There seems to be a pushback on the whole idea of FI/RE of late by a twin axis of Calvinists who think work is good for the soul, and perhaps the slow realisation that the goal is getting harder as times go by. There are a few reasons for that increasing difficulty – the people who started out of the GFC got the massive free gift of very good valuations. Fifteen years of wage stagnation in real terms don’t help, and increasing wage multiples going into housing is another headwind. I can understand the people who are going off the idea because it seems increasingly difficult, perhaps it was of its time. It was fascinating reading old_eyes’ FIREside chat, here was a fellow who started a few years before me, and indeed made a much better fist of his career than I did. He said some kind things about these scrivenings <blush> but also emphasised some of the wins that I gained from, though some were fast disappearing even if the few years since he began (I am a few years younger).
I am also acutely aware how lucky I have been, not only in having a good and satisfying career, but also in being born at the right time. A time when defined benefit pensions were the norm, student debt was unknown (apart from sometimes having to grovel for a tiny, tiny overdraft), and homes were an understandable multiple of earnings.
Fifteen years down the line from when I concluded FI/RE was for me, I wonder if these factors played harder than I’ve given credit for. It’s a mixed bag. The times were harsher in some ways and kinder in others, you gotta play the hand you’re dealt. Being a student was nutty in many ways.
There was very little of the pastoral care that you have now, I recall getting absolutely blotto and suddenly realising we had to keep one dude talking, because he was looking for a one-way ticket out of all this. A tough ask, to keep the wheels running across the small hours and the inevitable blood sugar drop, until the break of day when we could send out a runner into the grey dawn to find a phone box1 to seek more competent help. Nowadays you’d whip out your mobe and google Samaritans 116 123, but the past is a different country.
Student life was edgy then – massive upside potential for sure, but nothing to catch you if you fall. I recall going back to Imperial to the Physics department to ask them for a reference to go for an SERC grant to do a Southampton MSc and the head of dept Prof XX said no. You had potential, but you blew it. I Googled XX and he is still alive, and I read some of his backstory, and I could see how some young cock who failed to step up to the grade pissed him off. He didn’t know why I had made a mess, and anyway, the times didn’t believe in taking prisoners or making allowances for non-academic frailties.
My primary school headmaster had said I didn’t suffer fools gladly and with Prof XX I got to look at this in the mirror. I assumed Prof XX had cashed in his chips by now but while he is a Prof Emeritus he is very much still on this mortal coil so I am glad I checked first and didn’t slander him in this post. Thanks to the Manpower Services Commission for stepping up enabling me to redeem a pedestrian2 first degree. I actually had the money saved from working, to pay my fees and my board, but it was nice not to need to use it, so I could spaff it on a house a few years later3. While I tip a hat to old_eyes’s narrative, the path to that sort of success was narrow back in the day.
I didn’t want to pollute his inspirational story with any cynical mustelid grizzle, so I decided to STFU on that thread. It is inspiring – I can relate to allocating resources to Mrs Ermine after I am gone, but to throw the key 30-40 years into the future, as old_eyes’ feels he owes his son due to infirmity, I don’t know how you get from here to there.
Calvinist ice
Decades after materialist rationalism emptied our churches and turned them into silent disco-halls a new creed spreads – the Calvinist redemption through work. If you don’t want to retire when you get to FI, well, don’t. Take the money you don’t need and give it away, drop it out of helicopters or simply stuff it in your mattress and admire the precioussss. Just don’t make out this is the only way to the Good Life, because some of us haven’t lost sight of the elementary fact that there is more to life than work. And for heaven’s sake don’t come out with cock like this from Humble Dollar (H/T monevator) with condescending old man’s wisdom for the young
we might pick a career less for its income and more for its joy—because we envisage doing it for as long as our mind and body allow. As the saying goes, if we can find a job we love, we’ll never work a day in our life.
Well, this a new riff on the ‘young ‘uns can’t afford to buy a house because they spend too much money on smashed avocado on toast and lattes’. Presumably the fellow with a Deliveroo sack on his back and Amazon logistics workers failed to think of that? How remiss of them. Let’s deconstruct this old git brain fart. Here’s a Venn diagram of the Life/Work/Crap ontology. The relative size of the blobs will vary for different people, but I’d say the overlaps are the same for all.
Clearly the world contains more than you can do, or are interested in. I’ve heard as much as I want to of Balkan throat singing, while being glad it exists, in a what a weird and wonderful world sense. Even interesting stuff has some things you’d rather avoid – learning anything goes through a long and frustrating region of being crap at it without knowing if you will develop or remain a tyro forever. There are many people for whom paying work you could do overlaps hardly at all with your interests. Budding artists and resting actors know this feeling only too well.
The intersection of world, work, crap, and interests
Despite interview claims of having a passion for flipping burgers or crap jobs like chicken eviscerator, we all know that it’s just playing the game. Let’s take a closer look at the overlap between the teal work you could do bit and the yellow interests bit.
Let’s hear it from Joseph Campbell on HD’s joy, finding your bliss
“The way to find out what makes you the happiest is to focus on being mindful of your happiest moments—not simply excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy.”
How does that gel with the work you could do side of things? The trouble is that fun things are popular! Everyone else wants to do it too. Continue reading “Hinterland and FI/RE”
The dog days of summer drag on, we had the rioting in a minor way last month. Strangely muted compare to the summer of discontent ten years ago, Blackberry Messenger was a more effective spreader of sedition compared with TikTok, or perhaps we just got lucky this time. The greens of some of the leaves are turning brown, but this septic isle seems not to be a happy place, despite the sunlit uplands promised a few years ago and a late summer of, er, summery weather.
Compared with the mendacious clown and the mad cow dear Rish! seems to try hard, but I’ll leave it to the irascible Dominic Cummings to summarise the result – cascading clusterfucks. The air traffic control screw-up, apparently a failure to sanitise user input, the concrete lumps falling off public buildings which has been known about for decades, the inability to stop small boats while claiming the plan is working – in the words of Our Dom government is broken because the people aren’t up to it. I think he means the people in government, Dom’s not always charitable to the masses, despite his shtick.
