing base unit off the shelf.

So, After four trips to the shop and flattening my iphone battery, I finally got home and made a much needed cup of tea .

But if you ever need to buy a kettle in Spain you know who to ask ......

18th September 2012

I started work in 1961.

I left school before the term ended on a Friday and started my first job the following Monday.

I was paid Four Pounds and one Shilling a week.

Brilliant.

It felt really good to be a wage earner and whilst I couldn't live the high life, after I`d paid my Mum for my Board and Lodging, I still had One Pound One Shilling to spend on myself, and in those days it went quite  a long way.

My next job represented a step up.

It wasn`t as responsible, after all I had spent a year fitting tyres and repairing punctures and balancing wheels on cars that might then be driven at high speed on the newly opened Motorways.

In fact for the first year in my new job I wrote Giro Cheques, by hand, in an office of The Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance.

I was a Clerical Assistant and when I wasn`t writing Giro Cheques I was filing which is how I once found two files, both paying full benefits to the same gentleman, once under his first  name and once under his second.

But because my first job was weekly paid and my second monthly I had a major difficulty during the first month in my new job.

I still had to pay my Board and Lodging, but because my Mum was my landlady we were able to come to an amicable arrangement, so i wasn´t thrown out or made to go hungry.

But because my pay was a month in arrears it meant that for four long weeks I had to stretch my pound and make it last four times as long as it had ever had to it.

I think that even now fifty years later I am still catching up!

Now I am retired and when I rang the pension service to ask if I qualified for a state pension they confirmed that I did and then told me what amount would be paid each month.

But I was ready for them.

The pension is also paid in arrears so the first payment when it arrives has sat in a Government account earning interest for four weeks, whilst I scrabble around buying food and paying my utility bills on credit for which I am charged.

No, as I said I was ready for them, they trained me well in the MPNI, I had read the small print, so as politely as I might I said, very clearly, I would like it paid weekly.

I could hear the clerk wriggling, she tried to persuade me that monthly was the preferred method but I stuck to my guns.

So it was agreed I could and would be paid weekly.

So fifty years after first starting work I am back to being paid weekly and wonderful it is.

Apart from the satisfying clunk of the money bag dropping into my bank account every seven days it means that if I run out of Gin I only have to survive for seven days before I can replace the empty bottle with a full one.

But all this is about to change.

Mr Duncan Smith, who I doubt has ever been paid weekly and therefore has no understanding of the value to the person living on a low income or fixed wage of the reassurance that knowing that the next payment is due sooner than later.

As for people without a bank account who take their pension books to the Post Office even more reassuring is knowing that the cash is negotiable and the conversation with your neighbour can lift your spirits on a cold Monday morning whilst queueing for the Post office to open.

But Mr Duncan Smith´s focus is not on the poor or the elderly, his battle cry is efficiency.

So for now there is a stand off between a wide range of charities seeking to protect the interests of the poorest including the elderly and children in families and Minister who is driving forward changes that will harm those very people, all in the interests of efficiency.

There`s making work pay by making it more attractive, more rewarding, lowering the threshold for the disabled, offering better training for the unskilled and improving the routes by which people can enter work and making sure that the jobs are out there.

Or there is making work pay by reducing benefits, making it harder to live on benefits and harder and more degrading to claim benefits, this is the preferred route for Mr Smith.

Of course popular opinion has swung behind him, there is a strong groundswell of opinion that hate´s `benefit scroungers`, I don´t see it that way at all.

In the end it comes down to fairness in the distribution of the wealth created by the national economy, paid employment is the traditional mechanism and Beveridge saw benefits as a temporary bridge when a worker fell on hard times.

But now the structure of opportunities has collapsed.

We do not need full employment to generate the gross national income so we need to find a better, fairer way to share that income, so that all our citizens can live full, satisfying and creative lives, sometimes contributing through paid employment, sometimes via voluntary activity and sometimes by enjoying a period of leisure, education or training.

And soon my bank account will be restored to balance for another week.

7th September 2012

What makes someone a conservative?

