Comments by gufney

We are so lucky to be British, even in the present era of financial stringency. We enjoy massive advantages over those poor unfortunates (that are the vast majority of the world’s population) purely by the accident of our place of birth. Were any of Britain’s moaning minnies to have been born in Bangladesh instead of in Britain they would be up to their ankles in water in paddy fields from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. They would have known nothing different since early childhood and would know nothing different until their time came to die, irrespective of what natural talents they have or how skilled they could have become, given the chance.

So what is it then that makes today’s Britons think they have the right to presume superiority, to claim the entitlement to a level of wealth that most of the rest of the world can only dream about? We are certainly not worthier than they by virtue of our own greater exertions. There is many a home-grown idle layabout born in Britain that I would gladly exchange for a eager immigrant from a disadvantaged origin. No, it is because we live in a society whose infrastructure was fashioned and whose culture was developed by our tireless ancestors. We are but small cogs in a large wheel – but the point is that we do have a wheel, which our forefathers built for us, in which being a cog bestows privileges to which a lone cog by itself, unattached to any wheel, could never aspire.

We might argue that because our ancestors are OUR ancestors, and not anyone else’s, then we are entitled to the fruits of their labour and that others are not. (Curiously, adherents of this notion find it abhorrent when it is applied in the context of children born into wealthy families, especially if they happen to be in the British Cabinet.) Regrettably, unless we postulate an unlikely pre-natal prescience that earned us the privilege of being able to choose our parents and specify the whereabouts of our birth, this argument is flawed.

In my opinion politicians of all hues (but Ed Miliband in particular, right now) are to be blamed for irresponsibly stoking the fires of dissent when it comes to so-called “cuts” in public spending (and for misleading the electorate about the banking crisis and the recession too, for that matter). The drop in GDP, though seemingly dramatic, and the planned reductions in public spending, though seemingly draconian, merely restore the status quo ante that which obtained in the millennium year. Did we all feel desperately poor in the year 2000? I think not.

The bankers were indeed reckless for lending too much against the illusory security of ever-rising property prices, but they were not the ones who spent all the borrowed money. WE ALL DID. Even those of us who were not personally guilty of overborrowing benefited one way or another from the extra money injected into the economy (including our appreciative but unquestioning embrace of the vast expansion of central and local government spending on schools and hospitals, for example). This has never been made clear because politicians find it irresistibly convenient to blame the bankers rather than themselves. The electorate will not accept that they themselves are the culprits as well as the victims of the cuts, but they must be told if rioting in the streets is to be avoided.

