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Ask most Americans what the absolute worst way to travel is and they’ll tell you the Greyhound Bus. One step up from the bus, apparently, is the train. “Scum of the earth take that train” I was told… by an actual Amtrak employee. On an actual train. My apprehension about the coming journey was getting worse. Every American I’d mentioned the epic train journey to had been relentlessly negative about it. Everyone, apparently, flies. Trains are for scum. End of story.

Nevertheless, competing with the negativity and that advice was that of Michael Palin on Radio 4 who probably had no idea that people were going to make life-changing decisions based on his advice to “travel slowly” and to avoid planes where possible. Travel slowly, he says, and make the travelling as much the point as the destination.

How slow is slow, though? Well, New York to San Francisco is a 3,500 mile journey that takes 4 days using two trains, the Lake Shore Ltd to Chicago then the California Zephyr to San Francisco. It goes through: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island [Those are the Acela Express, Boston to New York, not the Lakeshore Ltd.. did that 4 days earlier.. whoops], New York, Pennsylvania,  Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and finally California. It is astonishingly long.

Turns out the Americans were wrong about this journey. It’s sort of redefined the words ‘spectacular’ and ‘epic’ in my brain… apart from the Day Of Corn which involved waking up in the corn fields of Ohio and going to sleep in the corn fields of Iowa and seeing very little else all day.. okay most of the day involved hanging out in Chicago Union Station, but it’s hard not to be someone stunned by the scale of the corn growing operations they have in the USA. There’s a day of it. A day.

The next day, however, waking up in Denver and then making our way through the most literally breathtaking landscape I’ve ever seen – first the Colorado Rockies then watching the sun go down on the monumentally epic mountains in Utah… I don’t know how I’m going to ever be content with Yorkshire now. Damn. The day after the train goes through the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s goo goo time, your brain is gone. That’s it.

America… it turns out… is a truly beautiful country. The magnificence of the scenery is then added to by the sheer audacity, courage and engineering-fu to build a train line all the way through it, not to mention everything else they’ve done to this continent.

I’m a bit stunned. In awe, really. San Francisco awaits outside but it’s all a bit too much.

What’s devastating, however, is that most Americans will never have this experience. They hate the train. They’ll fly, or maybe drive instead.. and they just won’t see their own country this way. They really, really, really don’t know what they’re missing. Far from sharing the train with ‘scum’ I found really pleasant, friendly people wanting the same kind of experience, sharing my own lack of comprehension at the gap between the perception and reality of these rather immense train journeys.

I’m glad I’m the kind of soppy loser tourist that can get some sort of quasi-spiritual experience from a journey of this kind. I gave up smoking so that this journey wouldn’t be ruined by waiting for the next smoking stop (few and far between) rather than living in the moment. Best. Decision. Ever.

Still, to get off a train 4 days after getting on feeling like it all went by far too quickly is not what I expected at all. Colorado… we’ll meet again, you and I, mark my words.

Apologies for the lack of blogging and continued off-topic stuff. Things will be back to normal soon.

The curious phenomenon of radioactively white and uncanny valley-esque perfect teeth in America continues to disturb, but one image has stuck in my head for two weeks. I can’t get it out of my head.

I wish I could remember his name – I have attempted to find it today but have given it up as a needle finding exercise for the League of Non-Guild Aligned Haystack Workers Union. Sod that.

However, the man’s face? That’s burned into my mind forever. He was a Democratic Party candidate for some southern state – that’s how he ended up on MSNBC anyway – and he had conspicuously man-made looking teeth. They were brilliant white, as if determined to bleach the viewer’s retinas with their fluorescent glow. His skin was orange and his hair suitably quaffed. He’s not the only one with such teeth and hair, but he’s certainly the only one that’s seemingly so proud of his teeth that his lips are permanently twisted into a grimace that, if nothing else, displays these teeth. Clearly he’s very proud of these new teeth and believes that it’s very important to his future career that people see them.

Hmm.

I wonder what the point of all this is, what the cultural significance of this display is, and what the connection between cosmetic dentistry and political ability might be. Then again, I’ve got his hideous face burned into my brain.. so perhaps mission accomplished as far as that politician is concerned. Perhaps this lesson is to terrify people with your appearance, so as to make sure they never, ever forget you.

