Despite this apparently being the start of a new era of austerity, there have been very few clear signals from our leaders on what measures we should be taking to help us cope.
Things were a lot different during the War. Posters exhorted the population to Dig for Victory. Roadside verges were ploughed up to grow vegetables. There were clear signs everywhere that things were tough and everyone would have to be even tougher to survive.
In the absence of anything approaching even a suggestion of a coping strategy from numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, those of us anxious to do our bit can only do as our leaders do.
That is why I am adopting one of the strategies formulated during last year's Strategic Defence Review; one, its proponents claim, that should save the country millions of pounds over the coming years.
Of course, mine is a much scaled-down version but I believe it follows essentially the same principles as those used by the MOD.
Step i: I decide to build a new house, commission the best architects and settle on the most expensive building contractors in the Yellow Pages. My agreed budget for the build is £500,000.
Step 2: With design changes, upgrades to incorporate new technology as it becomes available and the cost-overruns common to large projects, the cost spirals to around £2 million. More pertinently, build-time goes out from the original estimate of 12 months to around five years.
Step 3: Seven years after signing the contract, the new house is declared ready for occupation.
Step 4: Snagging all the faults and arguments about who is responsible for the cost, delays my moving into the house by a further 12 months.
Step 5: At last the house is ready for occupation, having cost around five times the original estimate.
Step 6: The economy has taken a turn for the worst. I estimate it will cost £20,000 per annum to maintain and decorate the house. In order to save this money, I decide to demolish the house without ever using it, writing off the £2.5 million it finally cost to build .
Step 7: My wife has me committed on the very reasonable grounds that I have completely lost my marbles.
If this scenario is unfamiliar, simply substitute Nimrod for house and multiply all of the costs by the largest number your mind can cope with.
Now, how do we go about getting George Osborne committed?
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Monday, 24 January 2011
Unable to value the woods for the trees
At some time over the last decade a million pounds turned into chickenfeed in the money mill we call our public finances.
Where once the thought of a publically-financed project going millions of pounds over budget would have elicited a collective, horrified intake of breath from the UK population, these days it would only merit a sigh of relief that the amount involved was so small.
How did this happen? What were we all doing that so important that we didn't notice someone changing the m for a b at the beginning of the word?
When did we become so blase about the cost of running our country that politicians could talk, quite cheerfully, about projects costing "only" a couple of billion, without eliciting howls of outrage from the people from whose pockets these enormous sums are extracted in direct and indirect taxes?
After all, a billion is a BIG number. Even allowing for the fact that we are dealing, as so often in modern life, with the American version of a billion, it is still one million multiplied by a thousand. That's 1 followed by nine noughts. According to Google, 1 million US dollars laid ened to end would be almost one hundred miles long, so 1 billion would stretch almost 100,000 miles. None of which is relevant except to emphasise the fact that a billion is a very BIG number.
Is it the sheer scale of the number that shocks us into silence, in the same way that an enormous sky or impossibly high mountain can reduce us to a state of numbed awe.
As a country, we are in debt to the tune of £952 billion. Actually, that isn't quite correct because that figure doesn't include the Private Finance Initiatives that Gordon and Ed(Balls) cooked up as a way of keeping almost £300 billion more of public spending off the official scorecard. ( all of which is another story in itself now that Balls has become the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.) So, we actually owe somewhere close to 1.3 trillion. A trillion is a million multiplied by another million, which anyone over the age of 50 will recognise as an old-fashioned British billion, so perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that we are now dealing with US billions rather than the real thing! So, 1.3 trillion is, actually, 1300 billion. That not only makes your eyes water, it's enough to make you want to cross your legs, too.
The point of all of this, long and meandering though it might have been, is to bring us to a discussion of the merit or otherwise of the Forestry Commission and DEFRA between them taking it upon themselves - at the Government's behest - to sell off our forests and woodlands to private investors. Actually, when I say OUR, that only applies to anyone reading this who considers themselves English rather than British. As is frequently the way in our heavily devolved Island, the woods that will be offered for sale are all in England; the Welsh and the Scots having, very wisely, decided to keep ownership of theirs in the public domain.
As justification for the sale, various estimates have been made for how much it will raise. The highest, so far, is around £300 million.
£300 million? Not even a third of a billion ( US Style) Not even 300th of a Trillion (US) or billion (old style UK)?
In modern money terms we are talking proverbial peanuts. This is the sort of money a Government department might possibly scrape together simply by digging down the back of a few couches. Yet, the very same politicians who cheerfully bandy billions around when discussing their pet projects want us to leap with joy at the prospect of raising a paltry £300 million.
