Tag: Fun

Wealth, income, and why that bloke on Question Time with £80k was wrong (and right)

There’s a bloke who’s been on Question Time who makes £80k a year and claimed he’s not in the top 5%. Which clearly makes him a moron and a subject of derision, right? Sock it to the wealthy! They’re all bastards who need putting in their place!

Well actually, he’s not. A lot of people arguing about him are misunderstanding him. Mostly through their own equivalent ignorance.

Now, I don’t know too much about this guy, but in the way he dresses, talks and where he comes from I’ve noticed a few things.

He and I are super similar, but he got a better start in life than me. He’s even doing well as an IT consultant, like I did. And he likes racing motorbikes. I liked racing a Lotus. Both of us have good lives, relatively.

I don’t feel rich either. I know I’m richer than a lot, but I’m still poorer than a lot too. And now I’m going to explain why someone working class, like Rob Barber or myself from relatively humble backgrounds don’t get to feel (or be) as rich as Julian Middle-Class from Surrey even though our incomes may be substantially higher. Because the system is rigged against us, dear reader, and not against the wealthier middle classes.

Those of you who are working class and shouting at Mr Barber are perpetuating this. I’ll explain this over a few key thingies (it’s an official term for worked out stuff, stick with me), using graphs and stuff. I hope it helps. Today is part one, reaching thirty.

1. The starting point

When I was 11 I went and lived with my granny. Lovely, batty lady, from a well off family, oddly enough, but had fallen on hard times through a bad choice of a first husband, deaths, and poor financial planning. We lived in a caravan. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

I don’t know much about Rob Barber’s early life, so instead, I’ll just do a chart of my approximate wealth from childhood to the age of 30 (I’m now fifty) and, for comparison, a similar middle class person who also gets into IT and starts consulting at the age of 27.

Now, let’s take a look at this hastily drawn chart.

I’m very very different to that middle class person. But why? Well, for starters, the middle class parents carefully saved £500 a year and put it into an account for their kid. I had no such luck. So by the time Julian Middle-Class was 18, he had nearly £10k saved to help him in university. I didn’t. I didn’t even have a home and my grandmother was clearly getting older and less able to look after me. I decided I should really work as soon as I finished my A-levels.

In theory that should give me an immediate advantage. But my grandmother died just a couple of weeks after I started work. There was really very little for me to inherit except a knackered piano and a broken Reliant Robin. But what I did need to do was find somewhere to live, get transport for work which wasn’t easily commutable. Thankfully I had a decent job and better income than most of my peers. Unfortunately I spent too much on consumables and partied too much. But I was in my late teens with no parental guidance, so bite me. I got into a bit of debt too, which explains the flatlining.

But at 21, Julian got an inheritance when Nana Mabel died. Only £50k in shares. Good job too as during university he’d been burning through those savings he’d acquired from his parents!

So, already, quite the difference. I’m earning and Julian isn’t, yet he’s the rich one in comparison! He’s joined the Socialist Students Revolutionary Union because he thinks he’s poor with his lack of income and the state should help him not eat into his capital. He’ll eventually turn into a Conservative. But he’s young and feels skint, so he’s all about wealth redistribution. He means income redistribution, actually, but doesn’t realise it.

On graduation from his Computer Science degree, he spends a year working in a company in London, and takes some risks because he knows that if he screws up and loses his job, he can go home to his parents. The risks pay off and he gets promoted twice in his first year!

I didn’t. I was super careful. I still cocked up, but I couldn’t afford to lose my job, and as employers in the area were generally struggling, there weren’t many options in my small northern town to choose from. I could have moved, but that felt risky.

At 22, Julian decides to buy a modest house. This flatlines his wealth a bit for a while because furniture is expensive and he needs to buy a bit, but it gets him on the property ladder. The furniture depreciates immediately, but the house starts to appreciate right away.

At age 24, Julian’s wealth suddenly spikes! Why? Because his great grandparents died within months of each other. They were very elderly, but in good health and had dodged care home costs. He and his brother got a share in a £600k house which they sold because they had an inheritance tax bill. Julian suddenly starts feeling more, well, Conservative, having seen so much money gobbled up by taxes.

At 26, finally clear of debt, I finally buy a house, cheaper than Julian’s, but about the same size because he’s near London and I’m in Widnes. So at least there I get to feel a little smug.

At 27, we both become IT consultants. Like Mr Barber.

I have a good income, but a good income also comes with some expectations. At a client’s I got the piss taken out of me for my cheap suit. At another I was mocked for my smoky old Peugeot. I bought some good suits and a Rover 600. Phew! But that meant my wealth still didn’t climb as much as Julian’s. Also, property prices aren’t rising in Widnes like they are in London’s commuter belt. So his wealth continues to outstrip mine!