The tyranny of pedestrian restrictions is getting me down. Sure you get pedestrian crossings absolutely everywhere – they’re on the end of every single road, mocking you, laughing at you – but the down side is that you HAVE to use them.

They really don’t like you just crossing a road because it happens to be safe. In fact it’s a crime. It’s called Jay Walking and it’s one of those crimes that exists purely because some utter arsehat decided that FromNowOnPedestriansWillDoThisOrElse and that’s pretty much all there is to it. No wonder people drive everywhere.

However, the sinister nature of tyrannical pedestrianism is nothing compared with the eerie phenomenon that is People Actually Pressing The Stop Button On Buses And Waiting For The Bus To Stop Before Standing Up.

I mean, for reals? Apparently so. People round here are strangely well behaved, following rules and regulations of which public life seems strangely full of. There’s precious few smokers (speaking of which, I’m not one of them) and…. there’s no teenagers. Or, at least, they’re impossible to spot because they’re indistinguishable from children or adults, or hiding in a special death camp of some kind.  I can’t tell you how bloody nice it is.

I’m missing pies, decent beer, Tea and my stuff and life…. mostly I’m missing proper broadband though. Oh, I miss my car… I really really miss my shitty hairdresser’s car. I even miss Enemy Cat, the fat bloated feline menace belonging to a neighbour that believes my car is some sort of cool hangout party place for cats. No, wait, I don’t miss Enemy Cat. I miss squirting Enemy Cat with the Super Soaker, the little shit.

What I’m not missing is the yobbery and the palpable air of menace that I normally have from home. I hate to say it but it’s just possible that there’s something not quite right with the UK, that it’s… actually… you know, a bit more horrible than it actually should be? Maybe? Or maybe Boston’s just weird and just happens to be a really nice place to live… stranger things, etc.

Sorry, did I say nice? I meant nice except for the pedestrian crossing tyranny, obviously. Bastards.

My favourite Labour supporting blogger, Sunny Hundal (left), has decided to join the Labour Party for a number of reasons that, I’m sure, make perfect sense to him in his own head. If you’re interested, his profoundly unmoving post on the subject is here.

This appears to have tickled my interest: Why would anyone want to join a political party?

I left the Liberal Democrats at the beginning of this year and all I really appear to have lost is the ability to not win Lib Dem Voice’s Blog of the Year award, or feature in Iain Dale’s list of Lib Dem blogs… boo hoo! Party membership (well, of Labour or the Conservatives) does have advantages for political bloggers who want attention. Perhaps Sunny can expect more appearances on the BBC as the representative of Labour’s Grassroots, which isn’t bad work if he can get it.

After all, the official job of the political blogosphere is for people to dress up in party colours and throw their own turds at each other until they each die of old age, but not before teaching this important and critically useful skill to the next generation. People want to see what the real nutters and crazies are like when they’re not media trained and not watching what they say. Every post is a mini, magical car crash and we’re all ghoulishly waiting for the next one.

Sunny can now join this wonderful game. Good for him.

But the biggest scam people fall for when they join a party is this idea that they can ‘change it from the inside’ which is a very cute idea but is essentially very much like buying a lottery ticket in order to stimulate the economy with the millions you’ll win.

Take the Liberal Democrats, for example. Here’s a party in which members are actually able to vote on stuff and set the party policy… but wait! First you need to be a voting rep, which is a gift from the local party. If you’re one of the lucky chosen few then you’re still just one vote. Power? It’s nothing of the sort.

That, however, is the most democratic of the main parties. Labour? You don’t even get that.

The only real power anyone in Labour or affiliate organisations really has is the power to give it money, then shut up while their betters use that money to ignore them and their crazy ideas and do exactly what the marketing people tell them.

Q: At which point does the opinion of the chumps who bankroll the whole business come into “how to reach A, B and C in the most cost effective way possible?”

A: Ha. Haha. You’re funny.

No, what you’re really buying with your hard earned/easily sponged money is the ability to change from saying, “they” to “we” and suddenly have your opinion discounted by the ‘not we’ as party political nonsense that isn’t worth a damn.

Joy!

But, all joking and cynicism aside… gosh darn it, knowing all the good that the Party will accomplish with that £10 you paid to join brings a warm fuzzy glow to your heart, doesn’t it?

It’s a lazy Sunday here. Local time is half eleven in the morning. Back home it’s half four. The sky is blue and the temperature outside is… warm.

