Category: Thoughts on Society

What have most of us been told since childhood. Do well at school, go to university, get a good job and buy a house. The school bit I get, a decent education is absolutely paramount, but the rest. I’ve never bought into the myth about home ownership, I could never see the point. That was of course, until I got married and had kids. A family needs roots, a stable platform to build from. I still wasn’t convinced that buying a house was the answer though.

To me, getting people to buy their own homes was just an act of subjugation. What better way to keep people working for most of their lives than to tie them down with twenty-five years of mortgage repayments. When asked what they do for a living, how many people follow up their answer with the statement, “still, it pays the mortgage”.

There is one inherent flaw in this plan to enslave people into a life of toil and drudgery though. House ownership, especially when it takes so long to achieve this goal, is a matter of diminishing returns. We live on a relatively small island here in the UK and there is only so many houses. Sooner and later, there’s not going to be enough to go round. What then? How are you going to enslave future generations?

Student loans of course! Genius!! After all, it’s still part of that mantra that is drummed into us since we were kids. University, good job, buy house. Apparently, if statistics are to believed (who said that about damned lies!), it is predicted that the average age of moving out of the family home is around thirty-four. Thirty-four, are you kidding me!! But it doesn’t matter that this generation of university graduates can’t afford a mortgage. Of course they can’t. They’ve got massive student loans to pay off!

Now, if you’ve read any of my previous diatribes, you will know that I always like to offer some kind of answer. My answer this time. Stop paying! Stop paying all of it. Mortgages, student loans, the lot. What are the banks going to do if we all decided to stop paying our mortgages. Take us all to court? Of course not. Society would be forced to come up with a new way of doing things. I still believe that we should pay rent, nothing in life is for free. Just without the burden of knowing that you are going to be in debt for your whole working life. Who knows. Maybe people will start doing jobs that they enjoy, rather than jobs that they have to do. Maybe we will see a rise in the numbers of nurses, policeman, teachers. You know, the jobs that matter and make a difference. Pie in the sky? Maybe, if we do nothing. Imagine if we all acted on this. Imagine what the outcome would be.

You could end up living a life that you actually enjoy. Fancy that!!!

 

 

Now, if you’re after reading a typical rant about the state of policing in the UK, then you’ve come to the wrong place. I have a lot of respect for the police and I believe that they do a great job. On the whole. The restricted conditions that they have to work under have made their task all but impossible. With reduced funding, increased bureaucracy and dwindling support from the public, it’s no wonder that we are seeing a degradation of our police force.

I was shocked to read a recent statistic that only half of incidents reported now are actually investigated. Imagine having your house broken in to, or your car stolen and the only response you receive is to have some details taken over the phone. When you ask, “will the person be caught”, or “will I get my stuff back”, the realistic answer now is, “no”!

So what should we do. Investigate the crimes ourselves. Start up a vigilante force to patrol our streets, or perhaps, pay higher taxes to fund a better police force. Many people are already doing the first two, although, this isn’t an option for everyone. The extra money thing is a nice idea in theory, but how many people can actually afford to pay higher taxes. In this age of austerity (here’s a shocker, it’s not over!!), people are having to decide which of the bills to pay and a reduced pay packet is not an option. Also, there’s always an argument that any extra money raised via taxation will only get soaked up by the political and bureaucratic machine.

Okay smart-arse, I hear you cry, what’s the answer. Privatisation. That’s right, turn the police force over to those who benefit from its existence. Corporations and businesses can have part of their taxes paid directly into a “pot” that is used solely for policing. Affluent areas can pay slightly higher council tax, the extra revenue again going into this pot. The people, that’s us, can decide, via local councils and committees, just how and where this money is going to be spent. People can volunteer for local policing schemes and incentives, to help bolster the national police force. And not just neighbourhood watch schemes that stand behind net curtains telling tales on their neighbours, but a useful feet-on-the-ground volunteer force. After all, shouldn’t we take care of our own safety and not leave it in the hands of the politicians.

Not practical? Of course it’s not, but what else are we supposed to do. Just sit back and blame it on the very people that are trying to help us. Surely it’s time that we step up and take on some of the responsibility ourselves. Those that can pay should, and those that can’t should at least help out in other ways. It’s only by coming together as communities and pooling our time and resources that we are going to see a change.

Or, we can just sit around moaning about it, blaming everyone else in the process.

 

This is not a strange concept and most of us realise this on some level. What worries me is the frequency with which it happens now. We get bombarded with these lies and untruths on such a regular basis, we are becoming anaesthetised to it. So much so, we are in danger of accepting some of them as being the truth.

I have many examples that I would like to convey and I am sure that you are aware of many of the same issues. At the very least, I hope you share my opinion and in some cases, I hope you might look at some of these issues in a new light. As I have so many of these examples, I’ve decided to break them down into small bite-size chunks.

