For me, the election war is over

“For you, Tommy, ze war is over!” The Germans always said this to captured British soldiers in the war films that were such a staple of my childhood.

Of course they were completely wrong, as Tommy invariably joined an escape committee and made an ingenious exit from his prison camp a couple of reels later.

But for me the General Election certainly is over, because I cast my vote on Saturday.

It feels wrong, just sticking an envelope in a post box rather than making a cross with a stubby pencil in a rickety plywood booth, after joshing with the party canvassers outside, and being ticked off the register by an official.

Not that there were many canvassers to be found outside the long demolished Callaly Women’s Institute hut, where I cast my last vote in person in Northumberland.

The election after that I was away on business so I asked for a postal vote, expecting it to be a one-off, but it turned out to be a permanent arrangement.

Now, I can see in theory that voting 12 days before the polls open is completely wrong. One should hear all the arguments before taking a view on any debate.

But leave it too long and you start to worry about your vote missing the count due to postal delays. And you end up, as I did in 2010, driving to the nearest polling station to hand over your postal vote in person. Which seems frankly ridiculous.

In any case, personal acquaintance with one candidate, and the conviction that she will be an excellent constituency MP, made her my absolutely obvious choice. I’d like to think I would still have voted for her if she had not been standing for the party to which I owe well over 40 years of tribal loyalty.

Naturally I’m going to feel pretty sick if, in the last week of the campaign, someone uncovers a secret off-manifesto commitment to slay all first-born sons, ban the wearing of ties or make forehead identity tattoos compulsory.

However, the chances of this seem slight. And now that I have become a mere observer of the various campaigns, rather than a potential voter, I can watch the contenders slug it out with the same sort of relaxed detachment with which I always approach the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. (Because, although I went to Cambridge, I have absolutely no interest in rowing.)

This election bears some similarities to that race with its two evenly matched teams slogging hard for the finish line. Though for the comparison to work fully we would have to add an SNP speedboat weaving back and forth across the course, threatening to upset the Conservative and Labour eights in its wash.

Plus a UKIP cabin cruiser, well stocked with gin, a Green pedalo, a Welsh Nationalist coracle and a Lib Dem submarine (actually a sunken coxless four).

The one and only time I went to watch the boat race, because I lived in London and could think of no excuse, it did not happen because Cambridge sank before the event had even started.

At least there is no chance of being denied a fascinating and unpredictable spectacle on the night of May 7th/8th, for which I will lay in Champagne either to celebrate or to drown my sorrows.

I have sat up for every election since 1970, when I enjoyed my first “Portillo moment” as the outgoing Labour foreign secretary George Brown lost his seat at Belper. That was an election the Conservatives were not expected to win; I can vividly remember the BBC bringing on a signwriter to paint some more digits on the Tory side of their swingometer.

The election of 1992 was also a pleasant surprise for those of a Conservative persuasion, though I don’t suppose there is any hope of Ed Miliband holding a triumphalist rally in Sheffield and repeatedly yelling “We’re all right!” to repel wavering voters.

Still, once every couple of decades the pundits seem to get it wrong. Let’s see if the pattern holds next week, with an unexpectedly decisive result for either would-be Prime Minister.

As I always say at weddings, may the best man win.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My Daddy is older than God

People who think God is talking to them tend to be kept under lock and key, or surrounded by adoring if gullible followers.

Up to now my five-year-old son is neither, but it could clearly go either way.

Shortly before the end of term his Church of England primary school held an Easter service for the children, so we naturally asked him how it went.

“We just sang some songs and God came to talk to us,” he replied disarmingly.

At Charlie’s age I had a clear mental picture of God as a very old Englishman (obviously) with a long grey beard and flowing robes.

But my son’s God is clean shaven and has short white hair and spectacles. I can state this with confidence because he is, in fact, the rector of our parish.

The last time he addressed the school he told them he had just celebrated his 60th birthday. I had passed this landmark myself a few weeks earlier, enabling Charlie to announce proudly that “My Daddy is older than God.”