Have adjusted to life without a kettle and taken up filter coffee as my main beverage. See, in the local supermarket there’s only a small selection of instant coffee – no freeze dried instant coffee at all – and just two types of tea. Pretty obvious why, in hindsight, if boiling water takes a minimum of four minutes in the Microwave.

So here’s an example of how something as simple as the Mains electrical system – 110 volts AC instead of 240 volts AC (apparently this stops there being enough juice for British style kettles) has caused an entirely different beverage culture out here. Here filter coffee is the easiest and quickest thing there is, creating a huge market for filters, coffee beans and ground coffee and destroying the market for tea and instant coffee. No kettles, no tea.

Cause and effect, you see.

With that in mind I notice this curious story about the Governor of Massachusetts, one Deval Patrick. He’s a Democrat, if that sort of thing matters to you, and he’s just signed an anti-foreclosure bill (or anti-repossession for Brits!) which will mean, in effect, a delay of around a year between someone stopping paying and someone losing their house. It’s called “An Act To Stabilise Neighborhoods“, and it is intended that it will help individuals and communities stay together. It’s the only bill like it in America, apparently.

Critics and cynics, and I have to say this includes me, suspect that the knock on effect of this particular Act will be to make getting a mortgage in Massachusetts more difficult than it currently is. People already in their homes, whether they can afford them or not, will get to stay – at least for another year – and those who are stuck on the sidelines waiting to get their own home? Well, they’re going to stay stuck.

Says a lot that the rights of people in a house that they’re not actually paying for count for more than the rights of a company that lent them the money to live in that house in the first place, but hey, I’m a ruthless evil Capitalist so perhaps I’m missing something here, but isn’t this the sort of thing you expect from old Communistic Europe, not the brave new world of the United States?

Ho hum. Your strangely baffled and bemused correspondent, signing off…

Okay so, yes, in America at the moment. Boston, actually.

Getting into America required filling in a special form on the interwebs, then after I’d arrived in Boston I was photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and yelled at. I was searched in Dublin but, good news, dodged the bullet of going through the electronic strip search in Manchester.

Last night I caught a special screening of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Edgar Wright, the director, was there… along with some of the cast which was nice. Suspect the film has a younger demographic in mind than Edgar’s previous films “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” and the use of the vocabulary of Nintendo games to tell a story in film form will leave many baffled… but for those that ‘get it’ this film seems to hit the spot.

America is fascinating so far, although I appreciate I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. First things first though… there’s no kettle in this hotel room. I mean, seriously? A coffee filter machine but no kettle? Even the dirtiest, nastiest, most cheapo hotel in Britain will provide you with a kettle – it may kill you, of course, but you’ll get a kettle. Here? No kettle.

It’s the little things that really freak you out.

Pandas.

They eat bamboo. They struggle to breed. The two things aren’t entirely unrelated – bamboo, it turns out, isn’t really what Pandas should be eating. They can only digest something like 10% of the bamboo which means they need to eat non-stop, all day, every day, just to basically feel completely knackered and hungry.

Why do they do it? Well bamboo is basically like a drug, and all baby Pandas are born with… I guess fetal bamboo syndrome or something.

Poor Pandas. Yet, crucially, there’s nothing anyone can do. You can’t reason with a Panda. You can’t explain that bamboo might give Mr and Mrs Panda a proper bangin’ buzz but isn’t really very healthy because Pandas have no ability to comprehend any human form of communication.

No, they’re just going to keep wanting nothing but bamboo. Forever and ever. Even if it kills them… which it seems like it will.

However, it does offer a handy new version of the cliche, “Yeah? Then I’m a monkey’s uncle” which, amusingly, is “Yeah? Then I’m a Randy Panda.”

Use at your own risk.

Is this thing on?

Guess who said this:

“This is not about trying to save money. This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Say hello to the ill-considered world of one Mr David Cameron, who’s got what he believes is a great idea but absolutely no idea how to sell it. The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible, horrible name for a project that seeks to make some of the buttons and levers of the State accessible to the outer party members or something. That’s got to be a good thing, right? So why is he having such difficulty winning support for the idea?

Consider: At any point normal members of the public already have the ability to get together to build or start a school already. They just raise the money and do it, and voila. There’s currently nothing stopping them. The ‘catch’ is that if people want to send their little darlings to this new school they’d have to pay themselves. The world of free money is the exclusive preserve of the State schools.

