The Glidd of Glood Blog

Give me a double helping of Fat Tax

A wringing of hands on Newsnight a couple of days ago, as projections are released that show that Britain will be bankrupt by 2040. That’s pretty grim news, but it’s not like being diagnosed with terminal cancer, although all the commentators seemed to think it was. You have to get a grip. Plenty of the workforce of 2040 haven’t even been born yet, so imagining that they won’t be able to do something about the economy looks to me like defeatist rubbish.

It is sad, if not pathetic, that Britain’s leaders have no vision for the future apart from cutting costs. There was much talk of how everyone’s lives are going to be less comfortable in the future. Nigel Lawson (as if we’d be interested in hearing what the ex-flabby chancellor had to say) spoke airily of increasing the retirement age to 70, now that we are all going to live so much longer. Someone ought to tell Nigel that only politicians and journalists are still employable at 70. Try to get a job these days if you are coming up to 50 and you’ll find your CV is quickly filed vertically in the bin. So that really amounts to the government paying more unemployment benefit and less pension. I wonder where the cost saving is in that.

You could, of course, think to yourself that if the country set out to have the best education in the world, fostered entrepreneurship and created the infrastructure that the working population requires, got behind the green economy and stopped exporting all jobs to China and other far away places, the future might look very different. But bean counters always prefer the cost-cutting option because it requires no imagination or creativity. It comes as no surprise that the imagination of professional politicians, who have never done anything much apart from swim in paper, seems stretched if asked to do anything more than create a fatuous soundbite.

There was much lamenting the fact that Britain wouldn’t be able to afford the National Health Service and you can see where this one is heading. Parroting the worn-out mantra that privatisation is the saviour of all aspects of government service, politicians are slowly thinking of dismantling the thing, bit by bit, doctor by doctor. In a decade or two’s time we will be told that it just isn’t possible to maintain it and it will be replaced by some private health insurance scheme.

Governments only have one source of revenue and that’s tax, so if they are strapped for cash, there is only one place to look for it. Recent talk has centred around a possible mansion tax on the buildings of the wealthy, but frankly, that ain’t gonna change the ball game.

I have a much better idea.

If Britain is becoming increasingly obese, and the BBC says that 61% of adults and 31% of children are overweight, then the health costs engendered by fat are rising. Indeed the Beeb quotes “experts” (ah, the famous experts) who think that in 10 to 15 years, 75% of the population will suffer health problems from being overweight.

We could just roll over (ho! ho!) and let it happen, or the government could do something about it. So far, their action has amounted to telling us to eat a balanced diet and getting Jamie Oliver to try and change a few school menus. Result: diddly squat. If the problem is increasing, then their “action” must be having no effect. After all, anyone who has seriously tried to do something about their weight sees results in a few weeks, so you have to think that the nation isn’t collectively doing anything at all about its.

Let me then add my voice to the other two people who are arguing for a fat tax. The idea is laughably simple: put a tax on processed, non-healthy foods. Use the proceeds to fund the NHS. You can’t lose. If it has no effect on behaviour (unlikely) then all the people stuffing their faces with pies, cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, crisps and Fanta will finance the treatment of the future problems that their over-eating will cause. If they change their behaviour and become thin through avoiding all the heart-clogging goodies, the government may have less of a contribution to the Health Service but will have a lot fewer patients to treat. How can this not be a good plan?

There are those who see this sort of thing as the thin end of the wedge (of pizza). Why should the government meddle in your daily life and influence what you eat? This is a facile piece of non-reasoning. The government already makes it compulsory for you to wear seatbelts and crash helmets for your own good because otherwise you’d be so stupid as not to do so. Alcohol and cigarettes, neither of which do your health any real favours, are taxed. Drugs like weed, speed, ecstasy and cocaine are banned because of the harm they are deemed to cause you.

But drug taking is small beer compared to cakes, it now appears, when it comes to the nation’s health.

