Coming out in hives

I've come to the conclusion that the issue of honey is not just a symbolic one. I fact, it's getting seriously worrying. There is no local honey at all coming from my huge local allotments, which we live basically in the middle of, at Spa Hill. Last year, there were at least four hives producing.

The trouble is, most of what we can do about this decline is symbolic. But I've made a little oath to myself that I won't buy fake honey any more - anything blended or imported. This is difficult because my local supermarket can sell me honey from anywhere from Tasmania to South America, but it can't sell me English honey. It can't even sell me Scottish honey.

So from now on, I will only buy honey which is clearly from the UK, and preferably somewhere in particular.

Please hold me to it...

I took this up with an important looking manager in my local Sainsbury's in Crystal Palace this morning, asking him - as I usually do - where the English honey was. Long search, and - sure enough - they don't stock it.

But he did tell me that every Sainsbury's store within the M25 will soon have its own hive, and that did take me aback. It's difficult for me to say anything good about the supermarket giants, but I thought this was rather far-sighted. The next stage is to get them to have more than one, and make their own honey locally.

More jobs for bee-keepers - the human race depends on it!

When the state can't afford anything

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was wondering if civilised government was possible any more, given the markets, the phenomenon of corporate tax avoidance, and the sheer cost of public services - and suggesting another way forward to end government borrowing.

Now comes the news that the city of Maywood in California is facing such a big budget crisis that they are laying off their entire staff, including the police, and contracting it all out:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/sheriffs-dept-to-patrol-maywood-while-city-employees-now-face-lay-offs.html

They are not the only US city in this situation either. If the USA, the richest nation on earth, can no longer afford basic services, what hopes for the rest of us?

None of this is intended to suggest that savings are not possible in the UK - quite the reverse - I just don't know if we can ever reach the mythical point of balanced budgets.

Why Prince Charles was right

I know it is de rigeur among people on the Left to be terribly shocked at Prince Charles’ ‘interference’ in the Chelsea Barracks issue. I don’t see it like that.

For one thing, look who he was up against. One of the equally unelected demi-gods of architecture, some of whose projects are wonderful, and some of which are concrete modern bastilles that dehumanise us all. Then there are the developers, packed also with unelected power, riding roughshod over local opinion.

For another thing, he is right. Much of what gets erected in central London are phallic monuments to concrete and glass, the fantasies of powerful corporations and their client architects. Who is going to stand up for ordinary human beings against that kind of power?

And don’t tell me he should have waited for the planning committee to decide: planning committees are, in practice, often timorous, largely toothless affairs which are not allowed to take aesthetics into account. What are we, who believe that aesthetics are the proper concern of local people, to do?

Prince Charles may not be the perfect instrument for a democratic age, but he is no less democratic than his opponents.

The irrelevance of pain

I don't have an axe to grind in the abortion debate, except perhaps to agree with Bill Clinton (it should be legal, safe and rare). But anyone who puts human scale and human values at the heart of their politics, as I try to do, might have been as irritated as I was this morning by the interview on the Today programme.

This is the problem, I suppose, of asking scientists to rule on something when they have no philosophical training - but how, exactly is, pain relevant to the morality of abortion after 24 weeks?

Well, if abortion was painful to the foetus at that stage, that would rule it out - but not because of the pain. We don't decide really important moral issues because of the pain they do or don't cause - we go ahead with operations despite pain if it is the right thing to do. It is because, if a foetus can feel pain, then it is more evidence that it is a human being with the full rights as such.

Equally, would we put a human being to death because we could prove it would be pain free? Of course not. Because abortion is pain-free is, in itself, irrelevant to its morality.

It is pretty damn important that we insist on this principle too. Because otherwise there might be some utilitarians out there who might feel, for reasons of the greatest good, that maybe a few painless lethal injections might be a good idea.

What if modern government is unaffordable?

Heaven knows, I’m not a deficit hawk – though I have Victorian Liberal’s horror of waste, especially wasteful public expenditure that is destructive: encouragement for buying cars, subsidised air travel or supermarkets, accountants employed by NHS trusts to code each treatment or to challenge each coding for each PCT.

