Choose your Strawberry Seller carefully.

In the market yesterday I bought four 400g punnets of strawberries for a total of £2-00 - I plan to make jam. A little later I noticed that Sainsbury had a special offer - 400g punnets of strawberries reduced from £3-99 to £1-99, so still almost four times as expensive as those in the market.

Hidden Numbers

I recently bought a new washing machine. When I decided to activate the manufacturer's five year parts guarantee I needed the serial number, which is hidden away on the back of the machine, and so accessible only with great effort.

That reminded me of the time I needed a spare part for my cooker, and found that the model number and serial number, while on the front, were at the very bottom, so the only way I could read them was to lie flat on the kitchen floor and peer through a magnifying glass.

Does anyone check such things before equipment is put on sale ?

Keynes as Prophet

It is strange that people should still cite Keynes as an authority, 65 years after his death and 74 years after the publication of his General Theory.

Indeed, to anyone who considers Economics to be some sort of science, it should seem odd that its practitioners need to appeal to any prophet at all.

Scientific theories rest on their ability to survive  tests and provide a coherent account of phenomena. There is a dynamic interplay between theory and experience. We need not look back at observations made seventy years ago, because a useful theory will be used and tested all the time.

Recent appeals to Keynes supposed authority have not even been accurate.

Keynes famously advocated government deficits as a remedy for economic recessions, and opposed attempts to balance budgets during the recession of the 1930’s. He has recently been cited by people who oppose a reduction in our budget deficit. Yet there is this time no proposal to balance the budget.

The appeal of Keynes is his support for wishful thinking. Reduction in government expenditure and increases in taxes are disagreeable, so it is pleasant to have an ideology that tells us we needn’t bother. People who are usually hostile to what they call laissez faire seem willing to make an exception for the belief that the budget deficit will sort itself out without our doing much about it.

Demonstrations and Riots

The difference is of degree rather than kind, and it is easy for one to turn into the other.

There is something odd about a crowd of supposedly peaceful people marching on a line of soldiers or police. Do they really expect to be allowed through, do they intend to fight their way through, or are they just pretending ?

I have reservations about applying ‘peaceful’ to any large gathering of people that blocks streets or obstructs access to public buildings. Even if no force is actually used, force is implicit in such demonstrations, because such demonstrators are creating a physical obstacle to other people’s access.

Such demonstrations are justifiable only as part of an attempt to remove the government, or to change government policy, by non constitutional means. That is only justifiable if there are no constitutional means for achieving the same ends because the government is a tyranny.

Police and troops defending a constitutional government against coercion by a large group of people are justified in firing, whether or not members of the crowd fire first.

Soldiers defending a tyranny are likely to fire, because that is what the servants of  tyrannies do.

In neither case is it sensible to be shocked or outraged by the event. It is indeed reasonable to be outraged by the existence of a tyranny, but having recognised it for what it is, there seems little room for further indignation because it behaves as we should expect.

Those observations were prompted by the recent discussion of the so called ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of 1972.

It appears that soldiers fired without being given orders to do so. That is a serious failure of discipline. The deaths seem to have been counter productive, that is a good reason for the soldiers having not been ordered to fire. Therefore the soldiers should not have fired. However that does not show that those who died were innocent victims. The good reason for not shooting them is that their deaths were very inconvenient. The fuss and bother on the part of friends and families is quite unjustified.

Isaac Newton Apples at last

My Isaac Newton tree, a specially grafted clone of the tree that grew in the garden of Woolsthorpe Rectory in Newton's day, has at last set fruit.

I've had the tree for at least 15 years and it didn't flower at all until two years ago, and then only sparsely, but this year there were lots of flowers, and today I spotted several tiny apples.

Incidentally the variety is Flower of Kent, though I think the only ones grown are the clones of the Woolsthorpe tree.

Economies in Education

I’m sorry the government has, as they put it, ‘ring fenced’ expenditure on schools, because there is a great deal of waste there. The waste is trying to teach bored and inattentive children, whose disruptive behaviour impedes the learning of others.

As a remedy I propose lowering the school leaving age to 13. By that age most children have learnt to read and write, and any who haven’t could be sent to special remedial literacy classes, with the incentive of being allowed to leave school only when they reach some minimum standard.

I do not believe many children would leave school at 13; the principal benefit of their departure would be an improvement in the achievements of those still at school.

Child benefit should not be paid for early leavers who would therefore need an occupation. I suggest domestic service. Food, clothes, accommodation and a little pocket money would be sufficient remuneration. To keep them out of mischief they could work long hours. I propose legislation to abolish the minimum wage and to set a maximum working week (for children) of 65 hours, which would allow a 10 hour day with one half day off per week. By the end of a day’s work they should be too tired to do much more than watch an hour of television before staggering off to bed.

Pricing a Duchess

The recent attempt by the Duchess of York to sell access to her former husband made me wish she’d left the Duke out of it and just sold herself.

True, the physical attributes that once captivated a young prince are no longer what they were, but I imagine she is still not entirely unattractive to those who like that sort of thing.

The considerably less youthful Patricia Hewitt recently put herself on the market at £3000 per day on the strength of being a Privy Councillor. A duchess should be able to beat that, even if her customers  only pay for the pleasure of boasting about it afterwards.

A Public Spirited Proposal

A substantial proportion of Government expenditure consists in paying unfunded index linked pensions to retired employees of central and local government.

As a recipient of such a pension I sometimes feel just a little guilty.

I therefore propose a 10% cut in all such pensions, accompanied by a doubling of the pension contributions paid by all working in jobs that entitle them to such pensions.

A new way of making money.

I've just noticed a story about people being paid to give up smoking.

What are the chances of my being paid for not taking up smoking ?

Electoral Statistics

The first General Election in my lifetime was in 1945. I was nearly seven years old at the time and so remember it well, though at the time I didn’t understand many of the details.

I remember being told that our bit of Leicester was part of the Melton constituency and that our MP was Anthony Nutting. I also remember that Winston Churchill, at the time considered that national saviour, was defeated as Prime Minister in favour of someone I‘d never heard of, but that Churchill was still a member of Parliament.

I later discovered that 1945 was a spectacular defeat for the Conservatives, who received only 39.7% of the total vote. A humiliation indeed !!

In the recent General Election the Conservatives won, or at least came nearer to winning than anyone else. They received 36.2 % of the total vote, so they’ve lost another 3.5% in the 65 years since 1945, yet they still seem to feel hard done by because they have no overall majority in the Commons. That is because they compare this election with the last, in which 35.3% of the vote gave Labour a working majority.

Funny things, British General Elections.

(I’ve taken percentages from the BBC web site. Wikipedia gives different figures but their percentages for 1945 don’t add up to 100. I wonder if they have a well paid vacancy for a statistical consultant ?)

Ugly Agitators

From time to time one comes upon groups of people waving placards in the street, shouting slogans, distributing leaflets, or manning little stalls selling propaganda. It has often struck me how ugly they are.

It's partly the expressions on their faces, angry scowls and staring eyes that look as if they could never twinkle, but it's more than that.

Their faces would be ugly whatever expression they assumed. If they tried to smile, all they'd be able to manage would be a rictus grin.

Perhaps evolutionary psychologists will offer an explanation one day, but whatever the explanation, the noisily self righteous are an ugly lot.

Still Bored by Dr. Who

I hoped this year's Dr. Who might be better than the last round, but not so

Instead of a mystery building up slowly and being unravelled step by step, we are told who the enemies are at the beginning, and most of the rest is fighting.

I may not watch any more.