Moscow's
RT TV: Here's something I haven't seen reported by this station yet,
from The Times: Russia is burning through its national reserves at an
unprecedented rate, amid a deep economic crisis that has plunged
millions of people into poverty and wiped out the advances in living
standards achieved during President Putin’s long rule. Hit
by western sanctions and low global prices for oil — the bulwark of
its economy — the country’s reserve fund, designed to cover
shortfalls in the national budget, has shrunk by two thirds since
2014, falling from £67 billion to barely £23 billion, the finance
ministry said this week. As millions of Russians struggle to make
ends meet, resentment has been growing over the opulent lifestyles of
many government officials. . . . . Wealth inequality in Russia is the
worst in the world, according to the financial services group Credit
Suisse. It says that a total of only 111 people own 19 per cent of
the country’s household wealth. Incidentally, the British contributor to RT's hilariously partisan roundtable discussion this morning was said to be from a London think-tank, Politics First. Strangely, its alleged web page don't seem to exist. But here's the chap himself. And here's someone from RT who's a lot prettier . . . I assume she appears on RT USA. By the way, did you know that President Putin was the most popular leader at the recent G20 jamboree?
The UK: At the end of this post is an article by Janet Daley of The Telegraph. It asks whether Mrs May will grasp the opportunity events have presented her with. Interesting and insightful.
The Pope: He and his legions continue to spam my Google + page. I've written to him direct, asking him to put a stop to this. As he surely will. Being a nice chap.
Galicia: We've just had another kamikaze driver, driving 30kmin the wrong direction down the A6 autopista. At 3.30 of an afternoon. This time a young man of only 21 who killed both himself and the driver of a car travelling in the right direction. Possibly a suicide, some say. Whatever, as with last week's train tragedy, it reminds us that there is always deathin the midst of life and that the latter hangs by only a silken thread. There but for the grace of God, as some say.
Talking of religion . . .
Christianity: To we atheists, it's comforting to know that the influence of religion is waning around the world. But yesterday I listened to a BBC podcast on the rapid growth of Protestantism in China, encouraged by the government. Why? Well, firstly. because it values the work ethic and, secondly, because it realises that it can't afford to finance its ageing population and is happy to rely on the Christian concept of charity towards others. Who'd have thought it?
Finally . . . Customer Orientation: I noticed at Vigo station last Thursday that you couldn't see the timetables as you entered or as you stood by the ticket counter, because they're hidden behind a pillar. But then I clocked this very helpful sign which the client-orientated management had put up:-
Brilliantly pragmatic. And cheap.
THE GALLERY
Another day, another lovely dawn:
The no-entry sign has been removed from down by my short-cut bridge. But this one remains, telling us who repaired the bridge. I wonder how long it'll remain.
THE UK
Theresa
May can now remodel the state in a way not seen since 1945. But will
she? Janet Daley
It is
becoming clear that Theresa May is planning to seize the moment and
interpret the challenge of a post-referendum future as much more than
a tricky set of negotiations with the European Union. She obviously
views that startling vote as unleashing a tranche of possibilities
for the country to re-invent itself, and to adopt a confident
scepticism toward the opinions of self-regarding metropolitan
know-it-alls (sometimes called “the expert consensus”).
What Mrs
May has before her is a prospect of government not only liberated
from the restrictions and regulations of the EU but from the
restraints of any effective parliamentary opposition. This is a
chance for reform and reconstruction of public services, taxation and
the role of government that we will be unlikely to see again in our
lifetimes – which makes for a dramatically unexpected, and
constitutionally awkward, situation. But the indications are that,
emboldened by its own bravery in the referendum, the country is up
for it, even given a prime minister who has not won a general
election or presented an official manifesto.
Her move
on grammar schools is hugely significant: it is an attempt to give
substance to a declaration of intent about meritocracy, providing
opportunity to those who are now losing out, but it is also an
explicit defiance of the dominance of London-based opinion. It is
worth noting that the predictions of education “experts” on the
terrible consequences of expanding grammar schools make such heavy
use of London’s singular experience. The Chief Inspector of
Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, seems to base his vituperation almost
entirely on the fact that schools in the capital have improved
without the need for selection – which leads him to the quite
groundless conclusion that introducing more grammars would reverse
this progress by removing bright children from existing schools. (He
made precisely this claim in a Today programme interview last Friday,
which went unchallenged.)
