I watched “CODA” last night well before the Awards ceremony and thought that it was wonderful. It is not a star vehicle and all the better for that. But some stars were made, not least Emilia Jones who was stunning. In our cynical age the movie was just what we needed. No special effects, no posturing prima donnas no “Me, Me, Me” – an absolute lack of phoniness.
I believed “CODA” because it was utterly uncontrived. It was as if I had wandered into that New England fishing village and was watching real life in a real community. But this is not just sentiment – the underlying issues in the story were real and tough. How we deal with disability individually and collectively the main one. And how we deal with differences – of ability, of gender, of needs. This was a small canvas but a very rich one full of colour.
Over the years the French have done emotion well with cinema vérité and despite the setting this is a very French film. The central character Ruby had echoes of Amelie and even Betty Blue and many other ingénues in French cinema. I didn’t feel that the movie was much about modern America – the brief reference to Donald Trump was little more than a signal of time. This is actually a timeless story and whilst mobile phones and text messages occasionally intrude we could have been in the 1950s.
Obviously our opinions of art are subjective but the Oscar process reduces that subjectivity by aggregating the choices of Academy members. For me “CODA” is an instant classic. I’m delighted that it won best film because that will bring more people to it.
There is a conflation in Matthew Syed’s piece in the Sunday Times today between “democracy” and “freedom of speech”. They are, however, not the same thing. Freedom of Speech is a necessary condition for a society or state to be democratic, but only part of it.
Back in the 1980s I lived in colonial Hong Kong. It was a benevolent dictatorship in which freedom of speech was present to a high degree but it was no democracy !
Choosing who leads us is another condition for a democracy – proper elections. Does Britain pass this test ? Much less well than other European countries because of our electoral system. For many of us our votes simply don’t count because of First Past the Post.
Then there is our choice of who is our head of State. Again Britain fails the test of freedom of choice. A constitutional monarchy is a democratic cop out. Surely a Head of State should be free to comment on important issues of the day and not be chosen by privilege of birth.
Public Services are vital to a nation’s wellbeing. But should the provision of them be primarily driven by private companies’ profit motives? The P&O Ferries debacle gives us the answer. It’s not alone – if you doubt that check your next gas or electricity bill. The postcode lotteries on healthcare and education favour the better off over the less well off. Is that democratic ?
What is the ideal mix of societal norms is subjective and freedom is certainly in that mix. And yet the astonishing Freedom to live, work and love across 27 European countries was taken away from us with no effective opposition. There were protests, but they got nowhere.
The defence of democracy rhetoric is common to those who have scant regard for it. The Home Secretary said “The freedom to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy. But it doesn’t give anyone the right to criminally vandalise private property or stop the hardworking majority going about their daily life.” The missing element in Ms Patel’s statement is in a democracy who decides? She clearly believes that she does.
I want to be able to stand on my digital soapboxes and say what I like. My views are sometimes censored or removed by the guardians of the medium, especially Times Newspapers! And even Twitter has banned comments from, for example, the outspoken but eminently decent Carol Hedges! Who decides ?
Ricky Gervais as Boris Johnson in “It couldn’t happen here surely ?”
The premise is far-fetched but Prime Minister “Call me Dave” Cameron finds himself under pressure from the Tory Right, combined with a maverick xenophobe called Farage, to call a Referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Cameron, brilliantly played by an urbane Roger Allam, takes soundings in the pro Europe establishment and is assured that he will win. Meanwhile Farage (impersonated by Hugh Jackman) gets financial backing from sources as diverse as Arron Banks (James Corden) and Vladimir Putin (Kevin Spacey) and actually wins an EU election.
Cameron panics, loses the Referendum and after a few false starts opens the door for Boris Johnson, played by Ricky Gervais with echoes of David Brent, who improbably become Prime Minister. Part farce, part comedy and part pseudo documentary this is a frightening warning of what could happen if British politics went all out dystopian.
There has been a plethora of politicians on the Left calling for a “Wealth Tax” recently although none of them has explained what it means. In truth they have no idea because the matter is complex. Don’t you think that in a hundred years of modern Britain if a wealth tax was a good idea, or even possible, some Government would have tried it?
The Leader of the Opposition knows this. Starmer was asked about the clamour for taxing wealth and said this: “People who earn their money from property, dividends, stocks, shares – capital gains tax, these should all be looked at as a broader, fairer way of raising taxes.” . Of course this wasn’t a call for taxing assets at all but for taxing what they produce (basically income). We already do this of course. Your income in Britain is taxed whatever produces it, whether you work for it or not.
