Ships and Sealing Wax

The government seems to be trying to compete with Nigel Farage over illegal immigration. Surely the bigger problem is the millions that government has let in and continues to let in via legal immigration. Illegal immigration hits the headlines, but it is small compared to the vast numbers coming in legally. Is this focus just a smokescreen to hide the reality?

Our economy relies on immigration to grow because of our inability to raise productivity, a problem that has lasted for years. What do we need to increase productivity? Skilled people and capital investment. We don’t do much about skills, the focus is sending people to university to do degrees for which there are no jobs instead of encouraging people into skilled trades such as the building industry needs. We have to recruit doctors from overseas as we do not train enough to meet our needs, something that to mind is not only wrong, it is unethical. We don’t invest in the capital equipment and automation that we need to improve productivity. We have no choice but to recruit workers from abroad, even though the long term cost in infrastructure and services to support them will cripple the country even more in the future.

Succesive governments have done little about this, probably as any investment would not pay back in their parliamentary term. They seem to think it better to make a noise about deporting a handful of people who arrived on small boats rather than invest in the long term good of the country.

In 1990, the European Court of Justice ruled that it was unlawful for the State to have different retirment ages for men and women. At that time men were able to draw their state pension at age 65 whereas women were able to draw it age 60. There was an enourmous amount of publicity at the time about this case as it was a landmark judgement. The government legislated in 1995 to equalise the pension ages over a period of time. This meant that the age that women could draw their state pension increased over time. Once again there was a huge amount of publicity about this.

There was a bit of a “cliff edge” in the increase as it coincided with the male pension age increasing to 66, but this also received considerable publicity. A group of women now complain that they should be compensated because the government failed to send letters telling them of the change in a timely manner (indeed for a number of years). Well, I am sorry but their supposed ignorance seems to me to be questionable. The change was in all the papers for months at time in different years, articles appeared in publications from financial papers to women’s magazines. Are we to believe that these women are so dumb as to be unaware of what was happening?

Perhaps there should be a campaign to compensate men who had to work for 5 years longer than women!

I read recently that Harvard University have removed a book from their shelves because it was bound in human skin https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-book-bound-with-human-skin-spent-90-years-in-harvards-library-now-the-binding-has-been-removed-180984057/

I would love to have a book bound with my skin after I am dead, wouldn’t that be brilliant! I suppose there is an objection that the person whose skin was used is not able to be identified and did not give permission. Personally I wouldn’t mind much what happened to my body after my death, after all I would be dead and wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t it be great to become part of a book rather than just be food for maggotts and bacteria or to end up as ash and carbon dioxide!

I bought a plug-in hybrid car a year ago with the idea that I would get used to charging it and using public charging points before going to a full EV. I think I am ready after a year and I will move to a full EV when I replace the car, but I do wonder why it has to be so complicated. I mostly use public EVs at our second home in Northumberland as I have a home charging point in our main home. There are several places with charging points and each one has a different way of paying. Each has its own phone app and there are 3 different ways of paying. For one you have to set up a Direct Debit. For another you have to register a credit card. The third way is that you have to pre-pay into a wallet on the app, so they always have some of your money! We have invented a neat way of paying for other things, the contactless payment card. Why on earth do we have to fiddle about with apps when we could just swipe our card.

The apps make it unecessarily complicated. Last year the most convenient public charging point was unusable for days, they had “technical problems with the app” for about a week. Now, they have been taken over by a different company so I have to go to a completely new app. It is absolutely ridiculous.

If we want EVs to take off, we need to make it as easy to charge an EV as it is to buy petrol.

Last week I drove along a road that was just wide enough for two cars to pass. Each side had a cycle path marked on the road, taking about 40% of the road on each side. It was not possible to drive a car without the nearside wheels being positioned in the centre of the cycle path. I wondered why they had bothered to mark the cycle path as I could see no difference for the motorist or the cyclist whether the cycle path was there or not. Indeed I have seen many examples of daft cycle paths recently as local councils rush to create more. I presume that they have a target for this and money to spend, so that is what they do: paint some lines on the road and claim a new cycle path. Tick. Targets met. Who cares about whether it makes any difference whatsoever to the cyclist or motorist. It would be a lot better for cyclist if the money was spent filling in the many potholes which are such a danger rather than wasting it on useless white-line painting.

I saw an advertisement for Sydney, Australia the other day. It mentioned the “culture” of the place alongside this photo. It made me wonder why examples of “culture” in travel adverts usually involve scantily clad women prancing about. Although it is all very pleasant, it isn’t the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Australian culture and the city of Sydney.