The Quiet Desperation of Christmas Present Buying

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is woefully unprepared and 10 is putting the sprouts on over a low light, how ready are you for Christmas?

Me, I’m about 2, edging 3. The Christmas cards are posted and the decorations are up, which is an improvement on this time last year when, although the decorations had been put up, no cards had yet been written.

There is a trend these days towards not sending cards. Many people prefer to make a donation to charity instead, and from next year, that is what I will be doing, although there may be a few distant and elderly relatives to whom I will still send a card. I said this last year too, but this time I mean it.

Christmas cards mainly benefit the card manufacturers and the Royal Mail. Most years I buy charity cards, but out of the twenty-odd quid I spent on them this year, I suspect that only a tiny percentage actually reached the charities concerned; far better to cut out the middleman and donate directly to the charities.

And the cost of stamps! A First Class stamp is 85p these days (the price of stamps always comes as a shock as I only buy one or two books a year before December). This year I spent over £50 on stamps, money that would be much better employed going to charity.

In these covid affected days it’s nice to receive cards from people you don’t see for months (or years) on end, as at least you know they are still alive (I know that that is terribly cynical, but sadly, it’s true). Less nice is opening a card and half a pound of glitter falling out: If I had my way, glitter would be banned from Christmas and birthday cards, it’s probably not good for the environment anyway. Any pleasure there might be in opening the cards is offset by the immediate need to get the vacuum cleaner out to clear up the mess.

There’s a lot of brinkmanship involved in Christmas card sending as well. This year you didn’t send one to Fred and Nora because they didn’t send one to you last year, when lo and behold, one turns up from them, provoking a scramble to see if there are any cards left you can send and hoping you’ve not missed the last day for posting.

So, bottom line: If you got a card from me this year you’re unlikely to get one in twelve months, and it’s nothing personal. If you didn’t get a card and you usually do, it’s lost in the post I’m afraid, although given that the cards I got the other day had about five different dates in the postmarks, it’s more likely just delayed: I imagine that the Royal Mail are under even more pressure than usual this Christmas.

When it comes to presents, my major problem is a complete lack of imagination. I don’t mind spending the money, but I have a problem with wasting it on presents bought simply ‘for the sake of it,’ or for things that people simply don’t need, or want. We have all felt that quiet desperation of browsing shops with an increasing sense of despair, trying to find a present for someone when we have no idea what they want. Just ask them what they want, you might offer. But half the time people don’t know what they want.

With more and more people downloading or streaming music and films, my old standbys of CDs and DVDs have rather gone out of the window, while online shopping and low prices enabling people to get what they want, when they want it, means that come Christmas, they have most things they need, and can’t tell you what they want. And me, I don’t even know what I want, so how does anyone else? This explains why socks, toiletries, chocolate, and alcohol feature heavily when I open my presents, but all of these things are good, because they will all get used.

Up and down the country there must be millions of pounds spent every year on presents that, once opened, rarely see the light of day again. You know the thing; stores like Debenhams used to have shelf after shelf of gifts that were overpriced novelties, bought by shoppers (including me some years, it has to be said) desperate to buy something for someone for whom they otherwise had no idea what to buy.

The sort of 'hilarious' novelty bought in desperation on Christmas Eve.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Boris Johnson’s best efforts to save it, last Christmas ended up being all but cancelled (unless you worked at 10 Downing Street). How many families up and down the country obeyed the rules and avoided visiting friends and family, only to lose loved ones to covid, meaning that this year, restrictions or not, they will have lost their last chance to see them? Johnson is at it again this year, but as someone tweeted as early as September, “Boris battles to save Christmas 2 is the sequel no one wanted.”

'Boris battles to save Xmas 2020'

'Boris battles to save Xmas - 2021, The Sequel'

We all hoped that this year would be better than 2020, our defence mechanisms couldn’t countenance it not being back to some semblance of normal, but it doesn’t look like our hopes will be fulfilled. A second covid struck Christmas makes one wonder, will it always be like this now?

News of parties in Downing Street and at other Tory locations means that should the government go beyond Plan B this Christmas, the patience of the British public will be sorely tested. Or, to put it another way, if it is announced that Christmas is cancelled again, most people will stick two fingers up and do their own thing, and who can blame them?

I shall be exercising that thing that various politicians laud the British public for having (in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary in many cases), and that is common sense, and will be spending Christmas accordingly.

Meanwhile, Dr Nikki Kanani, medical director of primary care for NHS England, is among those who have suggested people limit their interactions with others in the run-up to Christmas. Despite there being no legal limits on crowd sizes (although in stadiums with capacities of more than 10,000 covid passports are required), Dr Kanani advised supporters to stay away from football stadiums. People are advised to ‘prioritise events that matter to them.’ For the diehard football fan, going to the game is the event that matters to them, of course. Going to football, and Christmas with your friends and family - anything emotive in fact – doesn't always go hand in hand with common sense and pragmatism. There are no easy answers and like 2020, Christmas 2021 is going to be hard for many people.

Anyhoo, this is my last blog of 2021 so it only remains for me to wish you all as Merry Christmas as is possible, a Happy New Year, and let’s hope that things improve in 2022.

When Cash Was King

My parents didn’t have bank accounts when I was growing up, they had no need of them. They were paid in cash, and they paid with cash. On the odd occasion that they needed to send anyone any money in the post, they went to the Post Office and bought a Postal Order.

Postal Orders appeared frequently in the schoolboy fiction I read back then. Bunter and Jennings seemed to forever be in receipt of them, and now and again, at birthdays or at Christmas, I might get one too. Usually, they were uncrossed and could be cashed at the Post Office, although I remember that once we received a crossed one, and had to endorse it and ask a relative who had a bank account to pay it in for us.

When my Mum did finally open a bank account she kept a note book with all of her transactions listed, and every month she would check it against her statement. One time it differed; “It must be added up wrong,” I offered. In all seriousness, she asked, “Do banks do that often?” I had to gently point out that it was her arithmetic that was more likely in error.

