Friday 22 August 2014

22nd August 2014

I left school in 1960, maybe 1961, with the headmasters words ringing in my ears.

Smith, he said, it would benefit neither you nor the school for you to stay here a day longer than necessary.

My Mother was present for this interview, which was ostensibly about my spending a further year in what was called 6th Remove to resit my GCE examinations.

On hearing the headmaster share his opinion of my general worthlessness my Mother was mortified.

She dragged me out of school and onto the bus and, as we were walking up the hill towards home, we passed the premises of The Normeir Tyre Company, they were advertising for a trainee, the wage £4/1 shilling a week.

So I started work on the Monday after I had left school, or school had left me, on the Friday.

I enjoyed receiving a weekly wage packet.

Of the £4/1 shilling I gave my Mother £3 for my Board and Lodging and kept the £1/1 shilling for myself.

I managed pretty well on the money, and if occasionally I ran out of money on a Thursday or, heaven forfend, a Wednesday, I simply had to wait 'til Friday and I would have money again.

After a year I left the job, which it turned out was not a trainee salesman at all but, after a weeks training, a Tyre Fitter which as I have mentioned in a previous blog, was the most responsible job that I have ever had.

My next job, as a Civil Servant, was monthly paid.

I had to convince my Mother that £3 a week could be converted into a monthly amount by multiplying by 52 and then dividing by 12.

So 3x52 = 156.

156 divided by 12 = 13.

So if I paid her £13 pounds a month then we would be as we were.

She was not convinced. a) I had failed Maths, so there was a credibility problem and, b) Some months had four weeks and some five, so that was another problem.

Eventually I managed to convince her but for both of us the transition from weekly to monthly was difficult.

So when I retired, after a lifetime of robbing Peter to pay Paul, of too many days and not enough money at the end of the month.

I checked the small print and decided that I wanted my pension paid weekly.

The young lady in the Ministry of Pensions advised me that it would have to be paid monthly but I disagreed and quoted the relevant sub section, after speaking with her nameless and faceless supervisor I was advised that yes, the pension could be paid weekly, if I requested it to be.

I requested and for the last four years my pension has been paid weekly.

Why tell you this story?

Well it is a big society story.

Mr Ian Duncan Smith is introducing a new system of benefit payments and Universal Credit is to be paid monthly.

Already Housing Associations are advising tenants to pay more in advance, because as the payment is to be made in arrears and rent is paid in advance, they may well find that following the introduction of Universal Credit, they will almost immediately be plunged into arrears.

There is nothing big society about this decision, because benefits are paid in arrears, by transferring all beneficiaries to a monthly payment the Government will effectively save money by keeping substantial receipts in the Treasury for four weeks before they are paid out so who wins and who loses?

Is the reverse calculation multiply by 12 and divide by 52? Perhaps the mathematicians can advise?

My Mother was of course right all those years ago, because I paid her in arrears not in advance, for one month I had free board and lodging but I doubt if Mr Duncan Smith will be as generous as my Mother.


Friday 15 August 2014

15th August 2014

In a recent game of Words with Friends I found myself with only one consonant and six vowels.

This selection of letters made it hard to play my turn.

But then I realised that I had just the right combination of vowels to  make the word 'queue'.

So I played and managed a decent score with the 'Q' on a a tile which doubled its value.

I'm amazed that I didn't see 'queue' instantly because it is a very current word and there are lots of queues in the news these days.

Years ago I published an article in which I used the image of the queue to illustrate a thesis about the rise of unemployment.

I described a queue stretching across history as the poorest in society struggled to make ends meet relying as they always had on the 'dole'.

The dictionary defines a 'dole queue' as 'the number of unemployed people at a particular time'.

In the UK today that queue is made up of 6.4% of the population or 1. 01M people.

There was much made of the recent fall in this number, by 33, 600,  as evidence of the success of Government policies.