You might get the impression that I don’t like cakes, biscuits and crisps. You’d be wrong, though I hardly ever buy any. There are entire supermarket aisles that I just don’t ever visit. I don’t buy them because I know that if I did, I’d get fat, and I’d sooner be a thinnish and marginally frustrated non-cake-eater than a bloated biscuit nibbler.

Whilst I was about it, I’d tax ready meals too, since then the unsatisfying and salt-laden concoctions would become even more exorbitant with the result that the nation might even start cooking again. “Oh I don’t have the time,” people wail. Not strictly true that, is it? People have the time to Twitter incessantly and be on Facebook for hours, but not to chop up an onion. Whereas, if you did chop up a couple of onions and do a wee bit of cooking, you could invite a few Facebook friends around to eat it with you and have a real conversation without saying “lol” once. Hell, you could even laugh and joke without having to type ;)

Maybe the government could go one further and actually subsidise locally grown fresh produce, though it has to be said that parsnips, carrots and cabbages (and onions) don’t actually break the bank.  It can’t be a problem of cash anyway. The reason people are fat is that they can afford to be fat. Calories are now cheap. Never have people spent so small a proportion of their income on food and they are still ballooning up.

People also like to indulge the fantasy that their size isn’t their fault. It’s glands, it’s a compensation for being miserable, it’s the pernicious advertising. It would be interesting to see how these excuses would stack up in a world where Coke cost £4 a litre (like beer).

There have been mutterings about a “Fat Tax” but if you call it that, it won’t ever happen. Fat people have a tough time as it is, they say (all 20 million of them) without taxing them into the bargain. So call it the Health Service Levy. But for God’s sake stop wringing your blubbery mitts and actually do something.

I leave you with Ricky Gervais saying what needs to be said.

  

Greece? Let the banks take the hit

When you lend something to someone, there is never any guarantee that you will get it back. It might be a book or a CD or an umbrella. We've all lost stuff that people didn't return to us, and some of us still have an embarrassing few things that we know really belong to someone else which we haven't got around to giving back. It's the risk you take when you lend something. A book or a CD that doesn't come back is annoying but not a major issue. Money, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Lending a friend £20 for a short period is fairly commonplace, but you’d have to know someone extremely well and be very well disposed towards them to lend them £5’000.

In the commercial world it isn’t much different. No one really wants to lend anything to anyone, unless it’s worth their while, financially speaking. The lenders tend to ask you for guarantees, so that if the cash doesn’t come back, they have other ways of recouping their loan. But beyond this, there is the interest rate. The interest rate is proportional to the risk they think they are taking. So if they are nigh on certain to get their money back (by lending to large governments for example, or massive companies) they don’t ask for much interest. The hassle factor is low and it’s good business to lend someone £1m and for them to hand you back the £1m with an extra £20’000. If you know you’ll get the cash back in an agreed time period, then that’s an easy way of making £20’000. It’s not as if you had to sweat for it.

But if you thought that you would almost certainly get the money back but that there was a risk that you might not, then you might ask them to give you back the £1m with an extra £50’000. You take on the risk for price of the extra £50’000. The interest rate is the amount you charge to make the loan worth your while. This is how the government bond market works. After all, it’s nothing other than banks lending to governments. The more stable the government, the lower the risk, the lower the interest rate and inversely.

So consider the current scenario, in which it is being widely mooted that governments should bail out banks who have lent to Greece, because Greece can’t pay back their loans. Once again, this is a no-lose game for the banks. They make the loan to Greece in return for an interest rate, but when the loan goes bad, instead of swallowing the bad news, they expect someone else to come up with the money. Naturally, it is only through taxes that governments have any money in the first place, so guess who is going to make sure that the banks can report good figures in their annual reports? Correct: taxpayers – you and me.

This makes a mockery of the entire system. If the banks are going to be bailed out, then they haven’t really lent to Greece, they have lent to a wider European community and consequently, the interest rates on their loans should have been much smaller, as there was really no risk attached.