Having a bank account and a debit card are pretty much essential today, but even in 1976, when I started work at Midland Bank, an account was more a privilege than a right; prospective account holders had to supply references even then. Being issued with a Cheque Card, guaranteeing payment of cheques up to £30, was by no means certain, and credit cards were afforded to only the most respectable of customers. Cash remained very important to most people for most purchases.

Today, it's different. Unimaginable as it might have seemed only a year or so ago, it is now possible to go places and find signs saying things like, “Cash not accepted,” or “Contactless payment only.” Perhaps the fear of COVID-19 transmission through banknotes was overstated, but the pandemic has been a major factor in the shift towards card payments being accepted in more and more places.

Contactless payment doesn’t only mean waving a debit or credit card over a reader; we pay with our phones and even our wearables – Apple and Samsung watches support it, as do some Fitbits – and around 9.6 billion transactions (1 in 4) were carried out contactlessly in the UK in 2020. At the same time, we are using less cash: In 2019 there were 2,608.4 million Link ATM transactions; in 2020 that figure had fallen to 1,642.6 million. I am probably typical, and between March and September last year, I barely used an ATM at all.

The value of ATM withdrawals has fallen dramatically since the pandemic started.

Contactless payments have been around for longer than you might think, since 2007 in fact. Initially, only credit cards could be contactless but that was extended to debit cards in 2009. In September 2007, Barclays launched the ‘Barclaycard OnePulse’ the first UK card that combined Chip and PIN, contactless payment and Oyster functionality, allowing card holders to pay for goods, and pay their fares on the Transport for London network.

I recall seeing a Barclays contactless reader in a pub in Southwark around that time, and at first wondered what it was. I never saw anyone use one to pay for anything at that time, although commuters passing through Canary Wharf tube station were frequently seen using their Barclays Bank cards to operate the barriers. Unbelievably, it was in that same year -2007 - that PayPlus trialled the world's first NFC-enabled phone, the Nokia 6131 NFC, in New York.

The Nokia 6131 NFC, the first phone with contactless payments enabled

Contactless payments and Chip and PIN are a far cry from the 1970s, when buying something in a shop with a Visa or Access card required a machine which used carbon paper to emboss the customer’s card details onto a form which they would then sign to authorise payment. Shops would pay the vouchers in at their bank, who would process them manually; no instant debits in those days.

An ancient Credit Card imprinter

It is not so long ago that many retailers placed a minimum limit of £5 or £10 on card transactions because of bank charges, but now many small and unlikely outlets are not just happy to accept card payments, they positively encourage it. Shops like WH Smith sell contactless card readers for just £30. These connect via WiFi or mobile data, and although there’s a 1.65% transaction charge to the retailer, it’s still a cheap, convenient and safe method to collect electronic payments.

Contactless payments are booming, and it may be just as well that devices like the SumUp card reader have become available for people like market traders as our increasing preference in using cards and smartphones to make payments is going hand in hand with banks making cash transactions less attractive and less accessible.

Take my local branch of HSBC in Romford Market Place for instance. When I worked there in the 1980s (it was Midland Bank at the time of course) the counter was very busy. We had pubs, shops, and market traders coming in all day long, paying in takings and changing notes for coins (see https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-midland-odyssey-part-two-shot-coin.html), but that looks like it is becoming a thing of the past. I recently walked past the branch and saw that it had been closed for refurbishment since mid-September, and will only reopen in mid-November, and when it does it won’t have any sort of counter service at all.

HSBC's Digital Service Branches have no counter service, a far cry from the days when
 the counter service was the focal point of almost every bank branch

HSBC now have three different types of branches: Full Service Branches, Digital Service Branches, and Cash Service Branches, and Romford Market Place is set to reopen as a Digital Service Branch, which means that when I eventually get round to bagging up all the loose change I’ve accumulated but have not done anything with since before the pandemic started, I’ll have to find another branch to take it off my hands. A minor inconvenience to me, but a pain for local traders who bank with HSBC, I’d imagine. No doubt other banks have similar non-cash handling branches.

The explosion in cashless payments, banks removing cash handling, and it generally becoming harder for people to access and use cash are grist to the mill for conspiracy theorists who believe that moving consumers away from cash will enable corporations and governments to control us. Imagine, the conspiracy theorists say, if every payment you make and every product you buy are tracked by governments , along with your location, eroding your privacy, and meaning that the state could control what you can buy and who you can buy it from.

It’s pretty far-fetched to believe there is a conspiracy to withdraw all cash and control us through the only payment systems available, but there is a genuine concern that those who rely on cash and have little or no access to digital payment methods could become increasingly marginalised in a society that is gradually finding cash superfluous.

A logical extension to apps like Google Pay or Apple Pay would be the ability for users to receive money through them as well as pay money away. When that day comes, then cash will definitely no longer be king.

 

 

 

Living In The Past

I recently did something that I hadn’t previously done for more than ten years – probably about fifteen years, actually - I bought a suit.

For over thirty years I wore a suit every day at work. In my last few years, the dress code in my office became more and more relaxed, from casual clothes on special occasions (usually with a donation to charity attached), to dress down Fridays, to dress down every day.

The last suit that I owned before retiring – worn since only for weddings, christenings, and funerals – gave up the ghost a few years back, and I have been relying on a black blazer and (sort of) matching trousers for formal occasions. It didn’t look as smart as I would have liked, so when my daughter’s university graduation ceremony was imminent, I decided to buy a new suit.

At around the time that I was making this decision I came across news revealing that Marks & Spencer, the shop that is the first port of call for men like me when we want to buy a reasonably priced, good quality suit, had stopped selling them in more than half of its 254 stores.

Only 110 larger M&S stores, like this one at Bluewater, still sell men's suits.

Fortunately, my local store was still stocking them, although the choice was quite limited, but clearly my purchase made me part of a falling number of suit buyers. Unsurprisingly, covid was largely responsible for the drop-off in sales that saw M&S sell just 7,500 suits during the first two months of the pandemic, 80% fewer than in the same period twelve months before.

