Money Money Money...

Does money exist?

Well yes and no. It exists in a sort of quantum state where it definitely exists but them maybe it doesn't, a sort of Schrödinger's currency.

I know it exists because I've seen it, in fact I believe we have some downstairs.  I certainly have a pound coin in the bedroom, but that isn't really money because it is an old one and is no longer legal tender.  A very cursory search on the interweb shows that actually only about 3% of the money in the economy is in the form of notes and coins.  97% is virtual money which exists only in the balance sheets of banks and other major institutions.

Is this 97% real money.  Well no, not really. Did you know, for example that when you take out a bank loan or a mortgage, the institution which lends it to you creates it out of thin air. 

If you really want to know more about this here is a link to a paper published by the Bank of England on the subject https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf?la=en&hash=9A8788FD44A62D8BB927123544205CE476E01654

So money can be brought into existence with the stroke of a pen and is sometimes called fountain pen money, although nowadays it will more likely be a key stroke.

A good demonstration of the unrealness of money can be seen in the stock market.  Here billions are created and lost almost on a whim.  If confidence is high and the stock market responds favourably millions of pounds can be created overnight.  Similarly if confidence is low, as at present, billions can be wiped off just as easily.  How can this be? And does it really matter?

Well I suppose it does matter because things like people's pensions are tied up with the value of shares, and that will negatively affect individuals who, for example have to realise their assets at a time when their value is low.

But the truth is that we have a society based at its heart on gambling.  All these city traders are doing is gambling with other people's money and creaming off a percentage for themselves.  We have chosen, in this country to eschew traditional money making activities like manufacturing and to rely instead on the financial sector. We have become a nation of dodgy dealers.  Rees Mogg is only Del Boy in a top hat. His money comes from speculation, which is only a posh word for gambling.  In fact it could be argued that Del Boy was more honest or at least up-front.  He at least traded in goods, albeit they didn't always work. All Mogg and his ilk do is move money around, for no good reason other than it makes them richer.  Would we miss them if they were't there?  Definitely not.

One thing that this current crisis has demonstrated is who the real valued members of society are, and they aren't the money shovellers. The disgusting whinging behaviour of the likes of Branson have showed us what they are really like, and that it takes more than wearing a pullover to make you a man of the people. He's worth an estimated £4 billion.  If he spent three of those billions keeping his businesses afloat, rather than begging for bail-out, he's still have £1billion, which is a whole shit load of money however you look at it and he would still have functioning businesses at the end.  What is more he might earn a bit of respect.

Our government seems desperate to get things back to normal, although I would suggest that that depends on us finding either a cure or an effective vaccine, rather than a premature lifting of lock-down and fingers crossed. One thing is certain.  Capitalism does not hold the key in this case. Unfettered private enterprise in places like the USA, especially in the field of health care has failed and even Trump has intervened (I think, it's difficult to know what he is doing) and is using the military to help out.

Perhaps Marx was right.  Only time will tell but our strength certainly lies at present in the hands of our key workers, not our rich and successful, many of whom are reduced to sending us amusing videos from the security of their own homes.  Nice though this is it won't keep us alive or help us overcome the virus. Clapping and badges are just not enough.  Pay them properly.  To an individual money is very real.  To a government it is imaginary, so use your imagination and make some more.

Waiting for the grownups.

Just a short blog today.

I came to the realisation last night that in my case, and I suspect in the cases of many others, this self isolation thing make not make any difference.

The government, it seems are quite prepared to sacrifice a small proportion of the population to help bolster up the economy. There is much talk of ending the lockdown and for people like me, even if I continue to stay at home it may kill me.

