The Olympics are all about sport, like socialism is all about fairness

Hands up everyone who believes that the head of IT at RBS-NatWest will not be in line for a whacking bonus this year.

I see. And do you also, by any chance, believe in fairies? Hold that the moon is made of green cheese and that the euro is a great engine of prosperity? Have you already placed a bet on England to win the 2014 World Cup? Do you eagerly look forward to the London Olympics and imagine that socialists are keen to pay tax?

I do not have space to tackle all these delusions, but let me deal with a few. The person in charge of computer systems at our favourite state-owned bank will surely deserve an exceptional reward for giving us a real taste of what life will be like if and when the euro finally implodes and takes our banking system with it.

Plus, of course, some additional bunce for sorting out the mess, if and when they ever do. Personally, I’d try turning it off at the plug and leaving it for a minute or two. That nearly always works for me.

As for England’s sporting prospects, I know nothing whatsoever about football, except that every recent humiliation seems to involve our players’ inability to score penalties. So here’s an idea. Why not try practising that a bit before the next tournament? There is no charge for this advice.

Then there are the Olympics. Could anything be more ludicrous than the half dozen or more police motorcycle outriders I encountered on the M6 last Wednesday, escorting not some head of state but a common or garden van and bus containing the sacred flame?

Which trundles around in this inflated convoy until it reaches a centre of population where it can be handed to a “runner” who will, on the evidence so far, almost certainly be unable to run either because they are even fatter than I am, or lacking the usual number of legs.

No wonder they commissioned those shapeless white torchbearer costumes, apparently sharing a designer with the orange jump suits worn at Guantanamo Bay.

Actually, something could be much more repulsive than that. Namely the cordoning off of “Olympic lanes” in London, making our capital resemble that of some totalitarian state, and the equally loathsome crackdown on everyday commercial activities to protect the investment of official sponsors.

The Olympics are all about sport in the way that socialism is all about fairness.

One of the joys of being self-employed is retrospectively handing over large chunks of money to HM Revenue and Customs twice a year. I have never pretended to enjoy it, or believed for a second that the Government has a better idea what to do with my earnings than I do myself.

Yet I have a number of diehard Labour-voting friends who assure me that I am wrong, and that the secret of a happy and fair society is for me to pay even more tax to support those less fortunate than myself.

Only it never seems to apply to them personally. Obviously. I still reel at the hypocrisy of a lifelong socialist who cheerily described over lunch how he had saved himself a million pounds in tax through some jiggery-pokery involving transfers between jurisdictions with different year-ends.

In the same way that these types rejoice in the destruction of state grammar schools, because they were unfair on the kids who could not get a foot on the ladder out of the sink estate. Then send their own kids to private schools rather than the local comprehensive. Because they’re worth it.

So it came as a delightful surprise to find that yesterday’s column by that inveterate left-winger Tom Gutteridge came to exactly the same conclusion that I have been arguing for years. Namely that taxes should be made low, compulsory and ideally flat.

Except on bonuses for IT chiefs at banks that have dropped millions of customers in the proverbial, where a marginal rate of at least 110% should apply.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Let's build a new Royal yacht - and bring the old one here

One thing is for sure: Tony Blair is really going to struggle with delivering Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” when it comes up on the karaoke machine at party nights in his twilight home.

So far he has publicly regretted the (admittedly nominal) abolition of foxhunting and the Freedom of Information Act. Under pressure at the Chilcot enquiry, he also said he was sorry for the loss of life in Iraq.

However, he is on record as having no regrets about removing Saddam, befriending Gadaffi or indeed remaining silent about baby Leo’s MMR jab.

What else, in the fullness of time, might he come to see as a mistake? The most recent example of the benefit of hindsight came in the debate about a possible new Royal yacht, when it was revealed that Mr Blair now regretted getting rid of Britannia. An unsurprising revelation to all of us who pointed out at the time that it was an egregious error.

The value of Britannia for projecting British prestige and promoting trade around the world was incalculable, though arguably it could have been worked harder for this purpose. I can vividly recall the surge of pride I experienced each time I saw her, even when being rudely awoken by a destroyer’s 21-gun salute as the yacht appeared through the mist at the start of Cowes week.

Since this column was recently maligned as Tory propaganda, let me concede that her demise was not Mr Blair’s fault. The decision to decommission the ship was taken by the Major government, which then decided in 1997 that it would spend £60 million on a new yacht, scheduled to enter service in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Even Denmark can run to a functioning Royal yacht - and it is 20 years older than Britannia

Cue outrage from Labour in general, and Gordon Brown in particular, who had not been consulted prior to the announcement by then defence secretary Michael Portillo. It is good to note that he has since moved on to a career evidently more suited to his talents, spotting trains on TV.

Look out! No, on second thoughts ...

How could a country in Britain’s dire economic state waste that sort of money? That was the question being asked as we poured £800 million down the useless black hole of the Millennium Dome.

Now the cost of a new yacht has apparently risen to an eye-watering £80 million. Precisely what we are about to squander on opening and closing ceremonies for the London Olympics that will be over in a flash and doubtless occupy little space in our collective memories.