No doubt we will be able to iron this misunderstanding out eventually, though it is an uphill struggle. The child seems much more willing to accept the existence of Santa Claus than of the Holy Trinity. Though when his first milk tooth began to wobble recently, he announced with great confidence that there was no such thing as the tooth fairy.

A line to which he stuck resolutely until he was advised that there might be money involved.

I don’t understand how one of his tender years has attained such a level of technological sophistication that he can create and constantly add to his own Amazon wish list, yet at the same time believe this is being monitored by Santa. Whose elves, he asserts, are currently labouring away making the Playmobil, Lego, Brio and various other branded goods specified, presumably under licence.

One for a future wish list?

Still, I suppose it is no more implausible than the apparent belief of large sections of the population that those vying for their votes at the forthcoming General Election are going to deliver any material change to their lives.

Life will indeed change, and for most of us will change for the better, if the evidence of the last 60 years counts for anything. But the influence of politicians will be marginal compared with that of inventors, scientists, technologists, creative thinkers of all kinds and even humble marketeers.

When I was Charlie’s age the nearest thing my best friend and I had to mobile phones was two cocoa tins and a length of string. He uses an iPad where I aspired to an Etch-a-Sketch.

Mine was a reasonably prosperous middle class family with a car and a phone (albeit initially a party line shared with the family across the road) but even we did not own the massive luxury of a fridge until I was 10.

At Last The 1948 Show (not Monty Python)

At the risk of sounding like those competitive Yorkshiremen who lived in a shoe in the middle of the road and ate gravel, it is important to pause every now and then and remember just how massively almost every aspect of life has changed during the long reign of the present Queen.

And while we may look back fondly on some aspects of the old days, we should never lose sight of the extent to which our collective lot has improved.

If we are not all full of the joys of spring and attending thanksgiving services it can only be because our expectations have risen more rapidly than the economic system has been able to deliver. 

Capitalism, like democracy, is imperfect, but it is decidedly better than anything else that has been tried up to now. If you doubt that I suggest you read a bit on the history of communism, or take a look at North Korea today.

The bright lights of North Korea:
clearly a Green paradise as well as a Communist one

Whoever wins on May 7th, if indeed anyone does, money will be tight. Taxes will go up and Government spending will be constrained. Accept that, and focus on the many ways that your life continues to improve in ways that have nothing to do with politicians.

If you can’t accept that, you may as well believe in the tooth fairy.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Accept reality: there is no Santa Claus

Most of us now view politicians much as my younger son began to regard Santa Claus last month.

Two-year-old Jamie had a series of meetings with Santa at a variety of events. At each he was asked what he wanted for Christmas and replied, unfailingly, “a race car”.

At which Santa asked whether he had been a good boy and then handed over a small package that clearly, from its shape and size, contained either a book or a cuddly toy.

Each time Jamie eagerly unwrapped it and his little face fell as he surveyed the contents.

“Oh,” he said with infinite sadness. “I was hoping for a race car.”

Luckily the real Santa turned up on Christmas Eve with just enough racing cars to restore his faith in superhuman nature.

What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with politicians as we brace ourselves for months of General Election campaigning?

Simply that we too have a wish list – lower immigration, better roads, cheaper rail fares, improved health services, tax increases for the rich, tax cuts for ourselves – that the various Santas of the main parties may promise to deliver.

But then they’ll simply hand over the same old package that they had planned all along, and we will be terribly disappointed.

This is because our expectations, like Jamie’s, are fundamentally unrealistic. The national finances are knackered, to use the technical economists’ jargon, and whoever is in charge is going to struggle to do much for us against that background.

Let us take health as an example, because I happen to have had recent experience of attending Wansbeck Hospital for an NHS scan.

The premises were top notch, the equipment clearly state-of-the-art, the staff charming and my appointments on time. This is exactly what people pay for private health insurance in the hope of achieving.

Now, as it happens, the service at Wansbeck is provided in partnership with a private company: InHealth.