At present the experts, so derided by the likes of Gove, but nevertheless frequently referenced by Hancock, are not clear whether having had a dose of Covid-19 confers immunity.  In other words can you catch it more than once?  The initial barbaric policy of establishing herd immunity by letting those susceptible die off leaving only those with immunity conferred by infection to inherit the earth, or at least the Home Counties is predicated on the fact, or rather the hope, that you can indeed only catch it once.  Conventionally herd immunity is achieved, not by some Darwinian eugenicist's wet dream, but by mass immunisation.  And we don't yet have a vaccine.  We may never have a vaccine. Who knows what the future holds unless Russell Grant just isn't saying.

The plan seems to be to end lockdown in stages, releasing those deemed less vulnerable first, in the hope that gradually life will return to normal. Those deemed more at risk will be expected to remain at home for some considerable time. So far, so reasonable, but this must mean that personal contact outside the home will increase, exposing those who have been deemed low-risk to a greater likelihood of contracting the virus, and consequently spreading it to those still in isolation with whom they have contact.  At present activities such as food shopping are carefully regulated and social distancing is well observed, at least round here.  Would that continue?  Could that continue?

When you are a kid and things go pear shaped, the grownups step in.

Mummy.  Where are the grownups?

Society or bust.

In an interview with that radical right wing publication Woman's Own in 1987 Margaret Thatcher famously made the following pronouncement:

"... you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

This is utter grade one solid gold bollocks.

Society is everything.  It is what keeps us from anarchy.  It is a framework which nurtures us.  A human being can be broken down into its constituent parts, So much hydrogen, so much oxygen, so much iron and so on. Yet if you were to mix all the required ingredients together in big pot you would not get a human being but instead just a nasty and possibly evil smelling mixture which is neither use nor ornament. You could pass an electric current through the mixture, or at least you could get your strange assistant to do it for you while you laugh hysterically as the storm rages overhead and still you would have nothing more than your original mixture, albeit now considerably warmer.

Society is like that.  Individuals make up society, but on their own they can achieve practically nothing. Without the framework of society how precisely is an individual supposed to look after themselves? Okay, Bear Grylls might manage for a while by drinking his own piss and eating earthworms, but if he gets appendicitis or tetanus even he would struggle to survive, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he would die. And with a population of 67 million the rest of us would pretty soon run out of earthworms.

Society feeds us, it cares for us in hospitals, it educates us, it keeps us safe, it builds and maintains an infrastructure within which we can do more than just exist. We can be creative, we can enjoy the creativity of others, we can stop worrying where our next meal is coming from, we can get drunk.  We have the leisure to laugh together, and share our worries.  And I quite like that, in fact I like it a lot.

Society is what makes us human and not just an amorphous horde of hunter-gatherers with opposable thumbs and murderous intentions. Imagine how much more greasy the greasy pole would be if we were all just out for ourselves.

Even capitalism in its purest and least benevolent form requires society. It requires a hierarchy which provides a ready pool of labour to be exploited by those at the top, a means of distribution and a market in which they can sell their goods and services.  Fortunately pure capitalism is rare these days.  Profit is still the driving force in many capitalist societies, but usually it is tempered by government intervention of some kind, although the driving force is still profit.

Here in the UK we have a society which is buckling under the pressure it is experiencing, not just from the Covid pandemic, but from years of unnecessary austerity imposed for what are purely ideological reasons. The venture capital vultures are circling, waiting to pick over the bones of anything which fails to survive.

What is the answer?

Well to be honest I'm buggered if I know.  My instinct is to remove the profit motive from anything essential. It would be a start. Any excess money made could be reinvested rather than paid to shareholders in the form of dividends.  I don't advocate wholesale nationalisation of the means of production.  Why would that necessarily be better? But the concept that public services and transportation, should be run for profit is both stupid and dangerous.  If private providers find they are not making enough profit they can just stop their provision.  Who picks up the pieces?  The government, in one form or another.  And the wonderful thing is, governments cannot go bust, despite the theory (once again more bollocks from Thatcher) that a national economy is the same as household spending.

I had real hopes that soon we might see some sanity in this matter.  Now I look forward to an underfunded old age.  I hope I die, not before I get old, but before I need to go into a care home.