So let’s try and define what wealth actually is – you’ll certainly need to do this very precisely if you want to tax it ! And I’ll share with you my own portfolio in my dotage ! For some years now I’ve really only had two assets – my house and my pension. The value of the former depends on the property market – on a day to day basis the changes in value don’t bother me though at some point we might want to sell and then it would. We are not there yet.
My pension, like most people of my age from a Defined Benefit Scheme, has a value that you can calculate. Basically it’s the Discounted Cash Flow value of future pension receipts with a life expectancy assumption built it.
So my “wealth” is House value plus Pension value. You could add these together and tax it every year at (say) 5% of value. But this would be double taxation. I already pay income tax on my pension at the marginal rate, and Council Tax on my home – tax that is vaguely asset value related. Good luck with putting that in a manifesto and being elected on it !
My financial affairs are rather simple but I know many friends who have more diverse assets in their wealth build up. Stocks and shares, second homes, paintings, jewellery etc etc. The liquid assets like the equities are again already taxed by taxing the dividends they earn or the capital gains if you sell them. You could nominally tax “wealth” by increasing the tax rate on unearned income as Starmer is suggesting but in fact this is income tax by another name.
Most of the loud rhetoric about a “Wealth Tax” is done by reference to the “Fat Cats” in the “High Wealth Individual” category – the “Ultra Rich”. Let’s have a look at them (the example is from America but the same broad categories apply here):
For the individuals in the top three categories money management is highly organised. They may take a personal interest in that themselves (most do) and they can certainly employ smart people to advise them. Even with today’s tax model many of these very wealthy individuals will choose to place their money and often themselves out of the taxman’s reach offshore. Tightening up on this is possible and there are no doubt ways to do this under consideration. International cooperation is vital but post Brexit EU tax avoidance rules have no effect here. It would be a long haul.
The reality is that the modest wealth most of us have to some extent is already taxed – certainly if the asset produces income like dividends or property rentals. We can tinker with this – increase Council Tax on U.K. second homes for example. But if that leads to selling your cottage in Cornwall and buying a villa in the Algarve the taxman loses out!
The cry for a Wealth Tax is all too often driven by a wish to punish the rich rather than to significantly raise tax revenues. I personally subscribe totally to the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” – although it was Karl Marx who said this that doesn’t make me a Marxist ! Tax the rich more than the less rich and don’t tax the poor at all. And yes assets are a subset of wealth. But the vast majority of us don’t have much in the way of wealth other than, if we are lucky, a home and income/pension.
I sense the pursuit of a “Wealth Tax” is a chimera and many who cry out for it can’t or won’t think it through.
At the age of 34 (1980) I had to learn Dutch and to work in the language. I was monolingual prior to that date. It was the most difficult but most rewarding thing that I ever did. Here are the key factors:
▪️From a certain date my Dutch colleagues (all fluent in English) only spoke to me in Dutch.
▪️I lived not in an expatriate enclave but in a 100% Dutch community. Neighbours helped enormously.
▪️I took an interest in Dutch life – politics, culture, cuisine, festivals.
▪️I watched Dutch television and read a Dutch newspaper.
▪️I had a charming teacher who took me through the language not with text books but with chats and anecdotes.
Ten years ago as a Gamesmaker at London2012 I was assigned to the Dutch Olympic team. Despite the long gap I still (just) managed with the language. 😀
Another thing that unites us with Putin is having an inflated view of the importance of our nations in the modern world. Russia is a hydrocarbon rich dictatorship and little else. Regrettably it inherited obscene stocks of nuclear weapons from the USSR and is a existential threat to the world. Meanwhile Britain having lost its Empire then lost , by choice, its raison d’être as a credible state by cutting itself off politically and economically from Europe. Two Nuclear armed nations with powerful, if highly questionable, pasts trying and failing to recapture those past “glories”.
Ms Truss seems to have a golf club nineteenth hole view of the world. As shallow in knowledge and analysis as the club bore who’s just won the monthly medal. The idea of Britain as a serious player on the world stage is comical and to see Truss taking to the boards alongside the big boys and girls reminds one of Shakespeare’s genius in putting a fool alongside the important characters in his histories and tragedies. Mind you with Falstaff in Number 10 and Lady Macbeth in the Home Office La Truss may turn out to be the smartest person in the room. God help us.
Right Wing polemicist James Forsyth argues in The Times today that “If Russia paid only a small price for its assault on Ukraine, a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by force would have become significantly more likely.” It is a very forced and superficial analogy.
China is not run by a madman and unpleasant though Xi Jinping may be he has the familiar Chinese virtues of patience and pragmatism. And to all intent and purposes the Chinese and Western economies are merged as one. That is unbreakable.
Xi Jinping – he can wait
China did not retake Hong Kong by force but by negotiation. And it waited more than twenty years, and until the economic merger I refer to above was firmly in place , before tightening its grip on the ex Colony.
China today is a Western creation – we swarmed like bees around a honeypot when the People’s Republic opened up in the 1980s. And when the Chinese showed that they had no intention of becoming a liberal or democratic state (e.g. in Tiananmen Square in 1989) we ignored it and carried on swarming.
That Taiwan will one day return to the motherland, as Hong Kong did, is highly likely. But unless the West, including the Taiwanese themselves, provoke the Chinese it won’t happen in the near or even medium term. My guess is that there will be an accommodation involving the surrender of sovereignty but the continuation of most of Taiwan’s current governance structure – the Chinese know all about “One country two systems”.
Back in the 1950s Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought the consequences of the French Revolution were he answered that it was “Too early to say”. The Chinese are masters of the long term view.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia knows how to handle its huge crude oil production capacity – as a founder member of OPEC it’s been at the game a long time. The House of Saud’s principal objective is to maximise revenues and in times of world shortages, for whatever reason, it knows how to do this.
These days the KSA plays the supply game as it always did but whereas in the past its potential income streams from oil revenues were well ahead of its national expenditure today there is a balance. And America’s oil self-sufficiency (achieved especially by exploiting Shale resources) means that one once crucial customer is out of the picture.
It’s perfectly possible that a pariah state seeking friends will make some cosmetic “concession” to Boris Johnson. It won’t mean much. The British Government does not buy or sell oil, it leaves that entirely to the private sector. Oil is a perfect market and oil traders have been operating in it for a long time. If Russia was to be removed as a player permanently (very unlikely) then other producers like the KSA would benefit as they have always done at times of demand/supply imbalance. Prices would rise.
The KSA knows well the game Johnson is playing but to them the U.K. is just another market, albeit one with long trading connections as a weapons supplier. Don’t be fooled though. There won’t be any deals which mean anything – that’s not how the oil business works.
To actually use the words “Regime change” (as Matthew Parris does in The Times today) as if it is, or has ever been, a reason for military intervention is baffling. The only regime change that actually worked was the Cold War. The Soviet Union wasn’t brought down militarily (though American military expenditure, if not action, helped). The long list of failed military “regime change” initiatives – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. etc. should make us very wary of thinking that Western superior weaponry could ever do that job.
We are very close to having an authentic United States of Europe (Churchill’s nomenclature) thanks to Putin. The Germans, Swedes and even the Swiss are re-arming. The move to a European Defence Force seems unstoppable. Europe will choose to defend itself also negotiating bilateral alliances (e.g. with the US and Turkey) as NATO fades away. And for the first time Europe’s multinational defence capability will be democratically accountable (to the European Parliament).
And where will Britain be as all this happens ? Rocks and hard places spring to mind. How amusing that Putin’s determination to divide Europe (by opposing NATO enlargement and supporting Brexit for example) will actually lead to something more powerfully united across the continent. And pragmatically (if we haven’t forgotten how to be pragmatic) Britain will join in and clamber back on to the European train. Hooray.
Boris Johnson plans to go cap in hand to the House of Saud
Oil is a perfect market in which there is more than sufficient production to meet demand in the short to medium term and in which price will move to a level determined by supply and demand. Certainly the OPEC countries control supply, and therefore price on the margin. No western leader needs to go cap in hand to a producer, even a large one like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – the market will take care of that.
Oil prices have gone up because of actual or potential disruptions to Russia’s exports. Whilst this is significant it is not crucial. Other producers, especially in the Middle East, have the capacity to gear up production to cover the shortfall. But for now they are letting the situation ratchet up prices and rather enjoying putting the money in the bank.
Gas is much less flexible than oil – far from a perfect market. Europe has an extensive pipeline system and Russian supplies are important – not least for Germany. Britain is connected to this system though our still significant indigenous production combined with Norwegian supplies means that we only buy a small amount of gas from mainland Europe and none from Russia.
Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is increasingly important matching to some extent Oil in that there is a number of suppliers (though far less than oil) and procurement flexibility. Britain buys some LNG from Russia but this is easily replaceable, at a cost.
A visit by Boris Johnson to the KSA would be largely a publicity stunt. The House of Saud always acts in its own interests – they may give Johnson a few cosmetic barrels but don’t be fooled.
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 