Time for a cap on family size?

By Greg McDonald

The British mother of 13 who plans to keep having children should wake us all up to the over-population crisis in Britain and the greater calamity the planet faces.

In a society of finite social resources – from child benefit to working tax credits, and school sites to housing – we have a responsibility to monitor our own numbers.

And those numbers are shocking, with Government figures projecting a nation of 77 million by 2059, or 16 new Birminghams in our lifetime.

We simply don’t have room – either for more coming in, or for breeding 13-strong families – and both Britain’s political sleepwalk into a larger population than France’s on the one hand, and our benefits-led culture of social irresponsibility on the other, need revolutionising to cap our population at 65 million.

Yet a wider issue dwarfs Britain’s numbers game: global population growth, with the possible exception of nuclear arms, is the biggest threat to the planet, responsible in part for everything from global warming and territorial wars to poverty and starvation.

On a worldwide scale there’s no avoiding the crux of the matter: we need to stop increasing our numbers.
Closer to home, a British family of 13 should wake us up to our own home-grown population crisis and the need for a population cap.

Not-so-dumb blonde

by Alan Tyers

My favourite ongoing news story at the moment is that of the court case involving the squillionaire financier who is being sued for discrimination by a disgruntled former employee.

Jordan Wimmer, you may recall, claims that her mega-rich hedge fund boss Mark Lowe humiliated her by turning up to business events accompanied by scantily dressed hookers.

The case has now moved on with the news that Ms Wimmer is upset that he made a “dumb blonde” joke in a round-robin email. Even worse, she was suffering from depression at the time.

Mr Lowe doesn’t really seem like the sort of bloke a gal would be dying to take home to mum - and, judging from his picture, he might be well advised to keep his comments about other people’s appearance to a minimum.

But Ms Wimmer, for her part, sounds like she might be on shaky ground. How can you work in an environment like private equity - where short-term, aggressive, uncaring machismo is the name of the game - and not expect a bit of rough and tumble?

In an ideal word, we’d all treat our co-workers with respect and kindness at all times. But that’s a pipe dream, especially in a job that involves seeing the naked face of capitalism right up close and personal.

Jordan Wimmer joined Mark Lowe’s company in 2004 on a £50,000 salary; within four years she was making the best part of 600 grand a year. For that sort of money - and incredible salary increase - she should have been able to put up with a bit of argy-bargy.

MPs have rights too!

by Alan Tyers

The man they no longer call Prudence is having another bad week with the purse strings - both the country's and his own.

When he’s not having an embarrassing UK PLC fire sale of The Tote and the chunnel rail, Gordon Brown is having to make the magnanimous gesture of paying back 12 grand in expenses in a no-doubt futile bid to draw a line under the whole affair.

MPs, meanwhile, are taking umbrage that they might have to pay back expenses claims that had gone through when the rules, and (equally significantly) the mood, were very different.

They are asking why expenses that were approved at the time should now be subject to retrospective limits. And they have a point.

For instance, the period between 2004 and 2008 is now subject to a £1,000-a-year limit for gardening, and £1,000 a year for cleaning costs.

MPs are now getting letters asking them to pay back money that they - one hesitates to use the expression “in good faith”, the greedy devils - at least claimed for and got approved at the time.

Why you and I should have to pay someone, who already gets in excess of £60,000 a year salary from the taxpayer, a thousand quid to do their gardening is not the point. Even MPs should not be punished for crimes that were not crimes at the time.

If the top brass in all the parties wish to draw a line under this matter, and you can surely bet that they do, the best policy would be to forget about what has gone before and try to start with a clean slate - not chisel money out of people for past claims.

Too many students?

by Alan Tyers

Apologies if this seems a little mean-spirited in Freshers’ Week, but is it time for a radical rethink about the Government’s goal to have half of all young people at university?

For many of the students starting their university lives this week, the next three years or so will be a great chance to get away from home, discover who they are, learn some social skills and work out how to take care of themselves (a bit): all excellent and important stuff. But it’s not academia.

Are we kidding ourselves that all students are really getting a serious education? Is the grounding they get really going to help them get better jobs, and benefit the country as a whole – in an increasingly competitive global marketplace?

Business lobby organisation the CBI, cast here in its familiar role as villain of the piece, reckons not. It believes that too many people are doing too many worthless degrees, emerging from their student days ill-equipped for industry. Its solution: raise prices, thus making university less attractive.