The number of people working from home was growing even before covid; the pandemic accelerated that number and even now, with some people beginning to drift back to their offices, employers are embracing the idea of hybrid working with staff spending some working from home, and some time in the office, with benefits accruing to both employer and employee. In such circumstances, the demand for suits inevitably falls.

On the last couple of occasions when I have ventured into the City of London, the lack of commuters has been quite noticeable and equally so, the fact that many sandwich bars and coffee shops were closed – some merely having closed earlier in the day than they would have a couple of years ago, but some clearly closed permanently.

The detrimental effect on the local economy, and the businesses that rely on city workers who are now working from home is undoubtedly a driver for the government encouraging people to get back to the office. Just this weekend, Iain Duncan Smith (a supposedly intelligent man who regularly does a convincing impersonation of a stupid one) drew the tiresome and irrelevant comparison between covid and the Second World War when he said that workers still went to the office in 1940, even when the Luftwaffe were bombing London.

The comparison is pointless because not only are bombings not contagious, while covid is, few people had telephones at home in the 1940s and the internet hadn’t been invented, so working from home wasn’t an option. But he was actually wrong anyway. In 1940 the Inland Revenue began relocating to Llandudno, 5,000 civil servants from the Ministry of Food moved to Colwyn Bay, and the Bank of England moved to Staffordshire.

Living in the past, and particularly in WWII, is a bit of a national obsession in England. Had that conflict not taken place, I wonder what comparable event people like Duncan Smith would use as an alternative? The Great War? The Napoleonic Wars? And for how long will people born long after the event continue to reference the war? Will our great-grand children’s generation be doing so, or will some other event (Covid, perhaps?) supplant it?

Also living in the past, and like IDS, waxing nostalgic about a time before she was born, Clare Foges recently wrote a piece in The Times under a headline, “Don’t bet on a hard winter toppling Johnson,” in which she claims that “a large chunk of the population doesn’t just endure national crises like these but rather enjoys them.” Claiming that tracking down petrol and grabbing the last bag of pasta in a supermarket confers a thrill on those compelled to do so, she concluded that, “When those who were there in the Seventies speak of it, of three-day weeks and candles burning during the blackouts, their recollections are often tinged with nostalgia.”

There speaks a woman who was born in 1981. I was a teenager during the 1970s and while I didn’t suffer the stresses that my parents did in trying to keep their jobs during the three-day week, put food on the table during the various shortages while coping with the rampant inflation and power cuts, I don’t feel nostalgic for much of what happened in that decade. If those of us who were alive during the 1970s remember them with any degree of nostalgia it’s because we have blotted out the sheer awfulness of much of the decade. As I wrote a couple of years ago, “it was a decade probably best remembered for the Winter of Discontent, rampant inflation, unparalleled industrial strife, IRA atrocities, and Britain being dubbed 'The Sick Man of Europe.' It was the decade of my teenage years, and although there is much to look back on with fondness, there was much about the 1970's that was a struggle and not all that pleasant.” (See https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-1970s-part-two-strikes-shortages.html)

We had potato shortages, bread shortages, milk shortages; we had strikes by tanker drivers, local government workers meaning that the bins weren’t emptied for weeks in some places, and the dead weren’t buried. We had petrol shortages, water shortages, power cuts and IRA bombs. Oh yes, plenty to be nostalgic about.

I can’t help agreeing with Clare Foges about one thing though: The Conservatives are supremely skilled at taking no responsibility and pointing the finger of blame elsewhere, and, if mentioning Brexit at all, placing all blame on the EU for our current woes. I resolved earlier this year not to write about Brexit (the zealots on both sides of the debate aren’t changing their minds after all), and while it’s wrong to blame Brexit for all this country’s ills, especially when many are shared with other nations, Brexit has undoubtedly exacerbated a lot of our problems.

In 1979, the so called Winter of Discontent led to a vote of no confidence in the Labour government and its leader, James Callaghan. Margaret Thatcher won the subsequent General Election and ushered in seventeen years of Tory rule. Despite everything that has happened since Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservatives, I somehow doubt that our seemingly Teflon coated Prime Minister will suffer Callaghan’s fate, even with the evident similarities in their situations.

People like IDS and Clare Foges are keen to invoke the mythical Blitz spirit as though Britain is a nation of stoics rather than one in which people dial 999 because KFC or Nandos have run short of chicken, who hoard toilet rolls, clog petrol stations as they brim their already nearly full fuel tanks, and have hissy fits when asked to wear a mask during a pandemic. 

Don't panic! Motorists queue for fuel at Tesco in Ashford. Photo: PA

Blitz spirit? Whimsical longing for a return to the 1970s?  Don't make me laugh! It’s about as realistic as expecting future generations to wax nostalgic about the coronavirus pandemic.

 

 

Global Britain To Go Imperial?

Imperial or metric? Feet or metres; pints or litres? The overwhelming majority of countries on the planet are totally - or mainly - metric. Only Liberia, Myanmar and the United States use imperial measures exclusively (and the US version of imperial measures is not the same as that which has traditionally been used in Britain – a US pint is 83% of a UK pint, for instance). Britain naturally has to be different, and in this country we use a mixture of both, so that in a pub, beer will be sold by the pint (imperial), but wine is sold by the millilitre (metric); we sell petrol in litres, but calculate fuel consumption in miles per gallon (selling petrol in gallons again and so being more easily able to calculate MPG is actually a change I could get behind).

 

For those who supported the so-called ‘Metric Martyr,’ Steven Thoburn, the Sunderland greengrocer who was convicted for breaching EU rules banning the sale of fruit and vegetables in pounds and ounces back in 2001, Boris Johnson’s announcement last week that moves are afoot to once again make it legal to sell goods using only imperial measure will no doubt make their hearts swell with pride as the country begins to make a bonfire of Brussels bureaucracy, albeit at the cost of creating many yards (not metres) of our own, home grown, red tape.

