Category Archives: Grubby Capitalism

Essential Experiments?

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At the end of last week the Government gave permission for the construction, in Yorkshire, of what was termed “a puppy farm”  where Beagle dogs are to be bred for scientific experiments and  research.

In response to the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s contention (unarguable, you would think) that the decision will condemn the dogs to “a life of suffering”, the Medical Research Council stated that dogs were still “essential” for some medical experiments.

I remember, years ago, that Beagles were used to test the effects of smoking  (as if tests were necessary to demonstrate that smoking is bad for your health!)  but I had no idea that dogs were still used in medical experiments. Evidently “research” was carried out on 3,554 dogs in the UK  in 2013.

Although I find it hard to believe that there is no alternative to using dogs in medical experiments I really have no knowledge of the subject and I suspect most of us are the same. Surely, this is something that needs to be brought up for expert debate and public discussion, if only to learn the meaning of “essential”.

Does it mean essential in the sense that experiments on dogs could lead to the saving of human lives or essential for the safe use of women’s make up and the subsequent enrichment of cosmetics manufacturers?  One might be acceptable but the other not so.

It was only a week ago that our national newspapers were full of headlines featuring public demonstrations against foxhunting. Let’s hope the public  feels equally strongly about dogs.

Our Choice.

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There was uproar in certain parts of the media last week when it was revealed that insurance comparison websites are directing customers towards insurance policies that generate greater commission for the websites. The practice was condemned as deceitful and unethical, but why?

The whole point of using an agent is surely to save us, the customers, both time and money and if those objectives are achieved then why begrudge the agent his slice of the action?

Insurance brokers, financial advisers and the like can make a small fortune from the sale of pension, life insurance and other policies. No doubt some are less than honest and will invariably seek to put the earning of commission above service to the customer, but that short sighted practice is unlikely to see them survive in business for very long.

Common sense tells us that the best defence against exploitation is to shop around and speak to as many agents as we feel necessary. The final choice is ours and ultimately, as long as the customer receives what he wants and needs does it really matter what the agent or intermediary earns from the deal?

Love from Rover

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You may have noticed that there are no more heart-shaped balloons in shop windows anymore, that the fluffy pink teddy bears and cute little doe-eyed toy puppies proclaiming “I woof you”  (must be Chinese) have all disappeared, and the card shops on the high street have all undergone an overnight makeover. Yes, that celebration of kitsch ,vulgarity and blatant capitalism, formerly known as the Feast of St Valentine  has left us  for another year.

How times have changed. Like Mothering Sunday (Mother’s Day to the masses), St Valentine’s Day has changed beyond recognition and has become yet another day of rampant commercialism when many people thoughtlessly buy cards and gifts because they feel they have to.

Everybody gets involved now and what was once a simple celebration of love and romance has become something else entirely. I’m neither a curmudgeon nor a grumpy old man – yet, but I had to shake my head whilst choosing a card for my own true love. The trouble was, I wanted something simple and nothing too elaborate or vomit-inducing.

I found one eventually, stuck there among Valentine’s cards from children to parents, from parents and grand parents to children and believe it or not (you will, of course) cards from the family cat or dog. Poor old St Valentine, even his Roman executioners treated him with more respect than that!

Black Friday

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Last Friday we enjoyed, not the right word I know considering the undignified scrapping and punch-ups at stores up and down the country, a relatively new phenomenon (at least for us in the UK) called “Black Friday”.

It is, of course, an American phenomenon which occurs the day following Thanksgiving when, after a surfeit of turkey, Budweiser and Football (the NFL variety), our American cousins pile into the stores to grab bargains at knock-down prices.

We already have a similar shopping frenzy on Boxing Day when shoppers, for some inexplicable reason still not sated by the pre-Christmas spending splurge, think nothing of leaving their cosy warm beds to camp outside stores on a usually cold, wet, wintry night to await opening time and a dogfight for bargains.