Keeping the working classes down

I’m going to go off on a tangent now. I became an IT consultant not because I was desperate to do so, but because at my large corporate employer I’d kind of hit a glass ceiling. People I’d trained up had been promoted above me. I wasn’t a stellar programmer or anything, but neither were they. But they had Oxbridge degrees and I didn’t. They were on £30k and I was on £18k. I could have tried harder, but going back to Julian’s situation where he could take risks… I couldn’t. I was scared. So I was timid and overly cautious quite often. I was very anxious when on call that I didn’t screw up the payroll of the 70,000 people who depended on my decision during a call-out.

Technical people are often looked down on. It’s something graduates do for a short while on their career paths into corporate management. It sucks. At 18 I was a better coder than half the computer science graduates I interview today, but I didn’t know it then. So I was constantly scared of being found out. I thought I was blagging it compared to those with qualifications. But by the time I was 27 I was over that. I’d acquired a bit of security and stability by then.

Young Julians are currently shouting at Mr Barber, as well as actually hard up people who dream of £80k incomes! Neither should. The hard up should look to him as an example of a working class lad done good. He’s still working class, but he’s cracked the glass ceiling. Good on him! He just doesn’t understand himself very well. Not yet. Give him time.

Coming next

I’m my next post I’m going to cover hidden and typically non fungible wealth. The wealth I had by the time I was 27 and didn’t even realise it.

Why political parties lose support by winning.

People do like to look back angrily, don’t they?

Yet many a time, their anger today doesn’t reflect how they really felt back then. If you look at the Iraq War, and the UK’s involvement in it, most people supported the action. For sure, an awful lot of people today don’t think it was right to be involved in Iraq. And if you suggest they did, they react angrily and deny it vehemently.

A Yougov poll and survey suggests that what’s happened isn’t the same as what people say happened.

Are people lying?

Not really. It’s more that most people’s memories are far more plastic than people realise. Hindsight bias is one type of problem with perception.

So if you support Labour right now, it’s very easy to throw everything that happened in the Blair years under the bus. To disassociate yourself from the man who was involved in starting an illegal war in Iraq. It was obviously illegal at the time. That’s why you cut up your Labour membership card and joined the Liberal Democrats. Right?

Labour membership did plummet just afterwards.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#/media/File:Labour_Party_membership_graph.svg

Oh.

It was already pretty much half what it was. In other words. The plummet started… when Blair got into power.

Membership up in opposition when an attractive leader turns up. Down when he or she deals with the tricky nitty gritty of life in power.

Never mind.

At least councillors, being local and well known figures in their communities, won’t be punished by the parliamentary party shenanigans, right?

Party membership chart over time, showing its decline overall. Source: House of Commons Library

Dammit. No. Whilst Labour were in power, their councillors dropped off. Whilst Lib Dems were in power… their councillors dropped off. Whilst Labour were in opposition, councillors went up.

So in the Lib Dems, a traditionally localist party, we can look back and see that being in government was terrible for the party. But it turns out, that being in government is terrible for all parties.

Why?

Because, it’s hard. Being in government is tough on a party. It means making difficult decisions and trade offs that can’t possibly satisfy everyone. And they can express that dissatisfaction and will hold onto it for a cyclical period.

Which leads to a question. What’s missing in politics? Why does the party in power always suffer loss of members (although Conservatives have been failing to gain members whilst out of power, which is a problem for them) and councillors and never please the majority of their actual supporters?

Is it a case of becoming complacent? Like a decent but lazy football team that gets 2-0 up and then coasts to a 2-3 defeat?

I’ll posit another reason.

No party politicians ever manage to engage with a majority, because they never address all the issues

So here we go… turnouts for the last twenty years have always been below 70%. And not above 80% for over fifty years. That’s in spite of it being ever easier to use postal votes.

Voter turnout in UK general elections 1918-2019. Source: House of commons library

And the number of votes for the winning party has hardly ever been over 50%.

Source – Wikipedia

Look at that. Since 1930, no single party has offered a view to satisfy the majority of voters, let alone the majority of the population. So when a party gets into power, it’s in an unenviable position – most people don’t want them there.

Only twice have there been governments that are technically approved by a majority – the WW II coalition, and the 2010 Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.

Both weren’t rewarded by their voters.

If we keep repeating the same mistakes, all parties keep losing by winning

One of the best ways to avoid losing your hard fought members is to not win. UKIP have almost entirely fallen apart recently… because they ‘won’ at Brexit. Boom! Job done! Party wiped out. Their purpose over, and the public scrutiny of the Brexit process rapidly revealing them as little more than political arsonists of little substance. Everything they said turned out to be bluster. It’s not the fault of the immigrants, and it’s not the fault of the EU that people’s salaries have been stagnant. It’s more to do with a greedy class of company boards and underperforming pension funds coupled with a financial crisis. The reasons for all that I’ll go into another day.

