Over the years this 'blog, along with various others, has fretted over the confusion caused by the high profile of Alan Johnson, the Cabinet Minister and Trade Unionist, and Alan Johnson, the Professor at Edge Hill University. It's not been merely theoretical - numerous people, including the Guardian's picture department, have been confused. To aid we have tended to refer to Alan Johnson of Edge Hill as Alan 'not the minister' Johnson, or simply ntm.
Today we have evidence that Alan Johnson has suffered as much as the rest of us. The Independent reports that he has obtained one of the government's new ID cards, far in advance of anyone else. With its photograph and holographic technology, there is now no reason why people will not be able to identify which Alan Johnson is which. The bill of £5bn for the taxpayer is surely reasonable given the severity of the problem and I commend Alan Johnson for taking this step.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Taxpayer's Alliance
An old and easy target, but the calculations quoted from this report are really screwy, aren't they?
In some ways it is a repeat of their old calculation that if you earn tax at the higher rate and spend it all (in fact this example is about spending none of it, strangely) on high tax goods and so your marginal rate is enormous. It also takes a US calculation that was hardly accepted at the time and applies it directly, with no mention of various reliefs. And it's an odd way to look at things anyway.
The weird thing is it quotes Theo Paphitis, of Dragon's Den, in saying something like 'this is my children's inheritance'. If he really believes they'll only get 90% of it, then the investments he invests in must be much better than they are made to seem on TV.
It doesn't represent reality. I'm not even sure if it actual represents anything that is possible.
In some ways it is a repeat of their old calculation that if you earn tax at the higher rate and spend it all (in fact this example is about spending none of it, strangely) on high tax goods and so your marginal rate is enormous. It also takes a US calculation that was hardly accepted at the time and applies it directly, with no mention of various reliefs. And it's an odd way to look at things anyway.
The weird thing is it quotes Theo Paphitis, of Dragon's Den, in saying something like 'this is my children's inheritance'. If he really believes they'll only get 90% of it, then the investments he invests in must be much better than they are made to seem on TV.
It doesn't represent reality. I'm not even sure if it actual represents anything that is possible.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Free wine!
Here is the monastery at Irache and its free wine fountain for pilgrims on route somewhere. You can drink what you want but you can't take any away with you (in containers).
Saturday, July 25, 2009
MPs expenses and Ian Gibson
At the time of the MPs' expenses scandal I took issue with those, such as John B (not mentioned in that post), who said it was all a storm in teacup and most of the public anger was rather manufactured.
However the new public anger over the forced deselection of Ian Gibson has made me wonder if I was wrong. Gibson was a serious offender compared to most MPs, his claim, or perhaps tactics, one that (unlike some others) would never have been justified in amost any other job. And yet it doesn't seem to matter because he was an 'independent' or 'maverick'.
It reminds me somewhat of the appearance of Bernand Manning on the Mrs Merton Show, when after being roundly criticised for his racism, and booed by the audience, he said something along the lines of 'But the Embassy raised £2,000 for charity last week' at which point the audience began applauding as if what went before hadn't.
Of course we shouldn't necessarily believe the worst of the people of Norwich - I've not seen any proof that Gibson would have won if he had been standing, in fact I suspect he would not. But it's an odd angle for the press to play up, and Labour MPs in the BBC story.
However the new public anger over the forced deselection of Ian Gibson has made me wonder if I was wrong. Gibson was a serious offender compared to most MPs, his claim, or perhaps tactics, one that (unlike some others) would never have been justified in amost any other job. And yet it doesn't seem to matter because he was an 'independent' or 'maverick'.
It reminds me somewhat of the appearance of Bernand Manning on the Mrs Merton Show, when after being roundly criticised for his racism, and booed by the audience, he said something along the lines of 'But the Embassy raised £2,000 for charity last week' at which point the audience began applauding as if what went before hadn't.
