We have become the nightmare vendor

25. May 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Climate Change, Demographics, Economics

For those of you who have ever bought or sold a house (and I realise that that is a dwindling proportion as we move down the age ranges), it occurred to me that the UK increasingly resembles the worst kind of vendor. The sort that removes the lightbulbs and the doorknobs before giving up possession.

Harold Macmillan referred to Margaret Thatcher’s Government “selling off the family silver” in response to the widespread privatisations of public assets at the time. This Government has gone further, denying funding to the health and social security safety net we all rely on to such an extent that, as Health Equity in England: The Marmot’s Review 10 Years On found in 2020:

  • people can expect to spend more of their lives in poor health;
  • improvements to life expectancy have stalled, and declined for women in the most deprived 10% of areas;
  • the health gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas; and
  • living in a deprived area of the North East is worse for your health than living in a similarly deprived area in London, to the extent that life expectancy is nearly five years less.

However it is even worse than that. I once bought a house from a man who had done all of his own plumbing, despite being a telephone engineer. He proudly took me up to the airing cupboard, where the boiler room displayed piping of complexity which would not have been out of place on a nuclear submarine.

“Everything has its own stop cock.” He said. He might even have called them isolation valves. I just thought of how many different leaks were possible from what he had constructed.

And so it proved. We had a plumber on speed dial before long and, with every new job he undertook for us, most of which was to undo the “work” of which the former owner had been so proud, he used to intone “what a man”, more to himself than to us.

Brexit, even as its architects start to disavow it in the face of the increasingly overwhelming evidence of the bullet holes in our own feet, is our home-made plumbing. And I am sure that there are any number of people around the world, looking at us and intoning “what a man” to themselves. It no longer matters to most of us how much the Brexiteers think they have buffed up their sovereignty isolation valves. Every week brings a new story about another leak of what Macmillan endearingly referred to as our “treasure” that it has enabled.

On immigration, we are like that house on the street which noone from the area wants to go anywhere near. Neighbours only reluctantly enter into any kind of dispute about who should replace the shared fence. There is a huge-sounding dog which barks at you fiercely if you venture up the driveway, on which the only car is on bricks. It feels like, if we were to ultimately die as a nation, noone would notice for years until the smell coming from inside became too much for anyone to ignore any more.

Anyway, enough of all that. I am off to the Hay Festival tomorrow for my annual infusion of ideas, erudition and words just flowing all around me. And so I must leave you with a book recommendation. I will be taking The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell with me, a brilliant beautifully illustrated book (illustrations by Talya Baldwin) with each chapter focused on a different endangered species. Sounds bleak? No! The writing is so good that you are soon just overwhelmed by the richness you hadn’t even been aware of and might otherwise never have been. I have been reading it very slowly as I really do not want it to end. As Katherine says about The Human at the end of the book, with a different take on treasure:

For what is the finest treasure? Life. It is everything that lives, and the earth upon which they depend: narwhal, spider, pangolin, swift, faulted and shining human. It calls out for more furious, more iron-willed treasuring.

I have this book because Katherine described it so compellingly in an interview at the Hay Winter Festival (a smaller one in November each year). She has also written a book about John Donne, the metaphysical poet, called Super-Infinite. I had not considered until now that I was remotely interested in John Donne, but I also cannot imagine that the week will pass without me buying this and reading it too.

Chasms

12. May 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Demographics, Economics, Pensions, Science Fiction

I recently finished reading Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, which I highly recommend. In it, sufficiently rich people have been able to buy a programme of treatments which make them immortal. Not that they can’t die, but they needn’t if they’re careful. Good science fiction, I thought.

Then I read Paul Kitson’s (the new UK Head of Pensions Consulting at EY) piece on LinkedIn where he wrote (bold mine):

Pension schemes, corporate sponsors, members – everyone, in fact – must now contend with a forward looking plan that (somehow!) considers on one side the possibility of future pandemic outbreaks shortening life expectancy, and on the other side the many £billions being spent on ‘regenerative medicine’ (AKA “the ending of ageing” or “escape velocity for death”!).

So perhaps not entirely, I thought.

In Chasm City, the immortals who live in “the Canopy” have two main problems:

  1. Hanging on to their wealth and, if possible, increasing it, as forever is a long time to finance.
  2. Boredom.

One particular group amuse themselves by hunting poor people in “the Mulch” (lower level where the poor live). Others indulge in increasingly dangerous pastimes to inject some urgency into the otherwise featureless expanse of their lives. No wealth moves from the Canopy to the Mulch, not even in a trickle.

I am just finishing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick (a classic, I know, but I hadn’t read it before, although I have seen Bladerunner). One of the features of the post-apocalyptic world of 1992 described are “mood organs” which allow you to dial up a given mood at any time, eg 481 is “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” whereas 888 is the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it. Again, good science fiction, I thought.

Then I read a piece in this months’ Actuary magazine called Apt apps, about doctors being recommended by NICE to offer patients with insomnia the Sleepio app as an effective and cost-saving alternative to sleeping pills. So perhaps not entirely, I thought.

The first book was written in 2001 and the second in 1968, so it would seem that lead times are variable.

