Dave from PR spins into 2011

According to David Cameron's new year sound bite, the government's spending cuts are an unavoidable result of unprecedented debt levels and not at all ideological. We've heard this one several times before - every Public Relations Professional knows the value of repetition.

It is, of course, a bit more complicated than that. If Dave from PR can repeat himself, then so can I. As previously noted, courtesy of the Left Foot Forward blog, when adjusted for inflation, the current level of public debt isn't unprecedented. In fact it's far lower than it was in the late 1940s; a time of austerity, sure, but also a time when the welfare state was being created. Hacking great chunks out of it now isn't inevitable - it's simply what the small-state ideologues on the right want to do.

By its very nature, selective PR spin abhors context, so here's some more context:

The National Debt was made possible shortly after the Glorious Revolution, when William III arranged to sell debt securities through a syndicate of London merchants. The syndicate became the Bank of England, and the securities founded the National Debt.

The introduction to Three Centuries of the National Debt, which includes some interesting charts giving a historical overview of the National Debt. Chart 1 appears, on first sight, to support the Tory spin

And here I want to say something to the people who got us into this mess. The ones who racked up more debt in thirteen years than previous governments did in three centuries.

Chart 1 seems to graphically support that assertion (although it only deals with the last 110 years) with debt crawling along the bottom of the graph for the first half of the century, ramping up in the '80s and '90s before skyrocketing up to dizzying heights in the late '90s and the noughties, or whatever we call the decade we're just leaving behind.

Chart 1, however, is just showing the debt in pounds sterling. The next two charts show debt as a percentage of gross domestic product. Adjusted to a meaningful context, the "unprecedented" level of debt becomes a relatively modest peak in an alpine range of debt spikes. Whether we're looking at the last century or the last three, we can see that we've been here before - and worse - and that the National Debt has tailed off and been managed down over decades, following bigger spikes than this. The last chart, showing interest payments shows a similar picture - taking the long view, the present levels of debt interest payments break no records:

The real risk from government debt is the burden of interest payments. Experts say that when interest payments reach about 12% of GDP then a government will likely default on its debt. Chart 5 shows that the UK is a long way from that risk. The peak period for government interest payments, including central government and local authorities, was in the 1920s and 1930s right after World War I.

The cuts are a choice, not a necessity. This government is starting to remind me of the bankers who got us into this mess in the first place. In Mark Twain's famous words:

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

By cutting public sector jobs and public services when they're most needed, Cameron and his millionaire chums are leaving us all out in the rain. It's kind of appropriate that the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt recently became the unofficial Minister for Rhyming Slang, just when there's no longer any doubt what a bunch of bankers we've got running the country.

Unconditional surrender

So that was Christmas, 2010. Despite the "War on Christmas" stories filling the media, everybody I know gave and received Christmas cards. Nearly everybody I know sent or received Christmas presents of some sort, even in this time of austerity and looming unemployment for many. Barclays Bank estimated that the British public will have spent £48.8 billion in the run up to Christmas.

The Queen's Christmas message went out as normal, as did the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. The Pope delivered a Christmas Message in the Thought for the Day slot on Radio 4’s Today programme. Every remotely popular television programme had its own Christmas special. Kings College’s festival of nine lessons and carols was broadcast as usual. Up and down the nation, churchgoers were freely able attend carol services and go to midnight mass without being threatened or hindered in any way. Children scoffed chocolates from advent calendars and took part in nativity plays. Homes and workplaces were festooned with tinsel and the houses in some streets were decked with so many flashing snowmen and Santas that they outshone Heathrow's snowbound runways 

If there's been a War on Christmas in the UK, then the anti-Christmas forces have fought half-heartedly and lost decisively. Let's face it, it's over. It's time for the volunteers of the Politically Correct Brigades to accept the inevitable and surrender. Ever since the ignominious collapse of the Winterval campaign, when it emerged that their much-vaunted offensive never actually took place, it was clear that this war wouldn't be over by Christmas and that the anti-Christmas faction has been comprehensively defeated by the massed forces of the Baby Jesus. Christmas has won. Further conflict would only be a tragic waste.

I therefore beg the Politically Correct Brigades to bring this unwinnable, seemingly endless war of attrition to an end by offering their immediate, unconditional surrender to the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Santa Claus and his little elves.

When we've ended this madness, we can all move on. The nation can go on to celebrate the peace with joyful thanksgiving bonfires and we can all come together in the shared warmth from the burning effigies of Oliver Cromwell, Richard Dawkins and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And newspaper commentators will finally have to find a real story to have an opinion about.

Party games

 'Tis, apparently, the season to be jolly. Here's a hilarious party game you can all play at home. It's called Uxbridge English Dictionary. Listeners to Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue will know how it works. For the rest of you, it's a game that involves coming up with new definitions for words. For example:

auto de fé - the Popemobile

goblet - small mouth

incontinent - not on an island

portent - shoddy piece of camping equipment

roulade - kangaroo fat (essential Australian cookery ingredient)

retard - very hard, in Yorkshire

tensile - Ireland, after the credit crunch

And for a masterclass in Uxbridge English Dictionary, I can do no better than to direct your attention to a classic recording of the game, featuring the late, great Humphrey Lyttelton and, as an added bonus, the late, great, Linda Smith.

What fun.

Hat tip to Tom Freeman.

Political maturity...

... in our democracy apparently consists of knowing who you can and can't disrespect with impunity. Here's short guide for the perplexed (this means you, Vince):


1) The people who voted for you and the British public in general

Tell them what they want to hear at election time, then once you get into power you can do the precise opposite - just tell them that your promise wasn't a promise and anyway, it had to be broken for complicated reasons that they shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about. They're probably too busy watching Strictly to notice what you just did anyway, and they'll have forgotten all about it come the next election. Little people, not worth worrying about.

2) Colossal trans-national  media mega-corporations with very deep pockets

Don't mess with The Man

Eat the rich

There's a well known story about the  famously eccentric Dr William Buckland that probably never really happened, but I so want it to be true:

Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King [Louis XVI] preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, 'I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,' and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.

This was brought to mind by the news that researchers in France recently identified what they think is the head of France's King Henry IV. I was hoping that Henry's head would go on to feature in a William Buckland-themed Heston Blumental Christmas special, perhaps stuffed with an orange, flambéed in Cointreau, then served up to an admiring gaggle of celebrities, preferably including Terry Wogan. The French, sadly, prefer to hold a national Mass and funeral for the head, before reburying it in the Basilica of Saint Denis. What a wasted opportunity.

Something for the weak end?

I was deleting some spam the other day, when I came across something a bit retro. Some obscure on-line pill vendor was touting allegedly genuine Viagra in an e-mail with the subject line "for the holidays you need it!" I was amused by the quaintly comic notion that people who are getting it together have scheduled a specific time slot, in the same way you'd plan your shopping to accommodate Sunday lunch, or your great aunt would let her hair down and open that sherry bottle at the back of the cupboard, but only at Christmas.* I'm guessing that such regularity of habit is very much the exception and most people just go for it at those random moments when mood and opportunity coincide.

In the less explicit days of my youth, I'm told that men's barbers used to ask customers whether sir needed "something for the weekend?" which was apparently a discreet way of enquiring whether "sir" wanted to buy some condoms. I was never asked whether I needed anything for the weekend, so maybe this form of words was already dying out when I was young, or perhaps the phrase was just an apocryphal popular cliché that nobody said for real. Or maybe they just took one look at me and decided I clearly wasn't having sex with anybody (to be fair, they were probably right for quite a lot of the time).

It's interesting to witness the recalibration of the British embarrassment threshold over the years, from the days when buying a condom was an oblique and furtive matter (which it surely was, whether or not anybody used the exact phrase "something for the weekend"), to a world where unembarrassed teenagers routinely share their sexploits with their mates by text and with a few hundred on-line "friends" via Facebook. Although the threshold has been re-set, embarrassment hasn't been abolished completely, otherwise people's e-mails wouldn't be clogged with spam advertising bogus Viagra and the like to be purchased in the privacy of your own computer, a market that only exists because openness about potency problems is clearly a step too far for many men.

For the consumer, there's danger in embarrassment and furtiveness - nearly all the libido-boosting money-spinners on sale on the net are probably at best ineffective and at worst harmful, but if you're too embarrassed to see your GP and your knock-off little blue pill doesn't deliver, who you gonna call? Probably no-one, which is why they get away with it.

The embarrassment threshold may have changed, but people are still probably much the same. When young men were being asked whether they needed anything for the weekend, I'll bet there were quite a few who bought rubber goods with no expectation that they'd be needed that weekend, or on any weekend in the foreseeable future, just to avoid admitting to the barber that they weren't getting any. Although the baseline of sexual activity is undoubtedly higher, I also expect that a proportion of the 21st Century bedroom antics being texted and Facebooked to all and sundry are face-saving fictions, produced by over-heated competitive, young - mainly male - imaginations. Boys will still be boys.



*See the opening of Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman:

As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life,--on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year,--as certain as ever the Sunday-night came,--to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands:--And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of,--he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.

or for that matter Ivor Cutler's monologues - I can't remember the exact quote, but I'm sure that one of them started 'it was a Thursday, which was our night for sex'.

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre

Britain's students have certainly put the trade union movement on the spot. Their mass protests against the tuition fees increase have refreshed the political parts a hundred debates, conferences and resolutions could not reach.

We know the vast rise in tuition fees is only the down payment on the Con-Dem package of cuts, charges and job losses to make us pay for the bankers' crisis. The magnificent students' movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped.

(Len McCluskey in The Guardian).

As retail outlets across the country tidy up in the aftermath of yesterday's protests, the corporate world has been caught flat-footed. Business leaders have been surprised by the sudden uprising and are struggling to find a coherent voice. Sir Philip Green, the normally outspoken boss of Topshop, at the centre of the protests, was not prepared to talk publicly. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which boasts of being "the voice of business", was surprisingly mute, with none of its current leaders willing to speak on the campaigns by UK Uncut, trade unions and charities.

From another Guardian article headlined "Big business goes on the defensive as tax protesters win the propaganda war".

There are clearly a lot of angry, organised, focused people out there who aren't just going to stand passively by as a cabinet of millionaires wreck what's left of British society just so that the City boys can nationalise their losses without having to endure significant reform or even mild inconvenience.

What a pity Ed Milliband isn't one of them. It would be a step in the right direction if he could find a window in his Filofax for taking a stand.

"I was quite tempted to go out and talk to them [protesters]," he said. "I applaud young people who peacefully demonstrate. I said I was going to talk to them at some point, I was tempted to go out and talk to them." Asked why he had not, he explained: "I think I was doing something else at the time, actually."

From that BBC interview with Ed Milliband last month, when he conspicuously failed to take charge. He really needs to do a lot better, and quickly, or we're all stuffed.