10th April 2014

Let's just be clear.

I have been missing in inaction recently so this is a catch up exercise

There's just too much happening I couldn't keep up.

It's difficult to know where to start.

Let's say they decide to start charging £10 per week for the NHS, as has been recommended by an ex labour health minister with friends in private sector places.

You have to ask is that £10 no matter how many visits you make? Is it £10 a week for each adult? Will children be free or will there be family tickets? Can you get a discount by buying ahead, a season ticket as it were?

And in any case don't we pay now?

There's income tax of course but then there is NI, National Insurance which covers health including the NHS surely, as well as pensions and etc etc but not elder care, aah, of course.

So is the £10 a week a positive idea?

Will it be welcomed?

Or is it creeping privatisation by the back door as distinct from the one marked A&E, although that door is sometimes round the back in some hospitals.

Then there is the ungovernable co-op.

It is being sold off piecemeal whilst all around the folk who were brought in to save it are donning their life jackets and throwing themselves overboard.

The Six Million a year man left because it was ungovernable and now the governance guru is leaving because of threats along the lines of: I've got more votes than you and my constituency is bigger.

Meanwhile the existing committees and boards carry on as though it was all a storm in a cup of Co-op 99 tea.

And the problem of Maria was finally resolved as she decided to go of her own free will.

Which somehow didn't sort out the problem for the PM as the MilliBalls took him to task, red faced and harrumphing, in PM's QT.

What nobody seemed to realise other than her constituents interviewed on the News is that there is a linkage between a large family home lived in by elderly parents, and a massive mortgage subsidy on the one hand and a spare room tax and a reduction in housing benefit on the other.

After all if you live in a rented Housing Association house and are told by IDS that you have more room than you need and we're not subsidising it, whilst across the corridor from his office is another person who has all the rooms she needs and more and you are actually subsiding it then it will occur to you that that is just not fair.

Red Tape and bureaucracy are two (three) words for madness.

I rang the council to ask if I could pop along to the cemetery and inter my Dad's ashes next to my Mums, I am a retired vicar so I know the words and I have a trenching tool.

Aah, they said, you need to pay £350 for us to do that for you and you need the permission of the Grave Owner.

Aah, I solemnly responded that will be difficult, it will take a seance and someone who can interpret table tapping noises.

Why? They asked, because Frank Oswald is in the grave I said.

Which is how in my 69th year and without any one asking what I would like for my Birthday, I became the owner of a Grave.

So all I can say to that is to remind all those mentioned above.

Memento Mori .............

21st March 2014

It is strange really!

How Bingo has become fashionable!

Apparently it is how hard working savers spend their time when they're not working or saving.

Unless they're in the pub saving even more money.

Good evening? Great evening! 

I saved fourpence, how did you manage that? I had four pints and that lovely George Osborne gave me a penny off each pint.

Whose George Osborne? 

He's the one who went to Eton and makes a habit of parking in disabled spaces to eat his lunch.

Oh! That one?

My father died recently.

He was a hard working bus driver for Manchester Corporation, bought his own house, did his best for his children, saved and, after my mother died, he remarried and moved to Australia with his second wife.

When we were young we used to go to Scarborough for a family holiday and stayed in a B&B run by a distant relative of my Grandmother.

Years later my father told me that after paying the fare for the Ribble Coach from Manchester and the reduced family rate for the B&B, he had £5 for a family of four to have a holiday, worth more than it would be today but still not a fortune and there were very few ice creams just plenty of long walks.

On one occasion my Grandfather joined us, I remember that he and I had to share a bed in the attic.

But I remember that holiday because my Grandfather took me to play bingo and to my great excitement we won, suddenly he shouted House, and an attendant came along and asked what prize he wanted.

Bingo!

In my first parish on a large Salford Council Estate I once suggested a Bingo Night to raise funds, the idea was rejected, Bingo was not for the upwardly mobile members of the parish, in those days attending church was how the aspirant working classes demonstrated their aspirations and they wanted to put Bingo behind them along with the Devil and all rebellion against God.

But the Bingo Hall in the nearby Town prospered and plenty of the parishioners who largely didn't attend Church, did attend Bingo faithfully and the caller called out the numbers like hymn tunes and sometimes people even won.