If you have enjoyed this please share so others can read it. Thanks T xx.

Globalisation, it's great isn't it?

In the summer of 1964, at the age of ten, I skipped school and flew as an unaccompanied minor to Greece to visit my Aunt who lived in Kipseli, a district in the north of Athens.  It wasn't the first time I had been abroad.  The previous year the family Green had driven down to Athens in a half timbered mini traveller.  We caused quite a stir as we travelled through villages where they had rarely seen foreigners, let alone any that looked like us, and kids would wave enthusiastically at us as we drove by.
 

Anyway I am sure that nowadays an unaccompanied minor on a flight from Heathrow to Athens would scarcely be noticed.  In 1964 I was treated like a minor celebrity.  The air hostesses (they weren't flight attendants then) made a right fuss of me.  I got a meal from first class, a visit to the flight deck and a chat with the captain and a sick bag (unused) full of exotic fruit to take with me when we landed.  I do remember that it contained a peach which was hard and still slightly green, a complete contrast to the Greek peaches which I was about to experience.

Why am I telling you this?  Other than indulging in a bit of pleasant nostalgia I wanted to demonstrate how much the world has shrunk in the last fifty years or so. A trip to Heathrow to stand on the roof gardens of the Queen's Building watch the planes taking off was an exotic day out. Now Heathrow is mainly somewhere you get stuck when your flight is delayed. Air travel was rare.  I am pretty sure that I was the only person in my primary school to have travelled by air, though Micky Simmonds might have flown too because his dad was Greek and he may have been to visit family.

In March last year there were approximately 176,000 flights per day around the world. That works out at over 64 million in a year. The planet is shrinking daily. Which has several consequences.

We now know what goji berries are and they are available to buy should you so desire. Me, I'm not fussed. But I do like the fact that we can have seasonal produce all year round.  Many poorer countries rely almost exclusively on tourism to support their economy.  Long haul flights are now commonplace, and people enjoy a week or two of exotic adventure to help them escape the mundanity of their daily lives.

But ranged against these are the disadvantages.  Clearly the damage caused by the emissions of this plethora of flights is significant.  It would seem that aircraft are serious polluters, although we must not forget motor vehicles when we are looking for culprits, nor any other activity which uses fossil fuels.

Something however which few had considered at least until we were forced to, was the spread of disease. As a complete non-expert I have been shocked by the speed at which Covid-19 has travelled to almost every corner of the globe. In this country we had the chance to lock down right at the beginning.  We are a small group of islands.  Stopping flights and ferry crossings is simple, but this government is driven by economics, not public health.  Even the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is an economist, with no experience in the area for which he is responsible, other than as a user. Even now they are talking about lifting the lockdown to help the economy.  Sure more people may die, but they've already let countless avoidable deaths occur, so what is a few more? Dead people are not statistics.  They are almost without exception somebody's child or parent or relative or friend. They may be saints, they may be utter arseholes, but they don't deserve to be sacrificed on the altar of economic necessity. There is an argument that if the economy collapses then more will die than would dive from Covid-19.  In that case it is the responsibility of the government to make sure it does not happen. It is no use relying on the market to sort this out.  If the economy shows signs of collapse they must shore it up, not wring their hands and mutter 'what a shame'.  And one way to do this is a Universal Basic Income.

When the banks came close to collapse the government shored them up by creating money to help them through the worst of it.  Has they instead given that money to the general population to spend, imagine the stimulation it would have given to the economy as whole.  Austerity might never have happened, food banks might be virtually unknown.

But they won't do his.  And why?  Because they are afraid somebody might get something they don't need, something, as they see it, for nothing. Just there are benefit scroungers and so they make it impossible to live on benefits, some of those in receipt of UBI might not need extra income, so they won't give it to anybody. But then what should we expect from a government who are said to be considering reopening schools despite the possibility of the death of a 'small' number of pupils?

Help.