 

And when we raise our pint in our local pub, we will be able to do so in a glass printed with the crown stamp (which was prohibited by EU directives) instead of the CE symbol. Edit: The crown symbol on glasses was NOT prohibited by the EU, I have learned since I originally wrote this. EU law does not prevent markings from being placed on products, so long as it does not overlap or be confused with the CE mark). That is if the CO2 shortage doesn’t mean that the pubs have no beer. Who really cares what’s on the side of the glass though? It could be a picture of Yoda saying, “A pint, this is,” for all I care, so long as it’s a pint!

 

As The Times mentioned when reporting these moves, they are largely (I’d say solely) symbolic, another dead cat hurled onto the table to detract from the very real issues that the country faces. And precisely who will these moves benefit? Metric measures have been legal in the UK since 1875, the country went metric in 1965, long before we joined what was then the Common Market, and imperial measures have not been taught in schools since the mid-1970s, so they will be simply a source of amusement and confusion to anyone under fifty. Perhaps the move is aimed at appeasing readers of the Daily Express, the majority of whom are in their dotage and for whom this sort of thing probably is actually quite important.

 

Pippa Musgrave, a Weights and Measures inspector, was highly critical of the idea on Twitter (you can read the thread in full here https://twitter.com/PippaMusgrave1/status/1438559713604608003), saying – among other things - that we have a shortage of weights and measures inspectors, most imperial local standards and testing equipment have long been retired, and that Certificates of approval for imperial metrological equipment have long since lapsed.

 

Boris Johnson has said of bringing back imperial measures, "People understand what a pound of apples is.” Do you know what a pound of apples looks like? I for one don’t.[1] When I buy apples I buy by number, because I need one, two, three, or four (or more): Weight doesn’t come into it.

 

It isn’t as though we really need to bring back any more imperial measures, we already use enough of them. Now, I’m not a great fan of George Galloway, but he illustrated this country’s mixed approach to weights and measures perfectly with this tweet, although the point he was making may not be the one he thinks he is:

 

If I am typical – and I think I am – we British are fairly comfortable with a mix of metric and imperial measures. I use imperial measures for my own weight – I can visualise how much I or someone else weighs in stones and pounds but not in kilos (nor just pounds for that matter, which tends to be how Americans express weight) - but I prefer kilos for cheese or meat or other foods. Pints and litres are to my mind interchangeable, especially as milk (which I still buy in pints, or quarts) is labelled in metric and imperial. I prefer miles over kilometres – if a distance is quoted in kilometres, I have to convert it – but for shorter measures, like lengths of wood, or the size of a piece of furniture, then I’m happy with either.

 

A logical extension of reverting to imperial measures could be that our athletes once again have to start competing in races over a mile, or 440 yards; that our long jumpers measure their personal bests in feet, not metres, and that the length of our swimming pools is imperialised. Chances of those things actually happening? Non-existent, but someone probably wishes they would.

 

If we are being honest, how likely is it that any retailers will suddenly start selling goods where the weight is shown solely in pounds and ounces? Not many, I'd say; perhaps the odd market trader here and there may, but, as Pippa Musgrave alluded to, for them to be able to do so legally, they will have to comply with new trading standards legislation with all the costly new bureaucracy that that entails.

 

In a similar vein to Johnson’s jingoistic call to arms on the weights and measures front, at the recent Royal Television Society conference, then Media Minister John Whittingdale announced a new plan that would make it a legal requirement for UK broadcasters to produce shows that are ‘distinctively British.'  While most commentators believed him to be referencing such shows as The Great British Bake Off, Fleabag, and Derry Girls, the more cynical among us suspect that the shows that people like Whittingdale – and Johnson, probably – were thinking of are The Dick Emery Show, Are You Being Served? Mind Your Language, and Love Thy Neighbour.

 

No doubt many of the younger generation get fed up with their parents waxing nostalgic about the 1970s, but if TV shows like those I’ve mentioned were to get remade, and if the soaring gas prices we are experiencing continue, if supply chain problems mean more and more empty shelves in the supermarkets, and if we have to start buying fruit and veg in pounds and ounces, then we’ll all be able to experience the 1970s again!

 

For a government that has previously railed against ‘gesture politics,’ Boris Johnson’s administration seems keen to indulge in such a thing quite frequently, and while it’s been said that a supposed Brexit benefit was the chance to be Global Britain again - implying an outward looking, forward thinking, dynamic nation - all we seem to be doing with announcements about crowns on glasses, imperial measures, and Britishness in TV is retreating into insularity.

 

But we’ll know what a pound of apples looks like, so that’s all good then.

 

[1] I weighed some apples in Tesco this morning to see what a pound of them looks like – it’s two, two apples.

All Our Eggs In One Basket

Last Friday I walked along the South Bank in London for the first time in over eighteen months, and it was almost as though Covid-19 had never happened. Cases – and deaths – might be just as high as last November, when we were relying on lockdown to stop numbers spiralling out of control, now the country has put its faith squarely in the vaccine programme to do the same. Social distancing and mask wearing seem to have slipped off the agenda.

On the tube up to Monument, the mask wearers were largely in the minority despite TfL making wearing one a condition of carriage. When I finished my walk from Monument to Victoria and got on another tube to take me to my destination at West Kensington, the mask wearers were firmly in the majority; perhaps central London commuters are less mask averse.

The South Bank was busy. Perhaps not as busy as it would have been on a Friday evening pre-pandemic, but busy enough, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that few pubs, coffee shops, or restaurants seemed to have closed, there were even a couple of new places that must have opened only since I was last in town.

