It’s a lazy Sunday here. Local time is half eleven in the morning. Back home it’s half four. The sky is blue and the temperature outside is… warm.

Have adjusted to life without a kettle and taken up filter coffee as my main beverage. See, in the local supermarket there’s only a small selection of instant coffee – no freeze dried instant coffee at all – and just two types of tea. Pretty obvious why, in hindsight, if boiling water takes a minimum of four minutes in the Microwave.

So here’s an example of how something as simple as the Mains electrical system – 110 volts AC instead of 240 volts AC (apparently this stops there being enough juice for British style kettles) has caused an entirely different beverage culture out here. Here filter coffee is the easiest and quickest thing there is, creating a huge market for filters, coffee beans and ground coffee and destroying the market for tea and instant coffee. No kettles, no tea.

Cause and effect, you see.

With that in mind I notice this curious story about the Governor of Massachusetts, one Deval Patrick. He’s a Democrat, if that sort of thing matters to you, and he’s just signed an anti-foreclosure bill (or anti-repossession for Brits!) which will mean, in effect, a delay of around a year between someone stopping paying and someone losing their house. It’s called “An Act To Stabilise Neighborhoods“, and it is intended that it will help individuals and communities stay together. It’s the only bill like it in America, apparently.

Critics and cynics, and I have to say this includes me, suspect that the knock on effect of this particular Act will be to make getting a mortgage in Massachusetts more difficult than it currently is. People already in their homes, whether they can afford them or not, will get to stay – at least for another year – and those who are stuck on the sidelines waiting to get their own home? Well, they’re going to stay stuck.

Says a lot that the rights of people in a house that they’re not actually paying for count for more than the rights of a company that lent them the money to live in that house in the first place, but hey, I’m a ruthless evil Capitalist so perhaps I’m missing something here, but isn’t this the sort of thing you expect from old Communistic Europe, not the brave new world of the United States?

Ho hum. Your strangely baffled and bemused correspondent, signing off…

Guess who said this:

“This is not about trying to save money. This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Say hello to the ill-considered world of one Mr David Cameron, who’s got what he believes is a great idea but absolutely no idea how to sell it. The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible, horrible name for a project that seeks to make some of the buttons and levers of the State accessible to the outer party members or something. That’s got to be a good thing, right? So why is he having such difficulty winning support for the idea?

Consider: At any point normal members of the public already have the ability to get together to build or start a school already. They just raise the money and do it, and voila. There’s currently nothing stopping them. The ‘catch’ is that if people want to send their little darlings to this new school they’d have to pay themselves. The world of free money is the exclusive preserve of the State schools.

So what is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ trying to achieve?

Imagine, instead, starting your own school AND getting the Government to give it the Free Money that’ll let you send your darling children to it.

No risk. No responsibility. Monkey see, monkey take.

Makes you wonder if this really will save any money. If anything it sort of sounds a bit… expensive, doesn’t it?

“This is not about trying to save money”

Ah. Right. Of course.

I’m just confused because people are attacking it (yes, really, attacking it) because it might deliver the same services for less money, which of course would be an abomination and an unspeakable horror. Those ghastly Tories! IT MIGHT COST LESS! AGHH! We’re dooooooomed!

But, no, calm your boots everyone. It’ll cost us more, don’t you worry. But, if it’s not to save money, what’s the point again?

“This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Oh. That… that sucks. Really?  That’s it?

The thing about giving individuals and groups access to public money to do stuff like this is that they’re not accountable. No-one’s really going to be accountable. It gives people access to public money without having to go through the democratic process and that democratic process is supposed to protect tax payers from the monkeys that would ‘fill the world with bananas’.

The democratic process will be sidestepped but the bureaucratic process, the bit where someone, somewhere, says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ is going to be enlarged and made more complicated. Someone, somewhere, will have to take responsibility for that decision to release the funding. Who’s that going to be? What’s their salary going to be? How many of them will there be? What sort of supporting infrastructure – call centres, form processing etc – is going to be required?

This is still taxpayer’s money we’re talking about here. You can’t simply invite this ‘bigger, better’ society to spend whatever it wants from the taxpayer’s purse and then have the politicians send the ‘bigger, better’ bill… or… is that what’s going on? Is this some sort of political game to (ironically for a Coalition obsessed with localism) render local councillors even more pointless than they already are?

I don’t know about you but I’m even more confused than I was.

Politics is the practice of never saying no to any request for free stuff from voters, and the art of obscuring who really pays for it.

I almost feel sorry for wannabe politicians that think that just governing responsibly might somehow be an attractive alternative to this most basic rule of modern politics. Cut the deficit? Forget it. Just spend the money. Spend, spend spend until you’re physically stopped, then blame the person who stops you. You’ll look like a saintly altruist who wanted to cure the world of all ills.

That’s how you really win in politics… or, at least, that’s how you win over the crowd on the BBC’s Question Time. He Who Promises To Spend The Most Money Without Explaining Where The Money Is COming From… wins.

Gah. Sick of this.

Party Politics: Where truth goes to die. It often astonishes me how slippery politicians can be. Clearly I’ve not been paying enough attention lately. In the interests of feigning interest, I watched Prime Minister’s Questions today.

Yes, I know, I deserve everything I get.

Today Harriet Harman wanted to tell the world that the Coalition will put 1.3 million people out of work. Cameron responded by saying that the independent Office of Budget Responsibility has confirmed that they expect unemployment to fall, that more people will be employed by the end of the year than were employed at the start. He didn’t deny it though, which made me wonder what was really going on.

Round and round they went, with Harman complaining about the 1.3 of job losses and Cameron talking about the extra jobs.

It turns out, of course, that these 1.3 million jobs Harman is referring to are as follows:

Assuming the Coalition changed nothing in the Budget, and assuming the previous Government’s own predictions about the effectiveness of its plans were 100% accurate, and we didn’t actually need to take into account the unemployment and disaster that would be caused by having to go to the IMF for a bailout or worry about the consequences of unrestrained borrowing, and if the sun shines just right on exactly the right point on the tip of the Red Flag flying over Labour HQ then maybe, must maybe, there might be 1.3 million MORE new jobs by the end of this year (UPDATE: Ha! It’s not even that! It’s by the end of the parliament! It’s more slippery than I though) than there will now be. Of course, when you know you’re going into opposition it’s easy to make spending commitments you know are impossible, just to make the incoming Government look like bastards when they apply the reality stick.

And, worth noting, a huge chunk of these ‘job cuts’ are those absolute bullshit, flushing-money-down-the-toilet, making-things-worse-in-the-long-run ‘Future Jobs Fund’ temporary jobs for 18-24 year olds. Harman didn’t say anything about these 1.3 million jobs being permanent or full time.

So Labour’s still up to its old tricks, still spinning, still trying to make political capital out of anything they can get their hands on. Sure it sounds rad, groovy, right on and seems to care passionately about ‘the people’ but it’s all statistical bollocks based on fantasy budgets they never, in million years, expected to implement.

Well, that’s party politics, innit?

Nubcake

1. noun: Pejorative; A person of so little skill as to inspire mockery in others

England lose horribly. It’s a massacre. Disappointment turns to laughter. Got to love those Germans – they looked like they were having fun.

I’ll leave the final word to an Anonymous English Football Player:

Yeah, I’m well gutted about leaving South Africa and going back to my fit wife, fast sports cars, big screen telly and loafing around having a laugh until training for the next season begins. Absolutely gutted.