A good word for British Railways

Twice recently in discussions of the privatised railway, once on a comments section in the Daily Mail and once in a discussion of something completely unrelated organised by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, one of the rare supporters of privatisation has contributed the same sentence. It is a statement, not a question, made with the intention of terminating all discussion of the issue. It is, “You don’t want British Railways back,” spoken in a tone of voice, or written in a tone of print, that implies that only a certifiable lunatic would want British Railways back. Rachel Johnson (no relation) said it again on Any Questions, on 18 May 2018. You can listen to the programme at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2mrxy, the question is at 38 min 44 sec, and Ms Johnson gives her opinion at 40 min 21 sec, ‘I don’t remember the days of British Rail with huge fondness.’

British Railways, aka British Rail, was the organisation that ran the nationalised railway in the UK from nationalisation in 1948 until privatisation between 1994 and 1997.

Well, no, I didn’t like everything about British Railways, but as Shakespeare said, the evil that nationalised industries do lives after them, the good is oft interrèd with their bones. For Ms Johnson, the worst thing about British Railways was the smell of the seat cushions — this in an era when polyurethane foam cushions were dangerously flammable and burned at high temperatures.

Here, therefore, is my cut-out-and-keep guide to what to say when you are in a meeting and somebody says “You don’t want British Railways back.”

In 1948, British Railways operated about 6,685 stations and about 15,000 route miles. In contrast, Network Rail now operates 2,563 stations and the franchisees operate 10,072 route miles (so say metadyne.co.uk and Wikipedia.) The number of passenger services has fallen by about one third since 1948, although I can’t find the exact figure anywhere.

Fares were lower. You arrived at the station, bought your ticket and went onto the platform to catch the train. It was as simple as that. The fare structure was far simpler than the structure in use today and everybody understood it. These days neither the railways’ own staff nor their ticket vending machines know all the dozens of different fares for the same journey on the same train. It is often possible to save money, sometimes a lot of money, by booking two tickets for different halves of the journey or by getting off one train half way to your destination and completing your journey on the next one. I don’t recall any British Railways ticket which had to be booked several weeks in advance. Between 1995 and 2013 the single fare from London to Edinburgh rose by 134% and the single fare from London to Manchester rose by 208% (BBC News report) while inflation over the same period was 66%.

As an example of how insane the fares structure has become, I mention Prof. Martyn Evans, who held a first class ticket from Birmingham to Durham and left the train early, at Darlington, and was charged a £155 excess fare. (BBC News report.)

British Railways and its successor British Rail trained their drivers to drive all the locomotives that they were likely to encounter on all the railway lines they were likely to drive along. In contrast, the privatised companies train their drivers to drive the trains that they operate along the routes that they serve. This sounds like a small quibble, but it isn’t. When a line is blocked, for whatever reason, in British Railways days the train usually took an alternative route and carried on to the same destination, causing minimum inconvenience to the passengers. Now, when operator A’s line is blocked, and operator B serves a line which might have served as a diversion, the driver from operator A does not know operator B’s line. (‘Knowing the road’ is vital on the railway: the driver has to know where all the platforms, level crossings, speed limits, engineering works etc. are.) But there is no point asking Operator B to provide a driver, because operator B’s driver does not know how to drive Operator A’s train. Every driver has to be trained on every type of locomotive that he (she) drives. Passengers are therefore ordered out of Operator A’s train and into buses, causing long delays, serious inconvenience and late arrival.

British Railways used to deal with late arrival by holding connections. Although they did not always delay an outward train until the inward connecting service had arrived and passengers had time to change trains, they did schedule guaranteed connections at principal stations. Private operators try instead to recover from delays by allowing trains to go through scheduled stations without stopping. I think that British Railways never did that. Skipping stops, as has been pointed out, reduces the ‘fines’ charged to the operator, while being staggeringly inconsiderate to passengers. Guaranteed connections, in contrast, reduced the inconvenience to the passenger.

Passengers boarding a privatised train are now used to jam-packed carriages offering standing room only. British Railways suffered this problem too, but less often, because British Railways ran longer trains. The service from Edinburgh to the west coast, for example, consisted of a locomotive and ten or twelve coaches. These days, Cross Country operates a railcar with four or five coaches. British Railways coaches were more comfortable and better designed than the coaches of privatised trains. The toilets worked. The seats lined up with the windows. The Mark 2B carriages, built in Britain by British Rail Engineering, were probably the most comfortable coaches ever operated on British tracks. And even if you were a second class passenger you could use the restaurant car. Virgin Trains, operators of the London to Edinburgh service, withdrew restaurant service from second class passengers. It is difficult to see why a restaurateur would want to exclude potential customers in that way. Later, Virgin Trains withdrew restaurant cars altogether.

As well as withdrawing restaurant cars, the privatised operators have also withdrawn Motorail services as well as most overnight sleeping car services. The sleeping cars are due to be upgraded, which the franchisees will use as a pretext for a huge fare increase.

On the subject of first class carriages, British Railways usually allowed holders of second class tickets to sit in first class carriages when overcrowding required it. The private operators never offer this simple courtesy. If you hold a second class ticket, you’re a second class passenger, and you stay with your own kind.

A few random thoughts conclude this article.

British Railways cost the taxpayer less than the privatised railway does. Subsidy to the railway has increased threefold since privatisation. The cost of running the railway has more than doubled in real terms since 1995. (Action for Rail.)

British Railways ran a long term electrification programme, giving faster and more reliable journeys, particularly on short distance commuter runs. The franchisees have not continued it. The Ministry of Transport recently cancelled electrification of the Great Western main line west of Maidenhead.

British Railways negotiated one of the first minimum wage agreements with the unions of the day. The minimum wage for a week’s work was £4 4s. In contrast, in an age of gruesome unemployment and poverty, the franchisees are plagued with staff shortages.

British Railways gave names to the crack expresses. The Flying Scotsman is probably the best known train on Earth. Virgin Trains reduced it to a one way service leaving Edinburgh at 05.30. Recently they appear to have abolished it. A search for Flying Scotsman on National Rail's web site finds no hits.

At a handful of stations on the main line, British Railways left the equipment which steam locomotives need in order to re-fuel en route. In a staggeringly mean gesture which surely cost more than it saved, Network Rail has removed it, affecting the steam hauled services which enthusiasts run.

Lastly, but not leastly, British Railways chose the elegant, simple Gill Sans typeface for its notices and painted its main line passenger coaches in a simple, dignified maroon livery with the beautiful British Railways wheel, lion and crown roundel, in contrast with the artless daubs which adorn the franchisees’ vehicles.

Do I want British Railways back?

Yes. Chances are, so do you. The Government, knowing that three-quarters of the electors who expressed an opinion favour the re-nationalisation of the railway (You Gov,) does nothing about it. Democracy, it appears, is a wonderful thing — when it suits the suits.

If I am right and British Railways provided a better service in 1948 than the franchisees do now (not a faster service, but a better service,) there is in my view every justification for calling a halt to the gravy train and re-nationalising the railways without compensation. If someone smashes your bicycle, you don't pay them for the smashed-up wreckage. Bring back British Railways.

