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27 July 2000
You're out of luck if you happen to come down with pulmonary fibrosis in Britain. They don't know what causes it (idiopathic, which is one word they use, literally means self-caused). They don't know how to cure it. Oxygen "therapy" or hydrocortisone spray "therapy" are suggested, but they're not sure if they'll work. Then there are lung resections or transplants. They probably won't even suggest that.
But A.C.L.Blair wants to hire lots more nurses and consultants.
So that's all right then.
More consultants to say, "Ye'll jist hae to thole it."
How can we afford pensions for so many old people?
27 April 2000
Well, we're going to have to afford them one way or another. Politicians are sure low tax
bills will win votes. But the fear they articulate of the looming burden of paying for the
elderly has a touch of the irrational about it.
Consider what Macaulay
wrote in his 1830 review of Southey's
Colloquies:
'We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning
point that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much
apparent reason. "A million a year will beggar us," said the patriots of 1640. "Two millions a
year will grind the country to powder," was the cry in 1660. "Six millions a year, and a debt of
fifty millions!" exclaimed Swift, "the high allies have been the ruin of us." "A hundred and forty
millions of debt!" said Junius; "well may we say that we owe Lord Chatham more than we shall ever
pay, if we owe him such a load as this." "Two hundred and forty millions of debt!" cried all the
statesmen of 1783 in chorus; "what abilities, or what economy on the part of a minister, can save
a country so burdened?" We know that if, since 1783, no fresh debt had been incurred, the
increased resources of the country would have enabled us to defray that debt at which
Pitt, Fox, and
Burke stood aghast, nay,
to defray it over and over again, and that with much lighter taxation than what we have actually
borne. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to
expect nothing but deterioration before us?'
So no change there then.
And I can't resist quoting Macaulay's speculations on a hundred years hence (from the same review):
"If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and
lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will
be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire are now, that cultivation,
rich as that of a flower-garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn,
that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that there will
be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us,
will appear to our great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance which might easily be paid off in
a year or two, many people would think us insane."
And yet Macaulay's only fault was not to go far enough. Cultivation became so much richer than
the flower-gardens of 1830 that there was no need to cultivate Helvellyn, let alone Ben Nevis. And
steam was already superseded by yet more "machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered".
What a wonderful thing is hindsight. And yet here we are today with a finance minister whose top
priority is - wait for it - paying off the national debt. And his party's candidate for mayor of
London thinks that to win votes he should quote Ken Livingstone saying, "The idea inflation is
bad is nonsense." Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Is this an example of today's government looking
out for yesterday's mistakes? But then, maybe they're right. Maybe the IMF would still love to
use national debt as a sledgehammer to crack the National Health Service with.
If Tony Blair and his merry men don't get there first.
Writer's cramp?
13 April 2000
Speech is silvern, silence is golden? I set up this facility to let myself have my say, but it
sits there unused, for reasons I don't fully understand. Of course part of it is to do with the
bother of getting my thoughts down on paper, or up on screen - checking their spelling, their
appearance, their coherence - which you can call plain laziness.
But part of it is a diffidence about saying anything. It's easy enough to rant off in One Foot in the Grave mode. But saying
anything positive is a different matter. A few years ago I spent a
night in a little place name of Goldendale, Washington. I'd read (on the web) that there was an
observatory there which let
ordinary people look at the stars. Sounded interesting.
It was. We had an open-air lecture in the middle of the clear, dark American night about the
stars, the Milky Way, the newly-discovered incoming Hale-Bopp Comet. We looked through a
telescope at the comet, way out there in space, boring in closer towards the Earth on its orbit
round the Sun. We saw the moons of Jupiter. The rings of Saturn. The folks there were impressed
we'd heard of Goldendale Observatory over here in England.
The next year we saw Hale-Bopp in London and in the American South West. We mentioned it to
some friends in New Mexico. 'Oh, you see it in London too!' they said. A pause. 'But of course you
do.'
And a week or so later, we saw it over Grand Canyon. That was something.
It is just one world, isn't it?
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