Tag Archives: cost of living crisis

A king, three MPs, and a former prime minister walk into a blog post…

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Let’s catch up with the news from Britain. 

King Charles–

No, not the King Charles who looks like his mustache is trying to get away from him. That’s Charles I and he was killed in a long-gone civil war. Also not the King Charles who looks like Bob Dylan in his older, seedier incarnations. That’s  Charles II. We’re talking about the bland looking and entirely mustacheless Charles III, who was supposed to go to France on a state visit and do I have no idea what there. Pose for pictures. Shake hands. 

No. You don’t do that when you’re a king, do you? You get bowed to. 

Would the president of republican France (revolution; La Marseillaise; you remember all that stuff, right?) bow to a king and what does the king do if he won’t? How many diplomats would it take to cut a way through that thicket?

Irrelevant photo: a hyacinth

Sadly, we’re not going to find out because the visit’s been called off. Too many strikes in  France. Too many protests. It’s postponed until “calm returns.”

That’s doubly disappointing because unionized public sector workers had already announced that they wouldn’t be rolling out the red carpets or hanging the flags that a state visit demands, so we also won’t get to find out what a state visit’s like in the absence of red carpets.

But let’s use the moment to remind ourselves that a few very real somebodies really do have to roll out red carpets if they’re going to be in place at the right time. In this case, the somebodies work at France’s National Furniture Service and they–or at least some of them–are on strike and said in a statement, “We ask our managers to point out to the ministry of culture that any request for furnishings will be seen immediately by workers as a provocation.” 

Their managers didn’t say anything like that, however. They said the carpets had already been delivered and nonunion workers would roll them out.

Who should we believe? We’ll never know how the story would’ve ended, but we could compromise and say that there might’ve been a bit of grandstanding on both sides.

I do like that line about any request being seen as a provocation, though. It lays the groundwork for quiet negotiations.

 

How different is it in Britain?

To the limited extent that I understand Britain after having lived here for 18 years, the country likes to think of France as a volatile, strike-prone, and generally unBritish sort of place, but the similarities are as striking as the differences lately. I got as far as asking Lord Google “who’s on strike…” and he intuited the rest of my question by adding (I couldn’t help but think, wearily) “…today in the UK?” So yes, we’re a tad strike-prone ourselves these days. The long-running strikes by nurses’ an ambulance paramedics’ are on hold while they vote on the government’s well-under-the-rate-of-inflation offer–an offer made after the government spent months swearing it wouldn’t and couldn’t offer more than a peanut butter sandwich and a bourbon cream biscuit. 

But even in their absence, the list of late-March strikes (ongoing, upcoming, and recent) is long and included bus drivers, professors (a.k.a. university lecturers), junior doctors (they’re not all particularly junior, but that’s what they’re called anyway), rail workers, passport office workers, teachers, and–sorry, I’ve lost track. Others. 

Most of those are government employees or people whose jobs are linked to the government tightly enough that when the government zips up its wallet, no settlement beyond the level of a bourbon cream is possible. And as the government keeps telling us, its wallet is staying firmly zipped because raising pay is inflationary, and they just can’t have that. We’re in a cost-of-living crisisl. This is no time to add fuel to the fire. People will learn to live on what they have.

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So what have Members of Parliament learned to live on? Two of them, former health secretary and general laughing stock Matt Hancock and disgraced former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, told the representative of a non-existent South Korean company that they’d charge £10,000 a day to join its international advisory board and help its “clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe. 

Kwarteng also offered to set up a meeting with Boris Johnson, the “best campaigner you will ever see.”

A third MP, Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative Party’s powerful 1922 Committee, settled for a measly £6,000 a day plus £500 an hour, but he did say he wouldn’t be able to advocate for the company. On the other hand, he could offer it advice about who to approach in government. 

Nothing about any of that is illegal as long as the MPs declare the income, the proper magic feathers are waved over the appropriate paperwork, and the correct formulas are spoken in broken Latin. 

As the old song says, it’s nice (and completely non-inflationary) work if you can get it.

The sting was set up by the unpredictable and inspired campaign group Led by Donkeys.

 

How about Boris Johnson?

He wasn’t part of the sting–why bother?–but pound for pound he leaves these guys in the dust. In the (more or less) six months since he was run out of office, he’s pocketed just short of £5 million in outside earnings.

Outside of what? Why his £84,000 salary as an MP, of course. And hs assorted expenses. That puts his outside earnings at something like £25,000 a day, much of it for giving speeches.

Why would anyone want to listen to him? Sorry, the world’s a much stranger place than I can possibly take in, never mind explain, but I will say that paying the man to speak doesn’t guarantee that anyone listens.