Now, given that avoiding losing members and popularity by avoiding winning in parliament sounds like a silly idea for a political party, we have to think a little more deeply about what anyone, in any political party, can do to actually get some stability back into the country.

I have a few ideas, and I’m using my marketing and business experience here…

1. Work for everyone, but especially the people who have been left stagnant

The economy has been stagnant for a lot of people, for a long time. Not the very poorest, who are generally in a better situation than ever before.

Not the very richest, because they’re actually quite well off and much more so than for a long time.

Labour has systematically failed people who are not unionised and who work. Try being a cleaner on £8 an hour, looking after two kids, and dealing with school holidays and child care in a constructive and nurturing way. Go on. It’s almost impossible.

And the Conservatives have been cutting finite resources, such as social housing (and Labour, when in power, didn’t grow social housing either, so they can’t get too smug here) and then both have become surprised when populist anger has risen, blaming immigrants, globalisation and bankers. Yet without more immigrants we are not going to be able to care for our elderly, or deal with our NHS… we will go bankrupt. If we allow the populists to leverage the anger of the people who have lost out from economic growth, then we will have huge problems in the future.

This graph charts the distribution of income across earners, with 50% of people getting only 20% of the income and the top 10% most recently getting 35.7% of the income – so 3.5x as much as the rest.

On the upside, it’s way better than it was at the turn of the 20th century. But the lowest half haven’t increased income that much, and the top have reduced income, so it suggests that people the top 50% to 90% range, the middle classes, have done best of all and must have seen their incomes do quite well in that period – probably largely due to the emergence of a new technical class.

Source: ONS Chancel and Piketty (2021), in the World Inequality Report 2022

2. Stop looking at averages

Don’t look at averages, but look at curves like the above. Those poor performing people, those losers, are the working class and lower middle classes of Western economies.

We need to look and listen to the stories of people and stop looking at averages. Average income going up is no use if you’re in the group of people where average income is not going up. But we need to find convincing stories to bring back to them. We can’t say “Hey, we’re cutting back all the welfare for you and spending on your schools, but we can spend it on bringing in a load of immigrants!” Now, we are 100% correct that we need lots of immigrants here, but we have to explain why – if our economy is based on the amount of workers and the amount of capital in the system and we’re not replacing our population then populists will do the stupid thing. They will say “No to immigrants! More welfare and money!” But that can’t work. It’s pathetic.

But it’s imaginary and easy and short term. So when Farage says this they’re just trying to take advantage of a situation that the rest of us leave lying around.

3.  Politics has to stop ignoring the voters

All parties are doing this. They pretend people are better off because they can afford smartphones and big TVs, but if going to university leaves you with a massive debt (rather than leaving it on the shared government balance sheet) and you feel you can’t afford a house like your parents had, then you don’t feel better off than your parents did… you feel annoyed and angry.

But listening to the voters doesn’t mean doing what the voters tell you to do. It means showing thought leadership. Explaining, patiently, why you can offer more than the previous status quo. The constituency I live in has voted Labour since its creation. But it hasn’t become better off even when Labour were in power. Why not? Why did house prices still rocket up?

4. Create these policies

Because I’m intolerably lazy, I’ve broadly nicked these 5 changes from an expert on all this. A chap called Mark Blyth. He’s an expert. I know we’ve had enough of them, and I know why we’ve had enough of them. But Mark Blyth is genuinely sharp on this. Look him up. He’s not right on everything, nobody is. But that doesn’t mean these points aren’t valid:

  1. Make university tuition free again. Because it takes a stress away. Yes, the system in the UK is very well structured and very fair, but it doesn’t feel it. And that matters.
  2. Provide much more subsidised childcare over a broader. Including during school holidays. Because it discourages women from fully contributing when the cost of childcare for two children is more than a salary. And because it helps single parents to function properly and give the nurturing care their children need.
  3. Resist and prevent the NHS being dismantled or turned into a multi-payer US style system. Simple, that one. The NHS is hyper-critical.
  4. Corporate reform of how shareholder value is distributed. I know this will scare the capitalists, but it shouldn’t. Because trust me, an angry and inward looking economy looks like North Korea or Venezuela. And that’s even worse for you. You’ll still be rich if you can keep our economies open. Trust me.
  5. Break up or open up digital monopolies. They have too much power and too many rewards for too few people, with returns of over 60%. That’s just not sustainable. So you have Google blocking YouTube from certain platforms and Facebook downgrading your pages’ natural viewings if you don’t have a healthy advertising budget.