It is a classic case of having your cake and eating it. It means that banks, unlike the rest of the business community, are immune from risk. Whatever happens, they make money. How is that fair or reasonable? Companies that make bad decisions go to the wall. In the current climate, banks that make bad decisions get someone else to carry the can for them. When they make good decisions, they reward themselves handsomely with monster bonuses. Banking really is the best business to be in these days.

The banks were bailed out last time (ie 2 or 3 years ago) because they were too big to fail and it was best for all concerned. A bitter pill, and an unfair one for the taxpayer, but better than everyone losing their money and the economy melting down. Massively galling, but understandable. So what has changed in the interim now that we are all so much the wiser? Apparently, nothing at all. They are still too big to fail, nothing is being planned to change that imminently, and taxpayers are going to bail them out again. You wonder how long it will be before some Arab spring comes to Europe in the form of uprisings and civil unrest. There must be people who have surely had enough of this.

 

Homemade riot – a Delia Smith recipe

Ingredients:

You will need:

1 greed-is-good mantra. In this society, having stuff is by far the most important thing. The more you have, the more worth as a person you have. If you don’t have anything, you don’t count. The media, obsessed with wealth, fame, celebrity, champagne lifestyles and rich lists, will reinforce the mantra. Your mantra should also have rampant consumerism attached. Make sure your butcher leaves it on – makes for a tastier recipe.

1 cotton-wool society. In the cotton-wool society, everyone is a victim and no one is a perpetrator. Nothing is your fault; you are a victim of your circumstances. You must never be punished or fear anything. There is no authority you ever need to be afraid of. Your parents can’t clip you around the ear, nor can school ever make you unhappy by punishing your poor behaviour. If you are ever taken to court, you shall suffer a ticking off or some “community service”. All shall have prizes. You mustn’t ever fail at anything; that might be upsetting for you. You will wear fluorescent vests and hard hats on any occasion which might present even the smallest risk. You know your rights. You haven’t a clue about your duties. Do you actually have any?

1 disenfranchised underclass. Make sure that a large segment of your society is unemployed or otherwise has no prospect of achieving any material status through legal means. No material status means no status at all. Try to increase the gap between poor and rich as far as you are able, but make sure that the conspicuous consumption of the rich is never far from the eyes of the poor.

1 government of morally suspect politicians. Ideally, they should fiddle their expenses, cosy up to the media for political ends, and be out of touch with the poorer elements of society with whom they have never really had to mix. They should be professional politicians, well versed in the complexities of Whitehall, but with no clue about lives without money. They should also never fear that it could ever happen to them.

1 feral youth. You should be able to find one of these in a culture of failed marriages, one-parent families and a total lack of discipline from the earliest age. The marriages fail under the pressure of constant work and worry to make ends meet, and the perception that a better marriage can be had in the nearest department store sale.

1 multicultural society. This is a spice mix in which all the different flavours should be distinctly present. It will add heat to the overall dish. The origins of the spices should be evident – you don’t want some sort of British homogenised interpretation of the real thing. With luck, no one should really know where they belong or who they are.

1 directionless police force. Maligned, discredited, headless, understaffed, stuffed with paperwork and demoralised as criminals are let free in society where all the prisons are full. Not that the prisons seem to do anyone much any good anyway.

1 economic crisis in which the news is all bad and the future looks to be worse than the present.

Method:

Mix all your ingredients in a bowl consisting of an alien urban environment of poor housing, drab high streets, pot-holed roads, heavy traffic and creaking public transport. There should be few social amenities, and those that exist should be fairly second rate. Ensure this by spending billions of £££ on high profile white elephants like the Olympics.

There is no need to cook anything. The mixture is exothermic in nature and should spontaneously combust if your ingredients are fresh enough.

Stand back and enjoy.

Next week, we will make bread and butter pudding.

 

Exporting and making money – could there be a link?