Help.  Every morning I wake up (eventually) and one of the first things I do is fire up my laptop and check my emails. There is rarely anything there of real interest, but I check, just the same.  Then I check my news feed on Facebook and see if there is anything of interest which deserves my immediate attention, and when I discover that there is not I move over to Twitter and do the same there. It saves putting on the radio and having to endure the Today Programme, (I just typed that as Toady, should I have left it?).

At one time Today was the programme we woke up to every morning. Now I can't bear to listen to the news on the BBC. I don't think, despite what many on the left would claim, it is particularly biased in favour of the Conservative Party as such, although the Today editorial and presenting team have form, but I find it quite nauseating the way it slavishly parrots the propaganda which is daily churned out by this government. It is perfectly possible that they would do the same whatever the colour of the government of the time, who knows? Only time will tell.  However this is particularly pertinent at present as we all huddle in our bunkers, isolated and frightened.  We rely on the government of the day to protect us.  That is after all one of the main functions of a government.  If we can't rely on it to do that, or at least make a decent stab at it then why bother to have one at all?

Anyway.  Why 'Help'?

I don't watch daytime TV.  It offers so little and delivers even less, so I am not an aficionado of Good Morning Campers, or whatever the programme is called, and I receive my daily gobbets of wisdom through the medium of Facebook and Twitter, part digested, so much more palatable and easier to chew.

And.

And recently I have found myself agreeing with, nay even applauding (which seems to be very fashionable at present) that odious hypocrite and all round despicable excuse for a journalist known to us all as Piers Morgan. He seems to have got his mojo back and the bit between his teeth, if I may be allowed to mix metaphors in a slightly disturbing way. I still have to remind myself that this is the man responsible for hacking a dead girl's phone, but he certainly gives the anaemic government 'spokesperson of the day' a good going over.  It may be because Piers himself feels vulnerable to the virus, who knows? For me it's almost like discovering that Fred West played bass in my favourite band.

There is something disturbing about the way this government is handling the crisis. They behave as if we are all amnesiacs with no access to the internet. They tell us black is white and then deny doing so, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.  Now that the Spaffer in Chief is holed up in Chequers with his pregnant mistress, and apparently incommunicado, it is left to a procession of dead eyed zombies to give the daily press briefing.  Some make such a hash that we may never see them again. Will we see Priti Patel gracing the podium any time soon? I do hope not.  Her combination of psychopathy, estuary English and inability to read numbers was too excruciating even to enjoy.

And then there are those chosen to be sacrificed on the altar of Morning TV.  The reserve team.  Is this really the best the country can produce? If so we really are buggered.

And the only thing I have learned so far is that they will not answer a straight question with a straight answer. It's as if the are all taking part in a National Obfuscation Contest. And damn it some of them are good.

But it doesn't need to be like this.  The default setting for a Tory spokesperson is to deflect and, if that doesn't work, lie. Why? Why can they not tell us the truth? Admit they got things wrong.  This is an unprecedented situation.  There is no accepted correct way to deal with it.  There has to be a certain amount of 'suck-it-and-see'. What is important is that they learn from their mistakes and use what they have learned wisely.

'We are following the science', says Matt Hancock.  Really? What an utterly meaningless statement.  Science is a system of studying and testing in order to try and make sense of the world in which we live. In science having a theory disproved is as important as having one proved. It is science which is trying  to find both a cure and a vaccine.  Science is not an instruction book, it is the means of writing one.  And in this case there is no book yet.

The problem is that outside the world of science, failure is seen as a weakness.  Those who fail are losers.  Fighters recover.  If you don't recover, presumably you didn't fight hard enough. Winners 'take it on the chin' and barrel on through.  They spit in the eye of the virus. 

Tell that to the families of those who died.

We all want to survive.  None of us wants to die, so my message to our government is:  Grow up, tell the truth and who knows, maybe you'll earn some respect, even from me.

Lies, damned lies and... foreign influence.

