Karen Matthews Is Pure Evil?

 General, Media, Politics  1 Response »
Dec 052008
 

Now that we officially know that Karen Matthews is guilty of kidnapping her child in the interests of sharing the reward for finding a missing child, the floodgates have opened to headlines accusing her of being an evil mother. Personally I think it is a bit of a stretch to call her ‘evil’ given other examples of true evil in the world today … the mother of Baby P for example, or that Austrian gent who imprisoned his family underground and repeatedly raped them (or the English equivalent for that matter).

Let us have a look at what she did. She asked (or forced) her boyfriend’s uncle to pick up her daughter from school and imprison her inside his flat until they could arrange for him to ‘find’ Shannon and collect the reward for the both of them. The words for this that come to mind are ‘cruel’, ‘greedy’, ‘uncaring’, ‘malicious’, and ‘deceitful’, but not exactly evil.  The words of Shannon when she was rescued by the police (“Stop it, you’re frightening me!”) don’t indicate a child who was in chronic distress … it sounds like she was more distressed by the police barging into the flat!

That doesn’t mean to say that Karen doesn’t deserve a lengthy prison sentence for what she has done, and the uncle (Michael Donovan) too, but labelling her ‘evil’ is putting her crimes on the same levels as those monsters who deliberately go out of their way to torture and/or kill children.

The tabloid press are obviously having a field day with this, often blaming the welfare state and the ‘scrounging underclass’ for producing a Karen Matthews. Firstly the crimes of Karen are not a product of her class, but a product of her greed. If she was a middle-class accountant, she would be fiddling the books; if she were a stockbroker she would be guilty of insider-trading. If she were a banker, she’d be running off to some nice warm place with stolen money.

Secondly the existence of people whose lifestyle could classify them as ‘scroungers’ is just as irritating to me as anyone else, but removing the safety net of the welfare state does not seem to be a good idea. I might not like funding the lifestyle of the other Karens out there, but I would rather do that than risk harming the other Shannons out there.

UK Conservatives Confused On Public Debt

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 182008
 

Today the leader of the Conservative party David Cameron spoke on economic policy and went on again about the level of government debt in the Uk. He is quoted in a BBC article as saying Britain was different from other nations because public debt levels were already very high; in fact you can play the video and find that he believes that Britain already has “the biggest budget deficit in the modernised world”. Well perhaps, although it is clearly an attempt by the Conservatives to reclaim the “party of low taxation” banner and frighten the public with talk of a “borrowing binge”.

So shall we take a look at Britain’s public debt ? It is currently at the level of around £660 billion which sounds like a huge amount (and is). It is also around £11,000 per head of Britain’s population. Now lets look at Germany which has a debt level of around €1.5 trillion, or around €19,000 per head of Germany’s population. This comes out to £16,010 per head thanks to Google’s currency converter, or £1.27 trillion in total. I guess Germany is not part of the modernised world which might come as a surprise to the Germans!

Now the US; On 30 September 2008, the total U.S. federal debt passed the $10 trillion mark for the first time, with about $32,895 per capita (cut&paste from the Wikipedia article). This converts to about £6.66 trillion pounds in total and £21,900 per capita. It seems the Conservative party has trouble doing basic arithmetic with such large numbers.

Or perhaps they are being sensible and looking at public debt as a percentage of the size of the economy. Expecting an unsuccessful politician to be sensible is little unrealistic, but hey! I’ve been wrong before so I could be now. Looking at public debt as a percentage of GDP (a kind of measurement of the size of the economy) is a far better way of doing it, as we do not get distracted by all those zeros and is basically what the banks do when deciding how big a mortgage we can get (the old rule being up to three times the yearly income).

The CIA has an interesting table giving the level of public debt in terms of percentage of GDP for the year 2007. The UK is listed at position 50 with a level of 43% of GDP. Lets have a quick look at the big names above the UK in the list :-

  • Japan is listed at position 3 with 170%.
  • Italy is at number 7 with 104%
  • Germany is at number 20 with 64.9%
  • France is at number 22 with 63.9%
  • and the US is at number 27 with 60.8%

Does not seem quite so bad really does it ? Wait! The UK debt has risen considerably since 2007, so we should recalculate the level of debt for a later time. Fortunately the UK National Statistics department have an update for September 2008 showing public debt was at a level of 43.4% of GDP which would still leave us at position 50 in the CIA’s table. Even if we recalculate using the latest debt figure (given above as £660 billion) we get to around 44.4% of GDP which is a pretty big increase, but would still leave us at position 49 in the CIA’s table.

Interestingly the National Statistics page I referred to (here is the link) also gives us the highest percentage of GDP that the UK public debt level reached – 44.2% in 1997 when the last Conservative government was in control.

It seems to me that at best the Conservatives are scare-mongering with talk about huge tax rises to combat spiraling public debt at record levels. That is not to say that public debt is not a concern, but I think we have a fair way to go before we reach the levels of some other modern economies which are still reasonably successful. Of course public debt has to be repaid eventually, but some of that public debt will be repaid by the banks that have been bailed out and by eventually selling off Northern Rock (at a considerable profit I hope).

Of course I could be totally wrong about the level of UK government debt, and perhaps we do have the largest public debt in the Western world, but I cannot see the evidence for it myself. Perhaps someone could point me in the right direction?

