The good old days of State monopolies and Michael Foot

We all love a good moan about how everything used to be so much better in the old days.

No one more so than farmers, who are currently up in arms about the falling price of milk.

To keep their PR pitch simple, they heap most of the blame on price cutting by British supermarkets, when the reality is one of global supply exceeding demand.

Milk production around the world has soared at the same time as Chinese demand growth has slowed and Russia has banned EU imports. To add to the misery, the natural reaction of many dairy farmers to lower prices is to buy more cows and increase output in order to maintain their income.

Once upon a time farmers were sheltered from the harsh realities of global capitalism by the existence of the Milk Marketing Board: a statutory monopoly that guaranteed the same price to the dairyman with five cows halfway up a mountain in the Lake District and his counterpart with several hundred beasts on the Cheshire plain.

In popular mythology this beneficent institution was abolished by the evil Thatcher, clearly not content with snatching milk from schoolchildren in the 1970s and closing all the coalmines in the 1980s.

In reality the Board was abolished in 1994, four years after Mrs Thatcher left office.

Still, some clearly see instructive parallels between those who feel a hereditary calling to milk cows and those communities where sons once followed their fathers down the pit to hew coal.

Only farmers naturally tend to get a better press because our idealised image of England tends to feature green fields, peacefully grazing cows, bee-filled hedgerows and farmhouses with roses around the door.

Despite the best efforts of the Pitmen Painters, this has rather more general appeal than blackened terraces, winding gear and slag heaps.

The British coal industry died because the stuff could be produced more cheaply elsewhere, and because of pressure from the global warming lobby to phase out its use.

The same fate is unlikely to befall the British dairy industry so long as we consumers stubbornly insist on buying our milk fresh, rather than as longlife UHT. This makes it impossible to import the stuff in sufficient quantities even when the Channel Tunnel isn’t under siege from would-be migrants.
It will help if we also read the small print on packets of butter, cheese and other dairy products, and prefer the British option; and ignore the calls of those who would rid us of flatulent cows to help save the planet.

We have the freedom and the power to do this. In Morrisons, we will soon also have the option of paying an extra 10p per litre (that’s 23p on the usual four pint bottle) to help out the farmers.

It will be interesting to see how many take this up, because polls showing overwhelming support for dairy farmers seem to bear some parallels with those predicting a strong showing for Labour at the last election.

In practice, we have a long-standing tendency to vote with our feet for the cheapest option, and to mark a cross for the safest and least radical one in the polling booth.

Not so long ago we could have fresh milk delivered to our doorstep every day in re-usable containers on an ultra environmentally friendly zero emissions electric float. The milkman also performed a valuable social service in keeping an eye on the elderly and deterring crime.

But most lost their jobs not because of the evil supermarkets but because you chose to buy your milk there in bulk, at a lower price. No one forced you to do that.

Perhaps all this is about to change as Labour makes a headlong rush back to the 1980s under the widely predicted leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. A man who is definitely in favour of mining more coal, though not of actually burning it, and is the best chance we are likely to get of bringing back state monopolies for agricultural produce.

As traditionally conservative farmers blockade supermarket depots with their tractors, I wonder how many of them have also invested £3 to vote for the Labour leader most likely to turn the clock back?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Horsemeat in the food chain: seriously, why the long face?

In my day job, I have done virtually nothing else for a full month now apart from answering questions about horsemeat.

Those who have knowingly eaten it assure me that horsemeat is delicious but, like most English people, I always pass those boucheries chevalines in Paris with a shudder of distaste. Which is entirely illogical, given that I don’t even like horses.

Many other columnists have lined up to opine that we are in the midst of a huge crisis caused by our addiction to cheap food, fostered by those evil supermarkets who are constantly driving down standards and screwing their suppliers. The answer, clearly, is to pay more, eat better and support your friendly, local butcher and farmer.

Even though the roof is kept over my head by Britain’s leading high street retailer of frozen food, I am personally delighted that good independent butchers have enjoyed a boost to their trade as a result of all this nonsense.

But please be assured that it is 99.99% nonsense, and that the problem is not so much processed food as manufactured hysteria. Yes, a small handful of rogues have evidently been passing off horsemeat as beef to some unsuspecting customers. But, as the food safety specialists never tire of explaining, this won’t actually do you any harm.