If you notice, none of this says “Punish the rich.” Don’t do that. They feel unfairness as much as anybody, and there’s no point making them angry as well. Just fix the structural issues and things should balance out fine. You don’t need to simply turn up and take their money off them with a massive tax application. Just make sure their money has to be invested, rather than spent on impressive schemes like rocket ships that don’t address the problems that many people actually face.

Enough already

That’s my thoughts for now. About 1800 words of them, which is enough. These are the under-considered problems of the past generation, that are structural and required for a political party to prosper. And, if they get it right, perhaps they can even get a majority of people on-side.

Who knows eh? Maybe somebody can do it, and can convince enough people to do so. I don’t really care whether it’s Labour, the Conservatives, or my own favoured party, the Liberal Democrats. But somebody has to do it before the populists get another chance at polling booth. We don’t want them. At all.

Photo by H E N G S T R E A M on Unsplash

This article was updated with new charts and some copy changes on the 28th of May 2024.

Our office cleaner doesn’t vote. I think I know why.

Ever noticed that there’s a group of people who don’t vote? Good people, by and large… but they don’t vote. Eventually, I think I worked it out.

Ever noticed that there’s a group of people who don’t vote? Good people, by and large… but they don’t vote.

I noticed this during post-referendum chats with our office cleaners. Almost all of them said they didn’t vote. One said she voted for who her dad told her to vote for. I was a bit taken aback.

“But surely if you don’t vote, your interests won’t get looked after?” I asked.

One looked at me and snorted, “Like that happens! Doesn’t matter who gets in, they’re all the same!”

Sounds like a stereotype.

At the time, I wasn’t politically active. Now I am. The time before June 2016 is simply stated as “before the referendum” around here and with most people I know. As referendums go, it dwarfed all others. The Referendum, it should be. Because at that moment, a lot of things changed.

And, unusually, a lot of people voted. They voted for a change, and they were told it would make the NHS better and leave the country with more money.

I was deeply upset. I kept arguing with the hardcore Leavers, and then, in private, a friend sent me this message:

I’ve read a lot of what you have shared about the referendum, and as I leave voter I now fear I have made the wrong decision. I didn’t envisage the racial attacks that have since occurred, and did not vote out on the basis of immigration. I come across some of these people in work, and you then realise these are just normal and friendly people on the whole. I don’t have a great knowledge of politics and this is dangerous, as we all have the option to vote. I almost never voted, as had no strong bias to either side. I guess I’m trying to say your passion for remain has made me sit back and look at things from other people’s views. I can see you want the best for people. I wish I realised sooner, although it wouldn’t have changed the result.

Thing is, a lot of people realising sooner would have changed the result.

But people like me… we voted. But we didn’t try, did we? I know I didn’t protest, or man a stand in the streets. Had it too easy, you see. I thought others were doing it all anyway. Different people.

Let’s go back to our cleaner. Why didn’t she vote? Because she didn’t feel like she made a difference. Like she was going to get the shitty, difficult end of the stick either way. Not only that, but politics felt unreachable to her.

The Referendum got more people engaged, largely because a simple promise was made. £350m more for the NHS.

And people, even in post-Brexit Halton are still worried about the NHS. Here’s a local survey I did about concerns – sample size not massive at 67, but it’s enough to be a reasonable representation for the Halton area.

NHS is important. People worry about it. Because ultimately, we all get some sort of health problem at some point in our lives. Or our kids do. And we hear the stories of bankruptcies faced by US citizens due to their harsh private healthcare system.

Then Brexit and UK stability came in highly. And education. These are people’s primary concerns. I was actually surprised how few were worried about the benefits system, but then unlike the popular image of the North, most people aren’t substantially dependent on benefits. At least not in Widnes and Runcorn. So it’s not their biggest priority.

But let’s get back to our cleaner. Why doesn’t she* vote?

Unfortunately she couldn’t articulate it.

So I decided to remember what it was like when I was young, skint and facing homelessness. At no point did it occur to me to contact a councillor or my MP to see what could be done. They were distant people. Different people. Like teachers. I remember the shock and surprise when I learned that teachers had to go to the toilet! Yes really – they too need a wee sometimes. Amazeballs.

When you’re relatively naive, you don’t see the world all that clearly. Business-people are different. Asian people are different. People from the next town along… are different. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t know people, they’re different.

And most people don’t really know their local political parties. In the thirty years during which I’ve been able to vote, I’ve only heard from politicians during elections. I have never ever spoken to one on the doorstep. Except for one short period when I lived in Garston and my MP was David Alton. Now, David Alton has some peculiar views that I disagree with, but he’s a Liberal Democrat, now a Lord, and his councillors would drop in these weird Focus newsletters to the house. And I’d read them! I learned about what was going on in the area. They even had contact details so I could get in touch! They reached out… to me! Weird. But I realised, all politicians should try to do this. Push out their messages.

