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The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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A right-royal celebration (Tesco mail-out received yesterday)
Get ready for the long weekend with BBQ classics, teatime treats, summer drinks and more

Royalty is still quite important politically in Britain so I'm a bit surprised that they've organised the coronation at the end of April rather than the customary high summer. I haven't been taking much personal interest but are street celebrations planned? Or have they put it at the end of April because they figured nobody would attend street parties? The 1953 Coronation was the biggest event in contemporaries' lives whereas the 2023 one is (I am presuming) going to be the biggest damp squib since the Millennium. And I'm talking 1000 AD.

Or maybe it's just we've got better things to do in modern go-ahead Britain than we did in shell-shocked, still rationed, post-war Britain. And, yes, I have adjusted for the glamour-index of the respective stars of the show. Geoffrey Fisher or Justin Welby, anyone?
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Mick Harper
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I'm confused. After Tesco sent me the above I got in a few nibbles and a small flag (nicked but showed the right spirit), spread out a blanket on the living room floor and, I admit, had to crank up my feelings of national atavism. But I was all set to see in the new reign. There didn't seem to be anything on. BBC-1 or BBC-2. I felt sure they wouldn't have sold the rights to ITV or Sky but checked, again nothing. Turned out be next week. Sorry and all, but I'm not going through that little lot again. He's missed my boat, I'll wait for William.

Never mind, I'm in the mood, so I'm going to give you my views about Charles. He's all right is Charles. As a royal, I mean. As a person he seems a bit... Windsorian. There's two things that put him in my tick box. The first is all this Prince's Trust stuff. Just because it's PR is immaterial. The bloke put more welly into it than he needed to. The other one is possibly a more controversial mark of esteem. It was when someone shot at him in Australia and he didn't bat an eyelid. You can't counterfeit sang-froid. Which is the sign of a good monarch.
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Mick Harper
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Nationally branded beers have one thing in common with nationally-branded political parties. They dare not get too far ahead of the social curve. The SNP found this out with transgenderism and now Budweiser have discovered it too.

But they share another problem. Their consumers die of old age at such a fearful rate it is imperative to capture a slice of the youth market, and the young make a point of being ahead of the curve. On the other hand it is as well to remember that they will take on the all the attributes of old age by the time they're in their twenties, so just ignore them like the rest of us do..
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Mick Harper
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I have always been deeply antagonistic to foreign aid but a recent acquaintanceship, via R4's Crossing Continents, with something called 'Free Money' -- an idea from American economists -- may force me to revise this. The principle is simplicity itself. You go to (in this case) Tanzania, you select a sample of villages at random, you hand out free, no-strings, cash to everybody in the selected villages and see what happens. There are two models

1. everybody gets twenty dollars a week in perpetuity (or for as long as the experiment lasts)
2. everybody gets a one-off payment of a thousand bucks.

The best quote was from a woman, "I could afford to leave my husband" but everybody was (naturally enough) full of praise for the scheme. The experiment is only halfway through -- another five or ten years to go, it wasn't clear -- but some general principles have emerged. These are highly impressionistic and should not be relied on:

1. Every dollar given results in a multiplier effect of about two and a half as the extra money spreads through neighbouring non-chosen villages -- who are mad as hell and keep overthrowing their village headmen for not having the right connections to get on the scheme.
2. The thousand dollar cash handouts resulted in quite a lot of "he spent it all on a giant wedding and his wife left after the money was gone" but was better (naturally enough) for generating new capital-intensive projects.
3. The twenty dollars a week had an unusual side effect. Nobody had any excuses any more so had to buckle down and be good productive citizens.
4. Both schemes tended to result in permanent gains in terms of better houses and education but whether these are productive in themselves is not yet established.

It is far too soon to say whether this actually works, the woman in charge was suspiciously liberal-articulate. Or practical -- it clearly isn't in terms of overall available First World to Third World money transfers. Though it would be great if it only diverted the present appalling method of handing over monster sums to be spent locally by bureaucrats, whether governmental or NGO's.

It also has some lessons for First World schemes, mooted from time to time, to give everybody in First World countries a basic income equal to the cost of basic needs and hence abolish welfare.
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Mick Harper
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The Socialist Worker was on vigorous sale outside Ladbroke Grove station though not, as far as I could see, being vigorously bought. This may be because the headline didn't entirely capture the spirit of the day

Off with his head
Coronation Special

Personally I'm opposed to capital punishment in any circumstances but I recognise royal decapitations are part of the radical tradition and should be respected. I was vaguely approached by a young woman who said, in what I judged to be a Sinhalese accent, "Spend money on education not coronations." I thought 'coronations' plural was pushing it a bit but I said nothing.

Instead I got to pondering the choice. Surely it is a false antithesis. Coronations pay for themselves in terms of units of happiness per pounds spent. It's a bit like saying 'Education not cup finals." In any case, as is well known, I think too much is spent on education already. So, no, I didn't buy a copy.
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Mick Harper
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Ever heard of captagon? No, nor me either, but it's one of the most important illegal drugs in the world so listen up now I'm an expert on the subject. Basically it's one of the many amphetamine-type mother's little helpers invented in the sixties and had a short life as a pharmaceutical prescription, before being banned for being overly addictive. Then a long life as a street drug. The reason you haven't heard of it is that it's almost entirely manufactured in Syria and consumed all over but mainly in the middle east.

Why's it important? Because it's worth about fifty-eight billion dollars in exports and it's exported both by the Syrian government and the Syrian anti-government forces. Noises are being made about how this evil trade should be stopped and efforts are being 'stepped up' to this end. Even the United Nations is involved.