Of course we shouldn't necessarily believe the worst of the people of Norwich - I've not seen any proof that Gibson would have won if he had been standing, in fact I suspect he would not. But it's an odd angle for the press to play up, and Labour MPs in the BBC story.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Bendy buses
I've just seen a clip on BBC London about the scrapping of bendy buses. Unless I was mistaken, when the Routemaster made its final journey crowds actually went to watch. Quite bizarre.
[I think the policy is silly - perhaps bendy buses on some routes aren't desirable but they do a good job of transporting people at peak times and it'll surely be very expensive to buy 800 new buses]
[I think the policy is silly - perhaps bendy buses on some routes aren't desirable but they do a good job of transporting people at peak times and it'll surely be very expensive to buy 800 new buses]
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Ladybird books
It looked fun back then.
Taken from (in all their sunny glory) here (via CT). London in 1961 was epecially sunny, and except for the pool of London I guess not much has changed in what they show (oh and Heathrow). Here's an editorial meeting of the Daily Mail (I think) which looks a jolly affair.
Taken from (in all their sunny glory) here (via CT). London in 1961 was epecially sunny, and except for the pool of London I guess not much has changed in what they show (oh and Heathrow). Here's an editorial meeting of the Daily Mail (I think) which looks a jolly affair.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Books I read on holiday
All courtesy of Willesden Library:
Hurrah for the Blacksirts, by Martin Pugh. Certainly a very readable book, but I would tend to agree with Ferdinand Mount that Pugh fails to argue his thesis that fascism had deeper roots in Britain than commonly thought. It's all about Mosley really, and an uncommon amount of Scottish lords with links to the right-wing of the Conservative Party. But Mosley of course was a unifying fascist, a member of the Labour Party and Conservative party. And the New Party, and the BUF, and the one after the war no-one can remember. Pugh says the New Party, at least until near the end, wasn't particularly antisemitic, i.e compared to the baseline of quite severe antisemitism that was considered normal.
Full Hearts and Empty Bellies: A 1920s Childhood from the Forest of Dean to the Streets of London, by Winifred Foley.
The sort of book I would only get from a library, this is a memoir of a woman from the New Forest area and her life as a child and young adult, the latter spent 'in service' in London. The one conclusion one can draw is to be happy not to have been poor and born in 1910 (although might it have been exaggerated?). Foley died just this year and apparently was bit more famous than I realised. She and her husband to be turn up at the Battle of Cable Street, to link to the first book, an event that was for the 1930s what the Sex Pistols' gig at the Free Trade Hall was to the 1970s, one with about ten million people there, or so it seems.
My Trade: A short history of British journalism, by Andrew MARR. Readers will know he is not my favourite of people, his mid-life crisis when he pretended to be a gerbil I found particularly annoying. But this in fact is quite an interesting book, and although he's a bit brown-nosing about some of his fellow journalists, he's does refer to Janet Street-Porter as 'dreadful' right at the end, which was unexpected.
Hitler's home front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis, by Jill Stephenson. As the title suggests this looks as life on the home front in the largely (Stuttgart excepted) German region of Wurttemberg. The conclusion is essentially that such rural areas tended to be run by themselves to a degree which made even Nazi dictatorship harder, although much of their programme was implemented even here. Otherwise much as usual.
Our hidden lives: the everyday diaries of a forgotten Britain, by Simon Garfield. I enjoy this type of book, Simon Garfield's specialty, which is an edited collection of Mass-Observation diary entries, this time in the immediate post-war period. The difficulty is in knowing to what degree the editing is giving a rather skewed view - the author says he has chosen excerpts often because of what we know now or to contrast views held then with now. For instance two contributors (at least) wish Hitler had been given more time to 'finish the job'.