 

There were no masks in evidence at Nell’s in West Kensington, where I went to see Fischer-Z in my first proper gig since I saw IQ in November 2019 and the first live music I have paid to see since Joe Stilgoe’s show at The Barbican in January 2020. Fischer-Z – who I first saw back in the 1970s when they supported Dire Straits – are more popular on the continent than in the UK despite founder and lead singer John Watts hailing from Surrey and now living in Brighton, and the crowd was actually quite thin, and while that must have been a disappointment for the band and the venue, it made it a comfortable reintroduction to gig going – for me, at least.

 

Unsurprisingly, drink prices have gone up since I last ventured into a pub in London, but even so, the price of a pint in The Marquis of Granby in Dean Bradley Street, just north of Lambeth Bridge, did take me by surprise a bit, coming in at £6.20, and according to the barmaid, prices are higher on Saturdays and Sundays!

 

Picture by Stephen Harris

Post-gig, it was back to West Kensington Station and the long trot back on the District Line, topped off by a half-hour walk home. By the time I got indoors, Friday had become Saturday, and my phone battery had expired, so I plugged it in to charge and went to bed.

When I got up, the only sign of life on the phone was the green LED that shows that it is fully charged. The phone would not switch on despite simultaneously pressing all the relevant buttons as suggested in the Troubleshoot section of the user manual, or any of the many YouTube videos on the subject. Clearly I needed a new phone.

I have often thought – and I’m sure this has occurred to a lot of people – that we are becoming so reliant on our mobile phones that being without one is much more than a minor inconvenience. In the last few years more and more functions and activities are possible through our phones, so by choice, or increasingly by necessity, much of the mundane, everyday stuff we do, we do with our phones. Our dependence on them has gone way beyond a social media driven habit and now, whole areas of our lives are either simplified by our being able to use a smartphone, or are massively more complex and inconvenient without one.

We pay for things with our phones, we have train tickets and tickets for shows and football matches on on them. It is now possible to have a whole day out just using a smartphone, using the Trainline app for rail tickets, an app like Ringo to pay for car parking, paying for goods and services with Google Pay, using the Wetherspoons app to pay for drinks in a pub, ordering and paying for food at Wagamama, and using a QR code on your mobile to get into a gig at The O2. All of which demands that you have a working smartphone with sufficient battery life, and a 4G signal.

On top of all that, the NHS app on your smartphone gives you access to a record of your Covid vaccination status, and regardless of what anyone says, proof of that is increasingly likely to be required in plenty of places.

 

All of which is fine and dandy – until your phone packs up, which is why I rarely go out without back-up, such as a debit card, some cash, and printed copies of e-tickets.

With my four year old Samsung Galaxy S7 now defunct, but with a phone upgrade due, I phoned my mobile provider to see what they could do. Yes, they could get me a new phone, and get it to me by Wednesday, and on a contract that I was happy with. The only problem was that the only colour phone they could get me by Wednesday was pink. A grey one wouldn’t be available till next month. I declined a pink phone and on Sunday, popped into my local Three store where they had exactly what I wanted, and on a better contract than I’d been offered over the phone.

Luckily, I was only without a phone for twenty-four hours or so and fortunately I didn’t need it for football – when Romford are at home I have the job of updating Football Web Pages through my phone, but this weekend we were away, so I didn’t have that responsibility - but my temporary inability to access my bank account online, or see my NHS COVID Pass, to name but two pieces of vital functionality, showed how reliant on our phones we have become. It’s not until your phone is unusable that you realise how much other stuff you do relies on being able to receive text messages with One Time Passwords and the like.

Having not backed up the photos on my phone for a couple of weeks, I’ve lost a few pictures (I posted some from the gig on Facebook on the way home, so I still have them), but I probably got away lightly, most other stuff was backed up and a couple of frustrating moments apart, getting the new phone set up was relatively painless.

Phone technology is all well and good when it works as it should, but reliance on it introduces lots of points of potential failure: For all of the convenience of smartphones, our dependence on them means that we are in danger of putting all of our eggs in one basket.

 

Pitching the Landline

 

Imagine trying to pitch the idea of a landline phone to a telecoms executive in today’s world where the smartphone is ubiquitous and nigh on indispensable for many people.

“What’s the screen size?”
“There’s no screen.”

“So how do you use the camera?”
“There’s no camera.”

“But it’s got Bluetooth, right?”
“No, no Bluetooth.”

“Is it Android or iOS?”
“There’s no operating system.”

“What’s the battery life?”
“There’s no battery, you have to plug it into the wall.”

“Okay, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Nonetheless, even today the landline phone is essential for many people. People who don’t want, can’t afford, or couldn’t use a mobile phone or the internet; people who live in areas where broadband is slow or mobile signals unreliable. For those people, a landline phone is an essential, so they may have been somewhat perturbed to have heard that from 2025, BT OpenReach, who are responsible for our phone and Internet cables, will be phasing out the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on which our landline network operates.

This does not mean the imminent demise of the landline. Instead of the old copper wiring that connected us through PSTN, landlines will instead use our internet connection and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) which is how we currently make phone calls using apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Which is all fine and dandy unless you are one of the million or so UK households currently without an internet connection. While some may simply have chosen not to subscribe to broadband, telephone subscribers in hard to reach areas will hope that the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit plan to level up broadband access where they live will be completed by the time PSTN is switched off. Ingeniously, there are plans to connect households with fibre optic cables in the water mains, a system already in use in Spain.

 Unsurprisingly, the use of landlines has plummeted in recent years. In 2012, people in the UK made a total of 103 billion minutes of landline calls, but in 2017 that was down to 54 billion. While there are still about 22million landlines in the UK, that is down 15% from the start of the 21^st century, when 95% of homes had one. In the last three years 1.41 million lines have been ditched.