Dom’s a nutter, but the Tory Lord Aschroft’s latest State of the union address says the same thing in a different way
After 13 years of Conservative government, things were not supposed to look like this. Strikes, inflation, record NHS waiting lists, a sluggish Economy…
Let’s hear it from another Tory minister, from when we saw this movie last time, hello Norman ‘green shoots’ Lamont in his valedictory transmission on the 9th June 1993
There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. […] We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours’ publicity. Yes, we are politicians as well as policy-makers ; but we are also the trustees of the nation. I believe that in politics one should decide what is right and then decide the presentation, not the other way round. Unless this approach is changed, the Government will not survive, and will not deserve to survive.
Ouch. That was thirty years ago, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
This is how Tory governments die, strangled by self-serving and internal inconsistencies. It’s really hard to conceive of one of the current crew saying
we are also the trustees of the nation
because populism destroys character. We should, however, fear the strength of character that follows, as the force is harnessed by those more competent who watched and learned from the failures of the first generation of populists. Perhaps there’s just something about the thirties of a century and bad moons rising. Something is rotten in the Kingdom.
I have the privilege of having my interests represented by a a Tory MP. Dirty job, but someone has to do it, eh? So despite not being a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party I have microscopically more control over the future directions that if you have a non-Tory MP. I thought I’d have a word, via theyworkforyou. It’s largely futile, but hey 😉
Dear Tory MP,
I’m going to keep this short and sweet.
Please do NOT aid and abet the serial liar and moral vacuum otherwise known as Boris Johnson to return to trashing the future of the UK to appease his childhood dream to be King.
He was bad enough the first time round, bringing the government and politics into disrepute because of a congenital inability to tell the truth.
A Britain weakened by Tory incompetence and psychodrama does not need to drink of that poisoned well again.
Rishi Sunak, despite being rich as Croesus, does at least seem to have a working calculator and some track record of competence. Please support him as the next Tory PM.
Yours sincerely,
A snarling stoat
I don’t have anything against Penny Mordaunt, well, apart from abetting the existing regime. But the time for more untried whack-jobs has passed. What this country really doesn’t need is TWO kings. We’ve already got one King. He at least seems to have some idea of when to STFU. That’s not a high bar, but let’s remember the Hippocratic Oath
“primum non nocere,”
First, Do No Harm. It’s not a bad place to start. Tories aren’t going to give up power any time soon. This is a Sully Sullenberger moment. It’s not about where you want to land. That option’s gone. It’s about where you don’t want to end up.
No more Bozza. You’ve done enough damage for one life, mate.
Well, the last post didn’t age well, did it? Slightly better than fresh fish, worse than a piece of cheese, the lettuce is out for the count. No idea if this one will be relevant tomorrow, either. Events, dear boy, events1
It wasn’t really meant to turn out this way. Good old Krazi Kwarteng was out there, implementing the Trusster’s Britannia Unchained Manifesto with vim and Etonian self-confidence.
Overlooking the first rule of right-wing thinktanks the world over, which is fulminating generally that governments don’t have their own money Krazy Kwasi decided to slow the inflow at the top of the tank by cutting tax, without saying how he was going to reduce the outflow at the bottom in the form of cuts. Apparently all those less taxed higher earners were going to do a jolly hockey-sticks investing and spending splurge which increases growth and make up the difference automagically. Exactly how, Kwasi left as an exercise for the reader.
That included all the people who normally lend money to the UK, who asked themselves
How many times in the last few outings of the trickle-down theory has it actually worked, because we’re on the hook for the extra lending to fill up the tank if it doesn’t?
When you ask a wingnut what it believes, it will say one thing. But when you ask wingnuts with money to pony up, you realise that when it comes to their own money, they don’t believe everything they say. That’s for little people. In particular, it seems that supply-side economics was considered so off the wall at this time that they demanded a moron risk premium to invest in a submerging market.
Not only did Krazy Kwasi not want to show his own working, but he was damn well not going to let anybody in the know comment for several weeks. Instead, he produced word salad
“We are confident in our long-term strategy to drive economic growth through tax cuts and supply-side reform.
“Supply-side reforms are critical — increasing capacity brings down prices.
“Cabinet ministers will set out more supply-side measures over coming weeks to make meaningful change. Right across Government, departments have to be focussed on this.
“We are committed to fiscal discipline, and won’t re-open the spending review. We have a medium term fiscal plan coming on 23 November, alongside an OBR forecast. That will be a credible plan to get debt to GDP falling.”
Which is all very well, but can be summarised as Trust Me, I’m Kwasi, and for some reason that didn’t wash. It got him sacked for culpable incompetence and his boss into rather hot water. The wrong sort of clever, apparently, Cambridge failed to introduce Crazy Kwasi to Socrates. Or Icarus…
His replacement canned the entire Britannia Unchained budget, save some minor bits and the cap on bankers’ salaries. Oddly enough I am all for that. It will no doubt lead us into deep trouble at some future point, because it rewards risk taking but limits the downside to losing your job, now that debtor’s prisons are no longer a thing. However, making money out of money is one of the few things modern Britain is/was good at, so the moral hazard is probably worth it in the round.
Nobody was able to find a way to make the great Britannia Unchained project fly. So now we have Austerity 2.0, and somehow the guy who came last in the Tory leadership election is in charge, because he has a better bedside manner than Krazy Kwasi or the current incumbent of No 10. He’s also got a basic grasp of arithmetic. I always like that in a chancellor.
Let’s look on the bright side. At least the British Army isn’t in charge and on the BBC telling us all to stay indoors. The Tories seem to be doing their best not to let our Dear Leader open her trap, however, on the grounds that the economy cannae take another hit of Britannia Unchained gobshite.
Something that puzzled me about the Britannia Unchained agenda was that Dear Liz monstered those cynical of the whole trickle-down agenda as the anti-growth coalition which has spawned some great memes. Let’s ask ourselves what is the biggest anti-growth coalition of recent times? There’s a clue in that Trussonomics is about the supply side. So what did the BoE say about supply-side then
Brexit is a supply shock — that’s not a value judgment on Brexit, it’s an economic fact.
Hmm, obviously we’ve had enough of experts on that subject round here, but what effect did that have, now the results are in?
Put it this way, in 2016 the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70 per cent.