28 April 2018: And another thing. After the Beeching Report, a procedure was instituted whereby British Railways had to conduct a public inquiry before closing a passenger service. The privatised operators have found a way to circumvent the process. When they want to close a station, they simply tell the trains not to stop there, except for an occasional train once a month or so. This is legal and means that stations can be closed without any consultative process. The occasional trains have become known as the ‘parliamentary’ trains. For example, Teesside Airport station is at present served by one train a month, in one direction.

19 May 2018: And one more other thing. British Railways developed the Advanced Passenger Train. National Rail has, so far as I am aware, no project aimed at developing faster or technically advanced vehicles.

8 June 2018: Curly Sandwiches. Someone on Question Time started the customary paragraph about you wouldn't want British Railways back, this time because British Railways served stale and curly sandwiches. It is easy to forget that modern sandwich packaging was invented by Marks and Spencer in 1980, three years after British Railways was sold off.

Jacob Rees Mogg nails his colours to the mast

I see that Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg has advised Theresa May and Philip Hammond, the leaders of the Conservative Party, to “bury their differences and get the Government back on track.” He said the new Cabinet should focus on delivering core Tory values. (Read all about it at Rees Mogg warns May and Hammond to bury their differences, Daily Mail, 7 January 2018.)

How right Mr Rees-Mogg is. We need a man who will champion the traditional Tory values: massive unemployment, low wages, high immigration, the worst schools in the world unless your parents are rich, rocketing train fares and stratospheric energy costs, unaffordable housing, a derelict Health Service, the end of industry, the abolition of old age pensions and no tax on the toffs.

We’re all looking forward to it, Mr Rees-Mogg. When can you start?

A happy New Year to any readers I may have.

On the main line

When I was at school, it never occurred to me that in my old age I would see public buildings transformed into soup kitchens in order to feed the starving.

If you won’t believe it until you see the MP4 video proving that it happened at Euston Station, one of the big London termini, click this link.

I am both revolted and very sad that we have an elected government which simply does not care about the misery in which some people are living. Asked about this sort of outrage, the Tory mantra is “We don’t have a magic money tree.” That just shows the power of a false analogy: it does not take a magic money tree to make the poor better off, it takes common sense and an understanding of economics and, perhaps, sociology. Oh, and it also takes money, which the Tories have in unfeasibly huge amounts. In truth all three political parties have collaborated in reducing us to the awful state in which we now find ourselves. All three have had the chance to make the dramatic changes that are now vital. It isn’t just the Tories’ fault, although they happen to be holding the hot potato this week.

In other news, Ms Kate Middleton, a member of the Royal Family who does so far as I know no work of any kind, went to church today wearing a coat that, I am assured by the newspaper, cost £3,000. I don’t understand why she needs it. She doesn’t need a coat as costly as that unless, unknown to anybody, she spends her nights lying on a park bench and unable to sleep.

A letter to the Taxpayers' Alliance

The Taxpayers' Alliance is a right-wing group with whom, most of the time, I disagree politically, but I do find their tales of woe and waste highly amusing. I don't donate to them. Today I received a letter from them telling me that they have a new campaign manager, Mr Harry Fone, and he wants me to write and tell him which campaigns I think the Taxpayers' Alliance ought to conduct. Here is my reply.

Thanks for writing.

Thank you for inviting me to suggest campaigns which the Taxpayers' Alliance should become involved in. There are many such campaigns, as Britain is in a desperate state thanks to completely incompetent management, but the most urgent ones I can think of are

(a) Double the old age pension, all social security benefits and the income-tax-free allowance. Make the bosses live on the average full time wage paid to their workers. This will at a stroke (remember that?) end the recession, which is caused by government meanness and a greedy and selfish toff class, and has nothing to do with debts or productivity.

(b) Ban all imports from China. Quite apart from deliberately collaborating with a foreign government that is trying to destroy the British economy by exporting goods below cost price, this will more or less eliminate the imports of the products of child labour, forced labour, convict labour and slave labour. No Chinese goods work properly and all of them fall to bits after a couple of weeks of normal use. A ban on Chinese imports would also stimulate the manufacture of British goods of quality.

(c) Requisition all unoccupied houses, second and subsequent homes, investment properties, buy to lets and illegal sub-lets and sell them to homeless families for £10.

(d) Re-nationalise the railways without compensation, slash fares to one tenth of their present levels, abolish second class, fix the toilets, bring back the restaurant cars and line the seats up with the windows.

(e) Hang criminal motorists if they kill or endanger life. If they were drunk at the time, hang them twice.

(f) Abolish the Royal Family except for one monarch, one monarch's consort, and one heir and trainee. Move homeless families into the Royal Family's mansions and palaces except for one palace in London and one in Scotland. All the rest of the sponging toffs should either get a job or claim the standard rate of social security like everybody else has to.

(g) Bring back the full student grant sufficient to pay tuition charges, accommodation, books, equipment, food and fares, as it was not all that long ago. Do away with the (imaginary or actual) need for billions of foreign speaking immigrants who have skills that British kids can't afford to learn any more.

(h) Abolish the Conservative Party. They do no good of any kind so why should we put up with them? Abolish the Labour Party as well because it's the same as the Conservative Party.

(i) Abolish the European Union. The Europeans should learn English and then apply, and pay a huge fee, to join the British Empire. (I owe this obvious idea to David Frost and Anthony Jay.)

Best wishes and thank you again for giving me this opportunity. I hope to see you making the case for all the above within the next week or two.

Sincerely, Ken Johnson

A place of beauty

Thank you to the gardeners of Edinburgh District Council Parks Department who have planted a small patch of land with meadow flowers, in between the children's swing park and the football pitch. The result is beautiful, and it reminds me of the way I think the countryside ought to be. For a few yards, the walk along the footpath from Kilncroft Side to Inglis Green Road is in bloom. Do walk it.

1 May 2018. At nearby Hailes Quarry park, the rough grass has been enhanced by several — about five — large beds of daffodils. The result is beautiful. I can walk past these beds on my way to catch bus number 30.

What Duracell and Ever Ready don’t want you to know

Following the appearance of this short article in the Daily Mail dated 7 September 2017 on how to recharge your mobile phone when there is no electric power, How to charge your phone if the power goes out, I feel entitled to publish the following short article on the same subject from the little known Journal of Physics and Mobile Communication.

Four engineering students from the university of Tempinbol, in the little known east European country of Tiurma, have discovered a replacement for conventional mobile phone batteries.

Cut a slice 1½″ × 2″ of British potato. Soak it in a mixture of vinegar, honey and cold tea for three months. Prick holes in both sides of it with a pin. Wrap it in a clean British cabbage leaf and put it in the hole where the phone battery used to be.

Once in place it will power your phone for up to 100 years and what’s more every call you make with it will be free.

A song about the Office of National Statistics

According to the eleven o’clock (in the morning) news on Radio Four today, unemployment has fallen yet again.

Tune: We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line. Acknowledgements to Michael Carr and Jimmy Kennedy.

Once I got a first class math-e-matics degree,
Then I was on the dole.
Now I’m back at work and in the right job for me,
I invent the figures that appear on TV!

I’ve joined the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
Where I work things out and often get them wrong,
It’s where they pay me to make up all the vital facts,
As I blithely go along.
Tell me the figures should be big or small
And I’ll tell you what you want to hear,
I’m in the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
And the answer’s crystal clear.

I’m at the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
Is your manifesto costed through and through?
Do you wonder who’s leading the opinion polls?
’Cause I haven’t got a clue.
All these improvements in the way you live
Are supposed to raise your self esteem,
I’m in the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
Where I fall asleep and dream.