But what, scream the hysterics, if the horses had been treated with the veterinary painkiller called bute? Yes, the Government’s chief medical officer wearily explained, that might indeed stand an outside chance of making you ill if you ate 500 or 600 bute-laced horse burgers every day. Not that any trace of bute has been found in any UK products tested to date.

My client – Iceland Foods, since you ask – withdrew and destroyed a couple of batches of their burgers after the Food Safety Authority in Ireland detected small traces of horse DNA, amounting to one tenth of one per cent of the product. That particular test was not accredited for use in the UK and samples from the same batches were immediately sent to two independent laboratories for confirmation. No trace of horse DNA could be found.

All Iceland’s other beef products have now been tested and similarly proved to contain no rogue horse or pig meat. So they said so. Cue howls of protest that the company is not grovelling apologetically for something it has not done.

It’s a rum food crisis in which no one has died or, so far as we know, even been made ever so slightly poorly. As catastrophes go, it’s the equivalent of the Titanic’s head chef running out of lemon juice for the mousseline sauce to accompany the poached salmon in the first class dining room.

Meanwhile a Titanic-sized death toll has been exacted by mismanagement of the NHS in mid-Staffordshire and yet that, bizarrely, is the story that has proved pretty much a one day wonder.

I am old enough to remember what food shopping was like before the big supermarkets became dominant and the important truth is that it was rubbish.

There has been a revolution in the variety, quality, freshness and value for money of the food available to us in my lifetime that has been driven by supermarkets and is hugely advantageous to us all.

Yes, I also buy from independent shops and farmers’ markets because I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do so, but I have no hesitation in doing the bulk of my shopping in supermarkets – including Iceland – and nor should anyone else.

If you’re going to get hung up on microscopic quantities of DNA, brace yourself for next week’s shock disclosure that your raspberry yogurt almost certainly contains a trace of banana.

Please also remember that your local butcher’s handmade burgers stand every chance of containing minuscule traces of other animals’ DNA. And, unless he washes his hands with the obsessive dedication of a serial killer who has successfully evaded justice, quite possibly human DNA too.

I really hope that some enterprising tabloid does run a test for that, so that we may look forward to the next stage of the crisis: Britain rocked by revelations of rampant cannibalism among the middle classes.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The perfect eco-friendly business - and how we destroyed it

Imagine that you have secured a slot on a special “green” edition of Dragons’ Den and want to devise a business proposition completely in tune with the spirit of 2012.

You surely could not improve on offering a wholesome, natural product in fully recyclable containers, conveniently delivered direct to the customer by environmentally friendly electric vehicles.

Which is precisely what we had in the doorstep delivery of milk, a system that we as consumers have happily conspired with the supermarkets to destroy.

Through high water if not necessarily hell, the doorstep milkman battles through

When I was a boy two competing milk floats clattered down our street each morning. My mother, in her belt and braces way, patronised both of them, believing that this might give her a competitive edge if rationing were ever reintroduced.

They competed, I should add, only on promptness and reliability. Both sold at the same price and the option of buying milk from a shop seemingly did not exist.

We needed a service like this because, until I was around ten, we did not own a fridge. Even delivered daily, milk was pretty unpalatable for half the year for those of us with delicate sensibilities. I spent many morning breaks at school ducking and weaving to avoid my free third of a pint, crates of which always seemed to be deposited in full sun in the hottest corner of the playground.

Yum or yuck? It had its fans, but they definitely did not include me

But then came our first refrigerator and I belatedly discovered a real taste for delicious fresh, whole milk, always delivered in bottles with a distinct layer of yellowish cream towards the top. This provided the perfect complement to strawberries in the summer.

Like so much else, milk has never been as good as it was in those halcyon days of childhood. Even whole milk, which we have to buy again now that we have small children in the house, is “standardised” and homogenised so that being able to pour fresh cream off the top is only a happy memory.

The coming of almost universal domestic refrigeration put the first nail in the coffin of doorstep milk delivery. The demise of the stay-at-home mum contributed the second, because who wants to come home from work to pick up milk that has been sitting on the doorstep all day?