Whoops. So who is the biggest agent of the Anti-Growth Coalition? Brexiters, bless ’em, and the current muppets in charge have been specifically selected for saying Brexit is A Good Thing. As Carney said, it’s not a value judgement on Brexit, if you are rich enough, you may well conclude that a > 20% fall in the size of the economy against a comparable European country is a price well worth paying to get control of your own destiny. If you are a low earner subject to the winds of competition from EU immigration you may be making a perfectly rational call that your end of the boat is fine. But it does seem a bit rich to be moaning about the anti-growth coalition faced with such full-throated support of a growth epic fail of that magnitude. You wouldn’t start from here if you want to get there.
Anyway, the Anti Growth coalition rode into town as the cavalry to save La Truss from herself, in the gnomic form of Jeremy Austerity 2.0 Hunt, busting the ass of the tax cuts, promising rises in other areas, Taking Back Control of stuff already promised to people like the energy price cap and the triple lock.
Apparently La Truss and stablemate Kwasi made some mistakes. No shit Sherlock. They got it all pretty much 100% wrong. Your mortgage will be dearer, if you want anything done by the government it will be greatly impaired because The Axeman Cometh, and the much-vaunted energy price cap will be filleted, so better start putting pound coins in the jamjar right away. Wingnuts are already rewriting history to say it was the bailouts energy price guarantee wot did it, presumably soon to be followed by ‘Britannia Unchained was right all along‘. Inquiring minds would like to know how other European countries managed the trick in similar ventures, for the moment at least.
Apologists for this crew will no doubt say that interest rates and energy prices are going up across the developed world, so suck it up, proles. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked, given that you are now getting tax rises and spending cuts how could they have got it so wrong that such a full-spectrum reverse ferret is required? Surely there must be some suspicion that Liz Truss’s grasp on the reality of what she could do is a few bricks short of a full load?
There’s something disturbing that this was referenced by the head honcho of the Environment Agency, following up with “Get the tone right: calm, authoritative, empathetic, commitment to do what’s needed.” So how comes there’s shit in our waterways again and again? The common element? Liz Truss. The force of competence is not strong in this one, it would seem. ↩
Reader, I sucked it up so you don’t have to. After diligently searching the library for a copy of Britannia Unchained, the 2012 tract authored by Kwasi, our Dear Leader, Chris Skidmore and a couple of also-rans, I failed to find it. So I sucked up the Amazon price of £16. I don’t suggest you do the same 😉 I am tempted to list it as an investment expense. After all, you need to know what Liz Truss is thinking, and since she didn’t have to put any of it in a manifesto, this is as good as it gets.
I expected to hate it, but though I found it somewhat studenty and one-dimensional in places, I found much to agree with. My main philosophical charge against the tract was the strong tendency to infer the general from the particular, heavy on anecdote and light on tested principle. You could, however, level that charge against most of the dismal science of economics. What theoretical principles I have seen in economics often doesn’t come out well in the testing, or there is a replication issue where it works in some circumstances but not others. This is not terribly surprising for something attempting to make sense of a multivariate system rammed full of independent and resourceful actors with varying degrees of knowledge and emotion.
But I’ll run with it, because for better or worse, this philosophy is guiding the country for the next up to two years. So far, what’s appeared has been consistent with the book, but I can promise you, dear readers, you ain’t seen nuffink yet. About 90% of the idea hasn’t been voiced yet. So let’s set the scene from Britannia Unchained itself, in the intro.
All five authors grew up in a period where Britain was improving its performance relative to the rest of the world. The 1980s, contrary to the beliefs of many on the left, were a successful decade for Britain. They were a time when, after the industrial chaos of the 1970s, business and enterprise began to flourish once more.
I’m not really going to dispute that. I saw the 1970s and started work in the 1980s. I saw a gradually improving economy, such that it blinded me to the single worst financial mistake of my entire life to date, buying a house in 1988. Because I inferred the general from the particular. The only defence was I was in my twenties and a greenhorn, but it’s not like wiser heads, both my parents and colleagues in the office, hadn’t suggested prices were high and there might be value in not acting right now. It is the nature of the world that young folk and believe themselves all-wise and invincible. It is the job of the world to disabuse them of that belief.
These authors ascribe this successful decade to Margaret Thatcher. She had something to do with it, for sure, but I would say that North Sea oil might also have had something to do with it. Outcomes are not always due to a single cause. But Thatcher did seize the opportunity, and did fix some deep problems that did need fixing. Seeing Arthur Scargill, or any union baron in general, still makes me want to throw things at the telly, because Art and his flying pickets and secondary action was running the country in the 1970s. Where Thatcher failed was not in taking the miners down IMO, but in leaving the twisted wreckage of those communities to rot – you can still feel it passing through some of the Welsh valleys. However, in the round, I’ll give the point.
They observe that in 1950 the UK was still richer than France of Germany, but lost its mojo and did not benefit from les trente gloriouses in the same way. We know the litany of 1970s decline. The surprising difference in belief comes with
a comparison of social mobility puts Britain near the bottom in the Western world. Yet the suggested cures to this disease — abolishing grammar schools or redistributing wealth — have been, if anything, counterproductive. This is not just a problem of the left, however. Right-wing commentators are apt to argue about natural ability and talent, as if success is solely a result of destiny rather than persistence.
Much of the following discussion is about the decline in educational attainment of Brits relative to our developed world peers according to the OECD PISA scores. And I’m surprised by Kwasi, Liz et al.
All the experience I have had in my decades on Earth is that intellect is innate, slightly inherited, and broadly immutable. Some people are brighter than others. Intelligence isn’t necessarily an indicator of success, particularly in the past, because there are many other skills – intelligence is broadly reflected in academic prowess, but doesn’t make you a better human being. It wasn’t even particularly advantageous in times past.
I formed this viewpoint in primary school, . In 1960s London, they were short of teachers, and some of the kids who had mastered spelling and some aspects of arithmetic were set to try and teach the slower ones. I was one of the child tutors, not electively, and found the experience frustrating, because I could not see why others could not see what I had learned/derived. Although I am probably to the right of the bell curve I am not MENSA bright, but the range of pupils at this school was wide. In a later repeat performance I saw a quarter of the class lose the plot when they introduced fractions in arithmetic. Many never really mastered spelling. I was not the brightest in the school, however, and even at that age could see that, though I was in the upper reaches. At secondary school O level maths, calculus1 in the form of differentiation did the same again.