PART ONE – THE FIRST 5000 CHARACTERS!
Of course it is good news that GDP growth is stronger than predicted, but that does not even begin to scratch the surface of Britain's gigantic (and still not fully appreciated) debt problems.
The problems are even worse than they seem because they have two parallel and undesirable dimensions. The first dimension is bad enough: even had our collective borrowings (i.e. public and private sectors together) been secured against valuable assets we would still be facing the problems or repaying them – but at least secured loans attract relatively lower rates of interest.
But the second dimension is far worse: because a frighteningly large proportion of our collective borrowings are not secured against valuable assets.
Let us concentrate on the first dimension for a moment. According to Bank of England statistics, between 2000 and 2007 Housing Equity Withdrawals (that is, withdrawals of cash for consumer spending advanced by reckless bankers against the illusory security of windfall gains in property values) exceeded the growth in our GDP over the same period by a factor of six. Approximately thirty billion pounds.
Whereas monies borrowed for investment (for example in a new machine that makes even better widgets or a new heating and lighting system that saves costly energy) can be repaid from the returns the investment earns, money borrowed for consumption (a nice new car, maybe, or an exotic holiday etc) cannot. Once spent it is gone in its entirety forever. Such borrowings can be repaid only by diverting out of future earnings streams (and into loan settlement instalments) some of the monies that would otherwise have been spent on future consumption. In other words, irrespective of how sound is the security for the loans, using them to bring forward consumption to the present necessarily implies accepting a lower level of consumption in the future than would otherwise have been possible. In an era of rapidly rising earnings this may be an attractive device: living standards will never actually fall. But when earnings are static then by borrowing to reward ourselves with higher living standards today we are inevitably condemning ourselves to suffer lower living standards tomorrow. At present and for the foreseeable future our economy is and will be under pressure. Our earnings will be static or shrinking. For the last ten years we (all of us, the private as well as the public sector) have blown borrowed (i.e. unearned) cash on boosting our living standards to levels we have not merited (and make no mistake – irrespective of who were the original individuals who did the borrowing, all that cash sloshing around in the system has been enjoyed by everybody in terms of higher living standards than they would have otherwise had) now we must brace ourselves to expect lower living standards than we have been recently used to for probably many years to come. (And make no mistake, although our reckless bankers deserve the public opprobrium they get for having provoked the crisis and for still paying themselves obscene and socially divisive bonuses, they are not the ones who alone have spent the unearned billions (some think trillions) that we have so casually extracted from the country’s housing stock – we all have, and therefore we all have to share in some part the necessary sacrifices to come.)
“How did all this come about?”, you may ask.
In normal circumstances, individuals who have borrowed against the security of their realisable assets in order to bring forward their future consumption in expectation of higher future earnings, but whose financial positions unexpectedly deteriorate to the point where they cannot afford the repayments, are punished for their appetites for spending by the confiscation of their assets by lenders to be sold to raise the cash to repay the loans.
But the last three years have emerged to be far from normal. The tragedy is that what happened was a foreseeable but regrettably unforeseen disaster that was wholly self-inflicted. House price rises were a bubble inflated by over-exuberant but perfectly understandable demand. Buying a house seemed to be a one-way bet to tax-free profits. First-time buyers did their utmost to get a foothold on the first rung of the “housing ladder”. Existing homeowners were just as eager to upgrade to more expensive houses. This was because ever-spiralling prices meant that the increases in equities in properties invariably outpaced the interest being charged for mortgages secured against them. To own a house, even one mortgaged to the hilt (or even, sometimes, to further than the hilt if your Bank was stupid enough – the misleadingly-named Northern Rock springs to mind as the most infamous example) was to possess a magical, infallible tax-free money-making machine.
(Read On …)

Dear Sir,

All religion is tribal tripe that festers division.

(B the way, excuse the computer jargon that follows - I'm sorry if you don't understand it but if you do I am sure you will understand better what I am driving at ...)

Imagine, for example, two babies born in Jerusalem: one in the Arab quarter and one in the Jewish quarter.

Both of them are born equal, albeit two miles apart. Both of them have "hard-wired" into their little brains those basic things that they need to survive and grow. Their hard wiring, if you like, is their BIOS. They could not "boot" without it.

Then they learn their "Assembly Language". Whichever community they are born into, my guess is that their assembly languages are much the same, irrespective of geographical and environmental influences. (After all, Jerusalem is Jerusalem and its climate is indifferent as to exactly which sector our putative infants live in).

The tragedy comes when each comes to be taught its prevailing "Operating System". Any given operating system will only run "high-level languages" that comply with it. Having been preloaded with its respective operating system by its respective communities, neither of our two children has access to the high-level languages being used by the other. Each begins to be programmed (and starts to program himself or herself) using their high-level languages that embed the detailed conventions of their tribes with which they are increasingly and helplessly being brainwashed.

The parents, relatives, teachers and friends of Child A all teach the same (or closely compliant) fictions that to that child's brain are unquestioningly received as facts: after all, what he is told from a multiplicity of sources is never contradicted and the child lacks the experience to challenge or disbelieve them. Prejudices are instilled and passed on not necessarily unconsciously but certainly systemically. His Mac software is inaccessible to a PC user. Likewise Child B, but within a totally different but (to that child) just as persuasive framework: that is, his PC software is inaccessible to a Mac user.

Thus you breed a Palestinian. Two miles away you breed an Israeli. Had the two neonates been accidentally exchanged at birth, you would have still have bred a Palestinian and an Israeli respectively. The newborn children are neutral: the evil and hatred (rooted in the contradictory myths of two religions) is (purposely) bred into them.

True, conversion programs between PC and Mac software do exist. Unpopular, largely unsuccessful and destined to remain almost totally ignored. In Middle Eastern politics these programs are called the Road Map. Unpopular, largely unsuccessful and destined to remain almost totally ignored.

Dear Sir,

All religion is tribal tripe that festers division.

(B the way, excuse the computer jargon that follows - I'm sorry if you don't understand it but if you do I am sure you will understand better what I am driving at ...)

Imagine, for example, two babies born in Jerusalem: one in the Arab quarter and one in the Jewish quarter.

