Category Archives: Grubby Capitalism

Exploitation

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Typical isn’t it? After three weeks of glorious English summer weather (four words  not normally seen in the same sentence!) the nation’s schools break up for their long break and, right on cue, the rain returns! Poor kids, poor parents!

Still, they can always take their holidays in southern Europe where the weather is guaranteed to be hot and sunny. Yes, they can, but as all parents know only too well the airlines virtually double their fares once the school holidays begin and the car hire companies and hotels are not far behind either. It is so unfair and unjust. Of course, the airlines tell us that it’s all about supply and demand but whatever they call it and whatever words they may use to describe their policies the only word that rings true is exploitation.

I hope the sun returns and shines for the whole of August so that families can forget about jetting off to the sun and instead take their holidays in the UK. The trouble is, as we know through bitter experience, it’s probably a forlorn hope but you never know, perhaps this is the summer we’ve been waiting for. After 30 years we’re surely due a good one!

Vanity Rules

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Bill Gates, one of the world’s wealthiest men and also one of its greatest philanthropists, recently said that capitalism is “flawed” since more money is spent on research into minor ailments than on diseases and conditions that kill millions each year.

He used the example of male baldness and said that more money is spent researching the prevention of hair loss than on finding a cure for malaria, which kills more people worldwide than any other disease on the planet. I had to stop and read that line again and maybe you did too.
According to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, some £1.3 billion was spent last year on research into male baldness. Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation says that just over a quarter of that (£361 million) was spent on malaria research.
Each year, malaria is responsible for the deaths of millions of men, women and children mainly in the poverty-stricken and undeveloped parts of the world. By contrast, as far as I am aware, nobody has ever died from hair loss or baldness.
That tells me two things, one that we in the West are more concerned with matters that directly affect us than things that do not, no matter how trivial. Secondly that we place personal vanity above death and suffering in the third world. Whichever way you look at it, it is a pretty sad indictment on modern society. 

Morally Bankrupt

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Last week I read that the Royal Bank of Scotland, in spite of making further losses of £5.2 billion, still paid its clearly useless “top” executives annual bonuses amounting to £607 million.

In the same newspaper I also read that a 92 year old World War II hero, Wing Commander  Bransome Burbridge, who shot down 21 enemy aircraft in the defence of his country, is to sell his war medals to cover the cost of his care home fees. 
What is wrong with us?

What Price Medical Care?

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Earlier this week the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, warned that 12,000 nurses will be lost to the NHS over the next two years if redundancies and lay-offs continue at the current rate. It could well be political speak of course, and politicians regularly distort the facts to suit their argument, but what if his warning is based on truth? Can our overstretched and overburdened health service cope with these losses to its front line staff?

We all know what a clumsy and ungainly beast the NHS is and how inefficiently it is run but my personal  experiences have convinced me at least that we still have doctors and nurses of the highest standard. I really don’t believe that many countries can boast a better quality of medical care than the UK but I cannot say the same for the management of the NHS.
Recent scandals involving NHS Trusts have clearly demonstrated that many hospitals are badly run with far too many inefficient and incompetent bureaucrats clogging up the system. It is surely upon those people that the Government’s axe of austerity needs to fall and not the poor nurses who seem to me to be performing heroically under the most intense pressure. We cannot afford to lose any more of them.
One last thought. It has often been reported that some top professional footballers earn as much as £200,000 per week together with endorsements. The average nurse earns around £20,000 per year. That means that some footballers earn as much in a year (£10.4 million) as 520 nurses combined. That probably tells you all you need to know about our society and its values.

Horse Burgers

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I’ve been fascinated by the fuss over the recent news that Tesco and others have been inadvertently selling horse meat in their beef burgers. Tesco went so far as to place full page apologies in national newspapers stating that they take this matter very seriously indeed and will no longer use the same sources (horses!) for their burgers.

It must have cost them a fortune and whilst it may be the fault of their suppliers, Tesco’s lawyers will certainly have warned their clients about possible legal liability arising from breach of sale of goods legislation and the law of misrepresentation. All that is pretty dull and mundane however and is best left to the dreary lawyers in their ivory towers.

No, what I found interesting was how meat and burger eaters, happy to eat cows, lambs, pigs and chickens etc are indignant and repulsed at the thought of eating horses. Why should this be, I wondered? Are horses superior creatures to cows and sheep, are they more intelligent than pigs? Actually, most scientists seem to be of the opinion that horses are pretty stupid and pigs are far brighter. In spite of this nobody objects to the slaughter of pigs, particularly whilst enjoying their pork pie or bacon butty.

I think it comes down to two main issues. Firstly, horses are useful to us and have traditionally served us well over thousands of years, pulling our carts, ploughing our fields and allowing us to ride them. We give them names and we bond with them. Secondly, they are cute and to eat a horse is akin to eating the family dog, which, of course they do in certain parts of the Far East………..but that’s another story!

In truth, meat is meat and logically there can be no difference whatever in the morality behind eating chicken, lamb, pork or horse. It seems somewhat hypocritical to eat certain sorts of meat and then object to the eating of other sorts. If people really feel strongly about this matter shouldn’t they just give up meat altogether and become vegetarians?

Waste

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It was announced yesterday that, worldwide, we end up throwing away one half of the food we buy with, perhaps  unsurprisingly,  the USA and Europe proving to be the worst offenders.