But I could see that some people were slower, and no effort seemed to redeem the problem. My valedictory primary school report had the phrase doesn’t tolerate fools gladly, and the succeeding decades has still not shown me why this was such a bad thing, fools should be kept well away from things they are foolish in 😉 I am foolish at all sorts of things, that house purchase was something I should have been kept away from! I have never, ever, considered teaching as a profession – not as a child, not as a young adult and I wouldn’t entertain the idea now.
In my grammar school, about half the class cleared off at 16, to go to work. These were the less academic, but the employment world of the 1970s was not the same as the employment world today. They could start earning – some of them worked in garages fixing cars or apprenticed to trades. The world of work presented opportunities for a much wider range of aptitudes than it does now, where analytic skills are much more to the fore, particularly if you want to earn well, and that roughly correlates to academic ability, and often to STEM areas, due to some of the analysis being mathematical, or at least arithmetical. Th 1960s and 70s had good earning positions for people without academic qualifications who could learn a skilled trade.
A lot of Britannia Unchained laments the poor academic and specifically STEM aptitudes of the output of Britain’s schools, and the tendency to favour arts and humanities because it is easier to get decent grades in these.
Instead of hard choices, students apply for a degree in media or business, which will often allow for the study of easier A Levels. As with US college courses, science A Levels are more harshly marked than those in media and sociology, the difference being up to a grade. In a culture of equivalence, where all subjects are deemed equal, students make the seemingly rational choice of going for the easier option.
Kwasi and Liz are of the belief that perseverance, hard work and application can compensation of a lack of innate ability. That may be true in many areas, but academic ability I am not so sure, although I have not darkened the threshold of a school for 40 years. Perhaps it’s all different now. This matters, because if an increasing number of jobs require academic ability, then the flipside of that is that the proportion of the workforce who are employable for anything other than national minimum wage will fall – the polarisation into some lovely jobs and lots of lousy jobs2, which seems to be what we are seeing. I am one of those commentators that are apt to argue about natural ability and talent, as if success is solely a result of destiny rather than persistence.
Success in some areas of life may well involve persistence, but academic ability is more innate IMO than persistence. Sure, it needs teaching to focus it, I am not saying teaching is irrelevant, but it won’t improve the material. It’s the same as indeedably’s tale of the second-rate athlete.
For whatever reason, often through no fault of their own, they just don’t have what it takes
The difference is important, because of the implication that the academically challenged can raise their game by putting in a lot of hard work. In which case, Kwasi and Liz are of the view that the problem is a lack of grit and determination of Britons to raise their game.
In Britain, there has been a massive rise in welfare dependency. The generosity of income support has risen sharply since the war. In today’s money, the taxpayer now spends ten times more on social security than in 1950 — with a fivefold rise in the number of people claiming unemployment benefits. The number of people claiming sickness and disability benefits has increased thirteenfold.
[…] The British state has made it too easy for too many people to take the easy option.
We know what’s coming. Massive cuts in benefits. So far very little has been said about this, but the authors of Britannia Unchained do not stint in their admiration for the American model of unemployment benefits, which have a time limit of about half a year. I believe that there is also a 99 week lifetime restriction. We will see Hoovervilles in the UK 3 in the coming recession and destitution if Lasi Trussteng have their way, because trailer parks and people sleeping in cars is how the US solves this conundrum, although to be fair that US is large enough that is some areas the climate makes this more possible, and it has a much lower population density, so the strife with the settled population is probably lower.
Our baby boomer can look forward to a long retirement, based on estimates of life expectancy nearly a century out of date. Most of his universal benefits remain ringfenced by the government, while his defined benefit pension is unlikely to ever be experienced by his children.
One has the feeling that your State Pension is going to be means tested at some stage 😉 The clue is in universal benefits, although it is possible that their position has changed on this – the recent rolling back of the child benefit withdrawal for higher-rate taxpayers goes against the grain.
The move towards an insurance based NHS is also lauded, thankfully more admiration for the European (French and German) way of doing that than the obnoxious US model. Supporting evidence is the pulling of the health inequality white paper by Therese Coffey. Although once you’ve done the work I’d be in favour of publishing it, it is going to be a statement of the bleedin’ obvious.
The rich are bound to live longer in general because they have more control of their lives. As a child I used to get bronchitis, because it was cold and damp in 1960s London before central heating. I never had it after my mid 20s – because I didn’t live in exceptionally damp and cold houses.
If you are poor you will fill yourself and your kids up with cheap carbs. That won’t be that varied, it will be ultra processed foods with all the problems that go with that, and that will not do you any good in the long run. There are whole supermarket aisles that I don’t recognize as food – nobody needs family packs of crisps or tins of noodles in alphabet shapes. Michael Pollan was right – eat foods your grandmother would recognize. But it’s all more time and aggravation. There is very little that can be done about this unless we decide that poverty is not allowed to happen.
Redistribution is very much a no-no in the Truss-Kwasi-verse. It is at the root of what has gone wrong with Britain, arguably redistribution and the everyone’s a winner approach are the Chains that bind Britannia, and This. Will. Not. Do. Any. More.
You know what to do to get out of the firing line.
If you are young enough to have the option, study maths and science at school.
If you are shit for brains then simply Work Harder, you’ll get there in the end.
Best not have bought a house in the last couple of years, if you have a mortgage, that is. You may be in for some interesting times
Although it’s easy to satirise because of its simplistic approach, there is a lot of truth in Britannia Unchained. Some of their examples haven’t aged well – the admiration for Brazil would hopefully be muted, because while Jair Bolsonaro may well appeal as a strong leader, but de Gaulle’s epithet that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be is ringing more true in the second clause than the first.
I agree with Lasi Trussteng that thirty or forty years the work ethic was stronger in Britain – working class people disliked going on the dole, and there was some sense of pride in not doing so. But there were more jobs right across the ability range 30 or 40 years ago, and the culture was more homogeneous, there was more commonality of media consumption (no talking heads TV and social media thriving on fomenting outrage, for example). People’s expectations were much lower, and they tended to raise their children themselves, rather than going to work and paying others for large amounts of childcare. Everyone was poorer, and there was less wealth disparity. Britannia Unchained will struggle to recreate those times nowadays.
You could make a much better case in the past that work was the path out of poverty. I just don’t think that’s true any more, because a larger and larger proportion of the working-age workforce can’t really add enough value to raise themselves out of poverty.