Why should anyone care? It works brilliantly and it remains free to the patient. If this is the sort of “privatisation” that is going to make the NHS “unrecognisable” after another five years of Tory government, I’d vote for more of it.

What’s more, I feel no confidence that Labour in office would do anything radically different, given that they persisted with the Private Finance Initiative and the introduction of private partners to the NHS throughout their 13 years in office.

The key, plain fact of the “NHS crisis” was disarmingly explained on the radio the other morning by a scientist introducing his research findings that two thirds of cancers are caused by random mutations on which neither lifestyle nor heredity has any bearing.

The human body, he said, has a design life of approximately 40 years and after that it will start breaking down, no matter how careful you are.

Trying to keep me, at the age of 60, doing all the things I used to enjoy in my 20s is like trying to do 24,000 miles a year in a 1954 Morris Minor. It’s likely to cover rather a lot of them on the top of a recovery truck.

But we expect the NHS to keep us going in good health until we are 80, 90 and – in ever-increasing numbers – 100.

The potential cost of trying to do this is limitless and ruinous. No political party is ever going to be able to deliver it, so like young Jamie we might as well stop wishing and accept the reality of ongoing disappointment.

Because there isn’t a benevolent Mummy and Daddy to step in and save the day for the NHS, the roads budget, the armed services or anything else.

Accept reality – and bear in mind that the reality of hard times in Britain is infinitely preferable to the condition of most of the rest of the world – and we will undoubtedly face fewer disappointments.

That knowledge may also enhance our lives for the next few months as we reach for the “off” switch at the start of every pointless political debate. After all, we don’t need a doctor to tell us they are very bad indeed for our blood pressure.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Fed up with austerity Britain? Sadly, you ain't seen nothing yet

The canny chief executive, on reaching the top of the greasy pole, makes the shock discovery that he has inherited a total disaster.

The company’s profits are immediately trashed by massive write-offs, its workforce slashed and expectations comprehensively lowered to a level from which even a halfwit should be able to engineer some sort of recovery - for which the new boss will naturally be richly rewarded.

This Year Zero strategy was surely the only sensible option available to whoever was unlucky enough to win the UK General Election of 2010: a vote that any sensible politician should have done their utmost to lose.

Losing: something to smile about properly at long last

Incredibly, the incoming Coalition did not seize the golden opportunity to make our lives an utter misery straight away, in the admittedly faint hope that we would have forgiven and forgotten by the time of the next election in 2015.

They have now been in power for almost three years, and the confiscation of my family’s child allowances has only just kicked in. Wealthy pensioners continue to trouser unneeded winter fuel payments, while whole swathes of Government expenditure on health, education and overseas aid remain ring-fenced against cuts.

Small wonder that the deficit remains stubbornly high, the national debt continues to climb, and economic growth remains a fond memory. But not to worry, because our leaders are fixing the things that really matter: imposing yet another reorganisation on the NHS and restricting the freedom of the press (which, in the current state of the industry, seems about as meaningful as slapping a preservation order on a snowman).

Our collective memory is short, and any reminder that this Government is dealing with problems not of its own making is now the cue for loud jeers. Hence the likeliest outcome of the next election is the return to power of those who did so much to create the mess in the first place.

Balls. Nothing more to be said

No wonder that electorates elsewhere in Europe, faced with similar choices, tick the “none of the above” box by voting for comedians instead.

Despite their failure to grasp the nettle in 2010, it is increasingly hard to see what the Government hopes to gain by continuing to pretend that “the medicine is working” and things are going to pick up any time soon. It isn’t, and they aren’t.

This week’s confiscation of bank deposits in Cyprus (an island that still drives on the left but foolishly abandoned its pound for the euro in 2008) could well be the taste of things to come for all of us as the mad European project continues to unravel, with potentially dire consequences not only for prosperity, but for the very peace that idealists proclaim as the European Union’s crowning achievement. 

A typical Cyprus ATM

Retrospectively imposing a 110% tax on all bankers’ bonuses, and perhaps hanging a few of them from lampposts, might help relieve our feelings, but it won’t actually get us out of the economic mire in which we find ourselves. Nor will trying to borrow even more money in the hope that we can somehow spend our way out of the hole.

