Week 43 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

Congratulations!

It really is an unusual pleasure to be able to offer unqualified congratulations to a senior member of the Government but I have no hesitation in doing so to Home Secretary Theresa May for her refusal to extradite computer whizz-kid Gary McKinnon to the USA.  Whether or not he was suicidal is surely beside the point.  I don’t think that it needed an expert in international espionage or a leading psychiatrist, to realize that this young (by my standards!) sufferer from Asperges Syndrome had no evil intent whatsoever when he hacked his way into some of the USA’s most secret electronic files.

If the USA feels that someone should be prosecuted for this affair, the individual or company who sold them a system that could be hacked into by a lone 42 year old in a distant land, might be a more appropriate object for their urge for justice (or could it be an urge for vengeance after they had been made to look ridiculous?) than this hapless British citizen.

If Gary McKinnon managed to hack into the USA’s most closely guarded secrets it cannot be impossible for someone else, deliberately and with much less innocent intent, to do so.  President Barak Obama might find it worth his while to despatch one or two of his own computer experts to England to have a polite and friendly chat with Mr McKinnon.  If asked courteously he might be prepared to tell them just how he did it and even, for an appropriate fee, help them to devise a system that is not just American-expert-proof but McKinnon-proof!

Footnote:   Where, I wonder, was the voice of UKIP in the McKinnon controversy?  Usually their strident voice is in the forefront when British sovereignty is being defended.  Their silence over this matter reinforces my conviction that they are motivated less by love of the United Kingdom than by dislike and suspicion of our fellow Europeans..

Growing old on the ‘Costa Geriatrica’

          That’s how I have heard our Essex Holiday Coast disparagingly described.  It is true that we have a higher proportion of elderly residents than most other areas in the United Kingdom.  Holland-on-Sea in particular is said to have the highest concentration of pensioners in Europe!  For that, I have no doubt, there are two reasons.  Ours is a very healthy area so we natives tend to live longer than those elsewhere.  It is also a very pleasant area in which to live, with low rainfall, lots of sunshine and safe sandy beaches, so those who live in less fortunate regions often move here when they retire and are able to do so.  Surely those are features about which we should be proud, not apologetic.

            Old age does bring problems – not least, as I can confirm from personal experience, to those who achieve it.  When I was in my forties I remember thinking how silly seventy and eighty year olds were to cling so frantically to their independence.  Couldn’t they see how much better off they would be in a residential or care home – no more worries about preparing meals and washing up, about the laundry or the neglected garden, about fuel bills or house maintenance?   There would be no more loneliness, with plenty of contemporaries available to chat and share memories, and there would be medical and nursing care available at any hour of the day or night.   

            It sounded idyllic to my then middle-aged mind but now I am over 90, and clinging to independence myself, I well understand the fears of those old people half a century ago.  I find that shopping, preparing meals, doing the washing (with a reliable washing machine!), dealing with my email correspondence and preparing this blog every week, keep me fully occupied, avoid my vegetating in an armchair while watching daytime television, and prevent my thoughts dwelling too much on happier days in the past.   I am lonely only for the wife who shared my life for 60 years. I appreciate the occasional company of my contemporaries but I also enjoy a chat (I can only hope that I don’t bore them out of their minds) with younger people – the ladies at the supermarket check-out, the younger folk (that’s actually everybody!) at the Quaker Meeting and at the two Clacton churches I visit with a friend each week.  Then there’s the lady who spends an hour or so with me every Friday, preventing the interior of my bungalow from becoming a tip, and the gardener who slows down my neglected garden’s evolution into a wild-life sanctuary!  Nor must I forget the value of my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) that gives me the independence I need to do my shopping, visit local friends and get to those church services and Quaker Meetings.

And, although it may sound fanciful in this secular and materialistic age, I don’t feel that I have entirely lost contact with my late wife while I remain in the bungalow in which we spent half a century together.  Often I feel her, always benign and loving, presence.  Somehow I don’t think that that presence would follow me into a care home.

My wife Heather – as I remember her towards the end of her life.

Towards the end of her life I went with her when she visited friends who were spending their declining years in residential care homes in Clacton (she was the visitor – I was just the chauffeur!) and I learned from my own observation that while some such homes were very good indeed, others were awful – with noisy, un-cooperative and antisocial residents and inexperienced, harassed and uncaring staff.

            Nor does remaining in one’s own home with the support of social services necessarily provide a happy solution.  Once again a government report (that the government chooses to ignore!) highlights the danger of contracting these services out to ‘the private sector’.  Investigation revealed that some private agencies were found to be using totally untrained staff, and even staff with criminal records, for personal and social care of elderly and disabled people in their own homes.  I remember seeing, in a tv documentary last year, a secretly taken video of a ‘professional carer’ giving an old gentleman a blanket bath, with a sponge in one hand while the other clutched a mobile phone pressed to her ear with which she was having a chat with a friend!

            Last week’s Clacton Gazette carried the shock/horror headline SHOCKING ABUSE OF OUR ELDERLY.  This did not relate either to care agencies or social services authorities, but to abuse of some old people in their own homes by their own relatives.  Age UK Essex Advisory Service (based in Thorpe-le-Soken) has found that some local families, impoverished by unemployment and rising prices, are bullying elderly relatives into handing over some of their money to them or, in some cases, stealing from their bank accounts by fraud

                                                                                                                  

Mrs Belinda Griffith, the service’s co-ordinator, said that there had been a surge of people taking advantage of elderly relatives since the economic crisis started to bite four years ago.  They had for instance not understood why one old lady’s finances were in a muddle until they discovered that her grandson was turning up on pension day and demanding money from her.  In another instance an unemployed woman had taken her elderly mother’s cashpoint card and was helping herself to money from her mother’s bank account.  The victim was reluctant to report what was happening, ‘because she loved her daughter and didn’t want to get her into trouble’.

Oh dear – how very, very fortunate I am to have reached the age of 91 and – so far – to have lived independently in my own home, without help from Social Services, with an adequate income and with a loving (and certainly never exploitative!) family and good and steadfast friends.  I only hope that, like my wife, I end my days here.

The Global Market – a blog reader’s view

My last week’s blog about the global market certainly struck a chord with a regular blog reader with a strongly developed social conscience, who is the founder and managing director of a small but successful private consultancy. It evoked from him an immediate and forcibly worded response.  Here – almost unedited – it is.

The story in your blog about your Royal Mail Envelope (made in China) was a small example of the absurdity of globalisation. Did you know, for instance, that almost all the souvenirs for London 2012, selling Britain to the world, were made in China?

If globalisation is taken to its logical extreme – and there is no sign that it will not be – then wages and taxes, working conditions and the welfare state are all pitched into global competition. How can an unskilled worker in the UK compete with a billion workers in India?  He is funding a National Health Service and an Education Service which his counterpart in India is not, and he has expectations of Employment Rights which the average Indian cannot even dream of.

 The mechanism by which this deterioration in the UK workers’ standard of living will occur is also clear and is happening already.  His UK employer will go bust, or go global and move his job abroad*. The worker’s  own desperate need to live more cheaply will ensure that he accelerates the process himself, by shopping around for the cheapest goods - made in the Far East. This of course creates a situation where the demands on the welfare state are growing and its cost is falling on a reducing number of better off workers, who themselves are being squeezed by foreign competition.  In the end they will want to cut all this welfare expenditure and be rid of the burden of funding the poor and disabled.  I can see that happening both in the UK and USA.

            I think the Tory party conference gave us a breath--taking glimpse of the future; endless multi-billion pound cuts to welfare (this got the loudest cheer!) progressively opting out of Europe; workers bribed and, in the end, forced to sell or forgo their rights to almost everything in exchange for a job. I realized with some amazement how far the Conservatives have come since the days of Ted Heath and John Major!

I cannot imagine how Cameron has been said to have “detoxified” the Tory brand or how he managed to keep the lid on this groundswell of extreme right wing opinion so that at the last General Election many voters felt that there really wasn’t much difference between the parties.

That email  reminded me of a verse from a rarely-quoted poem by A.E.Housman:

The signal fires of warning

Burn on, but none regard,

And so, through night to morning

The earth spins ruin-ward!

Not the whole earth perhaps, but certainly our small corner of it.


*Only yesterday (23rd Oct.) I learned that Birmingham Corporation (Britain's largest local authority) was out-sourcing its IT services to India and making members of its own staff redundant!

Week 42 2012

Tendring Topics……..on line

The Global Market

            It was I suppose obvious, but it still came as something of a shock when I heard David Cameron’s final rallying speech at the Conservative Party Conference.  We have, he said, to compete on the global market with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil if we are to survive and prosper as a nation.  That is, of course, the logical result of the free global market that most, if not all, our national politicians are so keen on.

            It is a subject on which I had my damascene moment about a year ago when I bought a padded envelope at the post office to send a small gift to a very young friend of mine in Germany.  The packet had ROYAL MAIL in big bold letters at the top.  At the bottom, in much smaller letters, were the words Made in China.  It dawned on me that thousands of miles away on the other side of the world there was a firm that could manufacture those packets, intended solely for the British market, transport them half way round the world, and offer them for sale in Britain at a lower price than any British or European manufacturer, despite the fact that those manufacturers were virtually on-the-spot!  Market forces, whose gods are cost effectiveness and profitability, then dictated that the Royal Mail purchased them in preference to any locally manufactured product.

            To compete with those emerging economies we have either to undercut their prices or produce better quality products.  There was a time when we could confidently predict our ability to do the latter – but that time has gone.  Those other nations with emerging economies, whom Kipling dismissed a century and half ago as ‘lesser breeds without the law’ are as good at quality control as we are and, particularly in China, have a thirst for technical – and general – education that now seems to be lacking in Britain.

            If we are going to undercut their prices we have to create ‘a level playing field’ which would mean that our working men and women would have to accept the same wages as workers in those countries.  We would have to accept the same or worse living conditions than they do, tolerate the same slums, the same level of public services, and the same health and welfare services.  Have you seen the film ‘Slum-dog millionaire’?  In India’s cities in real life there are thousands of slum-dogs for every millionaire!

            Well, we haven’t got there yet, but if the present government pursues with even more vigour its present policies of slashing public services, freezing council tax, cutting grants to local authorities, freeing employers of the restraints that protect the safety and livelihood of working people, and cutting the benefits of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who cannot find work, they’ll get there in the end!  Think of that.  Thanks to David Cameron and his millionaire-friendly government, we may one day be able to make padded envelopes with large inscriptions in Chinese, Urdu or Portuguese printed upon them (and smaller inscriptions saying Made in the UK) and sell them to the postal authorities in China, India and Brazil!

‘Well might the Dead, who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre to crime’

          So wrote 1^st World War poet, war hero and, from 1917 onwards, fervent opponent of the war, Siegfried Sassoon CBE, MC.   He was referring to the Menin Gate, perhaps World War 1’s best-known memorial, on which are inscribed the names of 90,000 men killed in the third battle of Ypres, often known as the Battle of Passchendaele, whose bodies were never found!   I think it likely that were Sassoon living today, he would say much the same about David Cameron’s idea of a day of special remembrance on 4^th August 2014, the 100^th anniversary of the declaration of war between Britain and the Commonwealth, and the Kaiser’s Germany.

Probably most of the dead of the two World Wars would express similar sentiments.  They know that no memorial to their memory or ceremony of remembrance can ever give them back their stolen lives nor ever begin to compensate for their loss.  To pretend that  they do justice to their memory is just a joke in bad taste.

 A memorial to the Rainbow Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, that captures something of the tragedy of war.  (Photo by my younger son Andy)    

However that memorial at Ypres, and the memorial events proposed by David Cameron, are not really for them.   They are not for the dead but for the living.  Those 90,000 names carved on the Menin Gate must surely bring to even the most frivolous visitor a sense of the enormity and horror of World War 1, of the appalling loss of human life, and of the deep and inconsolable sorrow of bereaved widows and girl friends, of parents and of young sons and daughters.

               I can just remember Remembrance Day (Armistice Day we called it then) memorial parades and church services in the late 1920s, when World War I was still a dreadful memory in the lives of most people.  There were ex-servicemen, some blinded, some with missing arms or legs. There were widows and girl-friends, some still wearing mourning black.  There were elderly mums and dads fighting the tears as they remembered their own sons whose lives had held so much promise, but who were now among the ‘heroic dead’.  Those scenes were replicated all over the world in lands of former allies and former enemies alike.  Death, love and sorrow hold no passports and know no national boundaries.