Lie #1 – “This call may be recorded for training purposes……….”

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah! I was on hold to one of the many service providers that I have the displeasure to call on a regular basis and this same message was droning on in my ear. We’ve all had to listen to it. And then it dawned on me. If these companies use these calls for “training purposes”, then why are most of the people that I speak to so incompetent. It appears that the only training they might have received is on how to use the phone system and how to read from the scripts in front of them. If your query is even slightly off from the list of things on their cheat-sheet, you might as well be talking to a trained parrot. Hell, at least the parrot would be entertaining!

If these calls were used for training, then these companies would see how ineffectual their call teams were. Such is the frustration at dealing with these individuals, normal, polite, self-effacing people are reduced to snarling, foul-mouthed animals, spewing expletives and profanities.

No, don’t be fooled. These calls aren’t used for training, for that would imply that they actually care about you, their customer. No, these calls are used to defend themselves should an issue arise that could be escalated. They can dredge up every word that you have uttered and use them against you. Prove that you are some unreasonable, quarrelsome time-waster who uses language that would embarrass even a fishwife.

Of course, this is only my opinion. If you are someone that manages to keep your cool in the face of overwhelming incompetence and obstinate ignorance, then I applaud you. If you are a company that does actually use this information for the betterment and training of your employees, then you are to be commended, a gold star for you.

Personally, my experience tells me otherwise. You’ve only got to trawl through the many corporate websites for these service providers to see the truth. What can you never find? A telephone number, that’s what! No, I don’t believe they use your call to train their staff, because they don’t want to talk to you in the first place!

 

I’m sure that everyone has noticed the slight kafuffle in the news concerning the salaries of a number of BBC employees. Whilst I agree with what seems to be the overwhelming opinion that these salaries seem to be completely out of step compared to the average wage of your general BBC viewer, especially when it is said viewers that are funding these pay packets, my concern comes from a slightly different direction.

Let’s step back a few years to an age when entertainment came in a slightly more basic format. Back to a time when what was considered to be entertainment was watching someone dressed in bright coloured clothing, perhaps juggling or walking on their hands.  Jesters in favour were rewarded with scraps of food, a place to sleep and maybe the odd coin or two if their antics and stories were funny enough. Jesters, or fools as they were commonly called, were considered to be no more than servants and were treated accordingly.

Fast forward a few hundred years and entertainment and more importantly, entertainers, are now viewed in a completely different light. Some are now the earning elite and command vastly inflated salaries for what appears to be the most perfunctory of roles. Whilst you could argue that newsreaders and the like perform a vital role bringing us the latest news and current affairs, does this really justify six and seven figure salaries. Especially when you consider that the average annual salary in the UK is approximately £26K. Basically, the lowest paid are helping to pay the wages of the top 1% of earners – that sounds fair! To look at it another way, if you were to relieve the top BBC earner of their salary, you would be able to give 440 nurses a £5K per annum pay rise.

And then it dawned on me. There is a solution to this problem. Are these people going to relinquish their salaries and take a huge pay cut? Of course not. Instead, what we should do, is re-categorise everyone’s job based on its usefulness and contribution to the rest of society. For example, jobs such as nurses, police officers, firefighters, teachers etc., would be seen as vital as their contribution is immense. As a result, these jobs would score relatively low. On the other hand, jobs such as actors, film stars, pop musicians, footballers (other sports are currently available) would be scored highly as their contribution to society would be seen to be comparatively low. Should the scoring system not be the other way around, I hear you cry! No, no, no. The reason being, the lower score a job carries, the lower tax that that person has to pay. Conversely, the higher the score, the higher the tax. Imagine an actor earning several millions for making a single movie paying 70 or 80% income tax, or a football player earning £500K per week paying a similar amount. All of a sudden, we would be in a position to lower the tax for everyone employed in one of these more “vital” roles, maybe even to the point that certain roles would actually be tax exempt. Writing off the income tax bill for a nurse is almost the equivalent of awarding them a 25% par rise.

I understand that there would be a huge resistance to such a scheme, but only from those top earners that are in that top 1% category. It would be down to the rest of us to ensure that the scheme was adhered to and people were accountable for what they owed. Incentive schemes could be set up, whereby discounts were applied for people that willingly “gave up” a percentage of their earnings. So, the footballer earning £500K per week could be liable for a £350K income tax bill, or alternatively they could “surrender” £250K of their salary into a government pot that then went to help fund health care, education, the police force etc.

On the other side of the coin, perhaps it would help encourage more people into jobs that were once seen as vocational rather than a career path to higher earnings. Am I being idealistic as well as unrealistic. Probably, but something has to be done to try and address the balance. And when all is said and done, if I were that footballer whose £500K per week was slashed to a mere £250K, could I survive. Possibly. It would be a struggle, but I’d give it a go!!