Meaning that the economy has recovered to its 2008 levels after six years of austerity and whilst the left hand has been busy cutting jobs in the public sector the right hand has been congratulating the private sector who have been equally busy cutting wages.

So in today's big society the unemployed are being invited to leave the dole queue in order to earn their poverty or become self employed.

But as one queue shortens another becomes longer.

The number of people who are in work but are still claiming Housing Benefit or have found that they now need to claim is growing, the queue is getting longer.

Sure the queue at the Job Centre door marked employment is shorter but the queue at the door marked help with housing is longer and just down the street at the Church Hall the queue at the door marked Food Bank is getting longer too, according to one report, up to three times longer.

Queues have always seemed to be a sign or reflection of either popularity or distress.

Queues were a feature of wartime rationing, of shortages and need.

But equally they might just hint at popularity, the queue for the latest block buster or popular night spot might stretch round the block and people will try to find ways of jumping the queue, using charm or luck or cheek or connections to get to the front so as not to miss out on either their entertainment or perhaps, if its that kind of queue, to grab a bargain in the sales.

Buying tickets on line or using telephone banking you might find a serene and charming, but disembodied voice advising you of your position in the queue, as it counts you down from fifth to second when one of our advisers, all of whom are busy with other customers, will become available to speak to you.

But the queue as defined and supervised by Mr Duncan-Smith and his department is for some people about as close as it is possible to come to a dystopian, Kaflaesque nightmare as is evidenced by the stories which emerge of the sheer human distress arising when people find themselves in a queue to have their disability assessed by ATOS or their accommodation assessed to ensure that they only have  the correct (and allowable) number of rooms.

Well I managed to play the word queue with my selection of letters, how will you do with these?

igucarnn

ieadnsmpirte

arcgit

eeamnngdi

ygsooncciebit













Wednesday 6 August 2014

6th August 2014

In 1978 I  moved from Manchester to Newcastle upon Tyne.

Partly as a result of publicity around this move and partly as a result of what was then my blog AKA the Vicars Letter in the parish magazine, a piece that I wrote was picked up by TV and Radio and the media generally and I was interviewed about my liking for Punk, I was outed by the Daily Mirror as Britain's first punk vicar.

Hey Ho.

Four days later buying fish and chips for supper my chips were handed to me wrapped in the edition of the newspaper carrying my photograph and the story, which was by now old news and soaked in vinegar.

Hey Ho, indeed!

In 1979 however, my interest in music (and Punk) undiminished,  I read a review of a new EP released by a Manchester Band called The Tunes, the title of the album was Truth, Justice and The Mancunian Way, a play on both the theme of superman as well as a knowing reference to the continuing need for Justice in the light of the rise of what was becoming known as Thatcherism, following the 1979 election.

I have continued to keep the title of the album as a personal slogan given that I was born in Manchester and continue to be committed to both socialism as a way to create a better world and Manchester United whose winning ways have always made my Saturdays better than the Saturdays when the team has lost.

I did consider using the title as a strap line for this blog but Truth, Justice and The Mancunian Way was in a sense copyrighted by The Tunes and they deserve not to have their brilliant pun pinched by me.

However I recently found myself absorbed in a book that might well have been called Truth, Justice and the Mancunian Way.

Easy to do I guess.

You find yourself caught up in the Author's characterisation, the development of the plot and, usually the actions of the key character (s).

The book is in its way a horror story.

A story of deception.

A story of a particularly successful exercise in highway robbery.

A story of a land grab.

A story about the private exploitation of public assets.

What it wasn't was a novel.

It is called The End of the Experiment - From competition to the foundational economy.

It is published by Manchester Capitalism an imprint of Manchester University Press.

It has an introduction, a conclusion and three case studies.

At the heart of the books' thesis lies the suggestion that privatisation and the creation of markets is a failed experiment which allowed private companies to generate shareholder assets from the publicly owned goods that they 'inherited'.

The three case studies are, telecoms, supermarkets and dairy and banking.