Both of them are born equal, albeit two miles apart. Both of them have "hard-wired" into their little brains those basic things that they need to survive and grow. Their hard wiring, if you like, is their BIOS. They could not "boot" without it.

Then they learn their "Assembly Language". Whichever community they are born into, my guess is that their assembly languages are much the same, irrespective of geographical and environmental influences. (After all, Jerusalem is Jerusalem and its climate is indifferent as to exactly which sector our putative infants live in).

The tragedy comes when each comes to be taught its prevailing "Operating System". Any given operating system will only run "high-level languages" that comply with it. Having been preloaded with its respective operating system by its respective communities, neither of our two children has access to the high-level languages being used by the other. Each begins to be programmed (and starts to program himself or herself) using their high-level languages that embed the detailed conventions of their tribes with which they are increasingly and helplessly being brainwashed.

The parents, relatives, teachers and friends of Child A all teach the same (or closely compliant) fictions that to that child's brain are unquestioningly received as facts: after all, what he is told from a multiplicity of sources is never contradicted and the child lacks the experience to challenge or disbelieve them. Prejudices are instilled and passed on not necessarily unconsciously but certainly systemically. His Mac software is inaccessible to a PC user. Likewise Child B, but within a totally different but (to that child) just as persuasive framework: that is, his PC software is inaccessible to a Mac user.

Thus you breed a Palestinian. Two miles away you breed an Israeli. Had the two neonates been accidentally exchanged at birth, you would have still have bred a Palestinian and an Israeli respectively. The newborn children are neutral: the evil and hatred (rooted in the contradictory myths of two religions) is (purposely) bred into them.

True, conversion programs between PC and Mac software do exist. Unpopular, largely unsuccessful and destined to remain almost totally ignored. In Middle Eastern politics these programs are called the Road Map. Unpopular, largely unsuccessful and destined to remain almost totally ignored.

The problem with western economies is that they seem not to have noticed that the last two or three decades have witnessed a transport revolution of much, much greater import than the coming of the railways had in the 19th century. Railways diminished the transport cost friction that until their arrival had impeded trade between scattered communities. Exchanges of goods and services between regional centres that had previously been unaffordable suddenly became profitable because the cost surcharge and more particularly the time penalty of inter-regional transits were slashed to virtually nothing in comparison with what had gone before.

Thirty years ago the creeping advent of containerisation, that is, the highly cost-effective use of standard-sized boxes amenable to rapid and easily-mechanised loading and unloading onto and from unimaginably huge ocean-going transcontinental carriers completely wiped out slow and expensive labour-intensive stevedoring and a whole generation of modestly-proportioned merchant ships that had previously plyed their international trade. It now costs less to ship a 1500 cu.ft box of cargo between China and America than it does to travel first-class between Chicago and New York. A hundred refrigerators can be carried from Shanghai to San Francisco for just a few dollars apiece - and because they can be assembled in China by nimble-fingered operatives working long hours and paid a fraction of what an equivalent American employee, brought up in an economy previously insulated from the rest of the world by the barriers of prohibitive transport costs, expects to be paid for a shorter working day. Consumers would rather buy cheap refrigerators from China than pay over the odds to protect the jobs of American factory workers - who, incidentally, are consumers too ...

Low-skilled Americans (and Europeans as well, for that matter) have nothing to sell nowadays that anyone any longer wants or can afford to buy. Only governments, using money confiscated in taxes from the skilled fraction of the workforce whose efforts cannot (yet) be undercut by foreign competition, can afford to pay the redundant unskilled worker what ruinously spoilt western societies think is a minimum living wage - an amount which in reality is rather more, let's face it, than (in a world context) than he is worth.

Free trade is all very well and has vastly increased the rate of accumulation of wealth across the whole world. But only renewed protectionism will provide employment for the unskilled masses in the west at wages that they are willing or can afford to accept. We will all be impoverished as a result, but the alternative is a wholesale collapse of western societies into anarchy.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. Should we be worried? President Obama should be. He admits that his father is a Muslim. Ergo, he is a Muslim. He has no choice, just like no other child of a Muslim father has any choice. That is why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world.