There are times when Val and I have considered getting rid of our landline. We no longer need it for our broadband, and when it rings – which is rarely - 9 times out of 10 it’s a scam call. Just about the only reasons we keep it on are that cancelling it won’t actually save us any money and there are a few times when we get genuine calls. Yes, we could tell callers to use our mobiles, but there’s something of an overhead in working out who only has our landline number if we want to be proactive about that.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a phone – I think I must have been thirteen or fourteen when my parents got one - and even then I seem to recall there was a waiting list, so it took about six months between applying for one and having it installed. The one we had looked very much like this:

It rang only rarely as we knew very few other people who had a phone; mostly it was used by my Mum phoning her Mum. Prior to our having the phone connected, my Mum would have to walk about half a mile to the nearest phone box. In an emergency I guess we could have asked a neighbour who had a phone. Theirs was a party line, not something that has even existed since the mid-1980s but which was common years ago. It seems odd now that a phone line shared by two separate households would even be considered and one imagines that a few family secrets were revealed when one subscriber overheard another’s conversation. Which reminds me that crossed lines were another peculiarity of telephone conversations back in the day. In the middle of a conversation, you might hear another voice or voices, prompting someone to cry, “Can you get off the line please!”

Even accounting for the landline’s decline, the language that is associated with it lives on, and will likely continue to do so for years to come. Despite possibly never having used a rotary dial phone, people still dial numbers; despite being able to terminate calls simply by pressing a button, we still hang up. One thing that we do lack however, is the satisfaction that comes with slamming the receiver into its cradle at the end of an angry or frustrating conversation.

 What we don’t miss however, is the frustration of having to stay indoors and wait patiently (or impatiently) for someone to ring you back. And somehow they always seemed to choose to call in the couple of minutes when you’d popped to the loo. Oh, and the aggravation of being in another room when the phone rang, dashing to pick up and hearing the dialling tone when you put the receiver to your ear! When we first got a phone it lived in the lounge, so absolutely no privacy when taking a call. Later, after we moved, it was in the hall, which, lacking any heating, was absolutely freezing in winter; still, it kept costs down as no one spent longer on calls than was necessary.

 No one misses the irritation of misdialling the ninth or tenth digit of an eleven digit number, or being interrupted and losing track halfway through. “Sorry, wrong number,” is something that one hears very infrequently these days but which was a regular occurrence with rotary dial phones when there was no way of checking what you’d actually dialled.

 And since rotary dial phones had no memory to store numbers or calls, each redial meant actually redialling, not just pressing one button, and every number had to be looked up in a phone book, or dredged up from memory. The funny thing is though, I can still remember some phone numbers that I called regularly thirty or more years ago, but I have no idea of the mobile numbers of some family members today.

 One day the landline will probably be gone and forgotten, much in the same way as the candlestick telephone and having to ask the operator to connect your call, but probably only those who currently have to rely on it will lament its passing.

A Different Perspective

Years ago, I used to go to football matches as a neutral quite regularly,  usually on days when my team wasn’t playing or were away from home somewhere that I couldn’t get to. Nowadays I rarely go to matches that don’t involve Romford FC. For some people however, going to games without supporting either of the teams involved is how they watch all of their football; I’m not sure that I could do that, as a recent experience proved.

 

In recent years, the only non-Romford games that I have seen have been England v USA in 2018 (I was lucky enough to get a complimentary ticket, otherwise I doubt I would have gone), and the 2019 FA Vase and FA Trophy Finals between Chertsey Town and Cray Valley PM, and AFC Fylde and Leyton Orient respectively, but this week I took a trip to the seaside to see Eastbourne Town play Little Common in the Southern Combination.

 

Not being invested in the result, I was able to watch the game in a way I don't normally. It gave me a different perspective on the sort of incidents that may provoke a sense of injustice if they happen in a Romford match; it definitely makes me aware that no matter how impartial and reasonable I think I am when watching Romford, I am not!

The charming turnstile block, sadly not in use.

 

My main reason for going to watch Eastbourne Town play was the ground. The club’s home, The Saffrons, is also home to Eastbourne Cricket Club, Eastbourne Hockey Club, and Compton Croquet Club, while Eastbourne Bowling Club are next door, and the view beyond the bowling green takes in the Renaissance style Victorian Town Hall, built in 1886. The Saffrons was first used in 1884, and includes a beautiful turnstile block which dates back to 1914. It was damaged in a fire in 2004 but has been fully restored. Sadly, it isn’t in use – the actual entrance is a slightly more prosaic gap in the fence in the opposite corner of the site.

The view from the entrance with the Town Hall dominating.

For a Southern Combination League club (that’s five steps below the English Football League, nine below the Premier League) Eastbourne Town are quite well supported – there were 220 there for the game I saw – and have not one, but two groups, of ‘ultras,’ Pier Pressure and The Beachy Head Ultras (although neither were in evidence at the Little Common match), who have plastered the scaffold like standing accommodation behind one goal with the sort of stickers these groups tend to go in for.

The visitors, Little Common, hail from Bexhill, nine miles or so along the coast, but play their home games at Eastbourne United’s ground, and they were not without support on the night. Officially, the capacity at The Saffrons is 3,000 although it’s difficult to imagine that sort of number being accommodated comfortably and safely. It’s mind boggling to discover that back in the 1950s, for an FA Cup tie against Hastings United, 7,378 people squeezed into the place!

 

The game was entertaining without being especially engaging. As a neutral I felt somewhat detached because there was no jeopardy; because I didn’t mind who won, I didn’t really care either. Watching Romford play can be stressful at times, heart breaking sometimes, but thrilling and joyful at others. Supporting a team is emotional, watching a game uncommitted is a bit hollow.

There was no score at the break, but Eastbourne went in front in the first minute of the second half when a forward finished from close range after a good move down the right wing. Little Common equalised after a free-kick was deflected onto a post and the rebound was slotted home. Common then took the lead when a forward skipped past the last defender on the left and bent a shot past the keeper.

 

In the celebrations after Little Common’s second goal, an Eastbourne player ended up on the floor holding his head (I presume he was clobbered by an opponent; I didn’t see what happened), and a 21 man brawl broke out.

 

The scuffle - which came dangerously close to involving members of the crowd – was quite well handled by the referee and his assistants. When the dust had settled, one player from each side were sent off, although it could quite easily have been more.