 

Who else has outside earnings?

If you pile all our current MPs in a heap and empty their pockets (let me know in advance if you can; I’d love to take pictures), you’ll find that in the past year, collectively, they earned £9.6 million outside of their MPs salaries. That’s up from a mere £6 million in the 18 months prior to that. 

Of this year’s take, 90% went to Conservatives.

You can sort the numbers out differently, though. If you look at how many MPs from which parties held second jobs in their desperate efforts to make ends meet in inflationary times, it works out like this: Among the Conservatives, some 43% work second jobs. Or at least, Open Democracy classifies the work as second jobs, although a lot of it looks like freelancing to me. Never mind. I’m quibbling. Among Labour MPs, that’s 38%. Among Scottish National Party MPs, it’s  34%. Among Liberal Democrats, it’s 57%, and among the Democratic Unionists it’s 37%.

Be gentle with those last two percentages, though. Open Democracy gave the last bits of data in absolute numbers and I turned to Lord Google for help in percentifying them. It’s risky, leaving me to transport numbers from one location to another, so I’m not offering money-back guarantees.  

One of the mysteries of British editing is that not everyone seems to notice how useful it is to put statistics into parallel formats. I don’t get it. But never mind that. We’re close enough to see that the parties indulge roughly equally but that the big earners are the Conservatives.

None of those numbers include rental income or shareholdings, presumably because making money that way doesn’t take up an MPs valuable time or influence their policies, so it’s okay if they’re invisible. Or maybe gentlemen are expected to make their money that way, so no one keeps track.

 

But the government’s not standing idly by…

…while the country falls apart. It’s going to step forward decisively and ban the sale of nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas and give the police extra super-powers to test for it. Experts say the ban’s disproportionate and likely to do more harm than good, but what do they know? Something needs banning and by gum, this is indeed something.

 

In the meantime, elsewhere in the solar system

. . . an asteroid big enough to wipe out a city has slipped between the orbits of Earth and her moon without hitting either one. It was approached by representatives of a doomsday cult and invited–even begged–to make full physical contact, but after a brief study of Earth and its inhabitants declined to get involved. 

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An update on Hafiza 

Afghan artist Hafiza Qasimi has arrived in Germany on a three-year visa and is preparing to take part in an exhibition of Afghan artists and spend three months living and working in an artists village. In these days when most of what we hear is the sound of relatively safe countries slamming their doors in the faces of refugees, I’m happy to celebrate the freedom and safety of one brave human being. I only wish the opportunity didn’t come to us so rarely.

The latest thing in conspiracy theories: It’s the news from Britain

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The latest thing in conspiracy theories: It’s the news from Britain

Britain has a special relationship with the US, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey indicates that only Britain is knows about it. But never mind that. It’s so important that Britain sometimes gives it capital letters: the Special Relationship.

In fairness, Britain hands out a lot of capital letters, so Americans, don’t let that go to your head.

But special relationship or no special relationship, Britain doesn’t like taking second place, even in the production of conspiracy theories, so we’ve come up with a nice one that’s all our own: The security guards who attended King Charles–that’s the monarch formerly known as Prince–at his mother’s funeral used fake hands so they could keep their real ones on the weapons hidden under their coats. 

Well, of course they did. I’ve seen photos circulating on TikTok, and they show the security guys keeping a tight grip on their hands, as if they were afraid they’d drop off. 

Yes, people do stay up nights to work this stuff out.

The paper I found this in seems to have found it credible enough that they trotted out a security expert to explain why that wouldn’t happen in the UK, although it might, of course, in the US.

Isn’t it interesting what people think of the US? We’re a nation where people could, imaginably, hide an extra pair of arms under their coats.

Irrelevant photo: A pedestrian crossing in Camden, London.

But that’s not what the expert addressed. In the US, he explained–and this comes in the form of an indirect quote from the Metro–“close protection officers are more ‘trigger happy’ . . . but the ‘risk is too high’ in the UK.”

In other words, you might be able to run around shooting people at royal funerals in the US (assuming, of course, that you can find a royal funeral), but you can’t do that in Britain. 

No one seems to have asked how long it would take security guys in any country to break their real arms loose if they did need to get trigger happy, but before I’m going to get on board for this one I need an answer. 

But let’s move on

Do you ever wonder why so many conspiracy theories are on the loose lately? It’s a desperate effort to make sense of a  world that’s falling apart. 

That’s not meant as a joke.

So what’s the British government doing to hold it all together? Well, we have a brand new government, cobbled together by the Conservative Party, which still has a hefty majority in Parliament. Already, though, the shine’s coming off it. It–this is the government we’re talking about in case you’ve lost track–announced a new mini-budget that, in the face of a population increasingly desperate about inflation, promised a tax cut for the richest eighteenth of a percent of the population. It would fund that by borrowing money that it would pay back when pigs fly in formation past the Houses of Parliament waving lion-and-unicorn banners and singing “The Marseillaise.”