Customer Service at Tesco? Perhaps Not.

 General  No Responses »
Nov 142008
 

On the way home from work tonight (after a particularly hard day that started at 6am), I dropped into Tesco to pick up a lazy person’s meal – a pizza and a four-pack of Guinness. I intentionally queued at the very long queue in front of the human checkout rather than the very short queue in front of the machine checkout because :-

  • I wanted the goods bagged for me.
  • I didn’t want to wait (and queue jump) whilst the checkout people got around to authorising my alcohol purchase.

I noticed several curious things whilst queuing … which was rapidly getting longer :-

  • The checkout people included the slowest checkout person this Tesco has (not her fault I’m sure but it has relevance later), and someone who is not normally found working the checkout.
  • Shortly after I joined the queue, the one who is not normally working the till started suggesting that people use the machine checkout. In fact she was quite insistent about it.
  • She then shut her till and left the counter to go up and down the queue suggesting people use the machine checkout and offering to show people how to use it.
  • She then decided to spend a few minutes moving shopping baskets around whilst the slowest checkout person was left alone servicing a very long queue.
  • Showing people how to use the machine checkout actually took longer than it would have done to just do the checkout normally.

When I finally reached the head of the queue, it was obvious that there were no plastic bags to bag the shopping for anyone … except for those who had chosen to use the machine checkout. Which was decided odd as it is more common for those with full baskets to use the human checkout.

I can understand that plastic bags should be discouraged, but this was a little extreme! In fact the bloke in front of me was forced to buy a re-usable bag because he had far more shopping than could be carried by hand. I would have just left it and gone elsewhere in his case!

It did seem as though this particular Tesco seems to regard customers as an inconvenience.

UK Bank Holidays – Where Are They ?

 General, Politics  2 Responses »
Nov 112008
 

Of course speaking strictly they should be called “public holidays” or in the case of Easter, “common law holidays”, but whatever they are called, where are they ? The UK as a whole has just 8 days of public holidays which is decidedly stingy when compared to the European average of 10.8. What is especially irritating is that the part of the UK that has been the least well behaved over the last hundred years gets 10 days public holiday (NI).

But why limit ourselves to raising it to the European average ? That is somewhat unambitious, and we should think of actually increasing the average somewhat. Lets go for 12 days.

First of all we should add each country’s national day – St. George’s Day (in England), and St. David’s day (in Wales). Both Scotland and Northern Ireland already celebrate their national days, and Scotland needs the day it “swapped” to celebrate St. Andrew’s day restored. Frankly a country that cannot celebrate its own national day does not deserve to be called a country!

Secondly (and with good timing), we should be commemorating Remembrance Day as a bank holiday. Frankly not having this day as a national holiday is a complete disgrace and an insult to those who died in WWI. It could also serve a dual purpose as a sort of “Britain” day.

That leaves two left to distribute, and I would suggest having both in the summer – perhaps one on midsummer’s day and another in July.

Next all public holidays need to be properly protected. Many do not realise that there is no statutory duty for an employer to recognise “bank holidays”; we simply rely on them behaving properly. Employees need to be protected by being given the day off, or if it is necessary to work to be given double-time pay. And public holidays should not count against the yealy leave entitlement – as implemented in most of Europe.

Undoubtedly businesses will complain about the cost to business of all this extra loafing around. Well tough. You guys get it your own way far too much. Besides you might be surprised. Not only is there the surge of productivity that an employee gets when he or she has had a good break, but many also feel the need to “clear the desk” before a day or two off. It is possible that more work would get done with more public holidays than the current state.

Remembrance Sunday

 General, History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 092008
 

Today is Remembrance Sunday; a day to remember those killed in war. It should perhaps be on the 11th November (this year on a Tuesday), but the British government is too cheap to give us all a day off for remembrance.

As this is the 90th anniversary of the armistance of world war i, it is perhaps understandable that some concentrate on the dead of that war. As a general rule one of the things we remember when we remember the dead of the wars, is that they died for our freedom. For the wars since that is definitely on the true side, but perhaps not for WWI …

After all WWI started when the Austrian-Hungarian “dual monarchy” declared war on Serbia after Serbian military intelligence had been involved in assisting the assassination of a Grand-Duke. Russia was pulled in to support Serbia, and the rest of the European ‘powers’ were similarly pulled into the war.

But that is over simplistic – historians are still arguing over the causes of WWI. But what is clear is that there was initially no great villain that needed bringing down although many of the men who volunteered to fight were led to believe (in the case of Britain) that Germany was some sort of great villain.

To those who survived WWI, Rememberance Day was less a day for remembering those who died for our freedom, than just remembering the dead. It is difficult to appreciate the level of casualties today, but one clue is on the lists of the dead given on memorials in almost every little village. Probably just about everyone living in Britain in the 1920s would have been close to someone who had died in WWI.

To put it into statistical terms, Britain lost 2.1% of its population in WWI compared to 0.93% in WWII.

Some of the blame for the horrendous level of casualties can be placed at the door at the incompetant military leadership who took far too long to adjust to 20th century warfare from their 19th century mindsets. Or in the words of more than a few, the British army were “Lions led by donkeys”.

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