 

Both teams seemed upset at having a player dismissed, although it was difficult to see why other than because of the perpetual sense of injustice teams feel when they have someone sent off, no matter how bang to rights the player is, and they were also equally aggrieved at a number of yellow cards that the referee had to issue as the sides became increasingly fractious as the game wore on. As a neutral, it seemed to me that the referee got those decisions right, although had the team in yellow and blue been Romford and not Eastbourne Town, who knows how I would have felt?

 

Eastbourne snatched a point with a goal from close range after Common failed to clear. Of the two sides, Little Common would have been the happier to have taken a point.

 

I had heard good things about the Eastbourne Town programme, having seen a number of cover illustrations online including a Halloween themed edition and one with a retro-style FA Cup Final cover, and the cover for the Little Common game was in anime style. Sadly, the cover was the best bit as the contents comprised a few photos and some stats, but nothing to read except for the history of each club.

Many people believe that the football programme is an endangered species, and more and more football clubs are producing online programmes instead of the traditional printed version. In these days when all the statistical information you can want is easy to find online and more up to date to boot, a programme needs to have something you can’t get online, some sort of unique selling point, and the cover apart, Eastbourne’s doesn’t really have that.

 

Well, that’s my view anyway, I guess there are equally people for whom Eastbourne’s programme is perfectly good, but given that it is well produced and looks attractive, the lack of original content seems a missed opportunity.

 

My evening’s football at The Saffrons was enjoyable enough, but it made me realise that watching football as a neutral is not something I’m bothered about enough to do on a regular basis anymore.

 

Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear

Among the many conspiracy theories that have arisen during the coronavirus pandemic is the idea that the vaccines contain some sort of microchip designed to track the movements of the vaccinated. If it wasn’t COVID-19 it would be something else, as there are constantly evolving theories about how ‘they’ (governments, big business, shadowy but unspecified other groups) are tracking our every move, recording our conversations, building up vast amounts of data about us.

 

The one thing that these theories usually lack is what the explicit purpose of this information gathering exercise is: ‘Control’ is often given as a reason, but with limited explanation of how this control will be exercised or what purpose it serves, unless control is the end and not the means.

 

It is true however, that virtually everything we do is tracked, traced, and recorded somewhere by someone. If you own a car, have a bank account, store loyalty cards, or mobile phone, just about everything you do, everywhere you go is logged. And that is before we even get to the estimated 4-6 million CCTV cameras in the UK.

 

Almost everyone will have a story about the somewhat unsettling, spooky online incidents where an advert for a product or service pops up in our social media feeds for something we have been talking about: Coincidence, or is your mobile phone or virtual assistant like Alexa spying on you? Goodness knows, but for most of us the thinking must be, if we’ve nothing to hide, we’ve nothing to fear. If I’m going to see adverts on Facebook for example, they might as well be for things I might actually have an interest in.

 

But news coming from the United States about a plan by Apple to study images that iPhone users upload for storage in iCloud Photos takes matters a step further.

 

Before I go on I must clarify that Apple are only reviewing images to look for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and only in the USA. The creation and distribution of such images is so abhorrent that most people would consider it reasonable to justify almost any method of detecting such offences and bringing those responsible to book.

 

Apple’s process works by comparing images that are being stored in iCloud Photos with known images of CSAM, and if a potential match is found, a human reviewer will assess the images and report the user to law enforcement agencies.

 

Where we start to enter somewhat more uncertain waters however, is how this technology might spread, how it might be abused or misused. Yes, we could quite easily and justifiably defend and support the use of this sort of technology to combat the sexual abuse of children. But then law enforcement agencies and governments will inevitably ask the question, what else could we use this technology for, what other offences could we detect and prosecute using it?

 

Terrorism? Yes, obviously terrorism. If wholesale surveillance of mobile phones could have prevented 9/11, or 7/7 in London, or the bombing of the Bataclan in Paris, then surely it would be justifiable. Or people smuggling and trafficking? Or the drugs cartels? Or what about gangs planning robberies like the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary, surely we can justify using technology to combat that sort of thing too? I could go on, but that would risk straying into Monty Python’s ‘What did the Romans do for us?’ territory.

 

To some extent it already happens. Phones have been tapped for years if potential criminal activity is suspected, but only by going through a process to justify individual instances that ends with a senior politician or judge authorising such activity. Terrorist offences have been stopped through mobile phone surveillance, but what we are looking at with Apple’s photo scanning process is the possibility of blanket coverage of everyone’s phone at all times.

 

You might shrug your shoulders and say, I have nothing to hide, so I’ve nothing to fear. And if you are not inclined to commit offences that involve CSAM, and you aren’t located in the United States, then at present that’s true. But what Apple have done here is to open a door which they themselves had previously locked, barred, bolted and declared that they would never open. There have been cases in the past where law enforcement agencies have been stymied by Apple’s refusal to unlock phones that have been used by terrorists, even for the FBI, but now they are proactively saying that the data on iPhones is fair game.

 

Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has raised concerns: “They (Apple) have sent a very clear signal. In their (very influential) opinion, it is safe to build systems that scan users' phones for prohibited content. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong on that point hardly matters. This will break the dam — governments will demand it from everyone."

 

This sort of technology would enable an oppressive regime to clamp down on even the mildest form of dissent and suppress any form of protest, making criminals of even the meekest opponents.

 

And that is the point that defenders of free speech and civil liberties, and those who love a conspiracy theory will latch onto, and for once possibly with good reason. Who gets to decide what constitutes prohibited content?

 

In Britain, and in much of the world, people like to think that they live in benign democracies, where their rights are respected, where they can travel and speak freely, and that criticising the government and other authorities is acceptable, where free speech is protected, and civil liberties unlikely to be curtailed except in extremis, COVID-19 being a case in point.