Downstairs in the basement there’s a hardworking clerk,
Oh, what a rigmarole,
Guess how many citizens are looking for work,
Scribbling it on paper while he’s going berserk,

I’m at the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
Will your pension be enough to stay alive?
Have we paid back the debt or just the deficit?
And how many beans make five?
Is the exchange rate going to rise or fall?
Tell me, how long is a piece of string?
And then you take away the number that you first thought of,
Yes, we know that sort of thing.

I’m at the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
I decide on what goes up and what comes down,
I just pluck all the numbers out of empty air
’Cause the abacus broke down,
When people ask me what the future holds
I can cast the runes and draw a graph,
I’m in the Of-fice of National Stati-sti-tics,
I can have a damned good laugh.

Ken Johnson

How to stop people using mobile phones while they drive

Not that long ago I was crossing the road at the Pelicon crossing outside Saughton Park, when despite the red traffic light and the green man, a fast car passed within an inch of me, very nearly knocking me over. The driver was, you’ve guessed it, using her mobile phone while driving.

This dangerous practice has attracted some attention in the newspapers of late: for example, Motorists’ anger at plummeting mobile-phone convictions in The Telegraph. But the only solution anyone seems to have canvassed is increasing the fines or driving bans that the courts can hand down.

The trouble is, increasing the penalty has not worked. Penalties for using a mobile phone while driving were increased a few weeks ago, and the number of convictions has pretty much stayed the same.

The penalty for using a mobile phone, of course, should be temporary or permanent confiscation of the phone. This is obvious to any parent or teacher who has become exasperated by watching a child texting and yapping on the phone instead of making their own bed or doing arithmetic. But the long term solution to this serious road safety problem comes from a completely different direction.

Some futuristic engineers see the solution in driverless cars. Obviously, if your car is driverless, you will be able to use a mobile phone just as if you were aboard a bus or a train. When driverless cars are finally put to work on the streets I am sure that the roads will be safer than at any time since the invention of the motor car. But driverless cars are a long way in the future, and in the mean time I see the solution in subscriberless phones. These revolutionary telephones will sense the movement of the car, and immediately start phoning people and holding trivial and unnecessary conversations along the lines of ‘Hello darling, I’ll be working late at the office,’ ‘Happy birthday,’ ‘Does the dog have enough tinned food,’ ‘Eric’s feeling a bit poorly so I gave the stuff to Myra,’ and so forth.

By keeping up an autonomous torrent of inane conversation with friends, the subscriberless phone will free its owner to concentrate on the road ahead.

A modest comment on the unemployment figures

Here is the BBC News website’s summary of the unemployment figures published yesterday, 17 May 2017.

• The UK unemployment rate has fallen to 4·6%, its lowest in 42 years,
• The jobless rate has not been lower since the June to August period of 1975.
• The employment rate, the proportion of 16 to 64 year olds in work, was 74·8%, the highest since records began in 1971.

You can take that as the official version of the figures, published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which is the equivalent in today’s money of the Ministry of Truth. Disputing their opinions, particularly it seems in the Houses of Parliament, sets off a hurricane of rage from those who have put their faith in them.

There are many expressions of stunned disbelief in the English language, but like the great George Orwell, writing in his newspaper column ‘As I Please’, on 19 January 1945, I sense that, reading these incredible statements, you find the phrase ‘and then you wake up’ coming immediately to hand. It is common experience that unemployment is completely out of control. Unemployment has in reality reached a level so high that no politician of any political stamp asks to be put in charge of it. Worse, so far, no politician in the last few years has even suggested that anything can, or ought to be, done about it. On the contrary, several recently adopted government policies, for example that on the State pension, require old people to remain employed until an age well into three figures*, and assume, despite train-loads of evidence to the contrary, that there will be well paid work for all who want it.

Not for the first time I sense that the government has been deceived by its own propaganda. This time, though, the Opposition is guilty of pretending to accept ONS statistics on unemployment, for fear of finding itself responsible for a desperately serious problem for which it has neither diagnosis nor remedy.

It is exceedingly difficult to find a job, as my own experience and that of, probably, millions of others has shown. Unemployment is certainly well into the millions. How many millions exactly, nobody knows.

Further evidence may be found by searching on line for ‘How they fiddle the unemployment figures,’ or any synonymous phrase. You will see dozens of hits, each representing a different list of old Spanish customs whereby the ONS reduces the unemployment figures without actually employing anybody.

The only plausible alternative explanation of the disparity between the ONS figures and reality is that the ONS, far from counting the unemployed people and falsifying the results, simply makes up the figures as it goes along.

I doubt whether anyone in government, or anywhere else for that matter, knows who qualifies as unemployed and who doesn’t, let alone the vital information: who is unemployed, where they live, what skills they have, what they might be trained to do, or anything else about them.

What that means, I think, is that nobody in government actually cares about those people, including me, who face the daily misery of having no work to do and precious little money. That is especially poignant in the light of evidence such as a study called Modelling suicide and unemployment (The Guardian, 11/02/15) that, among men at least, unemployment is a common precursor of suicide. To the people who are undergoing it, unemployment is sometimes a burden which they take the most desperate of measures to throw off.

In the absence of any serious proposals from any political party to deal with unemployment, here are my modest proposals to ameliorate it.

1. Unemployment remains sky high, so stop lying about it. I haven’t spoken to a single person who believes the ONS figures.

   Count unemployed people in exactly the same way as they were counted in the days when an interviewer asked the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, whether he would resign if unemployment were to reach a quarter of a million.

2. Stop trying to force unemployed people to find work.

   Most unemployed people would probably accept a decent job if they were offered one. Any who prefer to remain on benefits, which means living on a budget so small that many unemployed people cannot afford electricity and food, are at least leaving a job empty so that someone who wants it can have it.

3. Raise the benefits that unemployed people receive.

   By a stroke of irony, paying unemployed people more money would reduce unemployment. Increasing the amount of money that people actually spend is a pre-requisite for an increase in the amount of goods sold, which is in turn probably a better way of reducing unemployment than not counting people with hats.

4. Finally, stop buying cheap goods from China. It's one thing to buy some cheap rubbish from China, or anywhere else, when you want some cheap rubbish. If you want a dress that costs ten times what the shop gave for it, doesn't fit and then falls to bits, China is probably the right supplier for you.

   It’s another thing altogether to buy things from a country which appears to have been subsidising the manufacture of various goods and then dumping them in British shops at less than what it costs the Chinese to produce.

9 March 2019. I have now learned the reason for the number of people employed being the highest since the Great Fire of London, or whatever it’s supposed to be. It is not a sign of increasing wealth. It is a sign of increasing poverty. A large number of people above the State pensionable age, just increased to 65 years for both sexes, cannot afford to retire. They are continuing to work because they have no choice. If you thought that children leaving school, or qualified professionals leaving university, or old men made redundant over the age of 50, were finding well paid work easily instead of spending years making one hopeless job application after another, forget it. In future you will work for poverty wages until you drop dead. The Tories, knowing this, have done nothing to stop it happening, and never will.