The book is well researched and annotated, it is also well written and I read it in a single sitting.

By the end I was shocked and angered.

I hope that it is on the Shadow Cabinet's reading list, as it offers plenty of solid ammunition to demonstrate that the con-dem's, sub-thatcher commitment to privatisation contributes largely to the economic problems that we face as a society.

My only disappointment with the concept of a the foundational economy was that the book did not explore the potential for increased co-operative models, as in for example energy, telecoms and the co-op's alternative model of food retailing.

But Truth, Justice and the Mancunian Way is promoted in this challenging book written by a team of members of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

The book ends on an optimistic note:

'We can blame others for the continuing failure of the thirty year experiment, the political responsibility for ending that experiment and starting another is collectively ours'.


















Friday 1 August 2014

1st August 2014

Just back from two weeks in France.

We had an enjoyable stay in Lille with trips to Ypres and Poperinge in Belgium together with a very pleasant lunch at the St. Sixtus Monastery, a place that always seems a trifle surreal to me.

The Trappist Monastery is enclosed and silent and the monks here brew beer which is sold at the monastery gate, usual in large wooden crates containing approximately twenty four bottles with a significant deposit charged on the crates and the bottles.

But the surreal aspect stems from the beer hall next door, where the Trappist Ale is sold 'on tap' alongside plates of food; bread and cheese, pate, pickled beef and a local delicacy, 'hennepot' which is a mix of meats, including ham and rabbit set in a jelly.

As you eat and drink, around you sit table after table a range of farmers with well developed beer bellies and their wives, Lycra clad cyclists, leather clad motorcyclists, families, scooterists and not a few who have arrived in motor homes and caravans.

Dancing between the tables are the waiters and waitresses bearing great trays of drinks often with up to six plates of food on their free arm.

It is a spectacle and the profits obviously pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the Monastery but building a beer hall such as this, outside a silent Monastery, in the midst of fields and farmland has something of the optimism of the Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams.

I am sure that the Monastery Business Plan was impressive but it nevertheless has the feel of 'if you build it they will come'.

And they do!

On our last Sunday we were invited for lunch and over conversation a comment was made by our hosts that one of the differences between France and the UK was that in France personal banking does not come with a credit card, only a debit card.

This we were assured made all the difference to family finances because it ensured that personal indebtedness is more strictly controlled than in the UK.

Indeed in some stores and restaurants all transactions have to be by debit card as credit card payments are not accepted.

I must say that I used both credit and debit cards on holiday and both were accepted without argument from either waiters, cashiers or supermarket card reading machines so ces't la vie.

Travelling abroad is always an enlivening and enriching experience and raises all sorts of questions about how things are done in England.

In France it seems that every small town has its boulangerie, its boucherie and its patisserie.

On our last evening in Calais we were intrigued to see a crowd gathered outside the shuttered door of a locked shop, what is going on?

On closer examination it was an automatic dispensary dispensing freshly baked bread 24/7.

A couple of Euros in the slot and a stick of warm freshly baked french bread appeared as if by magic.

The collapse of the French economy is routinely forecaste not only by Osborne and Cameron who remain convinced it seems that the only possible economic strategy available to the UK is austerity, austerity, austerity.

But as Philip Collins writing in The Times today comments, despite protests from the English right the French prove again and again that that 'there is no robust relationship between levels of taxation, the size of the state and economic growth'.

Indeed!

But it might also be the case that, as our hosts at lunch advised, by ensuring that anything bought with your Carte Bleu or any cash advance withdrawn using it will be debited from your account immediately that, to quote Philip Collins again, despite working a bit less and paying themselves a bit more, maintaining a large public sector paid for by higher taxation, the French have made a different choice, one that calls austerity into question.

France has, it seems, rejected usury, the usurers and all their works leaving the French to pay as they go, whether its 'Fromage or Vin or Pain' they remain happily in the 'Noir' and try not to venture into the 'Rouge'.