In a brilliant throwaway line on Newsnight tonight, the presenter, commenting on the financial meltdown, said that “the exporting countries, China, Germany and Japan, lend to the importing countries like Britain, the US and most of the EU”.

So would that not imply that if you actually make useful things people need, you make money and if you don’t, you don’t? The economic mantra over the last decades has been that things get made in countries where it makes more sense for them to be made, and instead of manufacturing, other countries become service economies where people do higher value tasks.

Which all sounds like patent rubbish. You can only have a debt if you can find someone to lend to you. It’s a zero sum game. So as the US and EU wallow in a debt crisis, through mostly not doing anything very useful, other countries are beavering away stockpiling cash. It’s handy if you inherit an oil well, but otherwise, you just have to knuckle down and make things.

I see no reason why, if Germany can be a manufacturing economy, Britain can’t, except that German-made stuff tends to be infinitely better. People actually want German made cars, whereas in the entire last half century, no one much wanted British ones. But politicians have clearly no grasp on reality if they think that you can import everything you need from abroad (paying someone else) and not have a debt problem. This seems so elementary, that I don’t understand why no one ever says it. Maybe it’s because they are economists.

British GDP: Agriculture 1%, Manufacturing 22%, Services 77%

Here’s a little chart I made with figures from the CIA Factbook.

 

 

It tells you a lot. It shows you that Germany exports more than the US (bit of a surprise, that) but imports a whole lot less. It shows you that Greece imports twice as much as it exports. Hardly surprising that they are in the poo. Switzerland about breaks even, but it has a slight surplus. So they don’t need to borrow and have barely any debt (or perhaps none). The UK lives completely beyond its means. I didn't put in China because who knows how the figures are calculated?

As far as I can see, making things still looks like a good idea. If you actually geared up your economy to do something useful, you wouldn’t need to have austerity measures. There are none planned in Switzerland. But then, that is also why the Swiss franc has been appreciating of late to ludicrous heights.

 

Cutting UK government spending - simple really

A noise on the Times website today saying that Labour has left a “scorched earth” financial state for the new government to inherit, with all sorts of contracts being signed-off for vast new costly projects. No doubt true. But what struck my eye were these two examples:

“The troubled £1.2 billion “e-borders” IT project for the immigration service, which, sources say, is running even later and more over-budget than Labour ministers had admitted.

A £600m computer contract for the new personal pensions account scheme rushed through by Labour this year, which will still cost at least £25m even if it is cancelled.”

Just give that five seconds thought: 

£1.2 billion for an IT project. What is an IT project apart from some software – ie programming, and some computers? We are getting so used to the word “billion” that it is rapidly ceasing to have any real meaning. Let’s get back to what a £1 billion is. It is one thousand million pounds. So this e-borders project purportedly costs one thousand two hundred million pounds. This amount looks like this: £1’200’000’000.00.

With the price of hardware dropping through the floor, just what is the government getting for its £1.2 billion? The only answer, you imagine, is an awful lot of programming. This could be out-sourced to India (after all, that’s what companies are doing to save money) where I can’t help feeling that £1’000’000 of programming will go a long way. But 1’200 times that?

These sorts of figures are just ridiculous and of course the only reason why anyone would sign a contract (or contracts) like this is that they just don’t care because it’s not their money. Or at least, not much of it. But this project still boils down to £20 for every man, woman and child in the country.

The truth is, it’s a gravy train. The public chips in £20 each, and then some people get very rich. There is probably nothing that magic about computer contracts in this respect. All government contracts work like this to some extent. But IT projects are the best for ludicrous price inflation because no one knows what they are really buying. What they should be buying is intelligence. What they are actually getting is stupidity.

There is a very rosy lining to all this. It means that if you wanted to cut government waste, it would be dead easy. You would, say, go to a company that could produce “e-borders” for you for the preposterous sum of £100 million (though this seems already outrageous). There you are, you’ve just saved £1.1 billion. Then go to the pensions programming people and say they have £60 million to deliver. You’ve just saved £540 million more. Keep this up and suddenly the government spending figures look very different.