3 May 2019 I have recently learned how it comes about that the number of people in work is high — usually cited as ‘the highest in the entire history of the universe’ or some similar accolade. What has really happened is that many women have had their pensionable age increased from the former sixty years to sixty-six years, or even sixty-seven. Because of that, many women are unable to leave work as planned, and have to stay on until their pension arrives. Hence, there are a lot of people in work, but there are still no jobs.

☆That is an exaggeration, but not a particularly big one. ↑

The truth about St George

An article in The Independent headlined “This St George’s Day, we should remember that the patron saint of England was an immigrant,” claims that St George was a Turkish immigrant, never set foot in England and was persecuted by the Romans on account of his quaint religious beliefs.

It’s time to set the record straight. St George was as English as I would be if I lived in England. He was born in Limehouse, went to the Alderman Gruesome comprehensive school and came out illiterate but a well respected street fighter who spent his days drinking warm beer in the Queen Vic. He lived in a cramped terraced house on Darkness Road which he shared with a bricklayer and a jobbing gardener, and he worked as a delivery driver on a zero hours contract with a pizza café.

On 23 April (or its equivalent in the Julian calendar) of 360 AD he heard a commotion from the general area of Blackfriars Bridge. He made his way thither and pushed to the front of the crowd, where he beheld the horrifying spectacle of a vast dragon, the size of at least three elephants tied together, breathing fire so hot that the street lamps wilted and all who came close to it were incinerated.

George (he was just plain George in those days, the title came along later) tied his shoelaces and drew his special left-handed sword, smiting the dragon with such speed and strength that its head was completely severed by a single blow, and the animal writhed in agony and fell down dead at his feet.

At which the crowd cheered George to the rafters and the Pope turned up out of nowhere, read George a magic scroll and pinned to his chest the golden medal which converted him into a saint.

After that, unlike most saints, St George never did anything noteworthy ever again. Nonetheless we still celebrate St George’s Day by roasting a goose, baking red and white cakes, dressing up as knights and dragons and pretending to fight each other with plastic sticks, and giving one another gaudily wrapped I-Pads and mobile telephones.

So mark the truth. Never let it be said that St George was a Turkish immigrant. He was as English as you or I would have been, if we were English. If they get away with that, these damned historians will be telling me that Jesus Christ wasn’t born on 25 December of 0 AD, and we can’t have that.

I first published this nonsense in the newsgroup talk.bizarre. The image of St George comes from joeatta78.deviantart.com. The Crusader image came from the Daily Express site.

A good word for the Daily Mail

Of all the British newspapers, the Daily Mail is probably the least respected. I’m the first to admit that on occasion I deride it too. I had an aunt who read the Daily Mail regularly and seemed to actually believe it. Some of the things she said about Black people, for which the Daily Mail would have been her only source of information, probably can't be legally written down on a web page.

Nonetheless, as I said when you were here last week, the on line version of the Daily Mail, however disagreeable you may find its content, is probably the best organised of the on line British papers.

For a start, it is free. Many newspapers on the Net now charge for their services, out of a belief that if they put their publish their content free, nobody will pay to read the same content on paper. So far as I know, that belief has proved mistaken. In particular, The Times is rumoured to be about to abandon its subscription scheme altogether.

Then again, the quality of the Mail’s news is not bad. Breaking news usually gets into the on line paper within an hour or so. This is in contrast to, say, the relentless fake news on offer in the Sunday Sport, which once published a story under the headline World War 2 Bomber Found On Moon. For real news, the only on line paper I can think of which rivals the Mail is The Telegraph, which is as good as any, better than most, and still free.

It is of course its opinions for which the Daily Mail is so widely ridiculed. The Mail obsesses about a handful of peculiarly uninteresting topics, in alphabetical order: house prices, Madeleine McCann, pædophiles, quack medicine, the Royal Family, and women from a lacklustre American city called Los Angeles where clothing appears still to be on the ration.

If you want to read the opinions of the political Right, you can read The Daily Express on line, and if you want to read the opinions of the political Left, you can read The Morning Star as well, although I must say The Morning Star would be more plausible than it is if it didn’t endlessly mistake the Labour Party for something to do with socialism.

Yet the Mail is neither nauseatingly liberal, like The Guardian, which appears to believe that every illegal immigrant, whatever his deeds, should be allowed to stay in the United Kingdom for the rest of his natural life, nor desperately Politikally Korrekt, like the BBC, which still refers to ‘firefighters’ instead of ‘firemen’ in case someone rings them up and pretends to have been dreadfully offended. I sometimes think the BBC would rather yell Fuck! on air, like Russell Brand did in front of the children on Red Nose Day, than describe a man who fights fires for a living as a fireman. Let alone a man who works on the footplate of a steam locomotive shovelling coal onto the fire.

All this ignores one vital consideration.

The opinions expressed by a newspaper, or by any other written communication, are created by their authors. It may be fair to judge the readers of the Daily Mail by the opinions that they read, but because of the Mail’s comment sections, it is also possible to judge the readership by what they write. Often they just write a throw-away catch phrase like ‘Throw them out’ or ‘Bring back the rope,’ but sometimes it is a carefully thought through couple of sentences and often they write what is, politically, the diametric opposite of what would have been posted by the rabid neo-Nazi Daily Mail reader of popular imagination.

Looking at the comments, I have been struck by one or two recurring themes.

Firstly, the sheer illiteracy of some posters. This may well be the true measure of the failure of the schools. Many comments are meaningless, written by readers who are unable to express themselves in written English. I try to skip over those comments rather than rack what is left of my brain working out what the writer wanted to say.

Any comment about a criminal convicted of a violent or sexual offence ignites a sort of firestorm of comments, each one posted by some wannabe gaoler with ideas of torturing the guilty man (it is usually a man) more severely than the wannabe gaoler before him.

Any comment about schools attracts a pile of comments pining for the restoration of the glorious Tripartite System, the competitive, disciplined education system that we had in the ’fifties and ’sixties, instead of the present comprehensive system believed by many (rightly) to set itself the wrong targets and then not hit any of them.

Comments about the afterlife or about everyday vegetables that miraculously cure all known diseases or about children who are the re-incarnation of an ancient prince, king or farmyard animal are greeted with terrifying, enthusiastic credulity.

But the Mail’s cringing obsequiousness towards the Royal Family is not shared in its comment sections. Many readers harbour dark suspicions about the fate of poor Madeleine McCann, who the Mail insists is probably still alive somewhere. Readers do not seem to share the British and American governments’ fears about the Russian Federation doing all it can to undermine the wonderful western life style which most of us don't enjoy. And readers’ comments on dangerous, drunken or homicidal motorists usually deplore the reckless leniency of the Courts — you know, the magistrates and judges who think that being banned from driving is a sort of punishment, instead of just a reduction to the same status as the rest of us.

I suppose I have to admit to sharing all those opinions except the one about the treatment of criminals.

Then again a lot of comments are written in jest and most of those are funny.

I have been a loyal poster of comments to the Daily Mail since 31 July 2015. In that time I have, I imagine, contributed more to the noise than to the signal, but occasionally I post a comment which attracts either nearly universal agreement or nearly universal disagreement. You can tell whether the readers agree or disagree with a comment because each comment is accompanied by its count of likes and dislikes. Looking at those ratings, you can see the opinions of the readers rather than the writers.

Here, so that you may fairly judge the readership of the Daily Mail, are thirty-one comments, all of them written by me, which met either with near unanimous approval or near unanimous disapproval. With the aid of the specially invented Unanimometer, which appears on the left of each comment and shows the percentage of readers who agreed with me, let’s dive in and take a look at them.