Then I moved back to Widnes.

And never, ever heard from a politician. Except during elections.

Sure, sometimes they’d say something in the local papers. But nothing relevant to me. Nothing that would fix my problem of living in a shitty shared house. Nothing that would make it easier for me to get a decent home. My parents had been able to get a council house, but it was denied to me. And I couldn’t save enough for a deposit on a house. It didn’t help that I wasn’t great with money either (credit card advertising has a lot to answer for!). But just being a young man, trying to run a car to get to work, renting a room, feeding myself, clothing myself and so on was sometimes tough. And nothing I ever saw from a politician made much impact on me.

Then I got older. And richer. Slowly but surely I made more money. I became a freelancer and discovered a piece of legislation might affect me – IR35. It wasn’t a massive issue, but it affected me. When politics affects you, you get to know stuff.

But working people are looked after by Labour, right?

I used to think that. Many people I knew voted Labour. Always voted Labour. Unquestioningly. I didn’t get it until I learned more about how unions work. Then I realised that unions and Labour are tied at the hip. Which is fine. The Labour Movement was what Labour was about, and it was massively important to the working man. Did a brilliant job.

Sadly, some unions got a bit giddy on power and decided to have battles to get more power. Which is a shame. They’d succeeded at getting working wages and privileges to a good point. They couldn’t see that some of those privileges were unaffordable in the long term. They simply had to keep them. At all cost.

That led to an interesting thing happening. Large organisations such as public sector, NHS and corporates started to outsource more and more functions. Our cleaners are employed by a company employed by our landlords. In many ways that can work. But truth is, that a cleaner at ICI or any other old large corporate like BA would have been exposed to unions, but our cleaners today are not. And even they were, many work for small companies disinterested in trade unions and employing fewer than 21 people. Others may not wish to join trade unions because they don’t like that they fund a political party.

So they’re not represented, really, by Labour. Labour mostly cares about people in trade unions and people who vote for them. People in unions are, for the most part, not the poorest part of society. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone in a union who earns less than about £30k a year once they’ve got five years experience in. That’s one reason why Labour are surprisingly reticent about taxing people in the OK to Quite Well Off groupings.

Nicked from the IFS website.

You could ask why the Lib Dems aren’t harder on the top 2%, but having worked with a lot of that range of people I can tell you that tax on income starts becoming optional at that level. If tax is too high they either put it into various perfectly legal vehicles (pensions and ISAs work well up to a limit) or they start looking keenly at moving cash offshore if possible. And taxing people too much can feel very unfair to those people. Get a £30k bonus and see £20k go to the government. They may not be right to feel like that, but that’s not the point. They feel unfairly treated and so get motivated to look for alternatives. As the IFS study reveals, the Lib Dems would almost certainly raise a lot more money with their tax changes than Labour would.

Labour is the party of the middle classes.

It’s true. Student fees position? Well, the current regime of student fee repayments introduced by the coalition means your repayments are lower if you earn under £35k than under the earlier top up fees system introduced by Labour.

Pensions position? Most of the people affected are people with good pension incomes. They are not poor people. Poor pensioners are considered in a secondary way, because they do at least vote. But most of the policies continue to leave wealthy pensioners paying far less in tax than young people on equivalent incomes.

The unions? Most union members earn good money. According to a study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, trade union members were paid an average of £14.45-per-hour, 5p more than in 2012 (£28k/yr, equivalent to over £30k/yr today) – source

So who does represent the best interests of our cleaners?

I say the Liberal Democrats. A party I finally got involved with in 2016, after The Referendum. You’ve seen the chart above, and in the early years of coalition, before the Conservatives neutered them, they did a great job of taking low earners out of the tax system entirely. The UK’s Gini Coefficient improved for once!

For more information, see https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed

But here’s the problem for the Liberal Democrats. Nobody really knows this. But our doorstep action, whilst being great on a local level, needs to talk about the bigger issues. Potholes and poorly kept parks are important, but these things rarely keep the bulk of people awake worrying. But the NHS does worry people. Brexit does worry people. Not being able to feed the kids does worry people. These issues need addressing. Loudly and proudly.

If you’re campaigning in the 2018 local elections, it’s important to share a little bit about what the Lib Dems mean for everybody. Not just campaign in the middle class areas and get squeezed, but in the poorer working class areas where we can make a big difference. Our policies are better for them. They just don’t know it. Not to tell them this is a disservice to them and to the Liberal Democrats. The working poor need us to help them. And if we reach out to them, maybe they’ll reach out to us. And our cleaners and their friends – they’re essential people, and once they get going they are awesome!