So what is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ trying to achieve?

Imagine, instead, starting your own school AND getting the Government to give it the Free Money that’ll let you send your darling children to it.

No risk. No responsibility. Monkey see, monkey take.

Makes you wonder if this really will save any money. If anything it sort of sounds a bit… expensive, doesn’t it?

“This is not about trying to save money”

Ah. Right. Of course.

I’m just confused because people are attacking it (yes, really, attacking it) because it might deliver the same services for less money, which of course would be an abomination and an unspeakable horror. Those ghastly Tories! IT MIGHT COST LESS! AGHH! We’re dooooooomed!

But, no, calm your boots everyone. It’ll cost us more, don’t you worry. But, if it’s not to save money, what’s the point again?

“This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Oh. That… that sucks. Really?  That’s it?

The thing about giving individuals and groups access to public money to do stuff like this is that they’re not accountable. No-one’s really going to be accountable. It gives people access to public money without having to go through the democratic process and that democratic process is supposed to protect tax payers from the monkeys that would ‘fill the world with bananas’.

The democratic process will be sidestepped but the bureaucratic process, the bit where someone, somewhere, says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ is going to be enlarged and made more complicated. Someone, somewhere, will have to take responsibility for that decision to release the funding. Who’s that going to be? What’s their salary going to be? How many of them will there be? What sort of supporting infrastructure – call centres, form processing etc – is going to be required?

This is still taxpayer’s money we’re talking about here. You can’t simply invite this ‘bigger, better’ society to spend whatever it wants from the taxpayer’s purse and then have the politicians send the ‘bigger, better’ bill… or… is that what’s going on? Is this some sort of political game to (ironically for a Coalition obsessed with localism) render local councillors even more pointless than they already are?

I don’t know about you but I’m even more confused than I was.

Going through Mandelson’s memoirs the BBC highlights that he claims Labour achieved 80% of its aims. I could agree with that, but only because it gives me an excuse to play funny buggers with the 80/20 ‘rule’ – that 20% of the effort will get 80% of the work done, and the last 20% of work will require 80% of the effort.

In other words, if Labour’s achieved 80% of its goals in 13 years, then to get that last stubborn 20% would take another 52 years – assuming the Pareto Principle holds true.

65 years of Labour. Yikes.

Of course, this assumes that all problems are a simple question of time and money and that there are never any new problems created by devoting said time and money, and that there’s never any unintended consequences arising from solving said problems.

Nope, I think even with another 100 years Labour wouldn’t get that last 20%. There’s no ‘with just a bit more time it would have all been perfect’ here. They had a super majority, unbelievable public support until the Iraq War, a boom and seemingly infinite money coming from tax revenues. If something went wrong, who can they really blame?

Apart from being able to name all the James Bond movies, one party piece reserved for very special occasions is doing Evil Third Person Creep. This is where you invert the lyrics of the Radiohead song, “Creep.” You probably worked that out already. Fair enough, moving on.

The same message said by the object of the “creep’s” affection takes on a whole new rather sinister complexion, and as a result I’ve been doing this on a Guitar or Ukelele for a few years now.

Here’s those alternative lyrics:

When you here before,
Couldn’t look me in the eye.
I’m just like an angel,
My skin makes you cry.

I float like a feather,
In a beautiful world
You wish you were special
I’m so fuckin’ special

But you’re a creep
You’re a weirdo
What the hell are you doin’ here?
You don’t belong here.

You don’t care if it hurts,
You wanna have control,
You wanna perfect body,
You wanna perfect soul

You want me to notice,
when you’re not around,
I’m so fucking special.
You wish you were special.

But you’re a creep.
You’re a weirdo.
What the hell are you doing here?
You don’t belong here.

*shudder*

Yesterday I found myself mightily amused by Smoker Logic. Smoker Logic is brilliant, and is something any smoker will recognise: When Smoker Logic is applied to any problem, the solution is always, “have a smoke”. No matter what the problem is. No. Matter. What.

For example, the other day I mentioned that paying less tax was a benefit of giving up. Ah, begins Smoker Logic. But they’re putting up taxes on cigarettes to get you to stop. THEREFORE you should keep smoking. In fact, have a smoke right now! As a fuck you, like! Cos they want you to stop! Fuck them! The only way to win is to pay the tax no matter what! They HATE it when you pay more tax!