Unanimometer	On personal finance On a suggestion that you should save one hour’s pay per day, The one piece of advice every self-made millionaire swears by for keeping their finances in check You report that, ‘If you were earning £8 an hour, you should save £8 every day of March, which would result in you saving £248 by the end of the month.’ And you will have saved £1,000,000 after just over 342 years, 2 months and 24 days. See you at the Ritz!
	On food On a report that a waitress wrote an insulting remark on a restaurant bill, ‘Small egg and tomato omelette for the weird freak:’ Father fumes after posh café hands him his receipt containing a printed insult about his wife Could someone explain how an ‘egg and [tomato] omelette’ differs from a tomato omelette?
	On immigration Reply to a comment on a report that police found three illegal immigrants stowing away in a lorry, Moment police discover three ‘illegal’ immigrants from Eritrea in the back of a lorry after the worried driver rang 999 after fearing people were inside JC4PM wrote, Pity we didn’t give them a warm welcome considering the hardships they must have endured. Hardship for most people in the UK is when it rains. You don’t consider a lifetime on benefits and a free house to be a warm enough welcome, obviously.
	On education On a report that some schools send badly behaved pupils home on the days of Ofsted inspections, The badly behaved pupils kept hidden from Ofsted Ofsted have been trying, and failing, to pull the wool over our eyes for years. How comes it that only one school, two on a really bad day, is graded Needs Improvement, Poor, Useless, or Worse Than Useless, but a third of the children in the final year of compulsory education can’t read and seven eighths can’t do simple arithmetic?
	On a report that a girl had been sent home from school following a false allegation that she was selling vibrators, Lutheran school principal suspends girl, 12, for three days for ‘selling sex toys’ in the classroom — but it turns out they were actually ‘water snake wigglies’ Do two members of school staff have nothing more important to do than accuse their charges of imaginary sex crimes? The important question is, can Frances Halbeck read and write? If so, apologise to her and then forget the imaginary sex crimes. If not, sack the teachers.
	On streamed schools: Streaming ‘holds back pupils from poor homes:’ Call to stop dividing pupils by ability as children in lower sets get worse teaching Demolish the comprehensives. Bring back the Eleven Plus, grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical schools.
	On the Royal Family On a report that a helicopter sometimes flown by Prince William was involved in a near miss, Prince’s helicopter horror as a lethal drone comes within half a second of his air ambulance in dramatic near-miss I don’t get it. How do you justify saying, ‘Scrounger William cheats death’ when he wasn’t anywhere near the helicopter at the time? He was probably out in some den of iniquity somewhere, getting off his face with his rich friends.
	On quack medicine On a story that a dose of cannabis had cured a child of cancer, I gave my little boy cannabis to help cure his cancer Bedelia posted, I work in the industry, it’s real. The wilfully ignorant just choose to stay that way. To Bedelia: You work in the fake news industry? Do you have any vacancies? I had a rare cancer of the nose but I cured it by eating a wet cardboard box.
	On foreign affairs On a report that Deutsche Bank believes the pound will fall to $1.06, Deutsche Bank predicts the pound will drop by a fifth by the end of the year due to Brexit Germany calling, Germany calling. Attention, all British persons. We know why your national currency has declined in value to less than two million Reichsmarks to the Pound. Great German economists calculate that before the end of this year, an egg will change hands for fifteen shillings and a loaf of bread for three pounds eighteen and sixpence. The Bank of England is outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the glorious Reichsbank with its ranks of fund managers and cashiers, all of whom are dedicated to terminating all financial activity in Britain. Soon your rations will be scraps of meat and crusts of bread. You will starve, you will freeze, you will sleep on the street etc.
	On a report that British banks are storing money for Russian criminals, Diamonds, Bentleys, private school fees and a £29m townhouse: How Russian cash ‘laundered by UK banks’ was spent Will the government now give effect to the Russian extradition warrants currently sitting in a waste paper basket somewhere in Whitehall? Or did they really imagine that the oligarchs and their British and American accomplices came by their wealth honestly?
	On a report that British banks allowed Russian billionaires to launder money, British banks including HSBC, RBS, Barclays and Coutts ‘processed £600million in multi-billion pound Russian money-laundering scam’ Jack Herer wrote, Fines aren’t working with these big corporations How about bulldozers?
	On defence On a report that North Korea might start a war, Inching towards nuclear war? It’s terrifying. North Korea’s use of missiles threatens a new global flashpoint which could suck in South Korea, China, Japan and the US I think the Americans did do something about Korea. They started a war against one of the smallest and weakest countries in the world, and they lost. Any threat of war from North Korea is the Americans’ own fault. Mark you, without it, the film Mash would never have been made, which makes up for the Americans being on the wrong end of about five million nuclear missiles made in China so they fall to bits and don’t go off bang.
	On a report that a British aircraft carrier was scrapped: Rust in peace, Lusty: Ex-British flagship now lies in bits at demolition yard after being ripped apart to make pots and pans War raged about them. Enemy forces had taken The Weald and were advancing rapidly on Guildford. Colonel McFlare stared at the map. Sweat ran down his face. ‘God damn them! We’ll send in the aircraft carrier. Give ’em something to think about.’ From the desk in the corner of the bunker, Perkins looked up, ready with the notepad to pass the great Colonel’s orders to the ratings. ‘Sir. If I may ask, shall we bombard them with cheap Turkish saucepans or delay the advance by fifteen minutes and serve them boiled potatoes?’
	On Gideon (‘David’) Osborne On a report that Mr Osborne has six jobs, Defiant Osborne says his six jobs make parliament better as he is berated by MPs in the Commons for ‘impossible’ conflicts of interest If Mr Osborne can make do with five jobs, can I have the one that he doesn’t want?
	On the afterlife On a report of strange apparitions, ‘Ghosts find me:’ The spooky revelations of graveyard and mortuary workers Funny thing about the ‘confession’ and ‘true tales’ sites on the Net is, all the stories are completely true. Nobody ever makes anything up, not even me. I wonder why that is.
	On pædophile rings In reply to a comment on a story that fictitious pædophile activity on Coronation Street gave rise to numerous complaints from viewers, Coronation Street ‘could face Ofcom investigation’ after complaints from viewers about “disturbing’ Bethany Platt sex ring storyline LKM wrote, Why? These things happen in real life. By not putting them on soaps is ignorant and makes people live in a fantasy where this awful thing doesn’t happen. Who do you know who’s experienced anything remotely resembling this exaggerated, lunatic invention?
	On the housing shortage On a report of a very small flat being rented out for £520 a month, Is this the worst flat in London? Tiny studio where the toilet is just inches from the bed goes on the market for £520 a month Requisition the flat and move purported refugees in.
	On a report that builders want to build houses on the Green Belt, Call to end the green belt ban: Experts say the housing shortage is holding back Britain’s economic growth Builders and developers have wanted to get their hands and their bulldozers onto the Green Belt ever since it was created. The problem is nothing to do with the Green Belt and everything to do with extortionate rents and house prices, which suck money out of the economy. Requisition empty buildings, refurbish them and adapt them for residential use, and sell the resulting housing units for £10 each.
	On democracy On the murky details of the Conservative Party’s election expenses, The Prime Minister, the Tatler Tory, his Conservative party Battlebus mistress and a very revealing election expenses leak Trouble with metaphors and analogies is that eventually people start to believe them. Elections are not a battle. They are democracy in its working clothes. The Tories should repaint the thing and call it the Democracy Bus. Or do Tories imagine an election to be a battle between the forces of good and evil, in which they’re crazed warriors swinging their axes on the side of evil?
	On Jeremy Corbyn MP On a report that Ann Smith MP had told Jeremy Corbyn MP to resign, Why don’t you just go? Corbyn’s new low as MP tells him to his face to quit. I thought that when a lowly Member of Parliament did not want to work under the direction of the Leader of the Parliamentary Party, it was the Member who had to resign. So why doesn’t Mrs Wilson, a.k.a. Smith, resign? After, of course, explaining how you get four beds into a one bedroom flat in London.
	On foreign aid On a report of starvation in Kenya, Victims of the greedy, profiteering vultures of the famine: Shocking dispatch reveals the horrific story of a little boy and his desperate mother starving in the heat of the Kenyan sun The foreign aid money that could have kept them alive and well is sitting in an anonymous numbered bank account somewhere. Send in the forensic accountants.
	On the BBC On a report that Google carries unsavoury advertisements, BBC and Whitehall pull ads from Google after it is accused of failing to remove antisemitic content in a ‘breach of law and its own rules’ Tim wrote, Do something radical, if Google run these ads in at the UK, and the funds go to a proscribed organisation, fine them for every ad until it stops. Yes, I know it is difficult, as the web is world wide, but it can be controlled to the layman with basic filters in place, although I admit, on deep searches this could be a nightmare. Oh, nonsense. The BBC haven’t been given their own way so they’re throwing a tantrum and taking their ball home.
	On energy policy On a report that ministers disapprove of energy price rises, Ministers pledge action on rip-off energy bills: Crackdown promised after minister attacks ‘unacceptable price rises’ Does the government really believe its own propaganda — the best way to reduce prices is to allow the rip-off merchants to charge as much as they like? Telling people to buy identical electricity from an identical company that uses the same coal, diesel and copper wires is a waste of everybody’s time and money. People are regularly found frozen to death in Scotland because of astronomic electricity and gas prices. Privatisation has failed again. Re-nationalise the electricity and gas industries without compensation and reduce energy prices by 90%.
	On landing a job On a story about interviews, Would YOU get the job? The 20 toughest interview questions asked by the world’s most élite firms (and how to answer them correctly) The easiest way to get a job is to sleep with the manager. The other easiest way to get a job is to be the son or daughter of the manager. Never known either method fail.
	On motoring offenders On a report of a near miss on the roads, Moment BMW driver ‘holding a can of beer’ shoots out from a junction onto a main road forcing a mother to slam on her brakes to avoid a head-on crash They’ll fine him at least 75p. Just you wait and see.
	On austerity On a report of the national insurance increase for self employed workers, Tory backlash grows as minister joins MPs including IDS demanding a U-turn over Budget tax raid on self-employed while Chancellor insists he needs to raise money for Brexit Squealer explained to the animals that when they experienced a fall in their weekly wage, what they were really getting was an increase in their weekly wage, because the pigs had been so successful at reducing the deficit. ‘Thanks to the financial acumen of our great leader, Comrade Napoleon,’ he squealed, ‘when the deficit appears to be increasing out of all control, it is in reality becoming smaller and more easily manageable.’
	On mathematics On a report that if you Own a bag for life? You’re a safer motorist: Sainsbury’s finds shoppers who use eco carriers are less likely to make an insurance claim Inferential statistics is hard, as Barbie would have said.
	On divorce On a a story about counsellors for recently divorced women, From fixing your finances to getting you dating again… Marriage on the rocks? Call the ‘divorcierge’ It is sickening to see greedy self appointed nannies making a pile of money out of unhappy marriages.
	On international travel On a story about leg room on airline seats, Why BA will soon have less legroom than Ryanair: Airline plans to reduce gap to 29 inches so it can add an extra two rows of seats on short-haul flights Go by train and ship.
	On money On a story about fake five pound notes, How to spot a fake fiver: Police release tips on how to tell if you have a counterfeit £5 note after a PCSO raises the alarm over alleged forgeries in circulation If it says ‘Monopoly’ on it and it shows a picture of Uncle Moneybags, then it’s probably a fake.
	On accidentally buying hamburgers On a story about people who go into Macdonald’s for a salad and buy a hamburger instead, Why do we go in for a salad… but leave with a Big Mac? History of how things become popular revealed Your use of the word ‘muck’ will offend many people who toil at all hours for low wages in hot and cramped conditions producing what is probably the finest junk food in the world. Macdonald’s food is excellent of its kind. You want filet de bœuf farci en croûte, you go to the five star Michelin restaurant down the road. Don’t insult Macdonald’s.