The lesson to be learned from all this is that money has a real value to the people who earn it and pay tax on it. At an individual level, tax has real value. But when you have a huge pot of it, the value of money disappears. I have done enough budgets in my life (and paid for enough computing) to know the veracity of this. If and when government discovers the real value of money, expenditure will fall drastically for the same amount of services.

And don’t even get me started on defence spending - not so much a gravy train as a 747 of béarnaise.

UK election - now everyone's happy. Er...aren't they?

 

The morning after the night before and I think I have an election hangover. The froth of yesterday has fallen flat. It’s looking like a half-drunk pint someone poured days ago and left next to an overflowing ashtray. The pundits had all told us that, whatever happened, politics in the UK would never be the same. It doesn’t look like that. It looks exactly the same. Almost 50:50 for the Tories and Labour, with the LibDems limping in a very poor third.

 

Everyone can reckon to be disappointed, although you could argue that Labour may be less disappointed than some. Only a couple of months ago and the Tories were going to give Labour an electoral bloody nose. But despite the fact that Gordon Brown has never been elected Prime Minister, has an annoying facial tic, slags off bigoted voters in what he thinks is the privacy of his car, and has about as much charisma as a packet of Daz, he hasn’t exactly been booted out of office. All you could say is that the electorate has given him a gentle shove, but he might just shrug it off.  As the Labour politicians have been quick to point out, only 3 governments in the last 200 years have been elected for a fourth term, and they have been doing their thing for the past 13 years. You can almost imagine a Bruce Forsyth moment – “Didn’t they do well?!!”

 

Cameron and the Tories must be gutted. Here you have a bright and bushy-tailed, charismatic leader who looks like a thoroughly decent bloke, in a position where after 13 years of the other lot, his party is the default choice. And despite this, they can’t even get an overall majority. Talk about a lack of enthusiasm. You’d look at this and say, “Ha! The electorate isn’t so stupid after all. They remember what the Tories are really all about. They’ve been given a new suit, but underneath it’s the same old pasty, flabby body.” Certainly that was the sentiment of a lot of people posting on the Guardian and Independent comments pages in the run-up to the election. But are those pages indicative of anything much? There is probably rabid crypto-fascist comment on the Telegraph comment pages. I’ve never been to look. Anyway, it is hardly the vote for change that the Tories were pretending it was going to be. Doesn’t look like the country wants change.

 

Then you come to the LibDems and the picture gets even worse. The LibDems, in this election, remind you of nothing more than a very hyped flyweight with a supposedly knockout punch who manages to go the twelve rounds but ends up with a face looking like a squashed tomato and loses on a unanimous points decision. The supposed third force in British politics that was finally going to come good, didn’t. Results seem to indicate that they will end up with even less seats than last time. OK, they polled almost a quarter of the votes, a best ever, but of course, under the ridiculous first-past-the-post system, that only translates to around 50 seats out of over 600, whereas the pundits had been reckoning on them maybe even achieving triple figures. So, same old, same old.

 

This tells you much about what people really feel like in the UK. The LibDems stand for more involvement in Europe and a realistic view of Britain’s place in the world. The UK electorate, it would appear, feels very ambiguous about Europe, if not openly hostile, and clearly likes to believe that Great Britain is still Great. Britain has a strong island mentality still, where Europe is seen as the repository of pesky foreigners who threaten the country every now and again. What dates do we all remember? 1588, Spanish Armada; 1815, Waterloo; 1940, Battle of Britain. The Spanish, the French, the Germans – you can’t understand what they’re saying and they periodically want to give us a hard time. Who needs them anyway when across the Atlantic we have our American cousins who might talk a bit funny, but at least they are just about comprehensible? And they have more cash. By all means go to your holiday home in France in the summer, or retire to an English enclave on the Costa del Sol. Order your cappuccino and put some more tomatoes and olives in your cooking. But get involved in Europe? Hmmm. No thanks.