Why we would want to copy the Americans and do the same thing the day after Thanksgiving, a day that I imagine most of the shoppers shown on our television screens on Friday night could barely spell, let alone celebrate, is beyond me.

Still, it allowed the rest of the world to see just how far our multicultural society has advanced.

Saving our Seas

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Greenpeace revealed this week that one foreign-owned fishing vessel (a Dutch super-trawler with huge nets covering vast areas of the ocean) controls 6% of the entire UK fishing quota. Meanwhile approximately 5,000 small family-owned British fishing vessels, (comprising nearly 80% of the British fishing fleet) between them control just 4% of the UK’s fishing quota. It almost defies belief.

Fishing quotas were introduced in the 1980s to safeguard fish stocks throughout Europe and the fact that one large foreign-owned commercial vessel has the right to catch considerably more fish than the entire British small fishing boat fleet is nothing short of scandalous.

How and why have successive British governments allowed this to happen? No wonder so many family fishing businesses have gone bankrupt and no wonder our fish stocks continue to suffer in the face of these huge factory ships vacuuming up the ocean.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope since fishing quotas are due to be discussed and re-fixed next month, presenting our government with the opportunity to do something about it. Greenpeace have set up an online petition to put pressure on the government (https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/fair-fish).

Whilst we may be sceptical about the success of such petitions it is surely a worthy attempt to both protect the UK’s seas and prevent further struggling fishing communities from sinking into oblivion.

Continued Destruction

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Earlier this month the Living Planet Report of the Zoological Society of London revealed that  in the last 40 years global animal populations have plummeted by 52 %. Put another way, during the course of half a human lifetime more than half of the world’s animal population has disappeared. Just pause and read that last sentence again.

Of course,  statistics are open to analysis since they can easily be distorted to suit a particular argument. Already, some experts are questioning the figures and are wondering how they can be so precise. What nobody has done however is dispute that the world’s animals, birds and plants are steadily disappearing at an alarming rate. Human efforts at slowing down, let alone halting, the trend are having little impact and this should be of great concern to every one of us.

This blog has highlighted the subject on a number of occasions but, no matter how many times it is repeated, it can never be emphasised enough. This planet is our home and home too to millions of other species, animal or otherwise. As the most powerful species on Earth human beings have a duty and a responsibility to ensure their safety and survival. The fact that we are failing in that duty and are in fact continuing to destroy everything around us is shameful.

As individuals, what can we do? In reality not a great deal; we can write to our politicians and to the CEOs of the large corporations responsible for over fishing and deforestation and demand action but how effective would that be? Taking collective action is, however, a different ball game and giving our support to pressure groups and organisations such as Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. One thing is for sure, we can’t just sit back and do nothing.

Planting the Seed

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I visit the USA quite a lot and have to say I love the place. The natives may well speak our language in a manner somewhat strange to our English sensibilities and some of their mannerisms can be puzzling to us folk from the old country but that, for me at least, is part of the attraction.

Some things though throw me completely and none more so than early Sunday morning television. In the UK we don’t really do religion on television to any great extent but in the US (and in the South particularly) it is big business. You can surf the channels and find at least half a dozen stations featuring some evangelist whipping the crowds into a frenzy with his or her Christian rhetoric. A lot of it, with its dramatic presentation, seems quite uplifting and I can see that it could possibly help a lot of those taking part and maybe even a good proportion of those watching at home.

There is however a side that seems somewhat less than wholesome and one show I recently tuned into was called “Wisdom Keys” presented by a “preacher” called Dr Mike Murdock. Murdock along with his excitable and enthusiastic co-presenters constantly urged the viewers to telephone the show’s hotline and plant a $58 seed, preferably each month for a year (though you could give more if you wanted as a one off payment!). This seed was said to ensure a substantial harvest and promised that the giver would, in return for his or her donation, receive a gift from God which could and often would change their lives. Examples were given of Mr A. who within two weeks of “planting his seed” received a tax refund of $20,000 or Mrs B. who, “ten days after planting her $58 seed”, won the local lottery and so on.

