Oh my word. It’s only just clicked into a new year and I already feel so weary with all the dumbness. It is everywhere.
It started with somebody somewhere in Westminster (where else) thinking that sending 200 Army personnel in to cover the 35,000 that were off each day on average in the NHS would do just fine. Don’t get me wrong, you need to be made of a special substance to serve your country but the maths just doesn’t stack up. Rather than use them for a cheap political publicity stunt, I’m a great believer that the army should just do army stuff. I’m a little old fashioned like that.
Perhaps the stunt was to deflect interest in the publication of the feasibility study into BoJo’s £335 billion bridge to Northern Ireland that cost £900,000 to conduct. £900,000 for a Structural Engineer to look out across the Irish sea during a storm and say “nah, not doable.”
Then the Daily Mail got involved in the loopyness with the first politically motivated bad maths of 2022……“Global population inches towards EIGHT BILLION after increasing by 74 million in a year”. Followed by the bewildering “America added 707,000 — with one new migrant every 130 SECONDS”.
Slow your horses there a mo. This makes no sense. The migrants already existed surely? They were just in other countries and have already been counted (years ago) as part of the global population. Total madness…..but that’s the Daily Mail for you.
IKEA then went on a campaign of “we don’t want anti / unvaccinated people in our stores.” Nothing like stoking the fire of the Anti-Vaxxers who immediately retaliated with #BOYCOTTIKEA. Could they not have made it any easier for IKEA?
Then the BBC pulled me in with their teasing of the new series of the Apprentice. Damn them. I regret watching it every year……every year I watch it though. People are always staggered that the Apprentice candidates are eccentric nutters with egos and odd personalities. But that’s the whole point of the programme. “We’ve found 16 experienced, excellent, sensible business candidates to bore you to tears for 2 months” doesn’t quite work for TV. The whole point of the show for me is swearing at the craziness on the screen.
And if all that isn’t enough, social media is full of too many normal people losing the plot and wild swimming in winter. Very sadly and suddenly, I lost another close friend to wild swimming. They haven’t drowned……they’ve just become an insufferable bore. Wild swimming is the new vegan. What is wrong with these people? When you think about it, heated, indoor swimming pools are……rather nice. I feel like it needs to become socially acceptable again to swim somewhere with a roof and not take countless pictures.
Enough of the madness 2022……I can’t take another 11 months of this. I deserve a little more after your offerings over the past 2 years.
The Numbers
There is a common theme to predictions for 2022 in that the first half of the year will be dominated by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Downing Street lockdown parties and the cost-of-living squeeze. They are all linked.
Russia-Ukraine tensions add to upward pressure on energy prices. “Partygate” adds to the impression of a dysfunctional, rule-breaking Government led by a chaotic BoJo in which any action to ease the cost-of-living squeeze has to be seen through the prism of political positioning.
Inflation hit 5.4% this month (a 30 year high) and it will go higher. The last time inflation was higher was in March 1992 when it was 7.1%. The biggest impetus will come from energy bills, which are due to increase sharply in April when the price cap rises by as much as 50% and likely to push inflation to 7%.
Rishi Sunak has previously suggested that a sustained 1% increase in inflation could add £25 billion to the cost of servicing the interest on Government debt. Good luck with that.
The UK economy surpassed pre-Covid levels for the first time after recording slightly stronger-than-expected growth. It meant the economy was 0.7% larger than in February 2020.
One of the questions I get asked most is whether the economy can continue to grow even as high inflation bites? The puzzle is easily stated. It is a matter of simple arithmetic……it is hard for the economy to grow unless consumer spending (which accounts for more than 60% of our economy) is also doing so.
Given that the cost of living will put pressure on household incomes, you would assume that consumer spending will slow. However, those lockdown savings totalling £200 billion still haven’t been spent as yet and that is what is driving a positive economic outlook for the next 18 months.
It is all well and good having hard cash but the product needs to be available to buy……and Covid had a huge impact on supply. Falling shipping rates point to an end to the great supply chain crisis.
The Baltic Dry Index (my second favourite index after the Purchase Managers Index obviously – it’s a class index that has stood the test of time) is anything but an arid subject. It measures the price of shipping bulk materials around the world and as such is used as a yardstick to measure the stability and efficiency of worldwide supply chains.
In times of market dislocation, it rises sharply to reflect the difficulties in transporting goods — and during the pandemic it has done little else but rise, peaking at more than 5,700. That peak in the Baltic Dry Index was hit on 7 October 2021. Since then, the index has fallen sharply to 1,300. To put that in to context, that puts the index back to the average over the past decade. It indicates not only that things are a lot better than they were only three months ago, but also that the great supply chain crisis may be over. May be.
This month saw Apple become the first firm to hit a $3 trillion market value. The US doesn’t even feel like a country any more……it's just four corporations in a trench coat.
Trump of the Month
When you live in a time when every hour of every day news outlets run stories solidly on the behaviour of the Government, there can only be one winner……BoJo. It seems that the media has suddenly realised that BoJo is exactly the person they knew he was before the election but forgot to say.
How do I measure success? Success to me is using the self-checkout in the supermarket without Brenda coming over to bail me out. Success when you are the leader of a country should not be used by the same metric……yet I fear it is.
January 2022 saw BoJo issue a “humble and sincere” apology to Lord Geidt (his ethics adviser) for withholding critical messages from an inquiry into the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.
If you withhold evidence from an investigation that confirms your unequivocal guilt, what does that make you? Fit to be British Prime Minister apparently. What have you got to do to break the Ministerial Code?
Then came the High Court ruling that a 'VIP lane' was used by Government to hand out PPE contracts to two companies during the first coronavirus wave, which was unlawful. The contracts amounted to £340 million.
All of this seemed to be missed as daily fresh revelations of parties at Downing Street swamp us.
Downing Street parties……where do you even start? Well, just for the record, I wasn’t there……I was thoroughly sanitising my home delivery from Tesco, not having a haircut and keeping immaculate timing to ensure I clapped on the right day at the right time .
The biggest embarrassment for BoJo is that even when people weren’t legally allowed to have any other social plans he still only managed to get 30 out of the 100 invited people to turn up to his party.
Bizarrely, BoJo stating that “nobody told me it was against the rules” is a pretty weird thing for someone to say who was literally on TV every night for an hour telling people what the rules were.
Rishi’s office overlooks the parties in the garden. Hancock visited Number 10 every day. Raab was deputy when BoJo was in hospital. Gove ran the cabinet office. Surely it’s impossible they didn't know. It’s not just BoJo……I fear it’s all of them.
After coming under pressure for weeks, the Metropolitan Police's decision to launch an investigation into potential breaches of covid regulations inside Downing Street and Whitehall is a huge new twist. Being investigated by the police is where no Prime Minister wants to be. It certainly stops the full ‘independent’ report from Sue Gray being published in the short term.
Officially ‘guilty’ of breaking the rules or not, it matters little. We are missing the point as the whole fiasco goes against the 7 Nolan Principles that are the basis of the ethical standards expected of anyone in public office:
1. Selflessness
2. Integrity
3. Objectivity
4. Accountability
5. Openness
6. Honesty
7. Leadership
They might as well say Maureen, Anne, Coleen, Linda, Denise and Bernie.
(ask your Mum kids – she’ll know the words to “I'm In the Mood for Dancing" inside out).
All very shameful stuff. All very like The Trump.
Trump Lunacy Rating: 10 / 10
And Finally……
"I should regret to see the day in which the people should cease to express intelligent, honest generous criticism upon the policy of their rulers."
Abraham Lincoln
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