Perhaps he
had forgotten that the London Borough of Barnet has some of the
best-performing grammar schools in the country and that this does not
appear to have damaged the neighbouring comprehensives, which are
rated by Ofsted as either good or outstanding. Even more to the
point, almost none of the “experts” spewing out fear and loathing
over the dire effect of grammar schools makes reference to the vast
wastelands to the North, where their absence has been most
deleterious. The Northern town I know best had half a dozen grammars
back in the wicked old Fifties to serve an overwhelmingly
working-class population of around 300,000. As a result, a
considerable percentage of its youngsters went on to higher
education, which helped to produce the almost-never-mentioned fact
that in the Sixties, Britain had the highest proportion of university
students from working-class backgrounds of any European country.
Today,
that Northern town is at the bottom of the national league tables in
educational performance, with its no-selection, no-hope schools
sending almost nobody to university. In fact, it was in predominantly
working-class areas that grammars made their greatest contribution by
offering poor children an escape from the monolithic street culture
in which they had grown up. The very fact of selective education, the
older inhabitants will tell you, gave rise to aspiration, with its
possibility of another kind of life. It is those glimpses of other
lives and other mores that neighbourhood-based comprehensives can
almost never provide to the pupils who might have been awakened by
them.
What the
May Government seems to have in mind is the very opposite of the
rigid old idea of separating children once and for all at a single
point in their education. The answer has to be flexibility and
fluidity: an enlarging of possible routes that permits as much scope
as possible for individual differences. And this principle (if,
indeed, it is their principle – I am only guessing here) could be
applied as well to healthcare, that other hugely problematic public
service.
The
rationing of medical treatment that follows inevitably from the
post-war funding model is obviously unsustainable, as is the absence
of choice and patient power. The resistance to reform in the NHS,
just like that in the school system, is entrenched by the dominance
of producer interests, who are determined to prevent what they see as
the anarchy of wildly differing parent and patient demands – which
they call “inequality”. Surely we could consider health vouchers,
or personal healthcare budgets (as are already available for social
care), so that patients and their families could exercise some
self-determination in their treatment? Why not open the forbidden
door to better ways of accessing, and paying for, the service? Why
should any alternative to the present arrangements be unthinkable?
Maybe the
new idea for this political era is that it is not “socially
divisive” to allow differences to flourish: that individuals must
pursue the lives, and make the decisions, that suit them with as much
room for variability as it is possible to ensure.
In order
to deliver this, by definition, it would be necessary for government
to get out of the way: to be less intrusive and less controlling of
the process. Such a retrenchment would have obvious implications for
taxation: a government that does less interfering and controlling
ought, in theory, to need less revenue. But even if that seems too
much to hope for, the spirit of the age would certainly point to a
simplifying of taxation so that individual enterprise found the
system less restrictive and overbearing.
There have
only been a few moments in modern British history when the population
at large seemed ready for this kind of major shift in the political
settlement. Immediately after the Second World War, there was an
overwhelming sense of responsibility and concern for the great mass
of working class people who had sacrificed so much for the national
cause. The scandals of poor health, housing unfit for purpose and
inadequate schooling were addressed with virtually unanimous support
from the electorate: these were moral priorities which, for a time,
transcended party politics.
Then, in
the Eighties, there was an almost universal sense that the country
had to deal with forces that were making it ungovernable. The power
of the trade unions to disrupt daily life and undermine the economy
produced a despair that invited radical change. Desperation and
hopelessness turned to anger and the obvious solutions became so
electorally irresistible that they had to be endorsed by every party
that wished to survive in the mainstream. So where there had been a
general sense in the post-war period that the answers to social
problems must lie in collective solidarity administered by state
control, by the Eighties the view was that individual aspiration and
the value of private life was being crushed by collectivism and Big
Government.
There is a
new mood now that could, if the government has the nerve to act, be
transformative. In June, the people decided to defy the smug
metropolitan club who were telling them that their national pride was
somehow despicable. Having won majorities in every region of England
apart from London (an important point) it has not escaped their
notice that their own judgment appears to have been vindicated by a
stream of good economic news. This is a revelation that goes right to
the heart of the power balance in British public life. At least for
the moment, it seems as if the “experts” who talk mainly to one
another in their London strongholds, were wrong and the people, with
their quaint instincts, were right. Imagine that.
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