It has questioned the fact that 25% of public money spent on higher education goes to student funding, and suggested a three-pronged attack of less favourable loan rates, smaller grants and higher fees.

The obvious response is that it is going to hit poor students, making it harder for non-wealthy people to go to university.

The President of the NUS, Wes Streeting, says: “Students are already leaving university with record levels of debt, while graduate job prospects are at an all-time low.”

But if Wes is right, and a degree doesn’t really help people to get a job but saddles them with a lot of debt, surely many people would be better off skipping tertiary education and going straight into the workplace?

Don’t (green) shoot the messenger

by Greg McDonald

Fetch the champagne! Break out the credit cards! Tot up the economic chickens! For the green shoots of recovery are all around us and the good times are coming back to Brown’s booming Britain.

Think I’m joking? Well, assuming you’ve still got a mortgage, you may not want to bet it on today’s budding economic good news blossoming into a landslide spring election victory for Gordon Brown just yet – but the UK’s leading forecaster is deadly serious in suggesting that we’re witnessing the start of a recovery.

And before heading back to your Jobseeker’s Allowance forms, just look at the evidence that Gordon’s stimulus is doing the business: industrial output’s up, the service sector’s up, and house prices are up despite predictions of a 10% fall in 2009.

Even the maligned pound’s back to its strongest level against the dollar in almost a year – time to break out the bubbly, right?

Today’s figures are undeniably good news for Gordon Brown’s electoral chances. He may not have saved the world – and there’s still the small matter of repaying £125,000,000,000 – but if the PM’s stimulus policies have staved off a depression, British politics might be about to turn on its head.

A woman's work

by Alan Tyers

It is wrong that women earn less than men, and society should correct this imbalance – for practical reasons if not moral ones.

Not only is the pay gap unfair, it is harmful and it’s getting worse.

In 2007, women earned 21.9% less than men; that gap is now 22.6%. Women are more likely to have crappy, low-paying, low-status jobs than men: cashier, cleaner, caterer. This in turn creates negative stereotypes and low expectations for the next generation.

That’s bad, but it’s further up the career ladder that the situation really bites. Despite all the progress of the last three generations, there is still a tough glass ceiling.

Taking one male-dominated sector – the upper echelons of the City – as an example, the Equality And Human Rights Commission finds that only 11% of senior managers in the sector are women and that women are getting paid anything up to 55% less than their male counterparts to do the same job.

Look at the royal mess that the banker boys have made of the financial system, with their willy-waving, relentless risk-taking and macho short-termism, and tell me they deserve the extra cash.

Equal pay is desirable not just in and of itself, but because business and finance need a radical overhaul in this country: a new way of thinking. Pay women the same as men; make it illegal not to. Impose quotas. Because intervention is needed to correct this situation.

Men have had their turn at running our country, let women see if they can do better.

Private party

by Alan Tyers

Top professional jobs are still disproportionately dominated by the privately educated. This is the conclusion of a cross-party committee chaired by Alan Milburn; for instance, 75% of judges and 45% of senior civil servants went to private schools.

Not exactly earth-shattering news, you might say. However, I think that the problem of social immobility is deeper than whether someone’s parents paid for their education.

I don’t about the top professions, but in the media, a large proportion of youngsters get a start via unpaid work experience placements. This puts kids without the means to support themselves during an unpaid stint – in pricey and often faraway London – at a big disadvantage.

And not only does work experience culture play towards the children of wealthier people, the chance of getting one of the placements is hardly a level playing field. Disproportionately, they go to kids who are the son/niece/god-daughter of a senior-ish staff member.

Meanwhile, another traditional route into a career – leaving school at 16, starting in the post room and working your way up – is getting harder. Firstly, and this is specific to a career in journalism but can easily be applied to wider commerce, because all the local papers (and local businesses in general) are gradually being closed down.

Secondly, and this is more universal, it’s more difficult because employers can demand that their young blood have some sort of tertiary qualification: everyone’s got a degree nowadays, after all. The well-intentioned drive to get half of all youngsters into a university has arguably made starting in some careers harder for the poorest.

As long as there are rich, successful people, they’re going to give their kids a leg-up in a variety of tangible and intangible ways that go far beyond schooling. Even if it were feasible, positively discriminating against those with a private education will hardly change that.