There is some argument that if people didn’t have children they couldn’t feed 4 they might be better off, and it staggers me that so many people bring up children in poverty, but every technocratic solution to that vector of poverty has ended up creating serious evil if it is coercive, so either everyone else gets bailed in to pay for the fecundity or the progeny have to suffer as a lesser evil.
Even without the problem of children they can’t afford, a life on the minimum wage is probably not going to rich in experiences. The privately educated journalist Polly Toynbee wrote a book about that called Hard Work, and it really doesn’t sound like the greatest amount of fun you can have, and ISTR she got to take some time off, possibly weekends, in her leafy middle-class home.
Liz and Kwasi haven’t gotten off to a good start with their attempt to implement the principles of Britannia Unchained, largely because the markets asked to fund the interim shortfall have taken one look at the project and thought to themselves ‘Nah, not gonna work, not a prayer, guys’ and raised the premium they want to lend against the collateral. The markets would have been a lot more convinced if Lasi Trussteng had first outlined the cost-cutting part of their project:
Massive cuts to benefits >10%
immiserate the poor in Hoovervilles. Much admiration for US tough love.
Public spending cuts – Think 10%. There is admiration for the Canadian cuts a few years before the 2012 publication of Britannia Unchained
Privatise the NHS (along the European model, in fairness to them)
Raise interest rates closer to the 5-7% long run average for the UK, crushing house prices, which would genuinely improve affordability for the young and transfer capital from the economically inactive oldies. How that will go down with the core Tory constituency remains to be seen
Make planning and zoning more like the US, pretty much build anything anywhere
Do something about the State Pension to reduce its cost – reduce eligibility, make it payable later, whatever.
A smaller State in general, as a matter of principle
Unfortunately they chose to major on the expensive revenue-losing aims first. It’s like going to the bank and talking all about the des res you want to buy on their dime or the flash car, without telling them about the promotion you are going for to be able to afford it. I’m not necessarily of the view that tax cuts are bad in and of themselves, but it would have been a lot better for the market’s ability to digest the great scheme if Lasi Trussteng had got off on the front foot with their savings first.
The problem is that the solutions outlined in Britannia Unchained are going to be unpopular with the voters or the funders. The unique talents of the Liz and Kwasi double act is that they’ve managed to make them unpopular with both. Well done them. Not only that, but they look decidedly shifty in telling the Office of Budget Responsibility to deliver their report six weeks after the October budget. That just looks shifty.
It is theoretically possible to improve the balance of payments by increasing growth, and undoubtedly some of the proposals in Britannia Unchained might increase growth. The trouble with increasing growth in developed economies is twofold. One is that economic growth means working harder, which is a decline in lifestyle for those of us who want to do something other than working with our allotted three-score years and ten. That includes you lot, dear readers, with your reckless FIRE fantasies, just as much as potential candidates for Benefits Street. Britannia Unchained shows a secular decline in working hours in nearly all economies, good luck with turning that round.
The second is represented by all those keen emerging economies and hard-working Asian students that are lauded in the book. There’s a hell of a lot more competition these days. It will be harder to shift the needle on the dial.
As the Torygraph fulminated, most of the self-inflicted wound Liz Truss and her sidekick made was because they didn’t have confidence in their working. There’s something studenty about the whole project, and particularly ill-suited to a crew who spend a fair part of their book spitting bricks about the lack of analytical skills and STEM smarts in the feckless British workers, students and school-leavers.
To get ahead in the new type of jobs you need to be able to reason and think logically.
[…]
While improving these skills helps growth, they can’t be restricted to the few. The biggest effect happens when on top of a large number of people with high-level skills almost everyone has the basic and mid-level skills. On the latter measure Britain needs radical measures.
Yup. I would say start with Dear Leader and Crazy Kwasi. Sticking “and then a miracle occurs” in the middle of your working has been disapproved of in the sciences for a very long time.
I saw a copy of this Sidney Harris cartoon, in Felix, the Imperial College student newspaper in the 1980s, and it’s still true forty years later
Show your working Kwasi, and having independent workers replicating it and getting roughly the same answer is even better. Independent workers like the OBR.
There’s a price to pay for unchaining Britain, which is deconstructing many of the things voters have been used to having. The NHS, benefits and pensions cost a hell of a lot of money, and that offer plenty of savings enough to make it all work. It’ll be a tough sell at election time, but if you have to borrow the money to make all the tax cuts eye candy work, you’re going to have to show your working to the bank manager, and show your plan to the voters.
I’ll leave you with what Liz and Kwasi of you, the voting public, as they open Chapter 4, Work Ethic
Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.
Just as well they didn’t have to sell this project at an election 😉
For you metropolitan city mice that say you haven’t seen anything like that, I have seen unauthorised camping by the poor in some parts of Somerset. This isn’t wild camping or elective #vanlife ↩
I’m perfectly aware of the social justice warrior argument that having a child is a 16-20 year project and a lot of ruin and misadventure can happen over two decades in a life, particularly with the increasing precarity of work. I have some sympathy for these unfortunates, but they aren’t the majority IMO. Contraception is free on the NHS. This one grates because I recall paying an awful lot of tax and NI towards New Labour’s largesse snowing parents with public money, to such an extent that there’s a hypothesis that Tony Blair was the daddy of the baby boom. At least Truss and Kwarteng approve of this baby boom for giving the bulge of young people now. They don’t give the daddy due credit for his redistributing ways, but they lambast New Labour for driving up public spending in the last couple of years of their tenure. You can’t have it both ways, guys ↩
While unemployment is at is at its lowest rate for nearly 50 years, the high number of vacancies that still exist and inactivity in the labour market is limiting economic growth
So wotcha gonna do about it, Kwa? Well, apparently
Anyone who works fewer than 15 hours per week on the National Living Wage will have to attend coaching sessions at job centres and prove they are trying to increase their earnings.
That’s highly interesting, Kwa. I am one of these feckless gits, so exactly whaddya gonna do about it if a mustelid remains sleeping in a curl and decides to pass on your coaching sessions?