But I have begun to get depressed by the rhetoric of the cuts debate. Has any modern economy actually managed to balanced their budget? Do we actually need to be in deficit just to operate these days? Isn’t it time we had a proper discussion about how, in practice, we can run a civilised nation when we can apparently no longer afford it.

Of course, there are still conversations to be had about why we allow our corporations to avoid paying their share – it may be that up to a third of the world’s money is now hidden offshore. But what if modern IT makes it impossible to collect now? What if we fail?

I have struggled for years about what I thought about future policy on money creation. There are radical voices – which rarely if ever reach the mainstream – which suggest that banks should now be prevented from creating money, as they currently do, because of the corrosive effect of the interest which they demand back on 97 per cent of the money in circulation.

I don’t believe this is practical or desirable. But the National Debt is a different matter. Why should a modern nation state have to pay £80,000 a minute, as the UK currently does, on interest – when it can create that money itself free of interest?

This is the stuff of heresy of course, but what is the argument against creating it rather than borrowing it? It is that governments cannot stop themselves from borrowing too much, and that is bound to create inflation. It will not create inflation in itself, any more than allowing commercial banks to create the money will do so. It is the failure of government control that we need to beware of.

So is it really beyond our skills to devise a branch of the independent monetary committee of the Bank of England that can decide each month – as they have been doing with quantitative easing – how much they can safely create?

At least this should be part of modern debate. Because it is quite possible that civilised government, that heals and educates, may become impossible without it.

A perigrination in the catacombs

In the library of the Treasury, there is an ancient copy of one of Keynes’ pamphlets, and it has been scrawled over by Treasury officials with the words ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘insanity’.

Keynes was challenging the Treasury idea, which seems to have been in their DNA since time immemorial, that the way out of recession is to get people to save not spend. The money has to be in the banks, ready to lend.

Keynes’ view was that, in the end, this kind of puritanical retrenchment led to death – “a peregrination in the catacombs with a guttering candle”. But we don’t have to worry because that was back in the 1930s. Or do we?

A little bird told me recently that the attitude in the Treasury has reverted to type faced with the recession and deficit. Once again, the official view is that people should be encouraged to save not spend, so that the money is available for lending.

Since Keynes’ day, there are two extra problems with this, and they are not small. There are hardly any banks left, and those that survive have long since dismantled the infrastructure they need for local lending. Their attention is elsewhere. They can’t do it.

So when the Treasury persuade George Osborne to raise VAT to 20 per cent, this is the agenda: don’t spend, save. Unless he and Cable and Danny Alexander can stand up to the Treasury, and tackle this hideous and ancient mistake, I fear it may be the peregrination in the catacombs for us.

A very British blindness

Perhaps this is very curmudgeonly of me, but we seem to be slowly drowning in that dreadful version of English nationalism called The-Best-In-The-World-Syndrome (after the well-known cliché about British bobbies).

Why is it that our commentators assume that England is always set to win every World Cup, and that everything less than that is a crime for which somebody needs to be disembowelled in the tabloids? It isn’t as if we have much of a track record for the past four decades or so. Where did this strange idea emerge from that we somehow deserve to win?

Worse, this bizarre blindness probably prevents victory, because the combination of smugness and stodgy chutzpah filters through to the players.

Then there is BP. Why on earth should we let the company off the hook for its safety record and hideous pollution? Because they are British? Because it may affect our pensions? Give us a break.

In fact, isn’t this combination of arrogance and blindness precisely why we had to put up with such appalling government for the past few generations. Don’t tell me, because we are in this – and all things – the envy of the world?

Where I have some sneaking sympathy, not for BP, but for those who criticise the equally sanctimonious American politicians, is about who we should blame for oil gushing all over the Caribbean. A nation which has consistently failed to release itself from such a dangerous addiction to oil really has to take some of the blame. Why else are BP drilling into the ocean floor at increasing depths?