Offmessage

I think they want us to think that this, like the Obama compaign before it, will be an Internet election.  Where smart people use the power of social media to get across the real messages of the election, empowering democracy and “getting the right result”.

What we’ve seen however, is the denizens of the Internet take the piss out of everyone  and both the main competitors make a complete hash of it (most recently).  Today’s example has to be the meta tags on www.number10.gov.uk:

<meta name="keywords" content="budget 2010,health,jobs and growth,life sciences,football,ada lovelace day,sarah brown,
            women,thameslink,trains,budget cabinet,israel,ssrb statement,piercing,tattoos,small businesses,
            trade credit insurance scheme,armed forces,idenity" />

Please, explain… tattoos? piercing? Ada Lovelace Day? Idenity?

I don’t really want to get all banker bashing, but these 3 stories really sum up my utter confusion about the end result of the “financial crisis”.  I’m an intelligent enough chap. I ought to get it, oughtn’t I?

• RBS paid £1.3bn bonuses on profit of just £1bn
• Threat to ’25,000 council jobs’
• Gordon Brown tells police to keep officers on the beat

I seem to have this awful Emperor’s new clothes kind of feeling that just won’t go away.

Coming firmly into the “you learn something new every day” category.  Bright Green environmentalism; environmental sustainability through technological change and advance. As compared to Light Green (personal lifestyle change) and Dark Green (socio-political change).

Aviva (formerly Norwich Union, formerly General Accident) is axing another 1,100 jobs, of which 570 are in York.  York’s already borne the brunt of NU’s consolidation in 2 previous rounds of heavy job losses.

With the loss of Terry’s chocolate, the huge reduction in Nestlé’s operations, the closure of the British Sugar plant (now we have no chocolate), the migration of huge chunks of the railway and Aviva’s previous consolidation we’ve lost thousands of jobs in the last few years.

In a city of only 100,000 that’s an awful lot of jobs to go. Losing another 570 today is a very heavy blow.

Yet more encroachments planned – this time it looks like we’ll need to present a passport to buy a cell phone. I mean really.

Everywhere you go Robert Peston has been the rising star of this recent financial crisis; from Joe Strummer on the Today Programme through to the Twitterati. To be honest it’s not that surprising that the SFO have been asked to investigate his “scoops”.

Homer tries to vote for Obama.  Thing is, we’ve all read enough about Diebold to know this is true, so why’s it in the Simpsons?

Saturday Night Live skit on Sarah Palin uses exactly her own words.  Nice.

So…  The Tories are proposing to scrap the third runway at Heathrow and instead build high speed rail links between London, Leeds and Manchester?  This should, in theory, be fantastic news for those of us that live “oop north”.  I have one problem with it though – travel from London to the North by train is so ludicrously expensive; my last long haul flight (from Leeds/Bradford to Nairobi) was cheaper than an open return from York to London by train.

Until the way the franchises for the rail network is sorted out we will continue to have the daylight robbery of the likes of National Express, and any amount of high speed rail network will be stymied by the worst type of lack of competition.

So…  Having a third child is “worse than having a patio heater“, is it?  In an age when this country’s birthrate is dropping rapidly and where the under eighteens are outnumbered by the over sixties for the first time it seems to be to be highly disingenuous to suggest that population growth is a problem in the UK.  In fact, much opinion suggests that exactly the opposite is the case.

Not only are many couples opting to have either no children or only one child, we are also having our children much later in life.  These two factors combine to cause a genuine risk of Britain not even achieving the “lowest low” (a birthrate of ~1.3, where population halves in 45 years and the decline becomes unrecoverable) let alone the “replacement rate” of 2.1. Countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Greece are already below 1.3, while the UK is at 1.65 and falling.

I may be biased (Claire is expecting our third child in January), but I can’t help feeling that a country at least maintaining its replacement rate can’t be anything but healthy.  I can’t even persuade myself that this is controversial view, surely?

This article on the topic of birthrate at the New York Times is long (10 pages), but well worth the read if you’ve got 5 minutes.