I mentioned a while back that I was seeking to rinse cash on nice things which would boost the economy. After I wrote that post I thought that, once I had found nice things to rinse cash on, I would write up all my “investments”. Readers will appreciate the lengths I go to to keep them entertained…

So, on Saturday I wandered up to Oxford Street. I have been on the lookout for a new suit to replace my wonderful but now ageing Primark number. Not many people make suits whose trousers can go in the washing machine. I don’t know why. Do most people get their trousers dry cleaned every week? They are madmen if they do. Machine washable is essential for a man about town like myself. So down Oxford Street I marched, heading West from Oxford Circus. It wasn’t until I got to M&S at Marble Arch that I found what I was looking for. I am now the proud owner of what is (IMHO) a very nice piece of material and am quite a few pounds less wealthy.

Last week my shower broke down (again) just a few weeks past its twelve month guarantee had expired. Apparently the morons who made it supplied it with a transformer which requires a forty-five minute rest after being used for fifteen minutes. This would be practical only in a household of one, what the rest of the population are supposed to do is a mystery to me. I was sold this ludicrously expensive piece of kit on the basis that it was top-of-the-range. I was sold a pup. So I have been buying British plumbing services to determine the problem, buying a new transformer and now will pay for some more British services to have it fitted. Some of you will be fully versed in my plumbing saga. The words “chronic recurring nightmare” sum it up nicely.

To summarise: one nice thing and one boring essential. And now I am skint. I hope my own personal version of QE has done the trick.

Saturday 7th November – Lukewarm reaction to UK tax plan
Monday 9th November – UK change of heart on banking tax plan

Gordon, have you ever considered thinking a policy through before shouting it from the rooftops? It’s almost like you have political Tourette Syndrome…

Lunch time saw another two added to my tally of Elite Bloggers Who I Have Met In Real Life. It was an honour to be invited and a pleasure to meet the people behind the illustrious computer screens. That takes my total up to several. Not one of the victims has been a dud, quite the reverse in fact.

You don’t have to pick six correct numbers to be the next notch on my tally stick.

I am surprised how un-angry I am about the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. I don’t see any point in bursting a blood vessel over something which has now happened and can’t be undone. I am certainly not taking any disappointment out on the Tory leader because Gordon Brown failed to hold the promised referendum. I can’t get angry with Cameron for lacking the ideological purity to promise an in/out vote.

From an “ideological” standpoint I would prefer any European co-operation to be along the lines of individual agreements between sovereign nations: a free trade treaty that sat separately from an environmental protection treaty, etc.. But I wonder whether, when it came down to it, we wouldn’t end up with a pretty similar outcome to that which we have now. All international treaties need institutions to monitor them, to make sure their members are toeing the line. Wouldn’t a setup where every country had a veto result in just as much “horse trading” as we have now? It certainly wouldn’t be the case that every country could get the things it wanted without ceding in areas it was not comfortable with. Not even a country as powerful as the USA gets everything it wants in life. Not even a country with as strong a democracy as it is possible to have can completely avoid dirty deals.

So, as much as I dislike the way the EU works, we are in the EU until we decide to come out. While we are in we should use what little leverage we have to try and make it into a club within which we feel comfortable. Having a requirement for a referendum on each treaty amendment is a powerful lever. I don’t understand why we have not introduced it already. What better position can there be to be able to say at the negotiating table “hmm, not sure the British electorate will buy that”?

If – as Prime Minister – David Cameron can’t get the other countries to agree to the devolution of certain powers back to national governments then we can give our verdict as to whether we mind at the ballot box next time around.

I know this will irritate the angry mob, but I actually think that the new Conservative position is pretty good. What a shame we had to go through the Constitution/Lisbon disaster to get there. He is right when he says that we should be concerned more with how things are than how we think they should be.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Rodney Park GCB, KBE, MC & Bar, DFC, RAF (15 June 1892 – 6 February 1975) was a New Zealand soldier, First World War flying ace and Second World War senior Royal Air Force commander. He was in tactical command during two of the most significant air battles in the European theatre in the Second World War, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Malta. The Germans called him “the Defender of London”. (Source.)

Thank you.

I am on the cusp. On Tuesday I sit one of the exams which I have so far not succeeded in passing. It’s a tough exam (I would say that, wouldn’t I?) – it requires the candidate to analyse and re-analyse the information placed in front of him. It asks the candidate to drill down past the words of each document on the table and to ascertain their true meaning in relation to the other words in the other documents.

The papers require a serious level of concentration, the require the candidate to enter a mental state not normally experienced in daily life. Yesterday after having looked at a past question I went out for a walk. I turned right out of the front door and promptly got lost. I had lost all sense of direction and urban survival skills because my brain had been doing something rather different for the last few hours. It was odd.

The problem is that, when you drill down deep enough there’s nothing there. The more you try to understand the words on the page you realise that they don’t actually mean anything unless you want them to mean something. When you start to think like that it’s very easy to get blown off course.

It’s hard to describe, but I am experiencing a horrible feeling of dread. I have this intangible fear that Western society is resting on nothing more substantial than a cloud. I can’t but think that at some point the fabric will start unravelling and that once it does the whole tapestry will come undone. When I look at my paycheck and standard of living, I wonder whether I have produced something of at least the value of what I have to my name. Is everything quite likely to collapse around us, leaving most Westerners with none of the skills we need to survive the aftermath? Perhaps I have been watching too much Mad Max and Judge Dredd.

Delve deep into your memory and you will remember the other day I was arguing that the roads should all be sold off to the highest bidder. Many of you came back with good arguments as to why this shouldn’t happen. There is a good case to say that certain infrastructure which, due to its very nature, has a natural monopoly. We wouldn’t, for example, expect a business to rip up the roads and buildings in order to connect a competing water pipe to our homes. It’s probably unlikely that road or rail companies would build directly competing parallel routes.