Yeah. Sure. Truth is packing in cigarettes is the single greatest perfectly legal tax avoidance scheme known to man. No expensive accountants required and you don’t even need to leave the country.

Of course if it were that simple Governments wouldn’t be able to tax tobacco in the way that they do. Smoker Logic says, “Have a smoke” as the solution to every problem, including the problem of how to give up smoking. Giving up smoking? Simple: have a smoke! Magic!

Smoking’s addictive, which people imagine means that it’s like Pong or Pac Man or Tetris or buying shoes or chocolate. You know… a bit moreish. Not really. In this context, “addictive” means that your brain gets rewired into believing that the substance you’re addicted to is AWESOME and you MUST continue FOREVER because its AWESOME. It’s not your conscious mind that gets reprogrammed though. Your conscious mind knows exactly what’s going on. Problem is people listen to their subconscious first, without even realising they’re doing it.

Needless to say I’m currently engaged in a battle with my half-witted subconscious, although this time I’m winning, which is why I’ve not had a smoke since Monday evening. “No, you moron,” says I to my subconscious. “You know NOTHING. You’re an instinct based want->get->reward->want reaction machine and I’m not fucking listening to you. Whinge all you want. Cry all you want. I don’t care. ”

That’s basically it. Every time I feel like smoking I explain the situation to myself all over again, that I’m in that battle between my subconscious and conscious mind and that with time my subconscious will get bored and start worrying about something else and I will basically be a lot richer, healthier and less of a drug addict than I was this time last week. I just need, for a very short while, to apply reason ahead of bellyfeel. Double plus good!

So this time I’m going to win. This is one of the few areas of my life where I can choose to be a slave, or I can choose to be free. Just like in the real world, choosing freedom often means things get worse before they get better, but things do get better.

So, if you want a super evil libertarian way of giving up smoking, do this: Imagine your smoking addiction as welfare spongers and cigarettes the welfare. If you cut off the ‘spongers’ from the ‘welfare’ they’re going to give you grief for ages, but, eventually, they’ll ‘get jobs’ and they won’t need ‘welfare’ anymore.

Yep. Can’t lose.

Politics is the practice of never saying no to any request for free stuff from voters, and the art of obscuring who really pays for it.

I almost feel sorry for wannabe politicians that think that just governing responsibly might somehow be an attractive alternative to this most basic rule of modern politics. Cut the deficit? Forget it. Just spend the money. Spend, spend spend until you’re physically stopped, then blame the person who stops you. You’ll look like a saintly altruist who wanted to cure the world of all ills.

That’s how you really win in politics… or, at least, that’s how you win over the crowd on the BBC’s Question Time. He Who Promises To Spend The Most Money Without Explaining Where The Money Is COming From… wins.

Gah. Sick of this.

In case you missed it, I’ve got a Doctor Who related piece on the Spectator’s Arts Blog “Touching from a Distance”.

Sorry about the lack of blogging this week. Have been working – got to eat!

Party Politics: Where truth goes to die. It often astonishes me how slippery politicians can be. Clearly I’ve not been paying enough attention lately. In the interests of feigning interest, I watched Prime Minister’s Questions today.

Yes, I know, I deserve everything I get.

Today Harriet Harman wanted to tell the world that the Coalition will put 1.3 million people out of work. Cameron responded by saying that the independent Office of Budget Responsibility has confirmed that they expect unemployment to fall, that more people will be employed by the end of the year than were employed at the start. He didn’t deny it though, which made me wonder what was really going on.

Round and round they went, with Harman complaining about the 1.3 of job losses and Cameron talking about the extra jobs.

It turns out, of course, that these 1.3 million jobs Harman is referring to are as follows:

Assuming the Coalition changed nothing in the Budget, and assuming the previous Government’s own predictions about the effectiveness of its plans were 100% accurate, and we didn’t actually need to take into account the unemployment and disaster that would be caused by having to go to the IMF for a bailout or worry about the consequences of unrestrained borrowing, and if the sun shines just right on exactly the right point on the tip of the Red Flag flying over Labour HQ then maybe, must maybe, there might be 1.3 million MORE new jobs by the end of this year (UPDATE: Ha! It’s not even that! It’s by the end of the parliament! It’s more slippery than I though) than there will now be. Of course, when you know you’re going into opposition it’s easy to make spending commitments you know are impossible, just to make the incoming Government look like bastards when they apply the reality stick.