Sadly we all need to adjust our fond hope that life is going to get steadily cushier. “Living standards” across the board need to come down until we have settled the bill for the criminal folly of the debt-fuelled artificial boom of the Blair years.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Our material expectations have risen massively in my lifetime. We are warmer, fatter, longer-lived and more richly entertained than ever before in human history. But I see precious little evidence that we are any happier as a result.

It will come as no comfort to a better-off Cypriot saver to be reminded of this, but life is extremely short and the important thing is to try and enjoy it to the best of our ability. People can be blissfully happy working for a pittance for a cause they believe in, while even billionaires can fall prey to suicidal misery.

I for one would appreciate the Government finally admitting that we all are going to get considerably worse off for the foreseeable future, so that we can focus on learning how to smile with gritted teeth.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pregnancy: on the whole, I am glad to be a bloke

Unexpected discoveries on the brink of old age include this: being pregnant with a breech baby is very like voting in a British General Election.

Despite appearances, I am not pregnant myself; but my wife unmistakably is. And our baby, due in February, is resolutely refusing to adopt the approved position for a conventional delivery, despite increasingly voluble encouragement to do so.

Mrs Hann reckons that this can only be because he is stubborn to the point of self-defeating bloody-mindedness, like his elder brother. I am genuinely unaware of anything in their genetic inheritance that could account for this profound flaw in their characters.

A small boy reluctantly obeying instructions he does not agree with

In case you are wondering, the similarity to voting in a General Election is that medics keep outlining various ways of dealing with the problem, and my wife’s reaction is the same as mine when confronted with a ballot paper: she does not fancy any of the above one little bit.

Whether that be performing origami on her womb before delivery, extracting the baby by Caesarean section or simply allowing nature to take its course (with special emphasis on how they would respond if the infant got stuck on his way out, as breech babies are apparently more prone to do).

Sadly, Mrs Hann does not have the option of spoiling her ballot paper and walking out of the polling station in disgust. One way or another, a decision has to be made quite soon on how to bring young Jamie into the world.

So tomorrow we are going to hospital for our consultant’s Plan A: attempting to turn the baby around inside his mother.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy: what could possibly go wrong?

This comes with plenty of caveats. It will be painful. It may distress the baby or damage the placenta. It could even induce premature labour and require an emergency Caesarean section. Best of all, even if it is successful, there is every chance that the baby could simply turn straight back round again. Particularly, I suppose, if he has already shown form as an awkward little so-and-so.

Luckily the doctor was quick to set my wife’s mind at rest when she said that she had read that the chances of this happening were as high as 50%.

“No, no, it’s much closer to 40%”, came the confident reply, as though that made it pretty much a dead cert.

The baby is scheduled to be induced before full term in any case, because Mrs Hann has gestational diabetes, and this happy event has already been pencilled in for Friday week.

I saw the light bulb clicking on above my wife’s head.

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you just wait until you are ready to deliver him anyway, and try to turn him around then?”

“Oh no, we can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Er, logistical reasons.”

“Such as?”

“The bloke who knows how to turn babies around only comes in on Wednesdays.”

So are the great life-and-death decisions of our wonderful health service arrived at. For some reason my mind wandered off at this point to that South African hospital where unexplained deaths in the intensive care unit turned out to due to a cleaner disconnecting the life support machine to plug in her vacuum cleaner. Though that is probably an urban myth, as most good stories turn out to be.

I do not know why women willingly put themselves through all this, and I certainly do not know why so many of them volunteer to do it more than once. Particularly in our case, when I kept leaving all those magazine articles about happy only children so prominently lying around, and even made one the home page of our computer.

All I can do is hold my wife’s hand, smile reassuringly and think, as I so often do when I run into the participants in elections: “Rather you than me.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

2010 assessed

My contribution to the double page spread in The Journal's nebusiness section featuring “Thoughts on 2010” from the Great and Good of the North East business community ... and, for some reason, me:

As usual, 2010 was a year mixing the entirely predictable with the genuinely surprising. Some events, like the emergence of a Mr Miliband at the head of the Labour Party, managed to combine both.