Then the big supermarkets identified the milkman, along with the family baker, butcher and greengrocer, as a soft target and relentlessly pursued their quarry with prices that were literally a fraction of the doorstep pint.

Ernie the milkman, R.I.P.

As if that were not enough of a headache, most of us now choose to buy our milk semi-skimmed or skimmed, creating a surplus of cream that has to find its way onto unforgiving global commodity markets, further driving down the returns to our hard-pressed dairy farmers.

Small wonder that three quarters of the UK dairy farms in business 30 years ago have given up. Many more will surely follow. I feel sorry for them, really I do. But sadly I fear that the future is no brighter for them than it was for the UK coalminers or textile workers, many of whom had also followed the same calling for generations.

If world market forces prevail, the future is more indoor mega-dairies like the monstrosity that the grasping Brian Aldridge aims to inflict on Ambridge in The Archers; and, for us consumers, more of our milk coming in UHT cartons from abroad.

Brian Aldridge: "One day, my boy, all this will be a bloody great shed."

Is this inevitable? No, nothing is inevitable apart from death and taxes. But, if we want to avoid it, many more of us need to think long and hard about the quality and provenance of the food we buy, and the welfare of the animals and people in the supply chain.

Seeking out and supporting local producers may always be a middle class luxury, in a mass market relentlessly focused on the lowest possible price. But for those of us who are lucky enough to be able to afford a few pence more, it really is the least that we can do.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Have you read the news? Time to start screaming

Given that we are all clinging to a smallish rock that is hurtling through space at around 67,000 miles per hour, it constantly amazes me that we do not spend all our time screaming like passengers on the scariest ride at an amusement park.

Now there's something you don't see every day

Heaven knows, there is plenty in the news to scream about. Petrol prices reaching an all-time high, for a start. Plus our Prime Minister repeatedly endorsing the giant supermarkets’ bogus claims to be in the business of “job creation”.

When in reality we all know that they have thrown countless thousands out of work in the small retail businesses they have destroyed and the suppliers they have squeezed to death; and that they will not be entirely happy until they have trained us to stack the shelves ourselves, as well as learning to operate their wretched self-scanning checkouts.

Then there is President van Rompuy of Europe being reappointed without anything so tiresome as an election, Vladimir Putin winning a landslide in a charade of one, and the Yanks reaching “Super Tuesday” in their endlessly bizarre contest between a small assortment of multi-millionaire loons. None of whom a sane nation would trust to take charge of a school crossing patrol, never mind a nuclear arsenal.

Though all these look quite rational developments compared with the Iranian elections contested only by supporters of alternative fundamentalists Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rather like a British general election in which the only parties standing were the BNP and the English Defence League.

Probably not exchanging highlights from the Frank Carson Memorial Joke Book

Not to worry, though. If the Iranians ever do get their hands on an atomic bomb President Obama or one of the aforementioned Republicans will undoubtedly take swift military action, in the way that has worked so splendidly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Closer to home, we have the suggested privatisation of the British police: what a simply great idea. It has worked so well in the NHS, with never a case of MRSA and virtually every ward boasting a Michelin star since they contracted out the cleaning and catering. And the staff all so well rewarded and jolly, too. No wonder the Government wants to extend the idea wherever it can.

Of course, many of the functions of the police and judiciary were put into private hands years ago. Specifically those of a Mr Rupert Murdoch, whose minions have allegedly taken it upon themselves to boost the meagre pay of numerous serving officers, pass far harsher judgements than the courts on anyone who offended against their “values”, and even to provide an active retirement for some of the more intelligent members of the mounted branch.

Bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “covert surveillance”. Fox coverts, that is. Sorry, but it is the only joke I have yet to see cracked among the reams of “Horsegate” stuff about hacking jackets, neigh-sayers and foal disclosure.

There have been many spoofs of Bond villains over the years, but it is increasingly hard to picture anyone better suited to preside over a missile-packing, hollowed-out volcano than Mr Murdoch. True to form, last week he even dropped his Mini-Me son James into the traditional tank full of hungry sharks.

But let us not despair. We may still look forward to 76-year-old Engelbert Humperdinck restoring our national pride in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, generously sponsored by the manufacturers of Stannah stairlifts and Zimmer frames.