The London Olympic mascots apparently hanged. Not at all a bad idea.

For comparative purposes, it might also be interesting to tot up the countless billions of taxpayers’ money wasted over recent years on endless reorganisations of the health service and education, grotesquely overpriced private finance initiatives and defence procurement projects that have delivered nothing but scrap metal.

You could buy five new Royal yachts for the price of one Nimrod, scrapped before entering service

But who needs taxpayers’ money? I for one would be happy to contribute to the cost of a new national flagship, if someone opened a bank account for that purpose. Come to think of it, I am surprised that those industrious gentlemen in West Africa, who are forever e-mailing me about my lottery wins and deceased relatives, have not already got in on the act.

It would be a nice gesture if a certain lightly taxed, globetrotting, multi-millionaire retired PM with an uneasy conscience could chuck in a few quid, too.

Personally I would simply confiscate Britannia from those ungrateful Scots in Leith, bung in some new engines and set her back to work. But if a new vessel that also provides sail training opportunities for young people has more appeal to the popular imagination, then that’s fine with me, too.

Though I would still tow Britannia somewhere a bit more attached to the concept she is named after. Like the Tyne, for example. Perhaps with a grand re-opening featuring ex-Prime Ministers performing karaoke. That should make Her Majesty smile.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: The Coming Apocalypse

I have a friend who has not yet been certified insane, owing to a series of regrettable oversights by the overworked medical profession, yet still purports to believe that the world will be coming to an end on 21 December next year.

The timing could be worse, I suppose. Royalists like me will have enjoyed the uplift of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, while those who care for that sort of thing will have been able to watch their money cascading down the world class gurgler of the London Olympics. And we will all be spared yet another excruciating Christmas lunch with the in-laws as well as those always daunting winter fuel bills.

The important question is whether it is really going to happen. Because, if it is, we might as well all stop worrying about our shrinking pension funds and start ticking off achievements from the list of 50 things to do before we die. Or in my case, five things, four of which will almost certainly be ruled out by my inability to secure the willing participation of a lingerie model suitably qualified by her ownership of a main line steam locomotive.

In her case, I'd have settled for a narrow gauge locomotive

Common sense, of course, decrees that the end of the world is not about to take place. But then I am pretty sure that common sense dismissed the Black Death, the huge death toll of the First World War and the horror unleashed on 9/11 as alarmist fantasies until they actually occurred. And if they had been slightly more intelligent, the dinosaurs would no doubt have enjoyed a good chuckle about the huge odds against their far from cosy world being blown apart by a massive asteroid impact.

Famous last words:"What the f... was that?"

Wikipedia is packed with laughable stories of those who made a wrong call on the timing of the Apocalypse, and I don’t have a lot of faith in my friend’s burbling explanations about the Mayan calendar. But I know from my own years as an investment analyst that once in a blue moon even a total idiot can turn out to be almost right, albeit for completely the wrong reasons.

The basis of my niggling concern is the way that the whole world economic system increasingly resembles one of those gigantic boulders precariously balanced on the top of a crumbling pinnacle of rock: the pinnacle in this case being the Everest of global debt. It will only take the failure of one or two meaningful sovereign states to bring the entire thing crashing down, taking with it the banks, what is left of our savings, and our ability to make payments with cash, credit cards or cheques.

Even if the trumpets have failed to sound and the four horsemen have not made their scheduled appearance the previous day, this financial scenario could make 22 December 2012 the occasion of some smugness among those who have invested in a bit of land suitable for vegetable cultivation, a large stock of tinned food, some chickens, a gun and maybe a few gold bars for conducting transactions with their neighbours.

Being one of the world’s foremost pessimists, I was certainly thinking along these lines when I bought my current home in Northumberland. Though I have never actually grown anything more ambitious than mint and chives, and the modest tinned food stockpile is covered in rust and swelling disturbingly at the seams; while the hens remain a pipe dream and I have yet to feel even remotely tempted to give the constabulary a laugh at my expense by applying for a firearms licence.

My little patch of land (though sadly not my sheep)

As for those gold bars, the only thing glistering in my house, now that I have had the crown on my back tooth replaced in porcelain, is the fake guinea dangling modestly at the end of my great-grandfather’s watch chain.

It is rather a shame that I haven’t had the courage of my negative convictions, or made any like-minded friends to reinforce them. We could have held a splendid Christmas lunch of tinned all-day breakfast in 2012, and smirked over the irony that one of the few growth sectors on the high street in the years before the crash was those shops devoted to parting the gullible from their precious metals and converting them into now worthless folding money.

However, I imagine that the smiles would probably be wiped off our faces quite quickly when rampaging mobs of the hungry urban underclass arrived on our blessed plots and started helping themselves to anything that took their fancy, in the popular Tottenham style.

I suppose if I really believed in the imminent economic Apocalypse, I would currently be looking for a small offshore island with fertile soil and scope for fortification. Though for a lazy man like me, it seems easier simply to take the advice so often shouted at me in the streets: “Cheer up, it may never happen!”

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who likes to prepare for the worst 

www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.