            I hope that the centenary of the beginning of World War I will be observed in sorrow and with repentance……certainly not in an orgy of self congratulation and triumphal nationalism.  World War I was declared to be a war to end wars.   It didn’t.  World War II was fought to defeat for ever the forces of Nazism and Fascism and to establish a new world order of peace, tolerance and prosperity.  It didn’t. Two Gulf Wars disposed of Saddam Hussein but have failed to make Iraq a safer, happier place in which to live.  Whatever may be the outcome of the current bloody civil war in Syria the one  prediction that I can make with total confidence is that we shall end with a Syria having less tolerance and freedom than it had before the conflict started. 

Peaceful negotiations do not always obtain their objective.  Warfare and violence never do.  The very best memorial that we can give those 90,000 lost soldiers who perished as they ‘struggled in the slime’ of Passchendaele and whose bodies were never found, and the millions of others of every nation who were slaughtered in two Word Wars, is an end to the international arms trade and real progress towards a lasting peace such as Tennyson prophesied nearly two centuries ago in a world where:

The war drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

The Time Traveller

I have in the past written in this blog that I sometimes think of myself as a time traveller; a mid-twentieth century man who has managed to stray into the twenty-first century and isn’t completely comfortable there.  Last week I travelled back in time, at least in my memory, some eighty years – and found that I was even less comfortable there!

 My new gas-fired boiler with automatic control was installed in July.  As  I am an early riser I have set the automatic controls so as to ensure that by six a.m. when I usually get up, my bungalow is warm and comfortable and there is plenty of hot water for my wash, shave and shower.  The boiler is set to switch off at 6.30 am. However I can, and do, switch the central heating and/or the water heating on manually at any time during the day when the need arises.

Last Thursday (11^th October) I was out during the morning and returned home at about 11.00 am.  It was, as Clacton blog-readers may remember, a chilly, cheerless and overcast day with occasional light rain.  I decided to switch on the central heating.  I pressed the appropriate button.  Nothing happened.  The boiler obstinately refused to respond.   I phoned the installer (the system was well within its guarantee) and was promised that an engineer would call and sort out my problem early the next day.  That was the most I could have hoped for.  The installer could hardly have been expected to get one of his men to down tools instantly in order to sort out my problem.

In the meantime I had to face the next twenty-four hours with no hot water on tap and no central heating.  Thursday was one of those relatively rare days on which there had been no sign of the sun – and therefore no heating of the water in my storage cylinder from the solar panel on the roof!   My mind shot back eighty years to my childhood.       

I was back in my mind to that small and draughty jerry-built terraced house in Ipswich where I spent most of my childhood. It was no longer 2012 but 1932 and I was eleven years old.  I climbed the stairs to my unheated bedroom, a lighted candle in a candle-stick in my hand, undressed, climbed into my pyjamas, and crept shivering between the icy cold sheets.  When I had warmed up a little I would blow out the candle on the bedside chest of drawers, and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I would hear my parents get up before 7.00 am.   I would do so at about 7.30, when I could hear the kindling crackling on the coal fire that my dad would have lit in the living room.  In the winter I would relight that candle before stepping out of bed with bare feet onto icy lino and hurriedly dragging on my clothes.  There might well be a film of ice formed from the condensation on the inside of the bedroom window. By the time I got downstairs the gas light hanging in the middle of the room would have been lit and, with any luck, the fire would be burning merrily.

My Mum and Dad would have finished their ablutions and Mum would be busying herself preparing breakfast.  The kettle, with water for my wash, would have been singing on the gas stove.  We washed in a bowl in the kitchen sink of course. We had a bathroom but it was a tiny room with space only for a small bath with one cold water tap, and a gas fired ‘copper’, in which on Saturday nights, we heated our bath water.   The loo was outside.      

No, my present predicament was really nothing like that, and it was even less like my experiences in the army and as a PoW (but I preferred not even to think of them!).  My bungalow is double-glazed, with cavity walls infilled and roof space thoroughly insulated.  My bedroom is carpeted. My bed, with its duvet, is warm and welcoming and there is a bedside electric lamp.   I had a portable electric fire to take the chill off the room as I dressed.

The bathroom was chilly but, in any case, I had no option but to miss my usual morning shower.  Hot water for my wash and shave was supplied from an electric kettle.  In my home in the ‘20s and early ‘30s there was no electricity. That was provided, for lights only, in the mid-1930s. In 1932 my mum and dad and I would have considered that my living conditions today, even without running hot water and central heating, were luxurious beyond their wildest dreams!