A sleeping mustelid, with the tail curled back to the tip of the snout. Do Not Disturb…
“will require benefit claimants working up to 15 hours a week to take new steps to increase their earnings or face having their benefits reduced. “
What benefits, Kwa? When I left work I didn’t take up the 6 months Jobseeker’s Allowance I would in theory have been entitled to, because I did not want to subject myself to your despicable goons at the Jobcentre mouthing off that finding a job is a job and all sorts of mealy-mouthed metrics making a misery of life. So I walked away from £72*26= £1872, basically for the sake of retaining my mental health. I’ve still always held that against the System, particularly when I had a check of my NI record to establish how many years I needed for a State Pension. At least I saved a lot of money on NI by picking about seven years up at the absolute steal of £150-ish a year of Class II. So excuse me, Kwasi, me old mucker, if I twitch my mustelid snout, exhale a weary “whatevs, Kwa” and keep the muzzle in contact with the black tip of my tail and return to sleep. Continue reading “Right you lazy FIRE 50-something layabouts – Britain needs YOU”
I extended a mustelid paw across the sea to visit the prehistoric standing stones of Carnac in France. I figured it would be a low-key attempt to test foreign travel post/during Covid. It’s not the first time I have been there, but there are one hell of a lot of sites in a very small area. The stones were good –
Geant de ManioCarved stone inside tumulus at Locmariaquerroof inside tumulus at LocmariaquerKermario stones at night
and it was an opportunity to remember what the point of this early retirement lark is. So I had a good time, also visiting Mont Saint-Michel on the way back.
Mont Saint-Michel
France seemed to work well in my view
Firstly a shout out for the fine Starling Bank corporation, where you really can use your debit card like you would in Blighty, you get the Mastercard interbank rate and no minimum amount, fees, loading or whatever. And they will send you a notification of the transaction and cost in pounds, pretty much before you get to put the card back in your wallet. Foreign travel money done right. What’s not to like, apart from that every other bugger nickel-and-dimes you for this that and the other.
There’s a lot of argy-bargy ‘twixt buccaneering Brexit Britain and our nearest neighbours, whether it be Brexit in general, fish in particular, or submarine contracts though Albion seems to be thought of as a bit-player in that specific perfidy.
I am not used to carrying ID in public, one of the nice things about this country is that what’s not specifically prohibited is considered allowed, so unless you are carrying tools for breaking and entering or hurling a ton of metal around menacing bystanders, there’s not a general sus law of people asking ‘papers please’, though you may feel differently about that if you are young and black…
Whereas in many countries and France more specifically it is illegal to be out in public without ID. I’m of the general view that when in Rome etc, so I go along with it if they feel strongly that way. Similarly I wouldn’t go to Dubai and get pissed up, because they are uptight about things like that.
One of the things about the French is they are really big on masks indoors. I admit I find that really unpleasant, because it makes me paranoid, because it’s a big statement that all other humans are out to get you. Yes, I know it’s irrational, it’s how it feels to me. But that’s the way it is.
They don’t generally let you into restaurants (and public buildings like museums of prehistoric artefacts or the Locmariaquer sites) without a Covid vaccination pass as well. You will generally get into shops with a mask but no pass, so you won’t starve, but if you are an anti-vaxxer your life will be hard in France in a way it wouldn’t be here. In France this is done via a smartphone app called TousAntiCovid. Quite remarkably, I had found on expat forums that TousAntiCovid (TAC) will accept the NHS Covid Pass QR codes, which seems either a quaint throwback to earlier times of the Entente Cordiale or a tacit acceptance of the value of the British spending. Given the current state of Anglo-French relations which I would describe as frosty it surprised me. Note that this is not the same as the NHS letter you could request. This isn’t infallible – sometimes it helps to delete the app and generate a new NHS QR code and enter it in, and the fact that TousAntiCovid accepts your NHS codes isn’t necessarily a confirmation that it will go through the app restaurants and museums check it with. Fortunately the first place we went, the Carnac Archaeoscope, wasn’t a stickler for the check actually working, it just had to be there, but some places were less forgiving, so you need to sort it out. And this is where the rest of this post will descend into a rant.
Once upon a time you could travel with just a passport and a ticket
You probably won’t be able to get any fuel to be able to do this, but if you decide to drive abroad in a British registered vehicle then you need to display your country of origin.
Back in the day, before we had joined the EUSSR Common Market I watched my Dad fit a GB sticker to the rust-bucket otherwise known as an Austin A40, to cross on the ferry and drive through Belgium and Holland to visit my grandparents in Germany. Your GB car sticker predates EU membership. Even oo7 had one.
James Bond’s sticker is no longer valid as of tomorrow. No, really. Bite me. Her Majesty’s benighted and incompetent ship of fools masquerading as a government has decreed it so. No. honestly. I’m really not shitting you.
If you want it alongside your number plate to cover up that pesky blue EU roundel, then you will have to display this full Brexit regalia
Now since my vehicle is old enough that the hated EUSSR insignia is stuck on to be legal at that time and looks sort of like this
so I have the option to peel that off, and get myself a nice, vanilla UK sticker a bit like the one my Dad used fifty years ago, except that he used a GB sticker like James Bond.
I’ll go that way rather than the number plate version because people waving union jacks around declaring their Britishness in the EU comes across a little bit, er, gammon.
Where the hell is James Bond when you need him? We used to know how to be British with some semblance of class, even if the Continentals had already sussed out hat you couldn’t trust perfidious Albion before 1973. Come to think of it, where the bloody hell is King Arthur in Albion’s hour of need? It’s all very well to lob Excalibur into the Lake off Pons Perilis but you’re asleep at the switch, mate.
the last sleep of King Arthur in Avalon
Would you mind awakening and waving the old sword at the fourth-division crew in charge of the Kingdom of Logres who seem hell-bent on cocking up anything that can be cocked up, and then a fair few things besides.
Brexit. Taking the Great out of Britain. You really couldn’t make it up. What are we going to change it to when Scotland goes its own way?
Nostalgia nuts can take comfort that there’s a plentiful supply of GB stickers for sale on Ebay, indeed there are special Remoaner editions with full blue stars. But if you want one to do its proper job, you need a UK one. Beats me what Ukraine is going to do. Greedy bastards that we are, it looks like we bagged ISO country code GB and UK, although the UK is exceptionally reserved so the ISO is with James Bond on the primacy of GB. With 111 years of tradition, the backing of 007 and the ISO I’m not sure why we trust the judgement of Grant ‘there is no shortage of fuel‘ Shapps, but that’s the ship of fools for you. This is the same fellow who tells us that
Shapps said there were no supply problems at the six refineries
Ah, diddums. Employers are yelling the house down that they are having labour shortages in, ahem, the lower end of the skills range. That’s your fruit pickers, kitchen porters and the like.