Nobody, (I suspect, I haven't asked them all), would deny that the internet has changed the way society works. For a start it has speeded it up beyond all recognition. In the early days of the Raj it took weeks for news to reach the UK.  Even with the invention of the telegraph, though news could travel faster it still took a significant time to disseminate it. Then came the radio and with it a massive leap forward.  Now you could sit in your plush armchair in Pinner and listen to what was going on on the other side of the world. The television added pictures, albeit fuzzy ones.

The problem with all this technology, if indeed it was a problem, was that it was one way.  You could shout as loud as you liked at the radio, but nobody except your neighbours could hear you.  If you disagreed with something you had to write a letter, usually beginning with the words: 'Why, oh why, oh why?' post it and hope that somebody would actually read it.  Even the telephone, which allowed two way conversations was limited by whether you both possessed a telephone or failing that lived near a phone box. I have an old telephone here on my desk.  It has been restored and works as perfectly as it did in 1955 when it was made. It does not have a # key.  I can't use it for anything other than talking to other people. It is the antithesis of the smartphone, but boy is it well built. It would probably survive a nuclear attack, so the cockroaches will have something to talk to each other on.

On the other hand, the machine on which I am typing this is frighteningly sophisticated. It is not a new model.  It is mid 2012, which worryingly is eight years ago. Where did the time go? I have upgraded it a bit but basically in computer terms it is an old clunker, and yet I have not even begun to scratch the surface of its possibilities.

I mostly use it to access the internet, and here we return to my opening remarks. With the help of this device and a fibre network (I always think that sounds like an organic pan-scrub), I have access to information and goods I could only dream of twenty five years ago. Then, mobile phones were status symbols and not particularly smart, and the web was the domain of academics. Now I can shop in the USA without even getting out of my chair, I can research my family history from the kitchen table, I can watch films and listen to music on demand, I can talk to friends and family almost anywhere in the world with or without pictures. But of course you know all this.  It's the way life is. And in our current situation it's a damned good thing it is. We are locked down but not locked out, in fact we have greater access than before.  We now know what Mary Beard's study looks like and what Matt Lucas's staircase is like (and what picture he has on the landing). Life has become like one long episode of 'Through the Keyhole' only mercifully without Keith Lemon's grubby commentary.

The problem with all this is that we all too often forget that the internet is a two way thing. Nowadays if you shout at your computer there is a real possibility that somebody is listening and will hear you.  It might just be Siri or Alexa and they may be confused by your ranting, but it might just be someone less harmless.

And in this instance I am not really talking about the dangers of a Big Brother state.  At least not our Big Brother state, corrupt and venal though it might be. I am referring to the interference of foreign states in the political life of our country.

It seems to me a tad ironic that we are (presumably) leaving the EU in order to 'take back control.'  Those damn Germans are too big for their boots, too successful, too powerful for us to want to be their friends any more. So instead brave little Britain heads off into he unknown to once again become a leading world power.  Except for better or worse we already are a world power.  We are permanent members of the UN Security Council; we are a member of the G7.

Sadly what we also are or will be is vulnerable. The Government has conveniently forgotten to publish the report into Russian interference in our elections. I'm sure Vladimir is in no hurry to see it on the bookshelves, but even if it is published and it shows that he and his regime did interfere in our democratic processes he will not be too upset.  He seems to want to sow discord and then sit back and watch the fun.  What else explains the Skripal case? His plan seems a touch ineffable.

And then there is China. China is a big country.  China is a powerful country.  China has its finger in many pies. Who knows what China is up to?  I wouldn't even like to begin to guess.  We shall have to wait and see.

And finally there is Israel.  The state whose name nobody dare mention.  Israel is a rogue state. This has nothing to do with its existence. It exists, simple as that.  It also flouts international law and convention with impunity.  It has nuclear weapons in direct contravention of the UN treaty banning them. It denies it has them and refuses to sign the treaty.  Draw your own conclusions. Daily it violates the human rights of the many Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. It wields an influence far greater than it should and there is plenty of evidence to show it has interfered with the internal politics of the UK Labour Party, when it became clear that Corbyn had sympathy with the Palestinians.