Be that as it may, I breathed a deep sigh of relief when the heating engineer turned up, brought my boiler back into service (I hope I remember his advice on the prevention of a recurrence!) and restored my home to the comfort and convenience that we expect today.  Despite my occasional nonagenarian despair at aspects of 21^st Century life, I really wouldn’t want to revisit the daily discomforts that we took for granted just eighty years ago,

           

           

           

Week 45 2011 15.11.2011

Tendring Topics……..on Line

‘The road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions!’

A well-meaning piece of advice given on the BBC tv’s breakfast programme this (7th November) morning threatens to upset the equilibrium of scores of  old people this Christmas and lead to many doctors’ phone-lines being jammed by anxious well-meaning callers in the New Year.

It seems that the early symptoms of dementia in the elderly are being missed and a great many of them are failing to get treatment and support that could help them endure their affliction and slow down (but not halt or reverse!) its progress. It was suggested that those who are seeing an elderly friend or relative this Christmas should look out for these symptoms and get in touch with his or her doctor to let them know.

The symptoms to look for are loss of short-term memory, anxiety, occasional confusion, and personality changes. It is, so we were told, all too easy to put these symptoms down to ‘old age’ when there may well be a more sinister reason. Well, I suppose that there could be, but I reckon that old age does have similar indications of its own for which there may be no other cause

None of us lasts for ever. Our bodies and our brains experience wear and tear as we get older. The results of this show themselves as ‘symptoms’ of what I believe is probably a natural progression for which the only remedy is to die young! There are, of course, lots of things that – with the help of medical science and possibly social services – enable us to make the best of it.

I no longer describe myself ageing or elderly. I am unequivocally old. No other member of my family has, as far as I know, ever made it to 90. I am in a position to confirm that old age is not ‘all beer and skittles. I am glad to say though that it isn’t either– at least isn’t yet – the extreme old age referred to by Shakespeare as ‘Last age of all is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’*. Mind you, without modern dentures, two cataract operations and two pairs of spectacles, hearing aids, on line access to my friends and relatives, and an electric mobility scooter to give me independent mobility, my condition might be approaching that. Much as we oldies sometimes complain about aspects of life in the 21st century, there’s no doubt that modern technology has made old age and disability a great deal more tolerable!

Yes – I do have an increasingly failing short-term memory (though I can remember, word for word, poems and short pieces of prose learned long ago!). I am absent minded, and any deviation from normality does make me anxious. I don’t think that my personality has changed much but perhaps I am not the best person to judge that!

I shall be visiting friends and relatives over Christmas. I know them all well enough to be confident that no one will be writing in a little note-book that ‘the poor old chap was anxious about leaving his bungalow empty for a couple of days’ and ‘He forgot to bring his reading glasses, fell asleep in his chair after Christmas Dinner and told us a story that I’m sure I’ve heard half a dozen times before’, all ready to be reported to my doctor in the New Year!

*From Jacques’ ‘all the world’s a stage…..’ speech in ‘As you like it’.

Age and Income Inequality

The fact that we are all living longer and those lucky enough to have a job are expected to work longer, has given extra urgency to the world wide demand for a more equal distribution of the world’s wealth.

A recent article in the Financial Times comments on a report by Sir Michael Marmot, professor of University College, London and former Chairman of the British Medical Association. Sir Michael forecasts that due to the inequality of health standards between rich and poor, two thirds of today’s population will not reach the new retirement age of 68 without chronic and debilitating illness. His report, based on the 2001 census reveals that the average difference in ‘disability-free life expectancy’ between people living in rich areas and those in poor areas is 17 years!

A blog reader points out that throughout Europe and North America we don’t have enough jobs for young people. We in the UK have 20 percent youth unemployment while in Spain no less than half of its young people are unemployed. Meanwhile the compulsory retirement age in Britain is being raised from 65 to 68 and old people are expected to work longer.

The reader asks, ‘How can it possibly be better for our economy to leave the strongest, fittest, child-rearing generation out of work while older people, many of whom are overweight, arthritic and suffering from mental exhaustion, are forced to carry on working?’ It is true that I was working – and earning – till I reached my eighties, but it was at freelance writing that I enjoyed, and from which I could take a break whenever I chose.

Have we already forgotten that a very high proportion of the rioters and arsonists of last August were unemployed young people. Satan will find mischief still for idle hands to do!