My favourite television series

My favourite television series, The Adventures of Mukhtar the Police Dog, is back on Russian television after a long absence. It’s a bit like Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, except with a very clever police dog. The series started in 2004 and has run for 798 exciting episodes, and it won the TEFI (ТЭФИ) Award for Best Daytime Television Series from the Russian Academy of Television in 2014 and again in 2015.

Somebody has put the series onto You Tube. Copy and paste ‘Возвращение Мухтара’ into the search box and you’ll find it.

Not the end of the Monarchy

The Daily Mail On Line, even if you don’t like its politics, is a very well organised on-line newspaper. It is free. It makes no effort — so far — to prevent its readers running ad blockers. It is well laid out, all the main stories of the day are previewed on its splash page, and every headline clicks through onto the story.

True, the Daily Mail is the object of much ridicule. It has a reputation, not entirely deserved, for comically rabid right wing politics. One day I’ll write about its politics, but today I’m banging on about something else.

The Mail has curious obsessions with house prices, quack medicine and the clothes chosen by certain young women. But the reason I read the Mail is its very generous comment policy. I can write comments on most of its stories and other readers can, and do, post their own comments and reply to mine. You can read every comment I’ve ever written on stories in the Mail if you click on my profile there.

So that’s my interest declared.

On 18 March 2017, the Mail On Line ran a story called “London Bridge Is Down” about the unsurprising, if mawkish, fact that rehearsals for the Queen’s funeral have been held. The article took its headline from a claim, which I suspect is unlikely to happen when the need arises, that various officials will refer to Her Majesty's demise by the cryptic phrase “London Bridge is down.”

It is not surprising that rehearsals of grave events of state take place regularly. The point that interests me, which so far as I know neither I nor the Mail nor anybody else has considered, is whether the end of the present reign would be a good moment to reform the British Monarchy.

I am a monarchist. Nevertheless I have the feeling that many British subjects are tired of the antics of certain members of the Royal Family and the enormous amounts of money, property and privilege lavished on people of limited talent and unlimited wealth who are related to the Queen but have not a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding her.

So here’s why I am in favour of the Monarchy.

The monarchy is the only means I know for the leader of the United Kingdom to be politically neutral. You need an apolitical figure to perform ceremonial duties such as opening Parliament, signing Bills into law, pinning medals onto distinguished soldiers, giving out honours to those whose donations to the political party of government merit them, speaking to assemblages of nonentities in Brussels and generally opening supermarkets and town halls.