Why “The Marseillaise”? Irony, that’s why. Their long and less than happy relationship with humans has led pigs to develop a sharp sense of irony.

The pound promptly tanked. That’s the vote that really matters, so the political world came to a rolling boil. MPs in the government’s own party publicly attacked the idea, attacked the prime minister, attacked the chancellor, and attacked Larry the Cat, who in fairness isn’t even in the cabinet. 

Cabinet ministers accused MPs of staging a coup. 

Larry the Cat accused the government of being stingy with the cat treats.

The prime minister said she wouldn’t back down. 

The prime minister repeated that she wouldn’t back down.

The prime minister backed down, but only on the most controversial tax cut, not on other problematic parts of the budget, which I’ll skip over. Come on, do I look like a newspaper? When the details overwhelm the humor, I have to move on.

The prime minister won’t rule out reinstating the tax cut. 

Larry the Cat upchucked a lightly used mouse head on the steps of Number 10.

In the meantime, the government that won’t commit to increasing benefits (Americans can translate that welfare and similar programs) in line with inflation. People–and not just the poorest ones–are seriously worried about how to heat their homes, food banks are deluged, and the National Health Service is coming apart at the seams. 

And we’re hearing a lot of talk about power cuts this winter. 

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But compassion isn’t completely missing. I recently stumbled over an expensively printed flier with advice on reducing fuel poverty. Some sponsors are in small enough print that I’m not sure if it’s only from the Cornwall Council or if it’s national as well, but hey, if I had anything to do with it I’d want my name in small print as well.

What does it advise us to do?

  • Keep warm
  • Have regular hot meals and drinks
  • Keep moving 
  • Look after yourself
  • Take care of your neighbors

Thanks, guys. I don’t know what we’d do without you.

To be fair, they also give us a handful of phone numbers to try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath about any of them solving people’s problems.

So what does the Department for Fiddling While Rome Burns say?

The government’s addressing the important stuff, though. Therese Coffey–the new health secretary who sports an accent in her first name but I can’t be bothered searching the depths of Word to find it–has taken a tough stand on the Oxford Comma. 

The what?

I’m not exactly British, so I’m not the best person to ask, but back in that big country on the other side of the Atlantic, I learned to call it a series comma. By either name, it’s the comma you either do or don’t use before the final item in a list. You know, when you write to the health secretary and say either, “I find your advice odd, patronizing, and trivial,” or “I find your advice odd, patronizing [no comma, you’ll notice] and trivial.” 

C’mon, this stuff is important.

I won’t try to explain why that’s called the Oxford comma in Britain, mostly since  I don’t understand it either, but Coffey’s agin it. (She wouldn’t approve of agin either, which is why it made its way in here.) She’d no more than located her new office and hung up her coat than she told civil servants to “be positive” in their communications with her, to avoid double negatives, and to not use the Oxford comma. 

After that hit the headlines, her departmental flak-catchers jumped in and acknowledged that the memo was real but said Coffey hadn’t written it. 

“There may have been a bit of over-eagerness” in the content, he, she, they [Oxford comma ahead], or it said.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they were half as eager to shorten the lists of people waiting for medical treatment, fill the National Health Service’s job vacancies, or fix hospital roofs? But those things take money. Oxford commas? They come cheap.

Yeah, but why’d the Conservative’s get a reputation as the Nasty Party?

Gee, I don’t know. I wasn’t here when it happened, but it’s not helped by people like Daniel Grainger, chair of the Young Conservative Network, who arrived in Birmingham for the party convention and tweeted that it was “a dump.” 

He’s stepped down pending an investigation, although that may be over a different tweet–one that, sadly, hasn’t hit the headlines.

How’d the party conference go?

Well, a recent study reports that dogs can sniff out whether people are stressed. I haven’t read that the conference center was surrounded by stress-trained canines, but then I haven’t read that it wasn’t. And for all I know, those hands really were fake. Can you prove they weren’t?

Can we go back to economics, please?

Sure. The Ig Nobel Economics Prize went to Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues for a mathematical explanation of why success so often goes not to the most talented people but to the luckiest. 

Irrelevantly but irresistibly, the prize for medicine went to Marcin Jasiński and colleagues for showing that patients treated with cryotherapy–a form of chemotherapy that dries out the mouth, gums, and tongue–have fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces the ice chips they usually suck on.

They used Ben and Jerry’s, although I expect the improvement would carry over to other brands.