10th October 2012

Having recently spent time in Spain it was impossible to ignore the news of  protests in Madrid staged by Los Indignados, as they work to achieve solidarity between those in debt, people struggling with Mortgages or rents that are unaffordable.

It is a protest that is political and practical as it seeks to steer the Government away from cuts that harm the lives of the poorest and to investment in the nations future.

I am sure that the indignados would have made their voices felt in Birmingham this week, there is every justification for indignation listening to the conference speakers.

The circus in Birmingham is in full swing.

Apparently Boris came and conquered and now we have a nation of strivers, aspirant strivers at that.

Well it is I suppose better than being described as a nation of skivers!

It's probably the first word the speech writers came up with but in the delivery Mr Cameron thought better of it and in order to keep the alliteration and the rhythm of his speech, changed the k for a t.

Difficult to know but what is clear is that the Government will continue to argue the causes of the financial crisis and focus the blame onto the poor and those dependent on welfare.

Welfare budgets are to be cut again, it will be very difficult for you we are told by the Millionaires in the Cabinet, but it has to be done, otherwise Britain will no longer be competitive in the global market place.

Two themes that I have pursued in my blog over the time that I have been writing, are the themes of fairness and opportunity.

It is essential that the national cake is divided fairly and it crucial that all people have the opportunity to do well.

The danger at the present time is that the rhetoric of the Tories, often using the same words, will mask the real difference between a fair and just society and a divided and broken society.

In so many areas of policy words are used wrongly and incorrectly, so many claims are made falsely and of course the con-dems with their liberal partners can find ways of masking the toryness of their policies with a dash of liberal rhetoric.

At the heart of the speech in Birmingham Mr Cameron declared that:

Cutting state spending was the best way to create sustainable jobs?

Helping people off welfare was a route out of poverty.

Academic rigour gave children the best start in life.

At face value these words can seem OK, but dig a little deeper into the ideas that underlie them.

How does cutting state spending create sustainable jobs in areas where the single largest employer is in fact the public sector and where business has withdrawn, either to cheaper labour markets or more profitable market places.

How does cutting benefits for families and individuals, for young people and the disabled provide a route out of poverty?

When I left school at 15 I was told that I was fit only to be a bricklayer, failed by the academic system I educated myself by reading and eventually five years later enrolled at college, not everyone responds to the notion of academic rigour, not everyone would succeed at Eton.

I lived in Birmingham for six years, for three of those years I helped to spend a Million Pounds a year regenerating the East of the City in Michael Heseletine's Task Force.

I worked near Saltley Gate which in February 1972 was the focus of a fight against austerity pay deals.

30,000 Birmingham engineers took strike action  in solidarity with striking miners.

The victory at Saltley, won through solidarity strikes, was the turning point for the miners.

Within seven weeks the government was defeated.

Today, people face an assault on their living conditions reminiscent of previous Tory attacks.

The Forty year anniversary of the Battle of Saltley Gate carries powerful lessons for working people whose jobs and livelihoods are threatened once again.

Indignation is a proper response to what has happened this week in Birmingham.

7th October 2012

So after one nation red Ed in Manchester, the blue meanies are about to have their conference in Birmingham.

Of course they're hopeless.

Booze ups and breweries come to mind.

The latest fiasco of course is the West Coast Rail Franchise.

Of course Branson is laughing his socks off, Sir Richard of course .........

He of the virgin business, business ......

Wish I had never bought Tubular Bells, but there you are, just didn't believe that buying a record would mean that 40 years later he would be treating my diabetes or selling me a ticket for when I travel to Edinburgh tomorrow ............ Just goes to show, never underestimate someone called Richard, even if his friends call him Dicky, he will still be tricky .........

The news, apparently, is that half of us make no contribution to the national purse.

Well I certainly don't, as a pensioner I am now a net incomer, the bulk of my income coming from the exchequer, I pay tax on it, of course, but between us, the indoor critic and I, take more out than we put in.

But, think tanks, and Tory think tanks at that, to one side, take more out of what than what?

The thing is that the national product in financial terms is huge, billions huge, but take away the profits lodged offshore, the tax dodging billionaires, the bankers and the footballers with rather large back pockets and my, relatively small monthly income, offset I might say, against the saving I represent to the exchequer in my role as a carer and?

Well there you have it, I represent good value for money.

I worked for over forty years, started when I was 15, paid tax from day one, so in terms of the social economy, I paid in and now the pension is worth what it is worth, so thank you Mr (nay Lord) Beveridge!

The latest news that 50% of the population takes out more than it puts in, is OK if you reckon without the overall economic performance of the economy as a whole.

Britain is a rich western nation, with an output from manufacturing, financial services and pension funds, far in excess of the income/expenditure equation of the working versus the not working (i.e. pensioners and beneficiaries) so to argue as Mitt Romney did in the USA, that 47% of the population would vote Democrat because they rely on the state is actually wrong.

The issue here is that wealth is inappropriately and unfairly distributed.

There is no longer work for everyone because work has changed.

Technology, robotics, intelligence means that there is, as the Bible has it, no longer, holes to dig or vines to tend.

So inevitably, there will be folk who have no place in the economic scheme of things, but they still need to spend, they still consume, they still have a role to play and a life to live.

This argument that 50% take out more than they put in is tempered by the 50% who for whatever reason fail to put in what they should, after all surely, the national income should benefit the nation?

The indoor critic hates the FT Weekend supplement, How to Spend It, I quite enjoy it, because it reminds me that there are folk who can spend £2000 on a shirt, or a jacket or a coat, who have more to spend on stuff than I have to live on for a year, there is money out there, being generated by the economy, so red Ed is for one nation, the Cameroons is another nation altogether, so lets see who's right, can we turn this round, boot out the blue meanies and elect a government that actually gives a toss, and share the national economy fairly and justly?

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.