 

A couple of things give credence to this view. One is that timing-wise, this could hardly have been a worse week for wanting to snuggle up to Europe. The Greeks are bankrupt, having failed to manage their economy and as a result are handing round the begging bowl to the attendant whump as the Euro falls off a cliff and rioting in the streets. Spain has 20% unemployment – count ‘em – and who is to say they won’t be next, unless it’s Portugal? Will the Eurozone melt down? A question that some people are seriously asking. Looking at that, it is understandable that Britain may feel like pulling up the drawbridge and saying thank God for the £ and the Channel. They might have felt somewhat different at the beginning of the year with the Euro looking pretty clever against the monopoly-money £. So Mr Clegg and his views may be considered with a certain amount of scepticism.

 

The second reason is that Brussels is, of course, faceless and seen as completely undemocratic. Who knows what people get up to there? There is very little appetite for getting more involved in processes that no one understands and which often seem to be bonkers when they do emerge into the light of public scrutiny. Even the Swiss have twice rejected becoming part of the EU, and you couldn’t tar them with being anti-European. They are Europe, for goodness sake – right in the heart of it and speaking three or four European languages. But they can’t see what they have to gain from handing over their amazing democracy to bureaucrats, let alone giving up the Swiss Franc, one of the world’s most reliable currencies. Clearly the British feel the same way. They might have a dodgy Parliament, but at least it’s comfortable, and the same can be said for the currency. Like a pair of dog-eaten slippers.

 

Then you come to Trident. Amazingly, the supposedly socialist, “we are all brothers” Labour Party still wants to squander more billions on nuclear weapons. As for the Tories – well, defence spending is always one of their favourite bits of the budget. Only the Lib Dems say we should get real, Britain is no longer really Great and we should adopt a different paradigm and scrap it. My view entirely, but it has never gone down well. Ever since the collapse of empire, Britain has plunged its head into the sand with the fury of a demented ostrich and has done anything it can to shore up the façade of being a major power. While the Germans and Japanese got on and built cars, the Brits postured in conferences around the world. There is no sign at all that the people of Britain think any differently today, which is why they are paying for two wars in distant countries, the utility of which, from any point of view, is highly debatable. So when they printed the headline a couple of days ago “Voters love Clegg but hate his policies” – the paper was bang on the money.

 

Finally, you have to look at voter turn-out which would appear to be high, or a lot higher than at the last two elections. Consequently, this is hardly the election of apathy and non-engagement. So what do you come away with? I suppose you would say, distrust of politicians in their entirety, the feeling that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, and a complete unwillingness to really want to change anything. The people of the UK are probably a lot happier than they are often given credit for. They might like a good whinge, but no one really wants to change anything much – they are conservative with a small c. I had a sense that real change was coming this time, but as I pointed out in a comment somewhere, Clegg is about a decade ahead of his electorate. He’ll just have to wait until they catch up – if they ever do. In the meantime, the UK has got what it wanted really – more of the same. After all, they did vote for it.

 

The government this time is in any case a poisoned chalice. With the cuts that no one will talk about but everyone knows are coming, no matter who forms the government, the guys with the job of inventing them are going to be about as popular as a very unpopular thing in a couple of months. Honeymoon period? Like a wet weekend in Skegness.

UK election fiasco - "Sorry, you're too late. No voting for you."

Well well well. This looks like a laff. The big news from the election as I type this is that umpteen people haven’t been able to vote because they were still queuing when they closed the polling station. Hard fromage, you may say – they had the whole bloody day; should have got there earlier. Well, on the face of it, fair enough. Except that when you listen to some of them, it appears they showed up at 6pm, saw a large queue, and went home, only to reappear and see the same thing at 7pm, 8pm and finally felt forced to join the queue at 9pm, but failed to make the cut.

That’s pretty poor isn’t it? You know how pissed off you get when you try and go to see a film, find there is a large queue and end up missing the beginning of the feature you wanted to see. Why? Because the idiots at the cinema don’t have enough staff to deal with the people who want to see the film.