Feature Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

Staleys in the Isle of Man

One of the funny things about children and their memories is just how fallible they are. Full of false memories and forgotten realities. I lived, for a while, somewhere on the outskirts of Douglas on the Isle of Man, when I was about nine years old.

The family I stayed in had a boy about a year older than me, and a girl about a year younger. The girl was nice, if disinterested by my presence. The boy was giddy at first, but horrible if I dared beat him at anything. Within a month or so every toy I’d brought with me (and they weren’t many) was damaged in some way by him and he wasn’t great at sharing… though he didn’t always get much choice in that matter.

His parents were, I suppose, alright. Why would they have looked after me if not? The father was a Scottish oil-rig worker and absent for what seemed like an age at a time. I didn’t mind. When he was home there seemed to be a lot of porridge to eat, and they weren’t good at making porridge. Then it became An Issue when I didn’t eat it all. I remember one day being left alone with what seemed like a monstrous bowl of porridge while everyone went out. I had to finish the porridge.

The good news is that with care and running water you can wash any amount of porridge down a sink. I don’t know why I didn’t think to use the toilet instead, but I didn’t. It would certainly have been a faster way of disposing of the sticky gloop.

And I have a massive collection of memories from the place. There was a bar of soap in the shape of a blue elephant. A bar of soap which, I must add, wasn’t to be used as soap. Simply not allowed. No idea why. But the days passed. I would go to school, come home for lunch of some thin, hideous soup – often oxtail, and go back. Sometimes I’d have a sandwich to take with me. I only remember soup and porridge from the Isle of Man. I’m sure I got nice meals too. I just have zero recollection.

The funny thing about informal fostering is how risky it is. I suppose that isn’t funny at all, really. But in doing it, your parent(s) could be unwittingly exposing you to dangers. So if I spoke to strangers in the park (and I would, being that kind of child) then my Dad would make it An Issue. But being dumped on an island while Dad goes off to marry his new 19yr old wife? Yeah, no problem!

But nothing bad happened, porridge aside. Nobody molested me. Nobody beat me. Nobody really shouted at me. All the people who put me up were better at the basics of childcare than Dad, no matter how bad their soup was. No matter that mostly they were much more boring in my eyes. Because Dad, although volatile and drunk, was funny and interesting. I didn’t want to live with him, but when he was sober and happy, he was great. But it’s how you act when things aren’t going well that tends to define you. And when things went badly he was a horror and couldn’t keep things together. Hence all the informal fostering when his latest escapade had gone wrong.

What was best about this informal fostering was the new experiences. In Horwich, the landlords of the Albert Arms put me up for quite a while. They handled feeding me, discipline and keeping me relatively on the straight and narrow. I was a little feral, I suppose, but that wasn’t so unusual in 1980. They even made delicious food like fish fingers. They even bought me my first bike, a used Raleigh Chopper. Good people. Took me on holiday too. To Garstang, admittedly, but it was still a holiday and I loved it.

Back in the Isle of Man there was one memory…an experience… that really sticks with me. There was a bakery in a nearby row of shops. I’d been told by some other children that they sold “staleys” some days. Confused, they explained a staley was just yesterday’s cakes and still tasted delicious! I was reluctant at first, but a friend, the guy with the mute mother, took me in and showed me the ropes.

To a nine year old with relatively little going on in life this was… heaven. The only feeling better was the same friend whose mum handed me unused toys and board games to take home. I loved her, a little. And I loved that bakery, because if I found 2p in the nearby phone box I had a treat to look forward to. I’d run in excitedly, ask to be shown the staleys, and choose the nicest I could afford.

But it annoys me that I don’t know the name of the school I went to. Or my friend with the mute mother. Or the name of the family I stayed with. Or their grandparents who often looked after me for long, tedious weekends. Nothing. Just gone. But I remember the bakery. And I remember the broken JPS Lotus model toy that got broken by my temporary roommate. The little shit.

Image credit: CC-BY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89clair#/media/File:Eclairs_at_Fauchon_in_Paris.jpg

Why Gay Marriage Matters

Two people meet. They decide to live together and grow old together.  Let’s ignore whether they are a man and a woman, or gay, or two brothers without any other relationships.  Doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that they’re not married.

Together, these two people set up home back in 1970 in a house for which they paid £8000.  Thing is, one was quite poor, really, so the other bought the house from his own funds and it remained his.

Both are now elderly, and the one owning the house sadly passes away.

If they’re married or in a civil partnership, everything that the deceased partner owns passes (unless otherwise willed) to the living partner.  But in any other relationship this doesn’t happen.  That house is now worth £500,000 – to the pair it’s still the same humble house they bought in a part of London that’s become quite trendy lately.  But that doesn’t matter – everything to be inherited over £325,000 is taxed at 40%.  So, you have a tax bill of £70,000.  The inheritee may not have the money to pay that bill so is left with the problem of selling the house, or borrowing against it, in order to pay the bill.  And that’s where the trouble starts.  Imagine having to pay £450 a month to continue living in the house you lived in for the past 40 years?