Now I am not a fan of Brexit. It is a pain in the arse – if one could travel to Europe it’s difficult to say if I could drive there, what sort of IDP I would need etc etc. I’ve stopped using places like Thomann and any EU suppliers, because you can’t say what you will pay. Curiously enough the Chinese can still deliver ebay components into the country, but you can’t reliably order from the EU. So if you want to buy things in Global Britain, buy it from anywhere but the EU it seems. UK Component distributors are bellyaching about supply shortages.
Brexit is delivering
Back to the Brexit dividend. I would say these low-end skills shortages are a sign of Brexit working, in delivering what many people voted for. If you look at Lord Ashcrofts reason for leave a third wanted more control of immigration. The sentiment is stronger in the 2018 ESRC report, which also notes Remainers have a less accurate sense of what drives Leave than vice versa. The immigration issue is split in some unknown element from people who dislike immigrants and people disliking immigration separate from disliking immigrants, and the latter usually boils down to economic fears of spreading a pie that’s too small (jobs, schools, NHS, housing) more thinly. Although we have seen an increase in racist talk and events since the Brexit vote it’s nowhere near as much as feared at the time, perhaps favouring the economic over the racist. The West in general and perhaps Britain in particular is in a secular economic decline, against that background such concerns will rise in importance.
It’s just not true that Brits won’t do those jobs
I an old enough to remember a time when Brits did these jobs. I was one of them – a kitchen porter in the City of London in the university holidays. KPs are one of the labour shortages enumerated. Scaling for inflation I was working for less than today’s minimum wage. That’s not as bad as it sounds, because the rest of life, in particular rent/housing was cheaper in real terms in the 1980s than now. For some reason inflation figures do not usually reflect the cost of housing, though it’s very often the dominant part of a young person’s outgoings.
Fruit picking wasn’t always done by EU immigrants, although itinerant labour has historically been associated with that, so it’s not totally a freedom of movement thing. Back in the day (before Thatcher, roughly), Kent strawberry farms were big on PYO (pick your own) presumably because of the cost of labour meant packing all this stuff into plastic punnets wasn’t cost-effective.
Sure, people’s kids presumably scoffed half the weight paid for before it got weighed, but that was probably allowed for. In Suffolk, as I started in the late 1980s, I used to walk past the CITB training facility on the way to the pub – that’s the construction industry training board, where they used to teach local apprentices how to lay bricks and all the other good stuff that goes into construction. These same companies that are bellyaching now used to accept that they had to train their raw recruits.
So to be honest, I have little sympathy for these employers, particularly employers at the bottom end, yes, hospitality, I’m looking at you. Of course the rest of us will have to pay a bit more for our lobster. With a bit of luck the bottom end dirty chicken shops selling factory farmed fried chicken will go to the wall and there will be fewer Mickey Ds, and yes, Waitrose fruit and veg is going to be dearer for Guardianista metrosexuals, presumably Lidl and Aldi will find a different way.
I will get to pay a little bit more for this beach view and the accompanying fish and chips/lobster. London metropolitan types will get to pay a little more for eating out. It’s not the worst thing in the world that could happen…
People at the bottom end have been treated like shit for a long time due to a semi-infinite pool of young cheap labour that could be drawn on to push wages down. The official pack drill from erudite sources such as the Bank of England is basically move along now, nothing to see here.
There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on native wages.
Hmm, so the usual laws of economics and supply and demand are suspended in this specific case? Let’s take another look
“If you look at the evidence of why we have seen wages going down, there is actually very little evidence that that is being caused by migration, aside from in construction.”
And they wonder why Labour lost the red wall, FFS. Before somebody charges the Ermine with being Nigel Farage and claiming their £5, it is perfectly coherent that perhaps immigration is great for the UK economy as a whole, after all you get more shit done, perhaps for less. But at the same time a bit shit for some sectors of the population. I believe the art of managing who is in the end of the boat going up and who is where it’s going down is called politics, so it behooves a politician to not explicitly deny the reality of folk they want support from. Our present PM is a lesson in how to do that indirectly without copping flak for your BS 😉 So it does appear that you can come unstuck generalising the ‘it’s the economy, stupid‘ Clintonism too far.
Because – life experience ≠ the economy for those on the margins. Guess what – the poor tend to be the lower skilled, and jobs for the lower skilled are being stripped out of the economy and either automated or sent to lower-wage countries in the process of globalisation. For some of them, Brexit was a massive vote against globalisation, in a sort of stop the world, I want to get off way, by people who were shat on by it. Maybe they were allied with old gits dreaming of Imperial glory days and not needing a job, along with a fair few other reasons for disaffection, some of which are considered less than pretty. In a rare retrenchment, perhaps the unskilled will become a bit more/better employed, until clever people work out how to automate their jobs or eliminate them.
But if you want to avoid pushbacks like Brexit then you have to ease the pain of the people who get crushed by the policy and spread the win – Universal Basic Income, go steady on the whole Protestant Work Ethic, there’s nothing inherently beautiful about getting meaning from work, and just STFU about work is the route out of poverty – it hasn’t been since the 1970s. Particularly at the bottom end of the ability range. And before you start going on about education being an answer to that, you need to find something to put in the water supply to raise the ability range, because not everybody has skills that are valued in the marketplace. Or the inclination to develop suchlike. Not everyone has skills at all.
I am not sure there will be graduate jobs for the third of a million university applicants this year, though bless their young hearts if nursing and medicine are the rising star subjects, perhaps I am just being a cynical git…
And you may have to pay a bit more for your food, and hopefully bottom end fast food will be run out of town. Still, look on the bright side. Australian beef with free growth hormones will be cheaper. I guess the wine should be cheaper, though I’m not personally a great fan of Australian wine.
The return of the Great Barrington Declaration
Looks like Britain is adopting a modified from of the Great Barrington Declaration as far as dealing with Covid, starting with a Wembley super-spreader event to get it going.