And what has this got to do with the internet? Well everything really.  With the internet these malign forces have access to millions of people. They can affect opinion, they can change the result of elections, and most of us don't even know it is happening.

A matter of life and death

I've always liked to think of myself as a rational man. I'm not superstitious beyond saying hello to magpies and to be honest I say hello to most wildlife and farm animals I see when I am out.  There is a herd of highland cattle in a field I pass on my daily bike ride to whom I always say hello as well, and there is a buzzard who lives in a small copse who gets a greeting if I see it.

I'm not religious, I don't believe in any higher force. I don't think everything happens for a reason. I do think we can explain why some things happen, but that is not the same thing at all. In fact I believe that everything has a rational explanation, just that we haven't yet worked out what some of these explanations are.  I suspect that our ignorance far outweighs our knowledge and much of what we think we know are actually theories which have yet to be proven, E=MC² being a case in point, as it seems to work in some instances and not in others.

I don't believe there is any such thing as the Bermuda Triangle, I think the nonsense talked about Roswell and Area 51 is just that, nonsense. I don't believe that aliens have landed in remote rural areas of the USA and impregnated unsuspecting young women (I'd look closer to home for the reason for that).  I don't believe the world is controlled by the Illuminati. I don't even believe the Illuminati exist other than in the minds of those with too little to do and a desire to find someone to blame for their current situation.

And I don't believe in conspiracy theories.

At least I didn't until very recently. My stance was always that someone would give the game away, Some disaffected ex-employee would sell his or her story to the Sun.

But now I seem to have been proved wrong. The leaked report from the Labour Party destined originally for the EHRC but later suppressed, would seem to indicate that there was indeed a major conspiracy within the Labour Party to destroy the political ambitions of the then leader Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general. It seems incontrovertible despite protestations from the likes of the malignant goblin that is Luke Akehurst who said on Twitter "I've read the whole of the report and there is no evidence in it of anyone working against the party." Ignoring for the present the slightly wild claim that he had "read the whole of the report", all 800+ pages of it, if you examine what he says he refers to the 'party' and technically he is correct. Those who plotted to sabotage Corbyn were not attacking the Party they were trying to take it back. It was not an attack from outside, it was an internal coup, facilitated, it would seem by employees of that party, presumably at the behest of those politicians who resented their loss of influence, not to say power.

That large numbers of the PLP were unhappy that Corbyn had become leader was well known.  It is difficult to hide mass resignations and leadership challenges. What was not known was that the Party machine was working along side them to plot his downfall.

Details of their actions are available now, so I won't dwell on them but I will say I was always suspicious that all was not as it should be, but dismissed my suspicions because they fell into the conspiracy theory category.  This plot seems to have worked because those involved successfully kept it secret.  It was a relatively small conspiracy and involved few people, basically only those who stood to gain from its success.  Who of them would have blown the whistle? Indeed the fact that it has been uncovered now, when effectively it is too late to do anything about it is instructive. Corbyn is banished and discredited.  The right wing of the party is back in control, and bugger the 251,000 who voted for Corbyn after he squeezed his way onto the ballot in 2015 and the 313,000 who did so the following year after a challenge to his leadership.

The party wanted him and huge numbers of them worked their cotton socks off for him and his policies with not the slightest inkling that forces within the Party were undermining their every move.

I feel incredibly let down.  This was the Labour Party.  The party of the people. For the many not the few. Except it wasn't.  It was for the few, not the rest of us. We could have had a decent stab at socialism.  Now that will never happen in my lifetime and for that I will never forgive the plotters and those on whose behalf they plotted. To paraphrase Bill Shankly, politics isn't just a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that, although for many today it really is a matter of life and death and that is sufficient reason to get very angry.