Engelbert: heartthrob

Though technically it ought to be renamed the Centralasianvision Song Contest since it is taking place in Uzbekistan. Where? It is amazing to think that, within living memory, Neville Chamberlain was talking about German designs on Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

I hear that Engelbert will be singing an updated twilight home version of his classic 1960s hit, “Please release me – where am I?”

Yes, you’re right. The time to start screaming is definitely right now.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: My Number is Up

The most regrettable business development of my lifetime has been the relentless drive to downgrade the skills and wages of the average worker so as to maximise corporate profitability, and hence the related salaries and bonuses of top management.

I recently did some work for a restaurant company and encountered a research report lambasting it for falling behind its peers by not “deskilling” its kitchens.

Because why go to the expense of having a meal cooked by a trained chef when someone with the IQ of a rather backward Border terrier could just slam it in a microwave?

Not that you the customer would receive any discount for that, obviously. The saving would simply enhance the company’s bottom line.

Similarly, having long ago trained us to select our shopping ourselves, why should supermarkets employ several workers to scan the stuff at the tills, when you could pay just one to glower at us doing it for them?

The supreme example of ‘deskilling’ is, of course, the automated call centre. Mrs Hann was literally reduced to tears by one the other day as she ran the apparently endless gamut of multiple choice questions. She pleaded loudly just to speak to a fellow human, though soon wished that she had stuck with the robot.

A friendly Indian call centre

It was all to do with personalised number plates: a vain and stupid affectation, I know, but handy for those of us with failing memories.

I have one on my own car that begins ‘AI’. This seemed uncontroversial until I went to stay with a vet friend recently, and he asked what on Earth I knew about Artificial Insemination. Not as much as he does, that’s for sure. I once made the mistake of asking if he could lend me a cool box for a picnic, and ended up walking across the lawn at Glyndebourne bearing a large polystyrene box across which was blazoned in large red letters ‘Semen: Handle With Care’.

I bought another number containing the initials ‘XPR’ to celebrate my retirement from the public relations business. When I had to re-apply my nose to the grindstone, I donated this to my wife, who has been vainly trying to arrange its transfer from her old car to a new one she is buying. Dealing with our insurance company’s call centre has all but destroyed her will to live. And the bottom line is that the new car, which she hasn’t got, is now insured. While the old one, which she actually needs to drive, is not.

I have waged an equally wearing battle with my electricity supplier’s call centre for years. They consistently refuse to believe my own meter readings. Often they won’t believe their own meter reader’s efforts, either. The last time he gained access to my house they insisted on sending someone else around shortly afterwards to install a brand new meter, but it hasn’t helped. A month ago they sent me an estimated bill for several thousand pounds, with a proposal to settle this by increasing my direct debit by 400% to around £700 per month.

After voluble protests, they finally agreed to use my own meter readings, but then transposed the day and night numbers (for I have the old-fashioned Economy 7 rate for storage heaters) with the result that my debt went up by another few hundred pounds and my monthly direct debit to £800.

Eventually they acknowledged this mistake and sent me an accurate bill, but were still proposing to charge me the £800 a month. Which, the latest call centre person admitted, was more than she earned in a month.

This at least demonstrated that I was dealing with someone here in the UK, rather than one of the overseas call centres so beloved of banks, insurers and BT (Bangalore Telecom) where £800 per annum would probably be considered an enviable wage.

I liked it when you could go into an old-fashioned bricks and mortar building and sort things out with an old-fashioned flesh and blood human being who knew what their customer was talking about.

If I have to speak to a call centre at all, I want to deal with well-trained, well-informed and charming people. The sort I could share a pint with after they have solved all my problems for me. And, above all, I want to talk to a Geordie. So let’s all commit ourselves to North East job creation by affecting accents so thick that only a fellow Geordie can hope to understand us.

The nation's sweetheart: howay, pet!

People from other regions consistently report that they find the accent reassuring. And why stop at UK domination? Once Wor Cheryl has won over the doubters in the US, we should be aiming to take over call centre duties for the whole of North America, too, before giving our friends in India a taste of their own medicine.

Keith Hann is currently a PR consultant, but is likely to be seeking work in a call centre quite soon – www.keithhann.com

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