If he renounces Islam (for example by claiming to be Christian as he does) he commits apostasy. In Islam, apostasy is punishable by death. I dare say that there quite a few Muslims out there who would like to see him bumped off for a variety of disconnected reasons, not least because of the the "collateral damage" the US military regularly and unrepentantly inflicts upon innocent and devout Afghan families. His unashamed apostasy makes it the duty of any genuine devotee of Islam to assassinate him with the eternal impunity afforded to him by the protective blessings of Allah. Let's see then how many Americans would be willing to defend the constitutional rights of Muslims to build Cordoba. Muslims are Muslims. They are not American. They have no constitutional rights.

Two years ago, as a civil engineer prematurely retired for medical reasons, I was exploring the possibility of making use of the much-vaunted "fast-track" PGSE for failed bankers to become a maths teacher, despairing as I do of the dismal (and for this country's engineering future, quite possibly fatal) levels of numeracy.

I am not a mathematical genius (I scored a Grade 1 in "O" Level Mathematics in 1968 but only a "C" at "A" Level two years later.) So in order to explore my aptitude for teaching the modern GCSE syllabus, I downloaded a couple of recent GCSE past papers. I completed both wih a 100% score in less than 30 minutes.

For most of the last decade I have lived in Singapore and I worked alongside talented youngsters fresh from school whose grasp of mathematics was exemplary. Maybe not a representative cross-section, I admit, but the examinations that they had passed were traditional British "O" Levels set by the same authority as had set mine so many years ago, the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. (Past papers are not available on line but they are published in booklet form and are for sale in Singapore.)

I could not finish any of the papers I attempted in the time allotted and my performance in those questions I did answer fell far short of being even adequate.

We are cheating our children, their parents and the country at large by pretending that a modern British GCSE is remotely the equal of the sadly discontinued "O" Level, or that British qualifications (and in this I include the plethora of "vocational" degrees that are more about training than education - there is an important but regrettably little-understood difference) enjoy the slightest bit of respect in those countries in South and East Asia that understand what it will take to become and stay competitive in the 21st Century. The privilege of a good education is not taken for granted because in countries without Jobseeker's Allowance school leavers must find a job or beg. I am back in the UK now where my stepson's contemporaries who have left school without any worthwhile knowledge or skills are grateful for a job as a table-wiper in a fast-food restaurant or a trolley-collector in an Asda car park. Or if they refuse such a job, they apply for benefits. The tragedy is, neither those who find menial work nor those who refuse it will never be competent to do anything else for the rest of their lives.

No doubt my critics will say that after just a few years' work experience academic qualifications become wholly irrelevant to a person's career prospects: recent performance in a work environment count for much more. I agree. But this defence denies that work performance cannot help but be a function of the quality of the hard work and enhanced competence afforded by an excellent education stimulated by the need to pass tough examinations. And I can testify from my own experience in trying to learn new skills that one's learning progress is far slower as one ages than it is in one's teenage years.

Indonesian (and its close relative, Malay) uses "dia" to mean "he" and/or "she" equally.

These languages also have other useful words in their vocabuary that sidestep everyday misunderstandings. For example they enjoy having separate words for "we, not including you" (kita) and "we, including you" (kami). This useful attribute often spares a good deal of embarrassment!

The posturing of the various interested parties about the size and shape of our armed forces masks the stark truth that our nation in today’s world cannot be militarily defended no matter how big or small our “defence” budget may be.

Our quixotic fondness of our regrettably long-gone colonial role as an all-powerful World Policeman blinds us to the reality that the very advantage that in centuries gone by that made it possible for us to hold out indefinitely against any attempted invasion of our territory – that of being an island – will in the event of any future offensive against us inevitably result in our almost immediate surrender.

It is because our strong industrial legacy that we were able to endure through the momentous era of the Second World War: we were largely self-sufficient in satisfying most of our needs for food, water, energy, manufactured goods and arms and munitions. Supplies of all of these were sustained to all parts of the country by a vast array of micro-production units interconnected by an intricate network of micro-distribution routes, together comprising a system having innumerable inherent redundancies such that damage or destruction of any individual part was not catastrophic to the working of the whole. When we did need to import, our needs were similarly brought in by multiple feeds (convoys of small merchant vessels, mostly British-owned and British-crewed) along multiple routes into dozens of well-equipped ports such that the loss of individual merchantmen or the blockading of individual ports could not fatally compromise the whole of the delivery system at any one time.

In recent years, however, most countries in the world including ourselves have rightly and properly benefited from economic efficiencies derived from the unprecedented dismantling of barriers to international trade.