And it would appear that there have even been instances where there weren’t enough ballot papers to allow people to vote. Doh! I can’t help feeling a certain amount of glee here, as the UK – together with most of the developed world – has been so patronising about elections in Afghanistan and Iraq and the way they have been conducted. Now here we are, electing the “Mother of all Parliaments” – as we are continually told – and the country is so disorganised that it can’t even sort its own election out. Bearing in mind that right now it looks like being a close one, there is going to be a big hoo-hah about this in the coming days. No end of media fun to come.

I have to admit that I would be pretty peeved if, given only one chance every 5 years to say what I think of the government, I wasn’t allowed to voice that opinion because the authorities couldn’t get their shit together. Still, am I surprised? Not really. About time someone came to visit Switzerland to see how it is done. After all, the Swiss vote every couple of months. If anyone knows how to organise an election, it has to be them. Or us, I suppose I can say, as a Swiss passport holder and enthusiastic voter.

Sorry. That sounds a bit smug. Let's just say I don't live here by accident.

3rd TV UK Election Debate – alright, who’s it gonna be?

I’ve just been looking at the latest debate – what fun. Sort of. I no longer have a vote in the UK election, which is fair enough as I don’t live there. But then, I suppose one of the reasons I don’t live there is that I don’t think the place is well managed, so it’s not as if I’m not interested.

 

Verdict? Well, if you vote Labour, you know exactly what you are going to get, as you’ve had 13 years to find out what that is. So if you think the current situation is hunky dory, then you’d immediately vote for them. If you don’t, then you’d have to choose between the other two, Tories and LibDems. If you’ve got any kind of memory and are old enough to vote, you should really remember what the Tories are all about. The way the UK generally works, is that one party fucks up the country and then the other of the two main parties gets voted in and fucks it up in a different way. That’s pretty much how it’s been for the last 50 years or so – as long as I can remember. Assuming that the Tories get voted in again, why would it be any different?

 

 Which leaves the LibDems. If you vote for them, you might get the fun of seeing an entirely different party mess up the country, which would definitely be more interesting. On the face of things, they are unlikely to do a worse job than anyone has done for as long as you can remember. Of course, it is a truism to say that you shouldn’t trust a politician. But it’s a bit like buying a second-hand car. You shouldn’t trust a second-hand car salesman either, but if you are going to buy a car, you pretty much have to choose the least blatantly untrustworthy. The only thing we know is that the country is going to be run by a politician, so you will have to suspend your distrust long enough to vote.

 

From what I could see, Gordon Brown was utterly unconvincing as a person – shaking his head at anything Cameron said, forcing a weird smile from time to time and utterly devoid of any charisma. Do we really want him representing us for another 5 years? Hmmm. And lest we forget, no one asked him to represent us in the first place.

 

David Cameron seemed to have a sweaty chin – in as much as he has a chin at all. There is something embarrassingly fake about him, like he wants the population to consider him as a real common-or-garden person, when he comes across as a plastic, made-in-China politician. He’s probably a top bloke – but he doesn’t look like one, failed to answer questions, ducked and dived and produced the same points scoring rhetoric that he must have learnt at the Oxford Union. I wouldn’t vote for him on that showing.

 

Which leaves Nick Clegg. Clegg actually looks like a real person, who doesn’t do the normal politician thing of pretending that everything is simple. I thought he was excellent on the amnesty for illegal immigrants. Of course it is sensible to recognise those who have been in the country for 10 years, not out of any philosophical conviction, but simply because they are not going to go away, so you might as well accept the situation. The other two parties would like you to believe that they have a giant carpet sweeper to brush them up with – or more likely, they’d just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. I thought that Clegg was the most realistic and by far the most likeable, so the LibDems would get my vote – as the lesser of evils. He is much more relaxed than the other two and has a common touch that they lack.