Age-old struggle

by Alan Tyers

Healthcare for the elderly might not be the sexiest topic for debate, but it will become a political war zone.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. By 2048, it might be that the primary struggle in our society is not class against class, but young against old.

One key battleground will be healthcare: the Government is planning to create a National Care Service that it hopes will reduce the so-called “postcode lottery” of care for the old by normalising standards and guaranteeing minimum rights.

With an aging population and ever-improving medical care, this is going to be staggeringly expensive. But these oldsters vote, a lot, and they want their due: woe betide the politician that takes on the grey vote.

Within just 20 years, there will be a £6bn gap in the funding for social care. And with more and more people also drawing the state pension, where is all this money going to come from?

The answer? From the working population. Already the state pension age is creeping up: it’s clear that the country just doesn’t have enough money to pay 61-year-old women not to work. By 2046 you will have to be 68 to get a few pennies out of the state – and who knows if that will be pushed up again?

As people live longer, though, reducing the minimum age for pensions becomes less effective. Those still working will be taxed harder and harder. The young, or at least the middle-aged, will be pitted against the old.

One group will own most of the property, but will not really do any work and will expect deference from the others, who will be so hard-worked and hard-taxed that they’ll have nothing spare with which to accrue any capital or property. The old play the role of the bourgeoisie, the young the proletariat: that's your future struggle.

Giz a (second) job

by Alan Tyers

Today’s the day that MPs either have to forgo their second, often highly lucrative, second jobs – or face having the nitty-gritty of how much they are trousering revealed to a contemptuous public.

Many Tories have already handed in their notice at various cosy-sounding part-time gigs which include “adviser to the JCB Group” (William Hague, £50,000 a year); Times newspaper columnist (Michael Gove, £60,000 a year; he says he spends about an hour a week on it); and “98 hours’ legal work, £18,750” (Bill Cash, Conservative MP for Stone).

A lot of their Labour opponents seem less willing to call it a day at their other jobs; and David Cameron has insisted that his top people all focus entirely on parliament, and the election, from December.

Is this because the Tories are a nobler bunch, more in tune with what the public wants from its politicians? Or is it because the Labour lot realise they’re going to lose the election and would thus be foolish to give up their other gigs as well?

Anyway, is it so bad for politicians to have a second job? On the one hand, one instinctively thinks that surely the business of running the country should be enough on anyone’s plate – and that 70 grand a year plus a regular trolley dash around Peter Jones at the public expense should be enough to keep body and soul together.

But what this expenses scandal has revealed above all is just how out of touch many MPs seem to be. Maybe actually having some other job – and I’m going to be ultra-generous and assume that they actually do something rather than just the corporate golf day and snoozing through a board meeting – might actually give them a taste of what business, media, professions, finance, industry or whatever is really like.

Perhaps, like a spoiled teenager being forced into a paper round instead of pocket money, they might learn how the world actually works.

A right royal carve-up

by Alan Tyers

MPs, failed but lavishly pensioned Speakers, BBC executives, bailed-out bankers...and now the Queen as well? Has EVERYONE got their hand in your pocket?

As her subjects battle through the biggest recession in a generation, the cost of keeping the Queen in corgis and formidable hats has risen. The total annual cost of the monarchy is up £1.5m to £41.5m.

The Queen’s Civil List, which includes staff, cost £13.9m in 2008. £7.9m of that came from the Government (i.e. the taxpayer) and a further £6m came from a reserve fund that was built up during the 1990s with unspent (i.e. taxpayers’) money.

That pot now stands at "just" £21m, so even the most mathematically challenged royal (no doubt a strong field) should be able to work out that, at the current rate of spending, it’ll all be gone in three years or so.

And so the Royal Family will be wanting more money.

As the Government - this one, the next one, whatever - effects huge public spending cutbacks to fund the bailouts of their chums in the City, the beleaguered taxpayer will have to dig ever deeper to support an anachronistic bunch of losers, freeloaders and no-hopers.

The Queen, Gawd bless her, has done a magnificent job, but once she goes, it’s time for this obscenely-funded monarchy to reform, massively. They have assets and earning potential, so let them pay for their own keep: scrap the civil lists and let them sink or swim.

There is just no justification for having an already vastly wealthy man like Prince Charles and his Hooray Henry sons suckling on the public teat – let alone the also-ran 15th in-line nobodies.

If they want to stay on with people bowing and scraping before them, they can do it without enjoying the largesse of their supposed social inferiors.