Of course Bingo is like life, and like life the faithful will rehearse the Bingo Prayer at the end of each day.

As I lay me down to slumber
All I need is one more number
When to the big game in the sky I go
I pray the Lord I can yell BINGO!

In fact I had to wait quite a few years before I could persuade a congregation to play Bingo.

My last parish was pretty upper middle class, and in parts distinctly nouveau riche, so after they had exhausted wine tastings and cheese and wine and bring and buy and garden fetes and garden parties and murder mysteries and antiques roadshows they asked had I any ideas?

I suggested Bingo to which someone added fish and chips so the date was set, the hall was hired and hard working savers set to and after some effort located a Bingo Kit and I was appointed caller.

Bingo!

The evening was a great success, funds were raised, fish and chips were consumed the Sancerre was chilled to perfection, it was a class act, if a tad middle to upper class.

Well after this weeks budget it must be said that Burlington Bertie (30) encouraged those approaching the time to retire (65) hoping in time to enter Cameron's Den (10) himself, meanwhile encouraging workers and savers to strive and strive (75) whilst making it clear that the shirkers will continue to find it unlucky for some (13) because they can no longer rely on the state (8), because he has removed it.

14th March 2014

Wry was the answer in a recent crossword clue, see:

Using or expressing dry, especially mocking, humour.

Well it is I suppose, given this definition, stretching a point to describe this blog as Wry!

But given the subject matter that I try to cover, the whole rigmarole of the so called, 'Big Society', the attack on those who stuggle in an increasingly hostile environment to make ends meet, who literally are faced with a choice between heating and eating, where the best example of the so called big society, in which citizens seek to help each other out, is the explosion of food banks, that dry, especially mocking humour, can only be seen as inappropriate.

But wry is the word I hang onto because every example that comes along simply re-inforces the view that whilst some folk barely hang on with the 'help' of pay day loans, others simply amass unsustainable wealth in their barns.

Two deaths this week, Bob Crow, the indefatigable leader of the RMT who worked tirelessly to  defend and improve, the pay and conditions of his members and now Tony Benn.

Both men, who have been excoriated by the press and politicians of both left and right, will now see their legacy reviewed and those who couldn't find a good thing to say about either will pay their glowing tributes.

In the village that I lived in until I retired and moved North, there was an eccentric couple who had literally filled their house with newspapers and magazines, rumour had it that when they died there were editions of various magazines and newspapers dating back to when they bought and moved into the house.

There were rooms that it was impossible to enter, piled high as they were with newsprint.

Certainly no car had ever been parked in their garage as that was the first place in which they began to store the collection.

They weren't misers.

They exhibited no particular signs of irrationality, they just couldn't thowaway or recycle their newsprint.

But it was odd behaviour which when it was shared amongst neighbours and villagers was described using dry, mocking humour.

But what if these elderly neighbours had otherwise been amassing instead money?

Brown, Green and Blue banknotes. stacked under the bed, in the garage, in the lounge and hallway.

What would have been said when this huge treasure hoard was finally revealed?

That amassing all this wealth only served to make other people poor?

That it was irrational?

That nobody benefits when such a huge amount of money is withdrawn from circulation?

That nobody needs a house stuffed with money?

But then when Bankers negotiate their bonusses, when the the senior management team of a business are offered retention bonusses simply for staying in the jobs they applied for and to which they were appointed.

When CEO's simply seek to amass wealth and store it in their barns.

What do we say?

Better to prepare for a rainy day?

Well I think that I would want to report the wry view of a penniless teacher from 2000 years ago who described such people as 'rich fools' who simply attached too much importance to wealth.

This 'rich fool' of Luke's Gospel amassed his wealth in his barns until his barns were full and then he built new and bigger barns and then he died.

As the condems vision of society, of which someone said, there is no such thing, moves towards its completion people are finding that there is simply less humour, less compassion, people are smiling less, we are entering difficult and anxious times, there is simply less kindness in human interaction.

Instead of piling up treasures on earth in bigger and bigger barns it is surely time for a spirit of generosity by which treasure is shared more widely and commonly between people.