The alternative usually canvassed is an elected President. The problem is, unless the elected President can refrain from being a member of any political party, he (she) is a representative of a fraction of the electorate, and can’t possibly represent everybody. If you save your platoon from being incinerated by an enemy daisy-cutter, do you really want to receive your hard earned medal from a member of the political party that sent you into the war in the first place?

The last serious reform of the Monarchy took place in 1649 when Oliver Cromwell ran the country for a while, slaughtering many thousands of civilians and, once established as ‘Lord Protector,’ presiding over a bizarrely intolerant theocratic regime until his death in 1658. After that, much to the relief of your average yeoman, the Monarchy returned and normal service was resumed as soon as possible.

Three and two thirds centuries after the failure of the only revolution that Britain ever had, can we imagine reforms to the monarchy that might keep it going a bit longer? After all, to quote Quentin Hogg, a. k. a. Lord Hailsham, speaking in 1943, ‘If you do not give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.’

Here are my proposals for reform. I wrote some of these in a comment on the ‘London Bridge is down’ story, which is why I spent so long introducing the story earlier. At the time of writing the comment has 5 votes in favour and 12 against, so I can tell you before you start to read it that you’ll probably think I’m wrong in every point.

Abolish the hereditary principle. Instead, allow any British subject to apply for the job of Monarch by filling in a straightforward form on line or on paper at the local Job Centre. Choose the successful applicant completely at random. The successful applicant shall reign for the rest of his (her) life or until he resigns.

Abolish the Civil List. The incumbent shall receive a salary equivalent to that of an industrial manager and shall have at his disposal a properly audited expense account. Establish conditions of work such that constant drunken skiving will be tolerated, but not paid.

All remaining members of the Royal Family, their husbands, wives, children, girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, relations and hangers-on shall either get a job or be expected to apply for social security, job seekers’ allowance and a Council house.

Palaces to be donated to the National Trust, converted into residential accommodation and used to house purported refugees and recently arrived immigrants. Two exceptions will be granted: one palace in England and one in Scotland shall be rented to the incumbent and will qualify as permitted expenses.

All gifts, favours and trinkets given to the incumbent shall be donated to an appropriate museum or sold at auction and the proceeds given to the poor.

A Royal Train shall be built, maintained and operated by any appropriate train operating company except Branson’s Breakdowns.

A number of Corgis shall be provided by the kennels of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Animals and the incumbent shall provide for their welfare.

The House of Lords shall be replaced by an elected chamber whose members shall not speak for a political party nor for the inhabitants of a particular geographical constituency, but who will state their own opinion, like the people on Question Time who aren’t there to read scripts prepared in advance by their respective Central Offices.

A person shall also become a member of the House of Lords on payment of about £500,000 at 2017 prices to the political party of government, thereby preserving the most remarkable feature of the present system of choosing who governs Britain.

Last and most definitely least, Members of both Houses of Parliament shall wear uniform, just to remind them of the reason we put them there.

That would set us up as a twenty-first century democracy.

25 March 2017. Off topic: Blocked! Today I've been blocked from adding the following comment to a story about Deutsche Bank’s prediction of a further fall in the value of the Pound Sterling, Deutsche Bank predicts the pound will drop by a fifth by the end of the year due to Brexit

Judge for yourself. Here’s the comment.

Germany calling, Germany calling. Achtung! Achtung! All Britisch citizens! Ve know vhy your vainglorious national currency has declined in value to less than two million Reichsmarks to the Pound. Herr Hilter's personal economist calculates that before ze end of zis year, vun egg vill change hands for fifteen schillinks and a loaf of bread for three pounds eighteen and sixpence. The Bank of England is outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the glorious Deutsche Reichsbank viz its vast reserves of looted gold, its well resourced hedge fund managers and its highly trained cashiers, all of whom are dedicated to bringink the financial superiority of the Britisch Empire to an end by nine o'clock on Tuesday. Your rations vill be no more than scraps of meat and crusts of bread, you vill all starve, you will be freezink cold and live in Underground stations etc. etc.

The writing on the wall

Long, long ago, in the heat of battle, a man picked up a brick and, just before throwing it at the enemy, realised that there was a good way of keeping the enemy away from his territory that didn’t involve throwing the brick at him, or at all. President Trump is only the most recent of a long line of generals, emperors and politicians to realise that if you stick large numbers of bricks together with mortar, you can assemble a wall, which with luck and good planning the enemy will find difficult to scale. By building a wall you might be able to keep the enemy off your home turf.

I imagine that when I mention a wall following a territorial boundary, most people think of some horror such as the Berlin Wall, which achieved considerable notoriety, or the Peace Walls that, still unknown to most, run along the religious dividing lines of Belfast.

Click on the thumbnail. The full size photograph opens in a new window. The photographs are all somebody else’s copyright. I acknowledge the rights of the copyright owners.
Berlin Wall	Peace Wall	Hadrian’s Wall	Byker Wall (wall)	Byker Wall (balconies)

Walls do not have to be quite as ugly as those, and if you are going to build walls, you might as well make them attractive things to look at. Hadrian’s Wall, which runs roughly along the border between England and Scotland, is so attractive that tourists come from miles around to see it, and at certain places along its 73 mile length, several organisations of local teichologists have reconstructed the wall so you can see what it looked like during the second, third and fourth centuries AD when Emperor Hadrian, his heirs and successors built it, manned it and maintained it so well that large parts of Hadrian’s Wall are still standing. Secretly I hope that when Scotland gains its independence, the reconstruction of Hadrian’s Wall will be the first thing on President Connery’s agenda.

The Mexican Border is 1,954 miles long. It would be nice to think that any wall which may eventually be built all along that enormous distance will be reasonably attractive to look at. Hadrian’s Wall is a hard act to follow, and you can’t get centurions for love or money these days, but I draw the attention of any wall-building contractor who may be reading this diary to my favourite wall, the Byker Wall, which runs for a mile and a half through Byker in eastern Newcastle upon Tyne. Ralph Erskine was the architect, construction began in 1967, the wall was granted Grade 2 Listed Building status in 2007 and the whole thing has recently been refurbished.

What lay behind the design is that a motorway was planned to run adjacent to a housing estate. The housing estate was designed to withstand the noise of the motorway. 1800 flats were built in a continuous wall, with the kitchens and bathrooms on one side and bedrooms and living rooms on the other. The kitchens and bathrooms have small windows, with the result that the motorway noise in the bedrooms and living rooms would have been at a tolerable level. The fad for building motorways through the middle of housing estates died out before the Byker Wall was finished, fortunately, and the motorway against whose noise the Byker Wall was designed to protect its residents was never actually built. Students of transport engineering will not be surprised that there never seems to have been any question of abandoning the motorway just because the residents didn’t want it. They must’ve felt as though they were talking to a brick wall.

1,300 Byker Walls joined end to end, made up of about two and a quarter million flats, would neatly occupy the Mexican border from end to end. What of the cost? President Trump has mentioned that he would like the Mexicans to pay for the wall. If he really wanted to, he could sell the apartments that make up the Mexican Border Wall to the Mexicans and probably make a handsome profit.

And if that doesn’t keep the Mexicans at bay, the only other thing the President can do will be to hurl bricks at them.