 

But not everyone lives in a benign democracy, and even in countries that purport to be so, governments are not above suppressing dissent – take a look at the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was passed in the House of Commons by 359 votes to 263 on Monday 16th March, and under which it will become an offence to cause someone ‘serious annoyance,’ or merely put them at risk of being caused serious annoyance. That could merely be a step on the road towards a government deciding that, in the interests of national security, they should start interrogating people’s phones for all sorts of material, including simple, straightforward, currently perfectly legitimate, criticism of government, its policies, and its ministers.

 

At the moment it’s just Apple, in the United States, targeting a particularly narrow, detestable group of people. But the line that has been drawn is not fixed; it can and probably will, move. Things we don’t have to hide today may be proscribed tomorrow. One day, that merry little jape you made about the Prime Minister might land you in very hot water indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liar, Liar!

Parliamentary privilege allows Members of Parliament to say things in the House of Commons that outside it would make them liable for prosecution for slander, contempt of court, or breaching the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, rules around unparliamentary language forbid MPs from using certain words or phrases about other MPs. Words like blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon, and traitor. And of course, liar.

 

Members of Parliament are generally described by one another as "the Honourable Member for . . .” and the assumption is, as the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has said, that “No honourable member would actually mislead or lie to the House,” and should an MP unwittingly utter a falsehood, or accidentally mislead the House, then they are obliged to correct the matter at the earliest opportunity. Not that they always do. [1]

 

Accusing a fellow MP of lying will result in the MP making the accusation being required to withdraw from the Chamber if they do not retract their remark, as happened to Labour MP Dawn Butler last week. Citing a YouTube video produced by the lawyer and filmmaker Peter Stefanovic in which he dissected and debunked a number of claims made in Parliament by Boris Johnson, Butler said that Boris Johnson “has lied to this House and the country, over and over again."

  

As Dawn Butler found, in this country we take accusations of lying very seriously. In much the same way as we take accusations of racism and anti-Semitism very seriously. Unfortunately, we take the accusations more seriously than the offence a lot of the time. As former Speaker John Bercow and Dawn Butler herself said in a joint statement published in The Times, “Someone lying to tens of millions of citizens knows he or she is protected by an ancient rule. They face no sanction. By contrast, an MP with the guts to tell the truth is judged to be in disgrace. It is absurd.”

 

Dawn Butler speaking in the Commons on Friday. Picture: House of Commons/PA

MPs can be accused of lying of course. Virtually every week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer says, of some answer or statement that Boris Johnson has given, ‘That simply isn’t true.” A lie, then. As he has said, “the Prime Minister is the master of untruths and half-truths.” Starmer says that he supports the deputy speaker who ejected Dawn Butler, but also supports Butler for what she said. He likely only said that because his silence on the matter had drawn criticism, but that sort of fence sitting harms him more than Johnson and the Tory government.

 

I saw a comment on Twitter that if MPs were allowed to call each other liars, then that word would be constantly bandied about in the Chamber, and the point being made clearly was that it would be uttered even when no lie had been told. Which raises two points.

 

First, if Honourable Members were actually honourable and didn’t lie, then the accusation would carry no weight (it wouldn’t stop it being used, but it would be more detrimental to the accuser than the accused), but secondly – and just as importantly – is it right that MPs shout across the Chamber?

 

While some speeches in the House of Commons are listened to respectfully, anyone who has watched PMQs will know that the House is often like a bear pit, with voices raised on both sides. MPs should not shout ‘liar’ at their opponents; they ought not shout anything at all. They should however, be able to use a speech to call out lies on the part of another member, particularly if that member knowingly and demonstrably did lie.

 

The arcane rules and customs of Parliament are like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where things are done a certain way because of accidents of history, because of tradition, not because they are logical or make sense. If Parliament were a private business, engaged in banking for example, it would probably use abacuses instead of calculators, and handwritten ledgers instead of computer mainframes because that is how it has always been done. Getting Parliament to move with the times is on a par with getting a cat to learn algebra.

 

Christopher Lee as Mr Flay, responsible for upholding the rules and maintaining 
tradition in the castle of Gormenghast. From the BBC production.

But move with the times it should. The whole system of politics in the UK is overdue for reform: Our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system for a start. In the last seventy years FPTP means that in all but three elections the majority of votes have been cast for parties other than the one that formed a government. 

 

Politics is binary, but the world is nuanced. The majority support a political party the way they support a football team, with blind, unthinking loyalty. But whichever party you support you are likely to be lumbered with just as many policies that you don’t like as ones that you do. In fact, it may be that there are policies that another party has that you support more than the ones proposed by the party you vote for. Which is the reason why we should stop voting for people and parties and start voting for policies.

 

Come election time, the parties should set forth their intended policies. The public votes for the policies they want and the policies are carried out by private industry. We will still need MPs, but not the 600 odd we have now; a couple of hundred should suffice to act as administrators and make sure that the private companies entrusted with carrying out the policies we voted for do so properly. An unintended consequence is that this could lead to a privatised health service, but at least it would happen through conscious choice and not implemented by stealth.

 

In private industry objectives are the norm, and performance against objectives is how pay rises and bonuses are set. In a privatised parliament, our MPs could be assessed and rewarded by how effectively they manage to get the policies implemented.

 

This method of governance would ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs. Iain Duncan Smith last year lambasted the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), for recommending that working from home measures stay in place. He said that SAGE had no right to tell employers what to do because “most of them have never run a business.” Duncan Smith has never run a business, nor have many MPs, so how appropriate is it that a completely unqualified person is put in charge of the Department of Health, or Education, or the Ministry Defence?

 

Michael Gove once said that Britain is fed up with experts, but it is normally accepted that some degree of expertise and knowledge of a business is useful when running it. Being in charge of a multi-million pound department with thousands of employees and the literal power of life and death over the population of the whole country apparently requires no experience or knowledge, just the good fortune to have won a popularity contest and be looked on kindly by the Prime Minister.

 

It’s time to privatise government and get the experts in.

 

 

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[1] Since 1979 there have been 93 occasions on which MPs have apologised for misleading the House. The most recent was in 2019. Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03169/