 

The one thing the LibDems continue to fail to do, however, is to believe that they can be elected as the government. Talking about hung Parliaments and power-sharing is like entering Wimbledon and telling everyone what you are going to do with the prize money for fourth place. It doesn’t actually demonstrate any belief, does it? The fact of the matter is, that anyone can win the election, as so far, no one has cast any votes, so all parties are in with an equal chance.

 

After all, if the USA can elect a black president, you’re not trying to tell me that it is beyond the bounds of possibility for the UK to finally elect a LibDem government – if only out of the sheer tedium of having yet another Tory or Labour one. Against all the odds, this election is now beginning to look very interesting. In the last elections, half the electorate hasn’t even bothered to vote, so the LibDems would only have to convince a few of those abstainers to trot down to the polling station, and Nick could be in No. 10. Exciting! At least for a few weeks.

Hilarious defaced Tory poster for 2010 election

 

One of the most fun things with any election is the posters that the parties produce to get you to vote for them. I have been investigating these on the web, as here in Switzerland I sadly can’t see any first hand. My interest was sparked by an article in the Independent which explained how the parties’ habit of denigrating their opposition was frequently backfiring on them.

 

It can’t be easy producing election posters. I mean, you could hardly get the whole manifesto on one, although wordy posters for non-political products are a feature of the London Underground, so maybe the major parties should try them out. Naturally, if you are UKIP or the BNP, you probably can get your whole manifesto on to a poster, probably into a couple of sentences.

 

Anyway, the net result of being faced with the Rumplestiltskin task of trying to get voters to change their minds as a result of your advertising is a lot of pretty lame or just stupid posters. And it is here that the genius of the electorate is really unleashed. No end of fun can be had by defacing posters, and the attempt above made me laugh hugely. You don’t even need to be anti-Tory to find it funny. If you go to Flickr, you can see all sorts of other amusing election posters.

 

Now I come to think of it, there probably isn’t any point publicising the different party manifestos, as they are unlikely to actually do any of the things they say they will.

“I’d do it all again” – Tony Blair

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? For all those who were hoping for a Blair mea culpa, they were always going to be disappointed, as he passed in front of the Iraq inquiry. Tony would do it all again because he can chalk up the removal of Saddam Hussein on his CV. He doesn’t have to worry about all the people who have been blown up or mutilated thanks to his intimate pow-wows with his friend George, because he wasn’t ever likely to be one of their number.

 

I am currently reading Desmond Morris’ seminal The Human Zoo, which, in discussing war and the human propensity for it, points out that in the old days, leaders were expected to lead their troops into battle with the significant risk of personal injury or death. This gave a somewhat deeper meaning to personal conviction. Would either Bush or Blair have been so keen to do the necessary in Iraq if they had been the ones dealing on a daily basis with RPGs and IEDs? You somehow get the impression that they wouldn’t. But cosseted in bunkers, rooms of state and bullet-proof limousines, it is a lot easier to claim that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. You can be the chef and not have to worry about being an egg.

 

Julius Caesar and Napoleon both showed up for their military shindigs – though how much danger they were in of being more than bystanders, I have no idea. Churchill rushed off to the front line of the First World War and was apparently fearless, which gave his decisions in war – no matter how costly they were in terms of human lives – a certain legitimacy. Hitler, from what I have read, actually hugely enjoyed the First World War on the front. But then Hitler was bonkers.

 

“We will never forget them”, goes the magic phrase as wreaths are laid every year at the Cenotaph. Complete bullshit. Our current leaders are quite happy to add to the number of war dead for causes that will struggle to make even the footnotes of history. Pathetic. And then they won’t even cough up for pensions and hospital care for the soldiers whose lives they have blithely fucked up.

 

Blair is still parroting the sentiment that the world is a safer place since the invasion of Iraq. A point of view that can only seem sustainable if you have read none of the literature on the subject, aren’t Iraqi or anyone who has been sent there. Bravo Tony. Marvellous.