As Tony Benn and Bob Crow might have suggested quoting another socialist visionary, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need ......

3rd March 201

From 1974 until 1978 I was the Vicar of St John the Baptist, Little Hulton, Salford, Greater Manchester.

Little Hulton was once famously characterised by one of its famous Sons, Sean Ryder of the Happy Mondays, (the actor Christopher Eccleston is another famous son along with Paul Ryder), as a place better escaped from.

Together with the neighbouring parish of St Pauls, Peel and parts of the nearby town of Walkden nearly 60,000 people lived on a vast council estate.

In the mid seventies Salford local authority was busy demolishing the inner city slum dwellings and employed a housing nominations policy which favoured those whose houses were being cleared.

The consequence of this policy was that young people in Little Hulton were not offered housing on the estate near their families and in their own communities and instead when they married moved off the estate often into private, mortgaged properties in the towns that ringed Little Hulton and ran along the East Lancashire Road towards Liverpool, and in the process affecting the communities sustainability.

With Right to Buy, Margaret Thatcher's iconic housing initiative, property in Little Hulton was sold to existing tenants at massive discounts and it was soon possible to recognise the privatised properties as they sported, porches and mock tudor beams.

Once the pressure mounted those properties that had not been privatised were handed over by the local authority to housing associations.

Two years ago the impact of the twin policies of the Labour Controlled Council and the Thatcher Government had resulted in the highest concentration of Housing Association Properties in Salford being concentrated in Little Hulton.

Of the properties in Little Hulton and Walkden 65% are privately owned and 35% owned by Housing Associations, comparative figures for the UK are 82% privately owned and 10% owned by Housing Associations.

But that was two years ago.

The numbers are changing dramatically. The Lobby Group Million Homes, Million Lives is now reporting that the number of owner occupiers could fall nationally as low as 49% by 2041 based on current numbers which have fallen to 65%.

It seems that the direct consequence of right to buy, as pointed out by James Meek in the LRB, amongst others, is the rapid increase in private landlords, many of whose portfolios include large numbers of former Local Authority properties.

The tragedy of the collapse of the post war vision, characterised as 'Homes for Heroes', is that the continuing desire for home ownership cannot be fulfilled, the report above characterises a new and emerging 'Generation Rent', relying on the private landlord, who by design or necessity can offer neither the security or the necessary support once provided by the local authority in its role as Landlord or indeed in some recently publicised cases simply refusing to accept as tenants any who are on benefits including housing benefit.

There are always good news stories to be found and publicly rehearsed but as Salford's Joint Strategic Needs Assessment reveals there is a high concentration of social properties with low private home ownership indicating low incomes, benefit dependency  and potentially, fuel poverty and health issues.

Diversifying tenure is recommended as a way of achieving an improved housing choice and a more sustainable community.

It is certainly better, than cutting benefits, sanctioning spare rooms and creating housing and economic stress.

As Vicar I lived in the Vicarage next door to the church.

Even that house, surrounded as it was by a tree lined garden, was not immune to the housing crisis. 

In 1976 during a long hot summer the foundations of the house cracked and the house split from top to bottom, coming to rest with a massive gap at the top of the wall requiring part demolition and rebuilding on new foundations.

If Pisa's Tower had been built to the same specification it would never have leaned.

It was the collapse of the Vicarage that led to me writing an application for a new job in the North East sitting at my desk tapping my feet to the accompaniment of pneumatic drilling outside.

For me, as for Sean Ryder, Little Hulton had become a place to escape from ........ and in the process I became Britain's first punk vicar, but that's a story for another blog!

19th February 2014

The dog barked.

The letter box rattled.

The brown envelope was slipped through. It bore the legend HMRC.

Here comes the tax man after my cash.

One of the many fantasies about benefits is that they are tax free. Well of course some benefits are. Especially if you one of those whose sole income is represented by the benefit you receive.

Of course a state pension is a benefit, it is in fact one of the larger costs of welfare. And it is of course like so many benefits riddled with myths, urban and otherwise.

I heard one such myth about a pensioner who lives in Gordon Brown's constituency. He went to a surgery to ask why he was paying tax on his pension.