Signs of the times

There have been three items of news during the past few weeks that I have found profoundly depressing. They seem to me to exemplify everything that is wrong with Britain today. The first was the news that in a time of cuts in public services mainly affecting the poor, growing unemployment in both the public and private sectors and frozen or reduced salaries or wages for most people, the directors and chief executives of Britain’s most profitable enterprises have been awarding themselves salary increases of up to 50% - and 50% of a salary already nudging a million a year is a very large sum indeed!

I don’t know how they have the gall to accept it – but they have. I heard one of them interviewed on tv say that if an attempt were to be made to limit the salaries of top earners, they would all disappear to the USA or Asia. I’d say ‘Let them go – and the sooner the better!’ If, to stay afloat, Britain needs the support of those who have no interest in life beyond making money – then Britain deserves to sink.

Those who make such threats will be among the first to accuse public servants of holding the country to ransom when, very shortly, they go on strike because their jobs are imperil, their wages have been frozen, their savings are diminishing as inflation outstrips interest on savings accounts, and they are going to have to wait longer and pay more for their – in most cases – very modest pensions.

Then there were the pictures of long queues waiting up for hours to be the first to buy the very latest, most realistic and most violent and bloody video game on the market coupled with the news that creating the make-believe world of video games is one of Britain’s most successful industries. And to think that the writers of popular fiction used to be accused of encouraging ‘escapism’!

And the last item! It occurred on a day when the financial foundations of the world were shaking; on which we learned that an unknown number of terrorists may have entered the country because the Home Secretary had lost control of part of her Whitehall ‘empire’, and on which there appeared to be a real risk of the UK being dragged by its ‘special relationship’ into yet another Middle East conflict, this time against Iran. Not one of these matters was the lead story of BBC Breakfast, the first BBC News Bulletin of the day. Oh no – the first story was breathtaking news about who had actually administered the final lethal dose of a drug to an American Pop Star with a questionable life style who was already drugged up to the eyeballs. I had felt just a tiny amount of sympathy for the doctor who, it appears, was responsible – until I learned that he had been receiving a salary of 95,000 dollars a month as the pop-star’s medical attendant. That was in a country where, despite the efforts of its present President, millions live in poverty and thousands of the poor can afford no medical care of any kind!

A Damascene Moment!

This afternoon, as I was preparing a packet to send to send off to Germany by post, I had a vision of the future. Quite suddenly, I realized what global capitalism was all about, what was meant by preparing Britain to compete in a global market place – and the inevitable result of trying to do so.

My little ‘honorary’ German niece Maja had recently celebrated her fifth birthday. One of my British real nieces had thought that she would like to give the child a belated birthday present. She gave me a charming child’s shoulder and hand bag to send to her. I duly bought an appropriately sized padded envelope/bag at the Post Office and, with the help of Google Translate, wrote a suitable message in German to enclose with the present. I addressed it and took it to the Post Office for despatch.

It was as I sealed up the envelope that I had my epiphany (sorry about my Biblical vocabulary. It seems to go naturally with the nature of my vision). There was the envelope, bulging with its contents, with Royal Mail stamped proudly upon it, together with Maja’s address, an airmail label and – in small print in the corner - Made in China!

All became clear. Of course there are firms in Britain that could have manufactured and supplied comparable, perhaps better, padded envelopes. However, free competition and the global market insisted that even such a very British institution as the Royal Mail has to accept the lowest tender. A firm in China could manufacture them and transport them halfway round the world, just a little cheaper than any manufacturer in Britain, or in Europe, could manage to make them.

How then must Britain, or indeed any other European country, prepare itself to compete in the wonderful new Global Market, so beloved by both the Conservatives and New Labour? The only way that I can see is by reducing British wages to below the level of those of the factory workers of China and India, and increasing their hours of work, cutting public services, social housing and public transport to the level in those countries and by regarding the poor, the disabled and the homeless with the indifference that many in those countries regard them. ‘They’ve got families to support them haven’t they? Everybody knows that the poor breed like rabbits!’

Who knows, if we do it thoroughly enough we may one day be able to turn England’s green and pleasant land into a brave new world capable of obtaining contracts with the Chinese Mail Service to supply them with padded postal packets! Even then, of course, there’s still the chance that some country in Africa or South America will manage to undercut all of us.

It makes me wish that I were young enough and fit enough to join the protesters at St. Paul’s Cathedral!