Running On Empty Money

The country is running on empty.

Forget what you’ve heard about the English classes being defined by culture and leisure-time pursuits.

The classes in England are defined by money.

If it was hidden by a smoke-screen in earlier generations, it is naked now.

The solid middle class might have to pull their belts in a notch in times of economic austerity, but they will be able to sail to safety in the lifeboat of their cash savings. Not that I blame them – let’s be clear. This is just about people surviving as best they can in a fragmented society.

Available cash is what marks the middle class from the lower-middle class below them.

The lower-middle class has the aspirations and some of the jobs, but they don’t have the cash. They exist on borrowed money. Their greatest fear is to lose their house. Their mortgages are what keep them compliant.

I didn’t mention the working class. There isn’t any working class any more. As soon as the Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right To Buy’ scheme gave Council tenants the right to buy their rented property, the working class disappeared. They are now the lower-middle class.

Well of course there are true working class people – people with nothing to protect and only their labour to give. But they don’t constitute a class now because they are too marginalised even to recognise one another.

Mark Carney On Bank Stress Tests

Shortly after the EU Referendum vote the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, sat on a panel and explained the stress tests that British banks were dealing with in the aftermath of Brexit. I listened to the whole thing – an hour of it.

If you want to listen to it, it’s on the Bank Of England website under Publications/Financial Stability

He said the banks are able to deal with twice as much stress as they faced in the days following Brexit. And they can deal with any future shocks.

A bit previous, as you might say, is what I thought. Let’s see what the situation is in six months or a year. Brett might be a slow burn.

He also said that banks needed to make credit available.

And now I have just read the August paper from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It starts with a quote about the blues from Gil Scott-Heron, so it can’t be all bad.

It concludes that these are risky times, but financial markets worldwide continue to have an appetite for holding UK debt. And it says that banks need to make credit available.

As I said, we have a pseudo-middle class living on borrowed money. Mark Carney didn’t argue when one of the audience asked what he meant about banks extending credit given that the ratio of average debt to available income in the UK is 132%.

And if the average is 132%, think how high it must be for some people.

That can’t go on forever. I mean, seriously, how can it just trundle on?

And if you are in the ‘poor’ sector of the population, how can you even think about getting credit from a high-street source?

Mortgage Relief On Buy-To-Let Properties

Did you see how the Government took away the tax relief on mortgages on buy-to-let properties? That’s going to put the squeeze on those landlords who can only make their sums work when they get that relief.

They will have to sell the properties, and then those with real free cash will buy up the properties. Meanwhile, slowly but surely, those who bought their Council houses will lose their properties and the gap between the rich and the poor will widen yet more.

It really is the Enclosure Acts for the twenty-first Century.

Meanwhile the new Prime Minister talks about making this a society that is fairer and includes us all. Well I shouldn’t bitch before I see how it plays out, but I have my doubts.

My Take On This

You know the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Well it seems to me that the one thing that is not taken into account in these bank stress tests is when the pips start speaking for enough people to do more than just complain.

I really shouldn’t go on about this much more, because remember that we (the UK, that is) voted for the Conservatives a second time after complaining for five years that they were terrible.

We railed against their inhumanity. We asked how they could tip invalids out on the street and deny them benefits. We said it was an attack on the three pillars of the Welfare State – health, education, and housing.

And then we (the UK, that is) voted for them again.

And what did we learn? We learned that when push came to shove, we voted for ‘I’m alright Jack and let someone else suffer.’ And all that complaining was just hot air.

So maybe Britain is genuinely immune from any action to adjust society to a fairer, more inclusive version.

United By Faith and Informed By Science

My wife pointed out that Theresa May is the daughter of a vicar and Angela Merkel is the daughter of a theologian. What insights they must have into each other – something that not a lot of other politicians can share.

And did you know that Angela Merkel was a research scientist before going into politics. She holds a Doctor of Natural Sciences for her thesis on quantum chemistry, and worked as a researcher and published several papers.

I am a sucker for education.

What Happened When I Learned To Concentrate

Someone asked me the secret to concentration. I don’t claim to have it, but I remember when I learned to concentrate.

It happened when I was nearly thirty years old. Yes, I had been through school, university and a post-graduate course, and still I didn’t know how to concentrate.

Then one day it all changed.

I was in the college library studying for an exam. I had my books and notes around me. Something clicked inside of me and I felt in command. I felt like Captain Picard on the Starship Enterprise.

What I mean is that my physical relationship to the papers around me changed. I sat up alert in my chair. I was in charge. I looked around at the papers, the notes and the books and saw them as connected rather than separate. They told a story together – no longer were they separate sources.

Maybe what happened was a lucky chance. Maybe it was because the papers and books were spread in a semi-circle. Maybe that is what made them seem like the dials on a starship, or a car or an aeroplane.

For whatever reason, it was simply easy for a moment to be aware of my physical and mental relationship to the material.