£300 million won't even cover the cost of the yet-to-be-finished Olympics stadium in Stratford let alone Spurs demolishing it, building a new stadium and renovating the old Crystal palace running track for UK Athletics. I
It is less than 1/10th the amount that is being saved by scapping the Nimrod fleet. 300 lower-order Golman Sachs investment bankers could buy the whole lot simply by pooling their annual bonuses.
£300 million is sufficient to pay no more than two or three days' interest on the UK National Debt.
In other words, it is chickenfeed.
And it is for this handful of small change that the Government is prepared to sell off woodlands that belong to the whole country; without discussion, without a by your leave and, apparently, without a toss for what the rest of us think.
They have placed a monetary value on the land itself without a thought for its amenity value - which in the crowded place that England has become, is almost priceless.
It does not augur well for the Big Society of Cameron's PR man's dreams.
More to the point, as I have said before, when the sell-off process begins and our interests are being represented by politicians the corporate boys will take them to the same old cleaners and we, the great English Public, will find ourselves short-changed once again.
Where once the thought of a publically-financed project going millions of pounds over budget would have elicited a collective, horrified intake of breath from the UK population, these days it would only merit a sigh of relief that the amount involved was so small.
How did this happen? What were we all doing that so important that we didn't notice someone changing the m for a b at the beginning of the word?
When did we become so blase about the cost of running our country that politicians could talk, quite cheerfully, about projects costing "only" a couple of billion, without eliciting howls of outrage from the people from whose pockets these enormous sums are extracted in direct and indirect taxes?
After all, a billion is a BIG number. Even allowing for the fact that we are dealing, as so often in modern life, with the American version of a billion, it is still one million multiplied by a thousand. That's 1 followed by nine noughts. According to Google, 1 million US dollars laid ened to end would be almost one hundred miles long, so 1 billion would stretch almost 100,000 miles. None of which is relevant except to emphasise the fact that a billion is a very BIG number.
Is it the sheer scale of the number that shocks us into silence, in the same way that an enormous sky or impossibly high mountain can reduce us to a state of numbed awe.
As a country, we are in debt to the tune of £952 billion. Actually, that isn't quite correct because that figure doesn't include the Private Finance Initiatives that Gordon and Ed(Balls) cooked up as a way of keeping almost £300 billion more of public spending off the official scorecard. ( all of which is another story in itself now that Balls has become the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.) So, we actually owe somewhere close to 1.3 trillion. A trillion is a million multiplied by another million, which anyone over the age of 50 will recognise as an old-fashioned British billion, so perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that we are now dealing with US billions rather than the real thing! So, 1.3 trillion is, actually, 1300 billion. That not only makes your eyes water, it's enough to make you want to cross your legs, too.
The point of all of this, long and meandering though it might have been, is to bring us to a discussion of the merit or otherwise of the Forestry Commission and DEFRA between them taking it upon themselves - at the Government's behest - to sell off our forests and woodlands to private investors. Actually, when I say OUR, that only applies to anyone reading this who considers themselves English rather than British. As is frequently the way in our heavily devolved Island, the woods that will be offered for sale are all in England; the Welsh and the Scots having, very wisely, decided to keep ownership of theirs in the public domain.
As justification for the sale, various estimates have been made for how much it will raise. The highest, so far, is around £300 million.
£300 million? Not even a third of a billion ( US Style) Not even 300th of a Trillion (US) or billion (old style UK)?
In modern money terms we are talking proverbial peanuts. This is the sort of money a Government department might possibly scrape together simply by digging down the back of a few couches. Yet, the very same politicians who cheerfully bandy billions around when discussing their pet projects want us to leap with joy at the prospect of raising a paltry £300 million.
£300 million won't even cover the cost of the yet-to-be-finished Olympics stadium in Stratford let alone Spurs demolishing it, building a new stadium and renovating the old Crystal palace running track for UK Athletics. I
It is less than 1/10th the amount that is being saved by scapping the Nimrod fleet. 300 lower-order Golman Sachs investment bankers could buy the whole lot simply by pooling their annual bonuses.
£300 million is sufficient to pay no more than two or three days' interest on the UK National Debt.
In other words, it is chickenfeed.
And it is for this handful of small change that the Government is prepared to sell off woodlands that belong to the whole country; without discussion, without a by your leave and, apparently, without a toss for what the rest of us think.
They have placed a monetary value on the land itself without a thought for its amenity value - which in the crowded place that England has become, is almost priceless.
It does not augur well for the Big Society of Cameron's PR man's dreams.
More to the point, as I have said before, when the sell-off process begins and our interests are being represented by politicians the corporate boys will take them to the same old cleaners and we, the great English Public, will find ourselves short-changed once again.
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