14 March 2017. Today's edition of The Long View on Radio Four discussed The Great Hedge of India, also known as the Indian Salt Hedge and the Inland Customs Line. It was an impenetrable thorn hedge 2,400 miles long, built by the British to keep contraband out of British territory in India in the late nineteenth century, which the programme compared to Trump's wall along the Mexican border with the US. Today only two miles of the Great Hedge remain.

21 March 2017. Today I coined the word teichologist and put it into this post. Teichologist means a person interested in walls. I derived it from Greek, τείχος, a wall.

Misery, thy name is Lettuce Rationing

According to the newspapers, Britain is in the grip of a shortage of lettuce. Actually there is no obvious shortage here in Edinburgh. I bought a lettuce in my local Sainsbury's yesterday, but perhaps we are exceptions. Everywhere else long queues are forming outside grocers, market stalls and vegetable shows, while shoppers are carrying string bags in their pockets just in case they happen to notice a lettuce in a shop window on the opposite side of the road.

The official story is that the shortage is due to bad weather. The weather here is pretty average for February in Scotland: rain, wind and freezing temperatures, just like the rest of the year. So I am led to wonder how much of the lettuce shortage is really due to the weather and how much is due to the European Onion's crazy ‘set aside’ policy, under which nice little earner farmers receive payments for not growing food.

Maybe this is what the future holds for other areas of economic activity. On the railways, for instance. The terms of the contract which Govia, aka Southern, holds with the Department of Transport pays them a fixed sum, whether they operate the trains or not. From their point of view, that’s the same as set aside, since they can stop operating trains and claim money for not operating them.

And then there's teaching. Thousands of people are being paid to run schools and teach children even though when they come out of school a third of children can't read and seven eighths can't add up.

It isn't because of the weather, or the leaves on the line, or sitting up after midnight buggering about with a mobile phone. They’re doing it on purpose.

The sort of pension I want you to get

What do we want?
Free pensions equal to the average wage!
When do we want it?
At age 60!
Pensions are, briefly, in the news again. It is a pity that there are so many distractions to be seen and heard, because old age pensions are one of the most important provisions that a country can make for the people who live in it. One forgets that before the Old Age Pension Act of 1908, people too old or weak to work expected to find themselves in the work-house until the day they died. The workhouses, incidentally did not finally close until 1930. I often have the feeling that some of our sillier politicians pine for the chance to bring back the workhouse.
This week the Daily Mail reported that the Office if Budget Responsibility believes that the pensionable age might rise again, this time to seventy five years.
There seem to me to be three basic objections to that proposal.
Firstly, the present government, though it appears less like a sort of political Keystone Cops than its predecessor, tries to justify its every act of meanness by claiming that ‘austerity’ has made it necessary. You get the feeling that if the United States said they only invaded Iraq because of austerity, everybody in Britain would have accepted their excuse. Usually the government claim that ‘we are all living longer,’ and therefore they cannot pay pensions as generously as before. Nonetheless they continue to spend our money on nuclear weapons, a high speed railway from nowhere to Birmingham, sending advice to Civil Servants not to take cakes into the office and a high maintenance multitude of wastrel Royalty. And while all that goes on, pensioners in the United Kingdom are paid less than almost any other pensioners in western Europe. Sometimes I get really annoyed when the government tells me what I have to put up with instead of understanding that I put them where they are, I pay them, and if I don't want them to boss me around they should damn well stop it.
If you look at the numbers, you can see that this purported justification is false. We are not living longer. The age at which the oldest people die has not changed. Life expectancy has not changed in a hundred years. Life expectancy at birth has increased because babies no longer die in infancy and women no longer die in childbirth. But life expectancy at age 18 has scarcely increased at all, except for people stopping smoking and surviving cancer for longer than once they did. That’s important, because it is at the age of 18 that you start to save for your pension. The number of years during which you will pay pension contributions and the number of years for which you will live on your pension are about the same as ever.
Secondly, unemployment is massive and shows no sign of diminishing. Don't believe the old wives’ tales about unemployment falling or about employment increasing. Neither is true. The figures are more fiddled than Paganini's violin. The terrible fact is that unless things change a lot, and quickly, many people now in their twenties will reach the age of sixty five having never had a paid, full time job with proper wages. By the time they come to claim their old age pension they will have a derisory National Insurance contribution record.
Thirdly, many workers, certainly including me, are not going to be fit enough to continue working long past their sixty fifth birthday. With massive unemployment meaning that every job is filled immediately, often by a friend or relation of a manager, and with the Job Centres reduced to advertising vacancies which are wholly imaginary, many skilled workers will find themselves begging or, worse, scraping a living on Social Security.
I have no clear vision of what ought to happen — obviously it ought to involve giant corporations paying their taxes and government not wasting money on endless computer systems that don't work and wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to anybody if they had — and nobody cares what I think anyway. I do propose a goal: a distant landmark, if you like, towards which we can all march on our bath chairs and walking sticks and zimmer frames, holding our banners as high as our arthritis allows. It is: Free pensions, paid at age 60, equal in value to the average wage of full time employed persons in the United Kingdom. The government can afford it, and don't let them tell you otherwise. They just don't want to.
If we know where we want to go, there is a small chance that eventually, and once the Revolution has overthrown the old order, we will get there.

17 February 2017. If you agree with me, please sign my on line E-Petition to Parliament about pension reform. You must be a British citizen or a UK resident to sign it. It's here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/185661/sponsors/yOLF7ucjsGAChNvzYHq.

27 December 2017. It's been pointed out to me that the life expectancy statistics have another odd property that I had failed to notice. You cannot extrapolate from them.

Life expectancy at birth has increased because children no longer die in infancy. Although it has taken some time to stop children dying in infancy, the process is now complete. There are, to all intents and purposes, no more deaths in infancy to stop. There will be no further increase in life expectancy due to the end of infant mortality.

Likewise women of childbearing age do not die in childbirth any more. There are, therefore, no more deaths of women in childbirth to be stopped.

Deaths due to lung cancer are, in many cases, caused by smoking. An almost universal habit in the 1960s, smoking has pretty much dried up now. There are many fewer premature deaths from lung cancer, so only a small further fall in deaths from lung cancer is possible.

What does this mean for pensions? It means that although these three important causes of death have been pretty much eliminated, the corresponding increase in life expectancy cannot continue. This means that, even if you consider the rise in life expectancy since 1917, you cannot extrapolate from it to predict the life expectancy of an 18 year old worker born today. In other words there is no reason to suppose that the increases in life expectancy due to the elimination of death in infancy, death in childbirth and death due to smoking will continue. There is, in other words, no reason to expect life expectancy at age 18 to be much greater in sixty-five years' time than it is now. The government is telling untruths about life expectancy in an attempt to cut taxes for themselves and their toff chums.

3 May 2019. The State pension does not actually work by accruing your weekly contributions into an account in your name. Instead, as is widely known, today's State pensions are paid out of yesterday’s National Insurance contributions. That means that it would be possible to, say, double that part of the National Insurance contributions that pays for State pensions, thereby making the increased State pension more self-financing than would have been possible in a pension scheme based on savings accounts. Since National Insurance provides a substantially higher return on investment than the pension savings schemes offered by the Banks, nobody should have qualms about stopping their payments into the savings schemes offered by the Banks and putting that same money into increased National Insurance.

Which only leaves the question of why two apparently sane political parties agreed to pay a hopelessly inadequate State pension and hand a nice little earner to the Banks.