The then Chancellor denied that this was the case.

In today's newspaper the same Gordon Brown was quoted as telling Scottish Pensioners that they would lose the benefit they had paid for during their working lives if they voted yes to scottish independence.

But as I have mentioned previously in this blog.

Income Tax and National Insurance pay for pensions, there is no fund into which you pay and from which you withdraw when you retire.

So my pension is paid for not by me paying in over the forty seven years that I worked but by those who are working and paying tax today.

And that includes me.

Because I am fortunate enough to have an occupational pension, which I paid for from 1968 until I retired in 2007 I pay tax.

Because I am over 67 I receive a marginally higher personal allowance.

But in his letter to me today, the taxman explained that because I also receive a state pension and the DWP cannot claim the tax, my personal allowance is reduced by the amount of state pension I will receive in the coming financial year.

So I do pay tax on my pension.

One of the frustrations of living close to the Scottish Border is knowing that whatever the outcome of the referendum I personally cannot vote.

On Saturday I was in Annan, a twenty minute drive from home, but soon to be (possibly) another country, the indoor critic and I decided to stop to buy a picnic lunch and I went into a bakery to buy two Macaroni Cheese Pies, what could be more Scottish, reflecting as it does a tradition that goes back to Robert Burns via Gramsci and the Italian Ice Cream sellers who made their home in Scotland enriching both the culture and the food.

I commented to the Baker as I handed over a Scottish Twenty Pound note, I wonder what the transaction cost will be after independence?


She dismissed  George Osborne's finger wagging warning as rubbish. Commenting you cannot spend a Scottish Five Pound note any place south of Blackpool anyway, so we do have our own currency now. .
In which view she totally supports all those from the South who refuse to take cash out of a bank machine in a Scottish Airport if they are flying back to England because their money would be refused by every single taxi driver at any of the London Airports as my Scottish Ten Pound note was refused when I tried to pay for a round of drinks at a pub in Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire.

But perhaps the best way to resolve the debate between First Minister and Chancellor is to quote from the 1984 Scottish Pound the legend on which reads:

Nemo Me Impune Lacessit (None provokes me with impunity)

And as for the Tax Man I can do little better than reading from the edge of the two pound coin in my pocket:

In Victory Magnanimity in Peace Goodwill

Maybe all benefits should be paid in two pound coins and handed over personally by Mr Duncan Smith.

11th February 2014

Well today I am feeling very virtuous.

I had a problem with my laptop, at least after dropping it, I had a problem.

A cracked screen.

Expensive to repair I thought, so I watched a video on you tube and it appeared to be an easy job and so to ebay I turned and like the Aladdin's Lamp it is, I rubbed it a few times and lo and behold a new screen came through the post.

And today I fitted it.

Like the marvellous comment in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about a Japanese folding bicycle. installing a new screen on a lap top requires great peace of mind and so I waited for the Zen moment to arrive and it arrived today so out with the screw driver, out with the old screen and in with the new.

Now I am wondering like the famous children's TV knitting wife of Noah whether there might be a you tube video for changing the Government?

You can't just buy one on ebay. Neither can you knit one. So I guess we will just have to wait for the election.

2015 can't come soon enough for me.

Underlying my general dissatisfaction with the con-dems is the fact that they make me feel ashamed. I find myself wanting to go up to complete strangers in the street and apologise for the government.

Of course once that is said there follows quite logically the inevitable consequence that some people apparently agree with all of what is being said and done and this expresses itself in the actions of people who are emboldened by the implicit support for their prejudices.

There is in my view a direct line of cause and effect which runs from the newspaper photograph of the Chancellor sitting in his car in a disabled bay eating his burger and the abuse of disabled parking spaces in town centres and outside supermarkets by people who appear as they walk away from their cars to be perfectly able bodied.

As the political rhetoric feeds into the public discourse attitudes harden, people are less generous, less kind to each other, less prepared to be tolerant, less neighbourly.

But the other reason why I cannot wait for 2015 to cast my vote is the rhetoric of blaming the last Labour Government for just about everything.

I came down to my newspaper the other morning to read that, on a recent visit to the Somerset Levels, the Prime Minister had suggested that the responsibility for the flooding should be laid at the door of the last government who had, it seemed, not dredged enough.