Both books deal with the fragility of identity, whether via memory implants and religious viruses in Reynolds’ book or how we go about separating androids from people from “chickenheads” in Dick’s. The divisions between the life experiences of the different groups are so stark, but it is the characteristics of the people in them which takes up everyone’s time and attention in both books, rather than the structure of the societies which create such extreme winners and losers. Which suddenly doesn’t feel like science fiction at all.

Meanwhile what has happened to England’s life expectancies by decile of deprivation in the last 10 years?

Source: ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthinequalities/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesbyindexofmultipledeprivationimd/2018to2020#health-state-life-expectancies-data

So not quite immortality yet at the top, but inequality is clearly worsening in life expectancy. The Government Actuary’s Department gave an upbeat view last year on what the impact of the recent Levelling Up White Paper might be. Others are upbeat too.

However the Government’s track record is not good on inequality. Sir Michael Marmot produced the Marmot Review on health inequalities in the UK in 2010 and then followed this up with a review of what progress had been made 10 years later. As he points out in his recent interview in The Actuary:

Health spending fell from around 42% to 35% during the 2010s. He notes that this reduction was carried out in a regressive way: “There has been a 16% reduction in health spending for the most affluent, but a 32% reduction for the most deprived groups.” In addition, he says, while unemployment fell over the course of the decade, the income of employed people also went down – so the proportion of people living in poverty rose, as did child poverty.

These are the kinds of interventions that matter for most people rather than sleep apps or regenerative medicine to achieve escape velocity from death. And they are definitely not science fiction.

A Tale of Two Weekends

08. May 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Legal, Regulation

If I were John and John were Me,

Then he’d be six and I’d be three.

If John were Me and I were John,

I shouldn’t have these trousers on.

AA Milne

Two weekends, two weeks apart.

In each children spent hours preparing their own personal tributes to the focus of the weekend. Parents arranged accommodation. Face paints were in profusion. Cardboard constructions abounded. There were placards and banners and flags.

One got minute by minute coverage in hushed tones, with talking heads running out of things to say after 6 hours or so and then needing to start projecting what various people, having their every movement and facial tic filmed, might be betraying in a momentary expression. The other one was almost totally ignored, despite both events occupying almost exactly the same space in central London.

Imagine if the media priorities had been reversed:

“And, as the man with the giant mosquito on his head, slowly makes his way around Parliament Square, we reflect on how many hours must have gone into constructing that mighty insect. And now we see the scientists, garbed in their traditional white coats, making the point that no nature means no future. What a riot of colour it is and so many volunteers have given up their time, not only today but in the months of preparation for the Big One. So, Sir David, are you surprised by the number of children in the procession today?” “Not really, Huw…”

“Meanwhile in other news, police arrested a Mr Charles Windsor and his wife Camilla at their home. Police seized several crowns, an orb, sceptres, rings, some very large chairs and other paraphernalia which could be involved in coronation activity. Royalists claimed that the police had been ridiculously heavy-handed. The police said that their actions had been entirely proportionate.”

In Christopher Clark’s new book about the revolutions throughout Europe in 1848, Revolutionary Spring, he talks about the origins of radicals and liberals in opposition to the establishments of the day, divisions which still seem to be with us today. But it is our Government which is radical, prepared to do great violence to the status quo, the opposition which seems to be liberal, bogged down in endless arguments about tiny differences, and the BBC which appears to be left on its own representing what it sees as the current Establishment.

Now there will be many who say that journalists should not be involved in defending any status quo, and I can understand that. However it can also be argued that a state broadcaster like the BBC does have some responsibilities in this respect. But which status quo do you defend?

The Government’s agenda is problematic – it’s not just about the lying and the corruption, but the constant changing of position, the most obvious being the Kwarteng fiscal event in the autumn. Climate protesters are remarkably consistent by comparison, not surprisingly really as the limits imposed by physics are not changing with each quarter. And their focus of sustainability is surely the most critical part of any status quo which needs defending, ie the ability of the planet to support life in all of its forms.

Television is extremely good at focusing our attention on something, and away from something else. This is why companies spend so much on television advertising and why our televised sports halls and pitches and the combatants within them are festooned with logos and messages from a myriad of sponsors. However, the Communications Act 2003 prohibits political advertising, which includes campaigning for the purposes of influencing legislation or executive action by local or national (including foreign) governments. The BBC have interpreted this as not allowing any form of protest to be visible during televised sporting events (most recent example being the Just Stop Oil protest with the orange powder at the World Snooker Championship), an event for which the title sponsor is Cazoo, Europe’s leading online car retailer. Similarly, the police have said that one of the considerations in their level of policing response to the Republic demonstrations this weekend, including pre-arrests before the procession or any protest had taken place, had been the wall-to-wall television coverage of the event.

46% of the UK population are very or extremely worried about climate change, but the biggest demonstration in the UK in the climate movements’s history was not covered on television at all. 62% of the UK population support the monarchy and we get all the main channels turned over to coronation coverage. I think what I am calling for is a bit more balance here, something we used to think, with some pride, was a national characteristic.