We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
I guess that’s one way of battle testing the irresistible force of contagion against the immovable object of vaccination, and the best of British luck to us all, eh. I do think if we are going to go the whole ceremonial magic approach of the GBD, which is basically the state of things will be what we declare, then we need to go the full Monty and do something about that NHS app. Ceremonial magic only works as a method of changing consciousness according to will if enough of the participants get with the program. That app’s gotta go.
There’s a small company supplying the project the Ermine is occasionally working on and they have been absolutely pole-axed by the self-isolation requirements. It’s not that there’s a pyramid of dead bodies piling high in the machine shop stinking the joint out. It’s that they haven’t got enough boots on the ground because of self-isolation, and they are running about trying to shovel jobs out as best they can, so they are sending out production jobs before the prototypes and occasionally measuring things from the wrong reference plane, presumably because the old boy who does that is self-isolating and the poor devil press-ganged into filling his shoes doesn’t have the domain knowledge.
Hospitality is spitting bricks on this subject, for once not on the vexed question of Brexit, but in a situation designed to serve lots of the general public, you will easily have waiters close to carriers, who then get close to kitchen staff, and all of a sudden you lose an entire shift of wait staff and back of house.
Magic only works in the places it will work if you believe in it, so if we are going to eschew epidemiology for English exceptionalism and the Great Barrington Declaration, or at the very least state that vaccination is going to save us, then you gotta believe in vaccination, and act that way – give all the vaccinated a free pass on the self-isolation thing and get those suckers back to work, pronto. All the time crossing one’s fingers and hoping that the Chirac doctrine that
“If you look at world history, ever since men began waging war, you will see that there’s a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins.
doesn’t hold in this case. The shield has held in other germ fights – polio, TB, smallpox. But at the moment this is more magic than science IMO. It reminds me of another piece of magical thinking that didn’t quite go according to plan – George Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech
On the subject of magical thinking to assist the economy, Grant Shapps has decided that, in a similar vein, we don’t really giveashit about road safety – fresh in from the Twitter
We’re aware of a shortage of HGV drivers, so I’m announcing a temp extension of drivers’ hours rules from Mon 12 July, giving flexibility to drivers & operators to make slightly longer journeys.
“We’ve ramped up the number of driving tests available & will consider other measures.”
What the hell is it with man-children and Twitter? Grant Shapps’ Twitter feed really is an absolute delight of magical thinking and a blessed unfamiliarity with elementary logic and the scientific method. Sustainable aviation, for crying out loud. In a theoretical and intellectual way, sure it’s possible. It’s just that a 747 jetliner would take 1.5 hours of the output of Sizewell nuclear power station at full tilt, so something tells me this won’t scale – you get 18 daily long-haul aircraft movements per Sizewell… Heathrow is gonna need a hell of a lot of nuclear power stations for sustainable aviation1, and fuelling your 747s with biofuel stealing land for food in a world where that appears in short supply is just plain…wrong IMO. You’re gonna have to fly less or burn fossil fuels. Simples.
Dr Strangelove would like to fly sustainably. You know the pack drill, too cheap to meter…
Grant Shapps seems to have a very tenuous grasp of epistemology in general. Apparently there is no sign people are deleting the NHS app to avoid being commanded to self-isolate. Grant me old mucker, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It’s the oldest trick in the book – don’t ask questions to which you don’t want to hear the possible answers. Pity David Cameron didn’t jump to that re Brexit, but presumably Grant had his fingers in his ears and closed his eyes when the pretty young thing on t’telly said she was icing the app for just that reason. Curmudgeonly Ermines never installed the app, but that’s because I don’t carry a tracking device plugged into the hive mind around with me.
And avoid having big trucks behind you on the motorway at the end of the day, poor devils….
Now I’m not inherently against ceremonial magic and magical thinking. It’s not a bad way to change consciousness in accordance with will on a smallish scale. But use the right tool for the job. It’s a rum way to run something on the scale of a country. I guess we will find out about the wisdom of the Great Barrington Declaration in a couple of months. It is closer to fiat lux! than e=mc²
There is a reasonable debate to be had as to whether nuclear power counts as low-carbon, given the amount of concrete you have to pour to keep the Bad Shit in, and there’s also a good argument to be made that it is a fossil fuel, albeit a low-carbon fossil fuel, particularly if the idea of sending nuclear waste by train to fast breeder reactors doesn’t give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Considering something sustainable where you have to post keep-out warnings for tens of thousands of years is also stretching the definition of sustainable for some people. But I just don’t want to try to imagine the amount of wind power or solar to keep leisure flying at current levels. We will have more pressing uses for it, anyway ↩
Sovereignty, such a many-splendoured thing. The right to do what you bloody well like regardless of Johnny Foreigner. Taken all the way you get to Juche in North Korea, but it is what a small margin of our fellow Brits wanted in that Brexit vote.
Its core idea is that North Korea Britain is a country that must remain separate and distinct from the world, dependent solely on its own strength and the guidance of a near-godlike leader.
The opportunity to make our own laws, and to eat our own fish, even if in fact we don’t really like most of it so we flog it to people who do. I am old enough to know what Britain was like before we kowtowed to the EUSSR, back in ’73. As a child there was a fix1 for fish we didn’t like, we called it Rock Eel/Salmon in fish and chip shops, and it’s what poor people had. Used to be catfish back in the day, nowadays it’s random shark, even stuff on the IUCD red list of endangered species, because, well, capitalism is rapacious like that. Expect rock eel to come back to a chip shop near you, along with warm beer and the sound of willow on a balmy summer’s day. Oh, that’s the wet dreams of the aristocracy who funded Brexit. More from them later on.
The initial juche Brexit ideal of “self-reliance” centred on three elements: ideological autonomy, economic self-sufficiency, and military independence.
There always was a fractious relationship ‘twixt les rosbifs and the French back in the day, and it’s returning to form. Agence France Presse have syndicated that les rosbifs can keep their damn ros bif out of the EU, indeed they can keep their biohazard sarnies in Blighty. I don’t find that such a terrible thing, it’s how things used to be2.
It’s not unheard of – you need to eat your ham sandwiches and indeed anything organically live before you touch down in JFK3 coming from Blighty, because else it’ll cost you no end of hurt. The French need the rosbifs’ money to make the otherwise twisted wasteland of some of their northern districts work, but they also need something to push back against. As do we.
Simple Living In Somerset 