As with a previous conservative PM we are always being offered simple statements of the blindingly obviously wrong when faced with complex issues.

There are factors at work here from treeless uplands to canalised rivers (caused by dredging?) to swapping grass crops for Maize crops to rising sea levels all of which point to the historically complex roots of what is happening and which suggest that these extreme weather conditions are arising as a result of changes to atmosphere such as global warming rather than a left wing conspiracy.

I wonder whether the next time Mr Cameron is asked a challenging question on American TV, remember Magna Carta? such as who was responsible for the Norman Invasion? his response will be to blame the Labour Government for reducing the defence budget in 1066.

Well I don't blame Labour for my lap top failure, or global warming, (although the decline of Manchester United under a new manager might have contributed) but I have to admit that fixing it myself, whilst brilliant, hasn't helped the economy because it means that I haven't popped out to PC World or the co-op on line store to buy a new one, so the imbalance of payments when it is announced might be down to me or could I blame labour too?

4th February 2014

Gosh.

In my small world nothing much happens any more.

I read about stuff of course.

And I can see how easy it is to get facts and statistics and information wrong.

I watch the news most  nights, I have been known to watch Question Time but usually switch off before the end having concluded that the audience are usually more articulate, sensible and informed than the panel.

Why is it that ill informed prejudice can be broadcast as though it were a rehearsal of carefully researched fact?

I am all for debate in the public square, I have participated in one or two televised debates myself, on the Jimmy Young Show I debated Norman Tebbit and I was invited on to the Robert Kilroy Silk show to debate drug use.

I did my research for these opportunities made sure that I had a set of handwritten cards each one containing a fact or two pertinent to the argument.

But, its more complicated than that, or I'd rather stick to the known facts about benefit fraud, such as the reality of how much less, at 0.7%, fraud actually is than the public perception that it is 27%, is actually, televisually pretty dull.

Better to go for a quick attention grabbing headline.

Mr Gove, as an ex journalist knows this better than most.

His comments on the causes and effects of the First World War were one example of putting the attention grabbing headline before the facts.

But his latest, that his aim is that you might visit any school in the country and there would be no distinction between private and public education, using the distinction appropriately in so far as in the education sector generally, public means private, with other public schools being described as State.

But does this mean that student/teacher ratios will change in the two sectors? Will there be a fairer sharing of resources? Will State Schools be given their sports fields back rather than having them sold off for housing or industrial development?

One estimate I read suggested that if the State sector had the same access to playing fields as the private, it would require 50% of the countryside being designated as school playing fields.

All of these discussions need to be engaged with in a serious way and disagreements need to be negotiated courteously.

The least courteous forum is Prime Ministers Question Time and the baying and braying across the benches sets a very low bar for the discussion of social and cultural issues but as we consider the landscape in 2014 surely it must become clear to most blinkered and prejudiced that a whole class and generation have seen their jobs disappear and there will be more of that to come as many technical and office jobs become computerised.

As we monitor the rising flood waters and the significant changes in the weather it must surely occur to someone that climate change is not just a passing feature of cyclical weather patterns and that human activity is having a telling and profound effect on the environment we rely on to sustain human life?

When I bought my first subscription to cable TV I noted that the handset contained a button marked Vote. It occurred to me that this provided a whole new way to engage with debate in the public square. My proposal for an Academy in Bradford was that at its heart there would be a commitment to citizenship and to honour this the Academy would have an Agora, a physical debating chamber at its heart and debate would contribute to both pedagogy and management.

I read recently about someone called Katy Hopkinson, I had never heard of the young lady but apparently she took part in a recent TV Debate, the criticism of her performance by Owen Jones in the Independent described the Hopkinisation of political discourse likened it to 'panto'.

Well, Oh yes it is or Oh no its not, but as Question Time, whether the PM's or the BBC's, also gets close to pantomime with its heroes, the hardworkers, or its villains, the shirkers I find myself making a plea for faith and values to be restored to the public square in order to create a better space for the community to begin or deepen conversation about our culture and the critical issues confronting our society.

So having made my plea I will press publish and settle down with a good book.