I suppose if you have something to conserve, that might make you want to hang on to whatever it is.

I recently volunteered in a conservation project electro-fishing in a tributary of the Eden to catch, measure and count the salmon fry.

The aim is to conserve the river as a habit for the Salmon.

So in that sense I am a conservative.

But only in that sense.

The current debate in the US Presidential race is a classic. The conservative, republican candidate has run an anti-Obama campaign culminating in the now infamous Clint Eastwood, empty chair debate.

But throughout the Obama Presidency there has been no attempt on the part of Republicans, to work for the common good, so all the Presidents' attempts to address the dreadful inheritance he was handed and the economic disaster that happened with the sub-prime mortagage scandal have been stymied by the forces of conservatism.

There has been no facing up to the fact that the countries problems arose on the Republican watch and were aggravated by tax breaks for the rich and a huge budgetary overspend on pursuing regime change in Iraq.

In this country the woefully inadequate narrative of the ´mess we inherited from Labour' has become less strident.

Neverthless the conservative voice is still heard.

The paralympic spectators might have booed the Chancellor, revealing the habitual sneer for the defence mechanism it is, but that has not stopped him in his strategy of welfare cuts for the poor, including many disabled people, and tax reductions for the wealthy.

The trickle down theory does not work.

It has never worked. Effectively reducing taxes for the rich is an upwards distribution of wealth.

Couple that with the recent reshuffle where individual appointments have, as has been pointed out by more than one posting on facebook and a general flurry of comments across cyberspace, promoted a number of ministers with previous to portfolios where they have clearly stated positions which if carried through will lead to a more divided and ultimately poorer society.

Health, justice and equality are all areas where the new incumbents have stated positions which suggest that the future will, to put it at it´s best, be pretty frightening if as Neil Kinnock famously said, you are young, old, poor or ordinary.

So what makes someone a conservative?

I find that a hard question to answer even though I am posing it to myself.

The net result of conservatism it seems to me is a divided, unjust, uncivil society in which the devil takes the hindmost and the privileged live a defensive life behind high walls, security fences and electronic gates.

I worked as a community worker on an outer estate in Birmingham, on one balmy summers evening I was sitting on the balcony of a flat on the twentieth floor of a high rise block, looking over the estate and sharing a cold beer with a local resident.

We were talking local community politics. I asked him about his political idealism, he was a member of the communist party, its not idealism he replied, its practical.

When I sit up here and see the estate, peaceful and quiet, with folk getting along and pullinig together, then I can enjoy my beer knowing that I have made a contribution that has helped that happen.

My happiness is linked to that wider human happiness that I have helped create.

The current political agenda is in my view truly frightening and I fear for the future.

4th September 2012

Top Tory calls for Shock Therapy for the economy.

Whilst agreeing with him  in principle unfortunately his shock therapy is not mine.

His is really the same old, same old, tired right wing proposals. Its the poor wot pays the price and the wealth creators who need encouragement, so reduce benefits and reduce taxes, the same old stick to beat the poor, the working class and elderly and the same old carrot to encourage the rich.

Shock Therapy is needed but who to shock and how?

Labour introduced a minimum wage, to howls of outraged opposition from the Tory Ukips.

Actually it was a sign of a civilised society that a fair days work is worth a fair days pay and anyway slaves should be sold not paid off.

So my first shock but would be a national maximum wage.

There should be a clear and agreed link between what the lowest paid are paid and what the highest paid are paid.

I and thousands like me have gone about the business of raising their families on the average wage whilst watching footballers, being treated by Doctors, seeing our bosses and being lectured by MP´s and Bank managers whose earnings outstrip ours by factors of not tens but many hundreds.

Linking minumum/maximum earnings would create a  real sense of connectedness that would demonstrate that we are really all in it together.

The coalition is proud that it has taken many lower paid out of taxation all together.

That is good, but it has also taken many high earners out of taxation too and that is not good.

So along with a maximum wage and linked to it would be a flat rate system of taxation meaning that we all paid tax, with maximum wage earners paying the same in percentage terms but more in actual money.