And, worth noting, a huge chunk of these ‘job cuts’ are those absolute bullshit, flushing-money-down-the-toilet, making-things-worse-in-the-long-run ‘Future Jobs Fund’ temporary jobs for 18-24 year olds. Harman didn’t say anything about these 1.3 million jobs being permanent or full time.

So Labour’s still up to its old tricks, still spinning, still trying to make political capital out of anything they can get their hands on. Sure it sounds rad, groovy, right on and seems to care passionately about ‘the people’ but it’s all statistical bollocks based on fantasy budgets they never, in million years, expected to implement.

Well, that’s party politics, innit?

Nubcake

1. noun: Pejorative; A person of so little skill as to inspire mockery in others

England lose horribly. It’s a massacre. Disappointment turns to laughter. Got to love those Germans – they looked like they were having fun.

I’ll leave the final word to an Anonymous English Football Player:

Yeah, I’m well gutted about leaving South Africa and going back to my fit wife, fast sports cars, big screen telly and loafing around having a laugh until training for the next season begins. Absolutely gutted.

Of all the fall-out from the Coalition’s budget, it’s the culture it’s exposed that’s most interested me.

We’ve not seen it for a while, mostly because Labour didn’t cut anything anyone noticed which is how we ended up with the public financies in such a state in the first place. It’s where people seem to have an expectation that any cash or employment they get from the Government is somehow – or should be – guaranteed for life, forever, no matter what.

This belief seems to colour their reaction to everything. There’s no “well, it was good while it lasted, but time to move on.” The relationship is far more like that between a child and a parent: “You don’t love me anymore! You’re supposed to take care of me! Waaa!”

It’s a bit unsettling really. I just can’t relate to it at all. It’s like these people are from another planet. Compare and contrast that with what life is like for the private sector: Jobs exist so long as the company is solvent and has work for the employees to do. Orders and sales happen only if their customers need those products and services – nothing is ever certain, nothing is ever absolute. For me, that’s what makes life bearable – that the future is entirely unpredictable and full of surprises.

I like surprises.

Sadly for many people this doesn’t inspire the same “let’s ‘ave it!” attitude towards life that it does with me.

They don’t seem to get the same buzz of adrenaline from uncertainty and change – instead it makes them miserable and depressed, pessimistic and concerned more about what they’re going to lose than what they might gain in the long run.

They don’t relish the opportunity to try new things or explore different avenues – perhaps a lack of confidence in their ability  to adapt and learn new skills, or worst of all the mindset where people refuse to accept that their skills are “superflous to requirements”, that giving up and trying something else even if it makes things worse before it makes things better, is the only hope they have. Instead they wait for the world to change back to how it was… and it never does.

As an example from my own life, I invested a lot of time and effort in becoming a bit of a Javascript Ninja. I could (and still can) make extremely advanced and graphically awesome User Interface widgets for websites. What I discovered is that however worthy this skill might be, there’s no bloody market for it. No-one needs it, it adds nothing but ‘bling’ to a website, no-one’s willing to pay for it, so basically I’ve given up even trying to sell it. It turns out what is in demand are people with WordPress expertise, who can write plugins and customise themes to a professional standard. So, hey, I moved into that instead.

And, in a nutshell, that’s all markets really are. What’s to be afraid of? What’s wrong with it? Should I be entitled to claim unemployment benefit simply because no-one wants a Javascript ninja? Of course not! I do the work that needs doing, and if I don’t know how I learn.

Thinking about it I suspect that it is this illusion of security and insulation from what people in the private sector go through that attracts people to Government solutions to problems in the first place. To me it feels like they want the world to stop altogether, to crush the variables out of existence so that all that’s left is drudgery and waiting to die.

But, as this last budget has demonstrated, the truth is that people cannot and should not rely on the Government. Governments change. Attitudes change. The public financies change, too. You’ve got to keep the Golden Goose alive if you want to keep stealing the eggs, and right now that Goose is on its last legs.

To quote my all time favourite song lyric ever: “Life is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it.”

Due to problems with the box that this site runs on, I’m having to move it to a new box. I hope this will fix some of the problems people have noticed lately.

Until it’s all completed I can’t add new content, and for some people it may mean the site is down for up to 24 hours due to delays that can happen when you point a domain name to somewhere new.