I realised in that moment that up until then in my mind I had always been hanging on by my fingertips – convinced I would fail or at least not do very well.

Up until then I had managed, but that was such a poor substitute for succeeding.

I had managed but I had always felt I was standing on a quaking volcano of uncertainty.

Now I was in command.

I didn’t suddenly become brighter or more able to do things – but I could concentrate. I was relaxed. And because I was relaxed, I could take things in, see the connections.

I already knew that being relaxed made studying easier. What I learned was that my relaxed state came out of my feeling of being in command.

And why shouldn’t I feel in command? If I feel anything else it undermines the endeavour from the beginning and I sabotage myself.

Of course, we humans are notorious for doing that, aren’t we?

The Mood After Brexit

Were you here for the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union?

Edinburgh, where we live, had one of the highest turnouts and votes to Remain in the whole of the UK. Scotland as a whole voted overwhelmingly to Remain.

So the mood on the street in Edinburgh in the aftermath – the few days to a week after the vote – was palpably strange. When you looked around, you could say almost for certain that most of the people you could see had voted to Remain.

So where were the people who had voted to Leave? They weren’t in Northern Ireland, that was for sure. They were in England and Wales. That’s where they were.

So in Edinburgh, the mood on the street was quiet. People stayed off the streets. When they came out, they dragged themselves around. The buzz of chatter was gone. There were listless movements. Where was the energy?

A post-apocalyptic mood. The mood after Brexit.

If people weren’t on the street, where were they? We sat in rooms, staring into space or wandered about aimlessly making another cup of tea. Our brains wouldn’t function.

We tried to claw themselves into getting on with things, but it would take a few days. Meanwhile, we were drained. So unhappy – and over such a senseless self-inflicted thing.

Bigots To The Left Of Me, Bigots To The Right

Not everyone, but a lot of the Leave voters were narrow minded and closed off to ideas. The deeper polls and analyses said that was what it was. We gobbled up the news. That was it!

It didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor – what mattered in the end was whether you were open minded or close minded. That’s what decided which way you voted.

Well that would be in keeping with the slide to the Right across Europe. The great experiment was falling apart.

Le Pen in France, a re-run of the Presidential election in Austria where the far-right candidate might still win, the rise of the Right in Eastern Europe. Was history going to repeat itself?

Stick It To The Man

Of course, not everyone who voted to Leave was a bigot. That would be too hard on people. There were those who thought we would do better economically out of Europe. And those who thought we would make a fairer society outside of Europe.

And there were those who just wanted to ‘stick it to the Man’, just because he was the Man. Resentful of the widening gap in wealth – anything was better than that.

Anything that would upset the apple cart and take us back to ground zero was better than plodding along and getting a bit deeper in debt.

The Cost Of Housing

This might not be the time to talk about it, but there is a huge, seemingly insurmountable problem in the UK.

It costs too much to buy a home. The asset value in the banks’ books couldn’t handle a huge fall in prices, so the market has every reason to keep the prices propped up.

But it is all, surely, unsustainable. Or are we heading back to serfdom?

Memories Of St. Petersburg

What did I enjoy about St. Petersburg? Well it was 1992, so things were just opening up. The main boulevard in the city was lit by what seemed like 50 watt bulbs strung across the street. In the early evening it cast a feeble glow over the street that was comical and gentle.

And there were pebbles sticking a finger joint’s length up out of the tarmac on the pavements because it was so long since the tarmac had been laid and it was worn away.

There were big trucks belching black smoke. I mean big as in the kind of truck you would only see in a quarry or a construction site in the UK. And there they were, big and unbreakable, thick metal plate, no finesse and built to never fail, belching smoke on the streets right in the city centre.

In a cafe where I ate, I recall a conveyor system for taking away the dirty plates. It was right there in the eating area and it led off to the kitchens behind – except it was very old and it creaked and rattled like a Heath Robinson contraption. The energy needed to keep that creaky old machine going must have far outweighed the benefit. I read into it a kind of sublimated desire on the part of the people to prove that they had technology and that it worked.

And among all this the people were really bright and quick on the uptake – a big change in the way they interacted socially from the people in Finland where I had spent the previous three months.

The women – a lot of them – seemed very sensual – aware of their sexuality – and it made me wonder how the Russian revolution ever took hold.

There were a lot of bookshops and they were full – people seemed genuinely interested in culture and in learning – about everything.

And I recall see men speaking in tight groups, inches from each other’s faces – either because of the cold (it was December) or because they didn’t want to be overheard. I got the idea it was a hangover from the previous regime. I wonder whether people still do that?

And the ice in the Neva had been broken up (by icebreakers, I guess) and was about a metre thick – in huge chunks against the river banks.

And the buildings – the decrepit and the refurbished – were lovely with lots of pastel colours.

And the best memory is the swing doors to the department stores, and people coming from the stores onto the streets like a ballet – a ballet of normality – of going in and out of the stores with the soundtrack of the doors swinging.