There's a value to things like brands. Obviously, because we will buy things adorned with brands that we know, recognise and trust. Therefore they are valuable to their owners and they strive mightily to protect that value by making sure that the brand and products adorned with it can be trusted. This thus is a very odd complaint:
We did rather think that Britain had got over this sort of nonsense these days. It's no longer necessary to have an accent that makes the Queen sound positively estuarine in order to get onto the radio these days for example. And yet we seem to be getting back this idea that class origin should be the (or at least a) determinant of who reads the footie scores out to us:
BBC staff will be asked to disclose details of their family income and upbringing, as part of new plans to ensure that the corporation is not dominated by the middle classes.
The BBC will announce today that all new employees will be asked to answer a range of questions about their socio-economic background, including whether they were entitled to free school meals as a child, which the broadcaster says will allow it work out whether its workforce reflects modern Britain.
It's most certainly different from Reith's initial conception of what the BBC was to be for, which was rather to teach everyone to be middle class. But that's not the only historical echo we hear: half of Europe was ruled for generations on the basis that class origin determined near all. A background in the bourgeoisie condemned one, decent proletarian roots promoted though the ranks of the society. It has to be said that the experiment didn't work out well. So we're rather puzzled as to why people are so keen to repeat the error.
We would propose something perhaps a little to novel for most tastes. Hiring and firing of staff based upon their competence. If someone, yes, even a white upper class elderly male, turns out to be good at interviewing people sitting on sofas then hire them and a sofa. If there's a QQ (as we understand the acronyms these days, "queer, questioning" is a possible combination) who's a dab hand at sorting out radio interference then hire them if radio interference is the problem to be solved. Class, gender, sexuality, race and yes, class origins, just aren't to us the correct criteria to be hiring people upon.
And if the BBC really is concerned about diversity then perhaps they might like to pay attention to the only sort that does actually matter, intellectual diversity? A few more people who think a little further out of the usual soft left establishment box perhaps?
Well, everyone wonders about MPs at times. Where do they find them? How on earth does anyone end up voting for them? You know, the basic questions that anyone would ask when actually confronted with a few specimens of the beast. And then there are those specific specimens that really puzzle us. To take this from Siobhan McDonagh MP. She tweeted out the letter she had sent to Azzurri, the owners of the Zizzi chain of restaurants.
Today, the Scottish thinker Adam Smith (1723-1790) is best known for his pioneering work of economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). But the book that actually propelled him to fame was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published on this day in 1759.
Moralists had been struggling to work out the principles that made some actions morally good and others morally bad. To churchmen, the answer was obvious: it was the word of God. Skeptics speculated about whether we had a sixth sense, a ‘moral sense’ that would guide us towards good.
Smith’s breakthrough was to identify our moral judgements as a matter of human beings’ deep psychology as social creatures. Human beings, he argued, have a natural ‘sympathy’ (today we would say ‘empathy’) for others. That enables them to understand how to moderate their behaviour and preserve harmony. It is the basis of moral judgements about behaviour, and the source of human virtue.
Writing exactly a century before Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), Smith was not sure why such social behaviour should prevail. He put it down to providence: today we would put it down to evolution.
The book was an intellectual sensation. Churchmen, of course, did not like it very much, but it caught the eye of Charles Townsend, an intellectual and senior member of the British government, who was highly impressed and sought an introduction to Smith through their mutual friend, the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Townsend immediately hired Smith, on a salary of £300 a year for life, to be tutor to his stepson, the young Duke of Buccleuch. It was a fortune – and it gave Smith the independence and experience to start writing the work for which he is remembered today, The Wealth of Nations.
That the population in general is getting fatter is true. The western world is rapidly becoming one of fatty lardbuckets as far as the eye can see with distressing aesthetic results. However, it's very important indeed to understand that this is not because we are all eating more:
Former UK cabinet minister Owen Paterson has just delivered the most intelligent case for the UK leaving the European Union that I have ever heard. His basic point is that the EU is not the ‘status quo’ but something that is rapidly moving to destinations that are uncertain and dangerous, particularly for the UK; and that being outside is the safer, more stable option.