I regret that I failed to include the Icelandic ash cloud in my helpful list of forecasts a year ago, but at least I was spot on in characterising the 2010 General Election as one not to win. It turned out that the great British public did not want anyone to win it, either, setting the scene for the first coalition Government of my lifetime.

My estimation of “Dave” Cameron as a political operator has shot upwards as he has deftly saddled Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats with the blame for so much of the ensuing unpleasantness, though admittedly they have not helped themselves either by breaking explicit election promises or choosing to shimmer around the Strictly Come Dancing floor in white tie and tails while rioting students are running amok in the capital. Louis XVI and Versailles spring to mind.

One thing I got badly wrong was expecting the pain of tax rises, spending cuts and job losses to impact straight after the General Election. Clearly we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Sunderland has a lot to answer for

Well done, us! It takes real skill and judgement to manipulate a simple first-past-the-post electoral system to achieve a result that absolutely none of the political parties wanted. That will serve them right for fiddling their expenses.

The only snag is that, being British, we are still not satisfied. The weekend newspapers were full of vox pop moans about that weird Scotsman still hanging around in Downing Street, and asking what on earth nice Dave Clegg thought he was up to, talking to nasty Nick Cameron.

And, with another election probably looming fairly soon, no one in any party dared answer “Because you willed it, dimwits.”

My own election day went very satisfactorily until about 11pm. I dropped my postal vote off at my nearest polling station, impeded only by two nonagenarians attempting to dodder through the door simultaneously, and enjoyed a fine lunch with two fellow scribblers, both lifelong Labour supporters.

Funnily enough they had both suddenly discovered an urgent need to support the Lib Dems, cheerily noting that the party stood to the left of Labour on most issues. Vote Clegg, get Miliband seemed to be the calculation. How could Nick possibly do a deal with “oily Dave” the PR man?

Of course, they may yet prove to be right, but at least I have enjoyed a few days sporting a wry smile.

Having viewed the BBC exit poll, I should have headed straight for bed, but the wait for those promised Sunderland results seemed tantalisingly short. And then the massive Wearside swings of 8.4% and even 11.6% to the Tories made me think that a night of genuine excitement lay ahead.

After all, if Sunderland was prepared to swing so strongly towards “Dave” after his candid predictions about how the North East could look forward to many fewer comfortable public sector jobs not answering the phones in call centres, or casually losing computer discs full of sensitive information, just imagine how well he might do in regions to which he was not actually proposing to lay waste.

Which is how I came to be still up at 4.30am, completely knackered, my bottle of Champagne still unopened, before I finally grasped that the ultimate result was going to be bang in line with the exit poll I had seen six and a half hours earlier.

Now one of the few areas in which I am in complete agreement with our (probably soon) ex-Prime Minister is the operation of a strict blame culture. With him everything was Tony Blair’s fault for about 13 years, then poor old Sue stepped forward to take his place. Luckily for me I acquired a wife not too long after I stopped being able to afford a PA, and fortunately for her baby Charlie came along quite soon afterwards to share responsibility for everything that goes wrong in the Hann household.

Sadly we spent election night 200-odd miles apart, but even if we had been together it is quite clear that this particular debacle was all down to the Makems. Either they weren’t paying attention to “Dave”, or they were too dim to understand what he said, or in the rush to win the race for first declaration (which isn’t too much of a challenge, really, considering that they are the only entrant) …

No, they could not have miscounted, could they? The British electoral system is beyond reproach.

My only compensation for a needlessly sleepless night was going live to Montgomeryshire to see the look on the face of chief asteroid worrier and Cheeky Girl fancier Lembit Opik as he was turfed out on a scarcely believable swing. But it was not enough, really. Next time I’m off to bed at 10.05 sharp. And the right advice for Sunderland is surely this: start training for a marathon, not a sprint.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne