Taking the Long View?

Panning in and out can make things look different. Take, for example, current fear that we are saddling our children and grandchildren with public debt on an unprecedented scale. Here’s a graph from the Telegraph, entirely accurate, portraying the problem of balooning public debt as a percentage of GDP: Dire times, you may say, and a real problem for us all.

But, you may wonder, what about the bigger picture? As public sector requirement has risen down the years, we’ve always funded it by borrowing. We never did, for example, save up in a Jam Jar until the nation could afford, say, an army and navy for the Napoleonic Wars. How does our present apocalyptic orgy of public debt sit within a historical range?

OK. Here is UK Public Debt as a percentage of GDP going back to, er, 1700. Hmm. Lies, damned lies and statistics, you may say. But it does indicate that statistics need to be placed in context.
By all means let’s not saddle our grandchildren with unnecessary debt — but let’s try and do so on rational grounds.

None righteous, no not one...

New Horizons in Infamy, as the Telegraph reveals that one Labour MP tried to claim £5 to put in the plate in Church. The whole country is now one seething cauldron of self-righteous rage and scorn, aimed at MP’s. Now we know all about their garden gnomes, tennis courts, staplers, dictation machines, chocolate santas, envelopes, and dogfood. Hang on, staplers dictaphones and envelopes, are legitimate office expenses. But what the hell, they’re MP’s and they should pay it all back anyway.

MP’s allowance fraud is a really significant story, and it was very important to draw it to public attention, and all dishonest politicians everywhere should be held to account, espeically the ones who have been playing hooky with houses. That said, Some of our boldest crusaders for righteousness have their own dirty underwear, and I don’t just mean their lunch expenses.

The last owner of the Daily Telegraph, for example, has been inside for fraud, having charged such items as FDR memorabilia and Cardinal Richelieu costumes up to his expenses. The way in which various present Fleet Street owners flip their homes for tax purposes is not as well known as it could be. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Squirming under a shower of filth, England tried to cheer itself up by following the antics of breakdancing East End pensioner Fred Bowers:

But now we learn, allegedly, Fred has been claiming £70 a week Disability benefit. He says his left leg is in fact disabled, a kind of still point in a turning world thing. This is giving me some misgivings about flooding parliament with unknowns and retired celebs.
People who aren’t atually MP’s can apparently be as bent as people who are. The Fall turns out to be stone cold sober truth; to quote the late great Noel Coward “Everybody is bent, Camp Freddie.”

Here’s the heart of the matter. We could develop yet more labarynthine and draconian regulations, guidelines and allowances to stop this kind of behaviour, but I’ve another suggestion. Brits have gotten into the habit of treating the ten commandments as obsolescencies in our Secular Brave New World, but they do have a certain resonance just now. “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” “Thou shalt not covet.”

Not exactly rocket science, are they?

But they do seem to reach some of the parts that regulations, guidelines and codes of practice don’t.

Rebooting

Madness is doing something over, thinking it will yield different results next time:

If all you do is what you always done, all you’re ever going to have is what you always had. (Def Leppard)

Saturday’s Board of Social Responsibility reflected on the need to reboot, using excellent materials from the CTBI Conference in January. At the centre of these was a paper by Bob Goudzwaard, Dutch economics professor, on money and idolatry.

Even in narrow financial terms, some wondered why we are now loading money so freely into the top of a discredited system, rather than financing businesses on the streets, refloating the economy, as it were, from the bottom up. Perhaps it’s time to re-read our own Scriptures in the light of experience, including such concepts as Jubilee, Shalom, and household. This might even mean challenging usury — the making of money out of money alone, with no added work. This cornerstone of recent practice is consistently condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures as unjust, immoral and oppressive in itself.

We need to reboot. But how?With the question ringing in our ears, and the Scriptures at our right hand, it’s interesting to begin by remembering that everything impacts everything else in interesting ways:

Target Driven Phantom Libraries

When is a Library not a Library? Lambeth council cut two of its libraries and couldn’t rack up enough hours to get good star ratings at inspection. Que Faire? Listen close, children. Lambeth Councillor Andrew Sawden will explain:

Government target monitoring does not ask for the hours libraries are open over a whole year, just scheduled opening hours in one particular week - whatever week the 31st March, the end of the financial year, happens to fall. Lambeth, fearful that its other library target figures were not robust or reliable, and could lead to the inspectors marking the council down, decided to exploit this loophole.

Cllr Sawdon was told by the Council that the consequences of losing the 1* cultural services rating would have undermined efforts by Lambeth to retain its 3* rating.

So, a week before the inspection, the Council opened library temporary outlets, which it dubbed “cultural information hubs”, and counted them in its opening hours statistics.

By the end of the week after the “cultural information hubs” — a room in a youth club in Brixton, a room in a children's centre, and a room in a council housing office in Clapham — had managed to issue only 25 books between them over three weeks, and although they then stayed open another three weeks, the total number of book issues in those weeks was zero; the Council then closed them down.

Top scoring location was Union Road Housing Office, Clapham (20 books, 10 during inspection return week). Brixton Children’s Centre... lent five books during its brief life-time, hampered by the fact that the building it set up in was still a building site, and not actually open as a children's centre. The wooden spoon was taken by the Marcus Lipton Youth Club in Brixton, which issued no books at all during the entire period it was open.

The Cost? a cheerful £70,000 — or £2,800 a book. Let’s hope they were all Gutenberg Bibles, at least. This all proves that human idiocy beats artificial intelligence every time. Me no Lambeth Council tax payer. I’ve no narrow political axe to grind about this gobsmackingly foolish waste of public money — but it does indicate the kind of nonsense excessively target driven culture can produce. It sounds like such a clever idea, until you try it on real human beings...
h/t Lambeth Councillor Andrew Sawdon