Take the eurozone. It is rapidly becoming one country, says Paterson. In order to deal with the imbalances that the fixed currency has only exacerbated, it needs to centralise decision making on budgets and bailouts. Plans for this are well advanced, eurozone sovereignty is being pooled, members’ discretion over their own budgets is being curbed and the eurozone will in effect be its own political union by 2025 – just nine years away. That is a very different kind of EU that is being envisaged, and not one that strikes a chord in the UK.
The UK government says that the UK will have ‘special status’ outside this and the other centralising tendencies. But how? There is no binding agreement that grants the UK any special status: the only sort of special status around seems to be a Norway-style outer circle. Not in the euro, not at the core, out on the fringes – it is clear that the UK’s influence could only diminish. The UK would still be outvoted, still overruled by the ECJ, still expected to chip in to eurozone bail-outs (as it was with Greece), but even less able to do anything about it.
Then there are security issues, with five new countries, 87m new potential EU citizens, waiting to join. Such as Turkey, with its leaky 700-mile border abutting a war zone. Once migrants make it to Germany or the other countries that are supposed to share them out, before long they become EU citizens and able to travel and work in their destination of choice – the UK. And we have no say in it. Migration, as ASI has shown, is generally beneficial: but far more so if it happens at a manageable rate.
Paterson’s vision for a UK outside these uncertainties is one of a self-governing, free-trading nation, a true part of the global family, its international trade and participation no longer absorbed into the EU. And as for trade deals, the EU is far weaker than the UK would be alone, each member having its own interests to throw into the horse-dealing, and proceeding only as fast as the slowest and most intransigent. The UK could do deals with China, India – and indeed the US, far quicker. It would also have greater representation on trade and other international bodies such as the WTO, where currently it is represented by the EU.
Leaving the EU is not an instant commitment, but a process. There would – and certainly should – be a long process of discussion before the formal commitment to withdraw (and the two-year i-dotting period that follows it) is given. In the meantime, the UK would continue to trade with the EU – something that 5m EU jobs, and EU supply chains, depend on. But meanwhile, we could be opening up better relations with the rest of the world.
There is no status quo. If the UK remains in the EU, it will be a second-class citizen, and the EU’s political centralization will continue, dragging the UK along with it. The eurozone, politically integrated by 2025, will dominate the rest. Outside, the UK could at least control its borders, its budget, its national debt, its public services, its international trade. What’s not to like?
A rather interesting little finding from over The Pond concerning the connection between inequality and the health of the population. Over here we've had Michael Marmot insisting for decades that health inequality is to be explained by economic inequality. And Wilkinson and Pickett have been shouting that they are not just connected by economic inequality is the direct cause of ill health for all. At which point we get the American study into health and inequality and we find something a little different:
The current complaint from these politicians seems to be that they don't like the way politics works:
That's our first reaction, at least, to this story that a Welsh billionaire is willing to invest some of his own money in a rescue of the Port Talbot steel assets. The giggle coming from, no, not the idea that there is a Welsh billionaire, the thought that, well, yes, that's what we rather expect from people when they buy something. They use their money to buy the thing that they're buying. Seems a reasonable and logical idea to us but it's obviously caught The Guardian by surprise:
St Joseph's Hospice is in Liverpool, where it cares for the terminally ill in a manner that the National Health Service simply never can manage. They have sent the following around to their supporters:
Charity shop staff who work for Jospice face the prospect of losing their job due to rises in the minimum wage…
There are currently eight retail managers working across these shops but it is proposed that this number be reduced to five.
The decision has been blamed on the government’s new National Living Wage, which rose to £7.50 an hour for over 25s as at the start of April and is expected to rise to £9 by 2020.
A spokesperson for Jospicesaid: ‘We have informed our eight retail managers that we propose to implement a new retail team structure. Due to ever rising costs and the introduction of the National Living Wage we are unable to continue with the existing staff structure within our retail team….
As a charity we have to raise half our income through fundraising in our local communities and so we have to be as efficient as possible.
We'd just like to say well done Chancellor, well done.