I would insist that we looked closely at the defence budget. What do we need an armed forces for? To fight foreign wars? To maintain peace in trouble spots globally? To police civil society in times of emergency or crisis?

Answer those questions and I am sure that the need for Trident would disappear completely.

So whilst the defence budget needs reviewing the pressure would be relieved if Trident was stood down and not replaced.

Another shock would be all the privateers who have taken over the running and administration of public services.

I am sure that people will remonstrate that the savings have been considerable and the efficiencies greater, to which the response is an Olympic G4s.

Public services should be run by public servants, it makes sense, it creates jobs, it keeps good folk in employment and because it is  obvious that, and there are plenty of well documented cases to demonstrate, the profits generated by the privateers are considerable.

And that cannot be right.

So an end to the capitas of this world.

The final shock is also the most controversial.

Most of us don´t need to work at all. There is enough wealth in the world that we need neither starve or be bored.

Technologies have been employed to make huge profits for individuals. Some seek to plough that back.

Some have simply become personally richer and that needs to be challenged.

But it is time that, with due oversight of the processes involved, a whole new generation of dreamers, artists, poets and musicians are rewarded and encouraged to deepen the artistic wealth of our societies.

So all the back to work schemes and the policing of benefits the whole apparatus of welfare to work could be dismantled as it would no longer be necessary.

People could study longer, dream their dreams, write their poems and find their audiences wherever they can

These days what has been called the malthusian - darwinian notion that everyone should be át work´ lies at the heart not only of conservative policy making but at the centre of their moral framework, and it is nonsense.

Individuals have no more need to justify their existence than the birds of the air or the flowers of the field.

3rd September 2012

There´s less heard about the big society these days.

In fact I cannot recall hearing or reading the phrase for some months.

The notion of a big idea to provide a framework for the coalition´s political narrative seems to have died a death.

The mess we inherited doesn´t wash any more, why? Because they have made it worse.

All the supposed feel good events that were meant to lift the nations spirits have been washed out by the rain.

Where there was meant to be optimism and a newly energised electorate following the Jubilee and the Olympics there were crowds in airport departure lounges trying to escape the worst, wettest summer in a century.

There is largely cynism born of the hard experience of seeing statements from the coalition discredited, denied or retracted.

The deficit which was to be reduced has been increased, instead the GCSE results have been reduced.

And Mr Cameron´s comments at the opening ceremony of the paralympics were met with well rehearsed synchronised cynism (a new Olympic event?) the marvellous efforts of these remarkable athletes will be followed by further statements announcing reductions in benefits.

So a cabinet reshuffle as a discredited tweedledum makes way for a discredited tweedledee.

It all has something of Alice in Wonderland about it as we are expected to believe so many remarkable things before breakfast.

It won´t wash of course. Or will it?

Do people care that much anymore?

This party is indistinguishable from that party, the same grey suits and and the same grey faces announcing solemnly that it is all the fault of the same grey suited predecessors.

The economy is in free fall, human rights are being threatened, disabled people are feeling increasingly anxious as illiberal legislation is brought in, the Green Belt is to be swept away and buried under an estate of new housing developments that people can either not afford or for which they cannot get a mortgage, Virgin has lost the West Coast franchise and Richard Branson is sulking.

So how, in the present economic and political climate do we take a wry look at the big society?

According to the sales pitch we were all supposed to reach out in help and support for each other.

The lonely would be befriended.

The sick would be healed.

The disabled would be offered the appropriate access they needed to ........ well, access the big society.

Instead we received an increase in VAT.

Tax breaks for the rich.

And reduced benefits that led welfare saying farewell to many who were less able to function in what is becoming an increasingly hostile and scary environment.

Food Banks become the face of the Big Society.

Soon the only occupation available to those of us unlucky enough not to be a banker, a hedge fund manager, a politician or a journalist will be selling the Big Issue.

The Big Society will become the Big Swap revealed for the Big Con it always was.

The New Statesman printed a joke about someone ringing up to buy the Lib Dem Manifesto to be told they had sold out, I know he said, I just wanted a copy of  the manifesto ..............