That’s it! Budget analysis will have to wait, but needless to say I’m not impressed with the VAT increase. I’ll still be Twittering – I’m on there as @charlottegore.

So I got directed to a post on Left Foot Forward, which describes itself as “Evidence Based Blogging” to much hilarity from many commentators. The first thing I saw grabbed my attention:

Cuts of £290 million from the Future Jobs Fund, which provides paid employment for unemployed young people. The cut will mean a loss of 94,000 jobs for 18-24 year olds facing long-term unemployment.

I decided to go look at what the FJF was all about. Turns out the Government pays organisations minimum wage for apprentices (£95 a week) so that people who’ve been unemployed for 12 months who are between 18-25 years old can get a temporary job. Organisations that want a ‘free’ employee have to ‘bid’ to the Government. They don’t offer cash. Instead they make a promise about how great it’ll be for the people they take on.

The Government has decided to cut this program, describing it as ‘ineffective’. Existing commitments will be honoured but no further ‘bids’ will be taken. Left Foot Forward describes this as ‘cutting 94,000′ jobs.

I looked at who’d been winning the bids and mostly they’re quangos, charities, councils and other NGOs. In other words, it’s proven to be a very effective way for the public sector to boost their numbers without requiring additional funding. The private sector, by contrast, has shown little interest.

The costs associated with employing someone are not limited to just wages. There’s training, mentoring, software licences, uniforms, desks, chairs, equipment and everything else. For a private sector company with workers already sitting idle, this scheme is simply a drain on resources.

But what about for the people who get these temporary jobs? How does it work out for them?

I followed the ’94,000 jobs’ link and found this:

Evidence tells us that this type of demand-led labour market scheme is the most effective means to prevent long-term unemployment when vacancies are limited.

That’s quite a bold statement! So I followed the ‘evidence’ link to find out where it’s supported and found it linked to… well… Left Foot Forward again, where they write:

There is a strong evidence base to show that the Future Jobs Fund model is the best available to prevent long-term worklessness and unemployment setting in – participants in job guarantee schemes have a better chance of moving into future work.

Crikey. Getting pissed off now. But, finally, this link leads to a PDF, a report written by Professor Paul Gregg, who was New Labour’s Go To Professor for academic support for welfare reform. The report itself, rather than being an out and out academic support of the arguments put forward by the ‘Evidence Based Bloggers’, is actually rather nuanced.

In fact it begins by pointing out that across the world virtually every single attempt by Governments to pay organisations to take people on for the sheer hell of it are NOT effective, that they do not materially impact long term unemployment and worse still they actually cause people to remain on benefits longer and reduce or stop job seeking activities.

It continues, attempting to understand these failures and then reframes the debate in terms of ‘well, if you HAVE to have a scheme like this, what version of it might have the best chance of success, or, at least, the minimum chance of not making things worse?’

I quote the conclusion of the report:

The evidence base present here suggests that increasing the focus on employer engagement, job search and search support will improve the chances of success for this programme…. But will it out perform the Flexible New Deal, which only has job search and support elements? This is not easy to answer definitively but, as shown with intelligent design around securing the next step into work, there is a reasonable chance.

Ignoring the rather weasel worded references to ‘chance’ – in academic terms almost entirely fluffy, useless language that tells us nothing other than, “dunno. My guess is… maybe”. Not exactly the devastating ‘evidence’ that I was looking for, truth being told.
So in other words, when Left Foot Forward say,

Evidence tells us that this type of demand-led labour market scheme is the most effective means to prevent long-term unemployment when vacancies are limited.

They are being deceptive or wrong. The evidence does NOT say that. When they say,

There is a strong evidence base to show that the Future Jobs Fund model is the best available to prevent long-term worklessness and unemployment setting in

… they’re neglecting to mention that ‘best available’ is only by comparison to every other project of this type which, historically, have caused more harm and damage than they’ve solved. That, again, is somewhat deceptive. The ‘evidence’ they’ve linked to does not support their argument at all.
Then again, anyone especially surprised?

Okay I’ve spent the last few hours collecting screenshots and transcribing dialogue from the series so far in order to highlight the big unanswered questions and the clues about what might happen in the next episode. It contains spoilers for most of the series, but only speculation about the Finale. Be warned!

If you’re interested, the post is hidden behind SpoilerVision™ again.

Yes, I’m interested, please show me the full post. That would be lovely.