Good luck with that.
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Mick Harper
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More high comedy from Elon Musk

His co-investors are getting restive as his antics drive away advertisers, though somewhat enhancing Twitter's allure for right-wing fruitcakes. Milord Musk has riposted by appointing a comely women with extremely long legs to be his Chief Executive. She being recruited from some advertising high-roller's position, he reckoned, would silence his financial critics and she shares, according to her Twitter record, Musk's own brand of politics. So that was all right too.

Unfortunately it transpired that she was also a member of the World Economic Forum -- such people tend to sign up to it for networking and credential-establishing purposes -- and the WEF is the chief source of ire for right-wing fruitcakes. Soon there will be no-one left on Twitter.
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Mick Harper
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A German Speaks

"We have a short-term problem which is basically a post-pandemic issue due to sick-leave numbers way above what we are used to in this country." Talking head, discussing labour shortages on Al-Jazeera

He may not have noticed that, with rare exceptions
1. People on sick leave due to Covid stop working for roughly one to two weeks.
2. Covid has not been an important factor in Germany for roughly one to two years.

Yes, folks, they've caught our disease! Once people get mandated by their government, for whatever reason, not to turn up for work, a lot of them find that's just the job.
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Mick Harper
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The China-Laos Railway: A 414-km high-speed railway that links Kunming in China’s Yunnan province with Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The railway opened in 2021.

If Keith Starmer wants a rallying cry for the next election he couldn't do better than, "We must catch up with Laos in high-speed rail travel. It may take two Labour administrations to do it but let's make a start!" The electrification of the Trans-Peninne will take longer and is best left out of the manifesto at this stage.
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Mick Harper
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Nigel Farage: We've got five point three million people of working age in this country who aren't working.
Victoria Derbyshire: Many of them are working.
Nige: Yes, illegally.
Vicky: Moving on...

I never like getting into bed with Nigel Farage but he's right and I should know I was one of them for most of my, ahem, working life. I've already covered most of the categories but the illegal side should also be addressed. For instance, in my day every motorbike courier in London was signing on -- it wasn't much of a living if you weren't. I was practically killed in the stampede when someone burst in shouting, "Bloke writing down number plates."

My guess is that one reason migrants head for our shores despite having already reached Europe's shores is (apart from us not having ID cards) our relaxed attitude to illegal non-migrants. We don't go in for round-ups in sweat-shops and that kind of thing. We prefer 'Tip us off' anonymous phone lines. "Press one if someone you know is working while claiming unemployment benefit. Press two if they have a lodger and claiming housing benefit. Press three if they haven't got any children but claiming child benefit. Press four if it's just a general suspicion that they're up to something, it stands to reason."

In this we are curiously similar to the communist regimes of yesteryear. They realised that there were a lot of 'people of working age' who were useless for productive purposes but were damned dangerous for non-regime-change purposes. Many were given quite lucrative lifetime tasks producing books and papers that would never be published. And that kind of thing.
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Wile E. Coyote


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That is presumably 5.3 million now claiming out of work benefits, for most of the last 10 years, pre covid, that was about 4 million. So, Covid added an additional 1.5 million universal credit claimants, from about 2 million to 3.5 million, that is presumably folks who lost work during covid. There is probaly going to be a time lag and it will go back to 4 million.
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Mick Harper
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We covered this before. I (at any rate) came to the conclusion that once the benefits of not-working have been experienced even more people took advantage of it so, no, it won't go back to four million. Covid has been over so long that you will have to explain why it hasn't gone back to four million already.

PS You should not be working with 'universal credit claimants' figures since these include many people that are working, by British standards, quite normally. (Even if everyone, myself included, may well be doing so.) The government seems not to be issuing the 'people who are skiving because we prefer it to having a high unemployment figure' figures.
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Wile E. Coyote


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That is presumably 5.3 million now claiming out of work benefits


I get you, but I was only using the figures for those claimimg "out of work benefits". The DWP can separately identify those that are claiming UC "in work" and UC "out of work." There was a huge leap in those needing to claim UC after Covid hit.
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Mick Harper
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One of the benefits of a public school education is the bestowal of feelings of effortless superiority over anyone who hasn't had one. This may be real (they are often actually superior), it may be illusory (they just don't know it) or it may be a pretence (though the patina is still there). Rishi Sunak is the only exception to this rule. He always looks slightly lost and over-anxious to please.

This is quite serious when he's hobnobbing with the great and the good at their now insanely frequent meet-and-greets. They might get the impression we don't count for much in the Halls of the Mighty. But AE-ists are committed to the conversion of problems into solutions. Stop going to them, formally announce we're above such things. Playing hard-to-get is always effective.

"Who was that chap I was having a photo-op with?"
"The British prime minister, Mr President."
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Mick Harper
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An intriguing interview on Newsnight with PC Samantha Lee, widely blamed for not preventing Sarah Everard being murdered by PC Wayne Couzens. Lee was most impressive. The same cannot be said for the interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, so intent on expressing outrage in various directions, we didn't get to hear precisely what Lee did wrong. Though she was ultimately dismissed for 'lying' over whether she had seen a service station videotape of the relevant incident. She clearly hadn't.

Then up popped an ex-police bigwig who said the Met had done nothing wrong -- apart from lessons will be learned etc -- it was all down to ex-police small fry, Samantha Lee, after all. That lesson was learned by the Met shortly after 1829.
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