Rush: the autobiography, by Ian Rush & Seeing Red, by Graham Poll. Entertaining enough, these. Ian Rush was someone I didn't like as child, for he was always scoring goals for Liverpool, the Man U of their day. But he comes across as a likeable figure and says that the infamous 'It was life a foreign country' about his time in Juventus was a joke. There's one strange bit where he is playing for Sydney Olympic in 2000 and Rafa Benitez asks him to return to Liverpool - which just can't be right, can it? Graham Poll doesn't come across as particularly likeable, which he is at pains to tell us is OK but clearly it isn't. There's a bit of David Brent about him, not least because he has the most objectionable of traits, being a 'practical joker' [something which Gazza of course took to the ultimate degree]. On the other hand he's clearly thought about what he wants to say, and I tend to agree with him about some of the behaviour of certain soccer players, and just wish he'd sued them for slander if his allegations are correct. Plus he does give an interesting background into how referees prepare for games and the behind-the-scenes of a major tournament. Poll never had a good one, it seems, culminating in the famous if a bit unfortunate three yellows in 2006.
Hurrah for the Blacksirts, by Martin Pugh. Certainly a very readable book, but I would tend to agree with Ferdinand Mount that Pugh fails to argue his thesis that fascism had deeper roots in Britain than commonly thought. It's all about Mosley really, and an uncommon amount of Scottish lords with links to the right-wing of the Conservative Party. But Mosley of course was a unifying fascist, a member of the Labour Party and Conservative party. And the New Party, and the BUF, and the one after the war no-one can remember. Pugh says the New Party, at least until near the end, wasn't particularly antisemitic, i.e compared to the baseline of quite severe antisemitism that was considered normal.
Full Hearts and Empty Bellies: A 1920s Childhood from the Forest of Dean to the Streets of London, by Winifred Foley.
The sort of book I would only get from a library, this is a memoir of a woman from the New Forest area and her life as a child and young adult, the latter spent 'in service' in London. The one conclusion one can draw is to be happy not to have been poor and born in 1910 (although might it have been exaggerated?). Foley died just this year and apparently was bit more famous than I realised. She and her husband to be turn up at the Battle of Cable Street, to link to the first book, an event that was for the 1930s what the Sex Pistols' gig at the Free Trade Hall was to the 1970s, one with about ten million people there, or so it seems.
My Trade: A short history of British journalism, by Andrew MARR. Readers will know he is not my favourite of people, his mid-life crisis when he pretended to be a gerbil I found particularly annoying. But this in fact is quite an interesting book, and although he's a bit brown-nosing about some of his fellow journalists, he's does refer to Janet Street-Porter as 'dreadful' right at the end, which was unexpected.
Hitler's home front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis, by Jill Stephenson. As the title suggests this looks as life on the home front in the largely (Stuttgart excepted) German region of Wurttemberg. The conclusion is essentially that such rural areas tended to be run by themselves to a degree which made even Nazi dictatorship harder, although much of their programme was implemented even here. Otherwise much as usual.
Our hidden lives: the everyday diaries of a forgotten Britain, by Simon Garfield. I enjoy this type of book, Simon Garfield's specialty, which is an edited collection of Mass-Observation diary entries, this time in the immediate post-war period. The difficulty is in knowing to what degree the editing is giving a rather skewed view - the author says he has chosen excerpts often because of what we know now or to contrast views held then with now. For instance two contributors (at least) wish Hitler had been given more time to 'finish the job'.
Rush: the autobiography, by Ian Rush & Seeing Red, by Graham Poll. Entertaining enough, these. Ian Rush was someone I didn't like as child, for he was always scoring goals for Liverpool, the Man U of their day. But he comes across as a likeable figure and says that the infamous 'It was life a foreign country' about his time in Juventus was a joke. There's one strange bit where he is playing for Sydney Olympic in 2000 and Rafa Benitez asks him to return to Liverpool - which just can't be right, can it? Graham Poll doesn't come across as particularly likeable, which he is at pains to tell us is OK but clearly it isn't. There's a bit of David Brent about him, not least because he has the most objectionable of traits, being a 'practical joker' [something which Gazza of course took to the ultimate degree]. On the other hand he's clearly thought about what he wants to say, and I tend to agree with him about some of the behaviour of certain soccer players, and just wish he'd sued them for slander if his allegations are correct. Plus he does give an interesting background into how referees prepare for games and the behind-the-scenes of a major tournament. Poll never had a good one, it seems, culminating in the famous if a bit unfortunate three yellows in 2006.
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