It may well be that these were true stories but it struck me as rather unsavoury that these presenters, who every few minutes linked hands and prayed for their audience, were quite clearly preying (no pun intended) on the emotions of gullible, vulnerable, and desperate members of society. I wonder if anybody in authority has looked into the ultimate destination of those $58 seeds? I think they should.

Choice and Responsibility

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Last week a US court ordered a cigarette manufacturing company to pay damages of $23 billion (approx. £14 billion) to a woman following the death of her husband from cigarette related lung cancer. The rationale was that the company, aware that cigarette smoking was both addictive and life threatening, still persisted in selling its product to the unfortunate man.

Putting aside the incredible amount of damages awarded to the woman (no doubt her lawyers earned several million dollars too for their noble efforts) the question is why should any award be made? Cigarettes may well be addictive and harmful but even a child could work that out. Alcohol is also addictive and damaging to health. How long will it be before we read about multi-million dollar awards for deaths caused by pickled livers?

One of the greatest benefits of living in the West is that we have freedom of choice. In the main, we are free to choose whatever we want to do with our bodies and long may this continue. We also need to bear responsibility for our actions but somehow that word doesn’t seem to be so important these days.

Food Waste

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A recent report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation revealed that worldwide approximately 33% of all food is wasted at a cost of £500 billion.

Those are staggering figures when taking into account the fact that nearly one billion humans are classified as starving. Put another way that’s approximately three time the population of the USA or eighteen times that of the UK.

Food wastage occurs in many forms from supermarkets rejecting malformed (but perfectly edible) fruit and vegetables to spoilt Westerners overfilling their plates and gorging themselves at all-you-can-eat buffets before discarding half the contents of their plates into the rubbish bin.

Those who govern us don’t appear to have any bright ideas on how to solve the problem but in the case of supermarket waste the rules regarding size and shape of vegetables need to be urgently reviewed.

As for the rest of us a little more restraint might be a good idea.

Flying Cheap

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On April 26th I posted a blog (  https://johnenglandcommonsense.com/2013/04/26/a-new-way-to-fly/ ) relating to an unpleasant flying experience with easyJet earlier that month. The problem was a drunk and out of control hen party who for a four and a half hour period basically terrorised those passengers unfortunate enough to be sat near them. Instead of dealing with the problem the cabin crew made matters worse by continuing to serve them alcohol throughout the flight.

On April 12h, the day after the flight, I emailed  easyJet to tell them what had happened. They replied with an immediate automated acknowledgement and then, on May 8th, sent a more detailed email stating how sorry they were. They said that their staff are “highly trained”, passenger safety is their “primary concern”, they “take all feedback seriously” and various other predictable corporate sound-bites. They concluded by advising me that they had passed the details on to the cabin crew manager so that he could “investigate this incident internally”.

A further six weeks elapsed until, on June 17th, having heard nothing further, I sent another email enquiring when they expected to conclude their investigations. I am still awaiting a reply and of course, I’m not going to get one.  In truth I didn’t really expect anything positive to come from my initial email, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

So clearly, whatever easyJet may say to the contrary they do not “take all feedback seriously”.  Whilst I’m sure they do care about passenger safety (they’d be stupid not to in these litigation fuelled times!) their prime and overriding desire, obviously, is to fill their flights and make money.

I’d like to say that I’ll never fly with easyJet  again but of course I will, it’s a simple question of economics. Why bite off my nose to spite my face? If an airline is cheaper than its rivals and it gets us to our destination on time and in one piece it will never be short of customers irrespective of the quality of the flight or the passengers, a fact of which all airlines are only too aware. The moral of the story? You get what you pay for. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere. Otherwise, have a few beers before the flight, plug in your MP3, turn up the volume, settle down and just grin and bear it!