According to many scientists, the Earth’s resources are stretched to breaking point and we are rapidly approaching the stage where there will be insufficient food to sustain the human race.
One of the biggest problems is clearly the rampant consumerism of the decadent West where supermarket aisles are jam-packed full of food at bargain prices (buy one get one free, for example) which prove irresistible to the average shopper. By itself there’s not a lot wrong with this but evidently, once we’ve hauled our purchases home, we realise that we didn’t actually need them after all and we end up putting half in the rubbish bin.
That is scandalous  and it makes our obesity crisis (see last Friday’s blog) even more shameful; and all this whilst a sizeable part of the world’s population starves to death. It’s morally wrong, of course it is, but will we do anything about it. Probably not, and that’s the sad part.

Money Talks

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Is money the only thing that matters in sport these days? I don’t mean football, of course;  the Premier League sold its soul to the devil (aka Sky TV) years ago. No, I was thinking about other sports such as cricket and rugby union, specifically the latter.

On Saturday, England played rugby (a debatable term as you will know if you saw the game!) against Australia and unless you were fortunate enough to have a ticket for Twickenham you would have had to watch the game on Sky. Like many people, I don’t have Sky and so, to watch a game that I’ve loved for most of my life, I had to forsake the comfort of my own home and find a local pub. It wasn’t a great problem however and although I enjoyed a few beers and a good laugh with some friends that’s not the point.

I seem to remember reading some time ago, after the last rugby world cup probably, that the English RFU were trying to increase interest in the game and attract more followers. Well, allowing the sport to be removed from terrestrial television is not going to help that is it? Not everybody wants to watch rugby in the pub and what about those too young to drink, the future of the game? I guess raking in some extra income from Murdoch just proved a more enticing option to the guardians of the game.

Talking of money, presumably that is the only reason why England discarded their traditional white shirts to play in purple against the Aussies. It can’t have been to avoid a colour clash since white is hardly going to clash with green and gold. No, the reason quite obviously is that the RFU, once more, wanted to cash in on their asset and create some extra revenue from shirt sales. Just like football. There could be no sadder indictment.

Child Benefit – Helping the Needy

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Much of our recent news, apart from predictable speculation on the identity of the next president of the USA, has focused on the payment of UK child benefit.  Evidently the Government has decided that payment of these benefits should be means tested. Well of course it should, isn’t that what the welfare state is all about?

Why on earth should people who earn enough money to pay higher rate tax receive welfare benefits? If you are fortunate enough to earn a large wage (the Government’s starting point is £50,000 a year) then you don’t need a handout from the state. This has got nothing whatever to do with socialism but everything to do with common sense.

The whole purpose of the welfare state is to look after people who are not able to look after themselves whether through age, infirmity, or a genuine inability to find work and please note the use of the word “genuine”. Those are the people who need and deserve state benefits and if it is true that some Tory backbenchers are opposed to this principle then they belong in the Dark Ages.

As I have said before in this blog, one of the prime responsibilities of a civilized state is to look after and safeguard the needs of the weak and less privileged, not to continue to line the pockets of those with no need for it.

We’re all Americans Now

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Isn’t this a lovely time of year? We may have lost an hour of daylight and there’s a definite chill in the air but how beautiful the countryside looks with the leaves of Autumn showing their colours of copper, bronze, auburn and gold. There’s a mist in the morning and frost on the ground and soon it will be time for bonfires, fireworks, parkin and the celebration of Guy Fawkes. Guy who?
There’s a celebration in the air, that’s for sure but it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Guido Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot comrades, those brave, reckless young men who decided that they’d had enough and planned to burn down the Houses of Parliament back in 1605 – now there’s an idea! (memo to Thought Police – it’s a joke!). No, if you look around you, in the supermarkets, shops, hairdressers, cafes and pubs all you can see are large orange pumpkins, witches on broomsticks, skeletons in black capes and cobwebs hanging from the walls and ceilings. All that seems to matter is the great American festival of Halloween.

Halloween, another celebration of consumerism, excess and bad taste far removed from the pagan festival of All Hallows Eve established, incidentally, about two thousand years before America even existed as a nation! Still, it doesn’t matter, we’re all Americans now, totally enraptured and in love with everything they put on our television and cinema screens. Penny for the Guy? You must be joking!

The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

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I’m sure that most of us watching the continuing cycle of banking scandals do so with a combined sense of bemusement and disgust. The collapse of The Northern Rock Bank during the sub-prime lending crisis of 2007, heralded the start of that cycle and, with it, the beginning of the worst recession in living memory.

It is a recession caused by the greed of financial institutions eager to make fortunes by lending money and  granting mortgages, usually at exorbitant rates, to people totally ill-equipped to repay them. The results of their greed were that borrowers, unable to repay their loans, had their homes repossessed and the ultimate lenders were left out of pocket, causing a spiral of debt.

When the continuing crisis caused the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland the bank was rescued and bailed out by Government (and therefore taxpayers’) money. In spite of this, leading City bankers have continued to award themselves huge personal bonuses when, all around them, people and businesses not so fortunate, and not so immoral, have gone to the wall. Now we learn that Barclays and other banks have defrauded us further by manipulating and fixing the inter-bank interest rate (the Libor rate) for their own benefit.

To refer to their actions as immoral is actually euphemistic. The correct word is criminal and if the behaviour of bankers, traders and other “masters of the universe” as they arrogantly refer to themselves is shown to fall foul of the law (and the fact that the FBI are investigating Barclays traders in the USA seems to indicate that this is indeed the case) those responsible should be investigated and prosecuted without delay. It is our money that has been misappropriated and, like common thieves, the perpetrators should be held to account by the courts.