So, that said, what is the best way of organising our natural monopolies? Is a privately owned, regulated monopoly (e.g. water) better than a contrived market (e.g. gas and electricity)? Can the wholesale part of an industry be separated from the retail section (e.g. fixed-line telephones and broadband)?

The privatisation of the phones has largely been judged a success. The cost of phone calls has collapsed since the introduction of the slogan “it’s you we answer to” and the quality of the service has improved significantly. We now have a choice of who we route our calls via and a choice of who we buy our broadband from. But it’s not perfect: the local loop is owned by a hived off bit of BT which has to deal with the retail bit through a contrived system so as not to give the retail arm an unfair advantage over other providers. That means, as I can personally attest, that sorting out a line problem is incredibly inefficient and time consuming. No longer can a BT call centre simply take details and send an engineer out to investigate.

The gas and electricity setup seems to work reasonably well, but within regions the pipes and wires are a regulated monopoly. Sorting out a case of mistaken meter identity is a nightmare, I can tell you. Accusations are constantly made that the big players fix the retail market to their advantage.

I can’t say that the water system is particularly praise-worthy. Customers seem to be the water companies’ absolute lowest priority. The railways seem to have become very much more expensive than they used to be without the service improving a great deal. The tracks and trains have absorbed a huge amount of subsidy since privatisation, whereas beforehand the profitable routes were able to cross subsidise the less-used ones.

You can guess where this is leading. What to do about the blasted Royal Mail?

Up until quite recently the Mail provided a good service for a reasonable price. It even made a profit. Then various things happened and now it provides a terrible service at price which seems to be increasing much faster than inflation. Mail goes missing or turns up badly damaged or at the wrong destination. Often there is simply no service at all. I am in trouble with Bill Quango MP for criticising the service, but I don’t think it’s good enough to simply roll over and say “nevermind, didn’t need that letter anyway!”. We need a good postal service. A service which delivers to every address in the country seems to me to lend itself to a public monopoly like the roads.

If we are to have a public monopoly, though, there must be some way to ensure that customers get the service they need. We can’t go on with a producer led industry as we have been. This is being driven home by these strikes. There seems nothing customers can do to get around the dispute between the management and the unions. Perhaps public monopolies such as the post, fire service and NHS should work under a different set of employment rules from private sector employees. There should be no strikes permitted in the public sector. There should be proper oversight of the way the system is managed – either by Parliament or a regulator. There should be service guarantees and a way for customers to be compensated when it goes wrong.

It isn’t as simple as public v private. It’s about organising services so that they provide the kind of service that people need and want rather than the kind of service that the employees feel like providing. It’s about having a sensible and transparent framework so that people can see what they are getting and how they are paying for it.

It seems to me that politics is veering from the frustrating to the outright bizarre.

One one level we had a nutcase Mayor who wants to ban parents from playing with their children in state playgrounds, on the basis that the measure aims to “safeguard children”. Presumably Dorothy Thornhill believes that council playgrounds are the only space in which parents could abuse their own or other people’s children. Perhaps she thinks that life stops at the park fence. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed that most abuse is carried out by the child’s own family. Never mind, Dorothy, I’m sure that society has some use for people without any brain cells whatsoever.

On another level we have members of the Labour government campaigning for the appointment of the party’s former leader as President of the European Union. A former leader who was ousted after a ten-year war of attrition against him executed by the very members of the government who now campaign for his appointment. Anyone who dares question whether Tony Blair would be a good choice or politically acceptable is dismissed as being “unpatriotic”. This is a position which would not even exist if the Labour party had fulfilled its promise of a British referendum on the treaty which introduces it. While most people are struggling with more immediate issues, such as the longest recession since the war, senior members of the Labour party are playing a silly game presumably designed to make sure the next government will be embarrassed.

It just seems so odd to me how out of touch with reality these political beasts are. They seem to be operating within a totally different envelope to the rest of us. When I was in Australia a few years ago I tried to involve someone I met in a conversation about Aussie politics. Having seen a news report that I didn’t really understand I wanted to know more about the issues. He couldn’t answer, he said, because he had pro-actively opted out of being interested when the GST (equivalent to VAT) was introduced. He could not believe that something which he regarded as self-evidently a Bad Idea had been pushed through.

I am getting to the stage where the actual issues are so crowded out by posturing, positioning and hypocrisy that they are rarely heard. I feel like I am on the verge of joining that huge swathe of the population who are actively disinterested in what goes on. I think it’s dangerous to opt out in case the “leaders” think they can get away with more and more, but how can I maintain interest in something so utterly off the wall?

If there is one thing which distinguishes a civilised society from a barbarian one, it is the rule of law. Which is why it is totally unacceptable for protesters for any cause whatsoever to invade people’s property, to try and damage their equipment and to deprive them of their right to supply a lawful product to their customers. Whether you think that burning coal to generate electricity is a good idea or not, it is not acceptable in a civilised society to stop someone from doing so if that person is doing so lawfully.

No matter how correct the climate protesters who invade power stations up and down the country may be on the “science” the fact remains that the electricity generators are perfectly entitled to exercise their right to burn coal to sell to sell electricity to businesses and consumers.

This blog categorically does not support protesters who break the law or try to restrict other people’s lawful freedoms in order to campaign on any issue. By all means argue your case, try to get Parliament to change the law, persuade people that you are right. But while the generators are acting within the law, you have no right to intervene. If you think that your cause justifies mob rule and the ignorance of the law, be careful because you might find that when you need the law to protect you against a larger mob it has withered and died.