Even worse, when that poor person dies, their estate will *also* be taxed at 40%.  This compares to the married couple’s non-taxable estate which is effectively £650,000.

And it doesn’t end there.  Pension funds often can’t be transferred to anybody other than a spouse.  Family health insurance (particularly relevant in the US) often doesn’t cover anybody not in a legally recognised relationship.  And so on and so forth.  If there are married people’s tax allowances, they apply too.

So Why Be Against Gay Marriage?

I’m always fascinated by motives.  It’s quite clear why a government would be against gay marriage, or even against making it really easy to marry or divorce – in doing so they get more tax.  That’s simple then.  From a purely fiscal point of view, governments get more tax from two single people than two married people.

And we have the religious lot – right now we have a dolt like Cardinal Keith O’Brien calling plans for gay marriage something that would “shame the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world”.  I mean really?  Why would that be?  OK, there are states in this world where gay people are killed for it.  I guess we would look pretty shameful to them.  Do I care?  Not really – we’re strong enough to let people live their lives how they wish to.

So the religious folk are worried.  In part I know why – right there in Genesis (so believed by many Christians, Jews and Muslims as being important) is an instruction “And you, be you fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.”  It’s translated in lots of other ways too.  But the key message there is that you should go out and reproduce.

Which makes sense.  If your religion can outbreed another, it can do very well.  And you know something I’ve noticed about gay folk?  They don’t have many children!  Of course, many do.  And it would seem that their children may even fare better than their peers.

So Are Anti-Gay Marriage Campaigners Being Rational?

Nope, it’s unlikely that rationality comes into it.  So let’s simply say this – they’re doing what most people do – look after their own interests first, then worry about the next level down because that can affect them too.

The joyous thing right now is that in the UK the mainstream political parties are pretty liberal about all this.  They know that happy people work harder and make more money, which means more tax money, which means more power for them.  The churches are no longer so relevant.

But in the US it’s a more dangerous situation – the significant Christian right can be an illiberal bunch, and the leading Republican candidates to run for president have come out with some deeply concerning statements.

In the UK we’re setting an example to the world.  Let’s mock Cardinal Keith O’Brien and his antiquated beliefs – he’s not relevant any more, and let’s keep it that way.  And if you hear somebody repeating anti-gay-marriage rhetoric then point out to them why somebody would object and why it’s so hard on gay couples.

The Liverpool Riots Do Not Indicate That Our Society Is Broken

Ok, the riots matter.  Especially if you’re unlucky enough to have had to face rioters in your district, near your home, or near your business.  In fact, the riots and disturbances are full of tragedy, deaths and ruined lives.  They are, frankly, horrible.

And strong action is needed to stop it turning into a joyfull rampage for our criminal underclass.

But what they aren’t is some kind of protest.  They’re a laugh.  If I didn’t have much to lose I suspect I might even find the thrill of a riot quite an attraction.  And in areas where there’s possibly not much to do if you’ve got very little money then I can quite understand the fun, the empowerment of feeling that police won’t stop you when they usually do.  Thing is, what nobody seems to be saying is that the number of people involved is tiny.

200/816216 = 0.0245%

Here’s a thing – the number of people kicking off in the Liverpool area has been reported as approximately 200.  In reality that means anywhere between 50 and 500.  But let’s assume that 200 is correct for now.  That’s a whole 0.0245% of the population.  Another way of looking at is that that 99.975% of the population in Liverpool didn’t feel compelled to smash anything up or set fire to cars.  I daresay the proportions around London are similar.

So actually, society functions well for almost everybody in it.  In fact, given that 45,000 18-20 year olds are indicted of a criminal offence in a year (sample from 1999) you can see that even the vast majority of young convicted criminals aren’t interested in rioting.  The numbers are so small that you can’t say that this is a problem with a consumerist society, a problem with poverty, or a problem with our culture – the sample size is too small.  It’s probably just some yobs getting the upper hand on the police and having some fun.

It’s a Policing Thing, Stupid

You can stop almost all riots.  All you need are an awful lot of police who aren’t scared to intimidate and bully their way through trouble.  It works.  Riots are rare in police states, for example.

So we need to ask if we really want brutal police officers?  What about when they’re not dealing with a riot?  They’re going to be the ones your son deals with when he gives a bit of cheek to an officer after being told off for cycling on the pavement.  They’re going to be the ones potentially wading in too early during an otherwise peaceful protest.