Unfortunately for Britain, our lot (and until the recent collapse in financial confidence, a lot that no party had seemed much inclined to steer us away from) has been to become predominantly a service economy. Manufacturing has been shrinking for so long and now represents such a small proportion of our gross domestic product (less than 15%) that we have neither the infrastructure nor the skills to revive it in the event of an emergency. (Was it 100 new fighter planes per month that our hastily-adapted factories turned out during World War 2? How long will it take to replace each Typhoon Eurofighter that is shot down?)

We are a sitting duck for any half-intelligent aggressor. A hundred or so co-ordinated detonations of explosive charges bringing down selected pylons on our high-voltage transmission lines (whose locations can hardly be missed, let alone kept secret) would bring the country to a standstill. Even gas heating will not work without electricity. Communications without computers would be impossible. Frozen food in domestic and supermarket freezers would become inedible within days. The merest threat of a submarine attack on the unmissably huge and defenceless targets that modern merchant ships present would surely guarantee that no sensible shipowner (nowadays certain to be foreign with no interest in Britain) would consider for even a second trying to call at a UK port, cutting off at a stroke our imports of everything. The aggressor need then just sit and wait until riots and looting spread from the city centres to the country as frantic, cold and hungry scavengers resort to the most basic and loathsome adaptation of “survival of the fittest”, namely, “survival of the strongest and least scrupulous”. In his own time our aggressor mobilizes his primitive ground forces with their AK47s to round up the exhausted and dispirited survivors to do with what they will. (If they happen to be motivated by what they have seen in photographs or Abu Ghraib prison or similar, I dare say they will be suitably imaginative.)

It is not easy to visualize what good Trident will be in those circumstances.

I do not particularly wish at this time to enter into the argument about how likely it is that Man, in the context of geological time (let us call it, for the benefit of economists, macrotime?), is responsible for the alleged global warning supposedly recorded over the last century or two (a period that if we call it microtime will surely be seen by the same economists for what it is, a dangerously short launch pad for extrapolations). Nor do I wish to appear to be a defeatist harbinger of doom. But there is no doubt in my mind that there is absolutely nothing Man can do that will make any difference whatsoever to the course of whatever climate changes Nature determines there might be. Unfortunately, it is typical of the arrogance of Man (who also presumes that the sole purpose of the entire course of evolution has been to arrive at the pinnacle he calls called homo sapiens rather than acknowledge the unpalatable truth that homo sapiens is merely an incidental twig amongst the enormous abundance of thriving branches that comprises the tree of life) to imagine that he can.

Life on Earth will survive (and probably even prosper) after Man's extinction: Man is a mere accidental in the vastness of space and time (and not necessary a happy accidental as far as the planet is concerned). It is futile to imagine that Man will survive, head-in-sand, by tinkering at the edges with the Earth's unpredictable kaleidoscope of weather. What is done is done, and even in the unlikely event that Man's ambitious new targets are met for reducing (or, more accurately, stemming the rate of accumulation) of so-called "greenhouse gas" emissions, change is already taking place that is irreversible. No matter how much deprivation and pain Man inflicts upon himself in virtuous pursuit of a stabler future, the fact is that in the grander scheme of things even the most ambitious percentage target reductions in emissions are hopelessly trivial. Are they worth it?

Let us consider an alternative. There is no reason to suppose that it is possible or even desirable for Man to attempt to prolong indefinitely the present patterns of human settlement and economic activity - patterns that were after all shaped by the circumstances of the past, not with an eye to the future. Rather than unjustly and inhumanely impoverish inhabitants the developing world by denying them the right to exploit the same fossil-derived energy sources that the developed world itself heedlessly consumed on its quick march to relative prosperity, and rather than demanding that the developed world itself squander scarce resources on investment in "renewable" energy sources that for the foreseeable future will remain hopelessly inefficient, we would be better advised to redirect our resources towards a worldwide investment in strengthening our defences of vulnerable coastlines and riverbanks (wherever such a strategy could be effective) and to relocate vulnerable populations (where that strategy would not). We should start now, whilst it remains feasible and relatively painless to do it, and not wait until emergencies overtake us that will drown, starve or dehydrate billions, and sooner or later almost certainly provoke wars on a global scale, probably to the point of human annihilation, as too many people compete for too little habitable territory.