We must come to accept that these occasional moments of unrest are, unless repeated again and again with significant economic damage, a relatively small cost of living in a relatively free society.  Just as we mustn’t allow the few terrorists with religious agendas to change how we live, we mustn’t allow the few thugs out there to change the way we deal with protest and the way we run our cities.

Of course, the cost mustn’t be borne by the individuals and businesses affected – if our society is to accept this, it must also ensure that nobody is left harmed or significantly out of pocket by this either.  We need to be humane and adult about it all.

What we certainly don’t need is to start pressuring our politicians into making some dumb, knee-jerk changes that will take away our hard won freedoms.  Let’s take stock, let’s maybe ask for police to be a little smarter in apprehending the rioters, but let’s not give up and change too much.

Blog “Reboot”

Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients

But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme.  I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters.  The typography is pretty good.  The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme.  Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years.  It’s just not our business.  So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme.  And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually.  I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do.  But the problem with that is that there’s not much need.  My blog is not an important one.  It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business.  Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit.  Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good.  A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?”  And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme.  I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t.  One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible.  This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import.  If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links.  And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost.  Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do?  Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue.  I have my tools.  But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images.  Every post with an image in it.  That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time.  Way too much time.  This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud.  Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on.  Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up.  But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on.  And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins.  The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it.  I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better.  Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask?  Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

Thinking Digital University (2011)

So, here I am again at Thinking Digital.  Only this time I’m no longer driving the seemingly doomed Golf TDI I had last year that did one of it’s self destruction tricks en-route.  Consequently I’m not missing out on the workshops here.

In fact, I’m doing better than that – an additional workshop was added for the Monday by Jer Thorp of Wired fame.  A workshop on Processing.  That, I must say, was a wonderful find.  Processing, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a data visualisation tool or sketchbook.  It’s a bit old-school, but this is a good thing, generally, because this has the advantage of being relatively accessible.  In fact it reminded me of the fun early days of BASIC on small computers.

Simply put, you can easily draw things, and you can analyse data with it.  Some was stuff I could do on a Dragon 32 nearly thirty years ago, but with many thousands of times the power – and that means you can do cool stuff in real time.  I recommend you look up some of the online Processing materials.  You can even try it out without installing anything by using my colleague Robert O’Rourke‘s website, hascanvas.com

During Nancy Duarte’s Workshop

That Resonates With Me!

Then on day two it was a half day ‘off’ which, for me, meant a series of telephone calls with clients while I ensure that work continues as it should.  The afternoon, however, brought along Nancy Duarte‘s “That Resonates With Me!” workshop.

Funnily enough, her resonate analogy was the one bit that didn’t work for me.  She used the peculiar patterns of salt as it’s vibrated on a plate as a way of showing how different people can resonate with your message in different ways.  It’s interesting, but I feel that people don’t work that way.  People can, however, be like salt – you know, small, hard, square and bad for your health.  So perhaps she had a point.

BUT – I’m picking.  Because truth be told it was a fascinating workshop that helped me to see through the clutter of my presentations and to find ways to understand my audience and find ways to connect with them.  The simple exercise she gave will help me improve my presentations – of that I’m sure.  I just have to make sure I put them into practice.

The Rest

The rest of the conference is more classically organised, with the usual talks, networking and information overload.  In the evenings there’ll be the usual entertainment.  Already I’ve been better at avoiding alcohol than last year – I’m remarkably sober tonight.  This is a Good Thing.

Highlights, I suspect, will be Jer’s talk (always visually amazing – check out his Vimeo feed) but the rest I’ll have to report on later.

Un Techo Para Chile

Chilean slumI struggled to find somewhere to eat this evening, and in the end decided that some more bad food would have to do.  I have at least found a source of decent fruit at the market, so I’m getting vitamins and fibre now.  Woo!

The smells of Telepizza were calling me in, and I succumbed.  I went in.  I watched them making a pizza… and lo, it looked like pizza!  And verily, I ordered.

While I was waiting for it to be made I sat down and combined reading and watching a telethon for Un Techo Para Chile which has been fundraising like mad lately around here.  I’d thrown a few coins into a collection box without really knowing what it was about.

A wino kept wandering in and out, watching the TV for a bit, and then ambling out.  He’d just stand there, near the door.  I studiously avoiding catching his gaze.

The program then showed a short film about a young family moving from what was essentially a corrugated board shack into a newly built, if somewhat spartan, apartment.  That’s when I heard the blubbing.  I looked and saw the wino, just standing there, mouth turned down, tears streaming down his cheeks, and blubbing like a three year old that’s been denied another sweet.

It was heartbraking.

If you have a moment, consider making a small donation by following the link above.  Since the strong earthquake recently a lot of families and individuals here have lost their homes.  Others are just living in absolute poverty.  They need your help, and once they have decent living conditions they can do more with their lives, educate their children better, and bring themselves a better future.