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Always The Bridegroom, Never The Bride
There are a handful of arguments against gay marriage, and they’re all pretty shit. Watching a Newsnight discussion on the subject yesterday turned out to be a frustrating dialogue of the deaf, but that’s half understandable. It’s difficult for the pro-gay marriage brigade to listen to and engage with the antis when the latter aren’t really making any sense. Here, seemingly, are the main points against gay marriage, and if these have been expanded upon elsewhere, and my objections either been put forward by those in favour of gay marriage or answered by those against, then it hasn’t happened within my earshot.
- Marriage is a vital institution; important to the very fabric of society, and to tamper with it would be crazy.
Let’s take that as read, for the time being, for the sake of argument. If marriage is so vital, surely extending it to other sections of society is a good thing? More importantly, just what does anyone think will happen if we tamper with this cornerstone institution which is suddenly so brittle? Literally, in what way would marriage be destroyed and lose its purpose? Even at a best guess, just what will be the terrible consequences of gay marriage of which we are being warned, because I’ve not heard anyone explicitly state what they think might happen, just some airy-fairy notion that bad things might. Personally I need more to go on before I agree with restricting others’ rights. - Marriage is an ancient tradition, and has always been between one man and one woman; to allow gays to marry is not to amend but to totally redefine it.
Perhaps, but this begs the question why has it traditionally been between a man and a women? Did some philosophers get together to devise a societal institution and look at all the alternatives? Did they test the concept of gay marriage by way of Socratic dialogue including a full review of all the available empirical evidence before finally settling on the idea that this new fangled “marriage” thing was best served by only being between and man and a woman? Or has marriage been solely between partners of the opposite sex because of convention; because homosexuality was ignored, illegal or considered an abomination by various people at various times? And if so (and it is) is that any reason to stick with the status quo?
At heart the anti-gay marriage lobby is against gay marriage because they don’t like the idea of marriage between gays; but they know that this is a pathetically week argument on its own, as shown by the briefly ubiquitous Milo Yiannopoulos last night openly stating that he thinks straight relationships are superior to gay ones but failing to give a reason, because there isn’t one, because they’re not. So to bolster their case he and others engage in a reductive, circular argument drawing on the historical fact that marriage has always been between a man and a woman; but the reason marriage has historically been between a men and a woman is because historically people like them didn’t like the idea of marriage between gays. Which is where this paragraph came in.
Anyway, this is before we even get onto the other nonsense excuse heard last night and seemingly made up on the hoof that marriage is about bringing up your own biological offspring – obvious bullshit for several obvious bullshit reasons far too obvious and bullshitty for me to waste my time with here – and the old canard that marriage is the best way to build a stable relationship for said children, a cart before the horse argument since surely it’s rather more likely that it is stable relationships that do more generally lead to marriage.
Finally, though, I will concede one point; the fear that if gay marriage is legalised equality legislation will force churches to carry out gay wedding ceremonies against their consciences. Now, I have my doubts here – churches seem to find lots of reasons at the moment to refuse to marry people they don’t want to, and I don’t see why that would change – but funnily enough this issue is in the same ball park as the subject of that post; you know, the one I didn’t write about last week. So perhaps this will give me the kick up the arse to get it finished.
So consider this a rapid-fire teaser post to another thing possibly coming soon. Something to look forward to, you lucky people.
Posted in Society
Cui Bono
I’m going to write that post if it kills me.
Not this post. Oh no, not this post. This post I’m dashing off because it seems to me that lots of people are missing the point about the impending changes to child benefit. And after all, erroneously thinking I’ve a cogent response when others are missing the point is the only reason to keep this blog this side of the mothballs. No, I’m saying I’m going to write that post if it kills me, the post I’ve spent the past fortnight trying to find the time and inclination to finish off.
But enough about that post. The point of this post is to address to the fact that (almost?) every report over the past few days referring to the half-brained clusterfuck that is the government’s “plan” for child benefit has been premised on the fictional idea of one household with a single-earner on an income of £80,000 losing their child benefit, while the dual-income household next door bringing in two incomes of £40,000 are allowed to keep theirs. Oh the humanity!
Perhaps. But why get hung up on child benefit? If we leave that to one side for a minute, the anomaly we are all suddenly getting worked up about is baked into the tax system already. Let’s take those two households again, each with the same gross income of £80,000; even without child benefit the household with two incomes will be better off in the first place due to their having two tax-free personal allowances; add in the fact that the single-earner household will then pay some of its income tax at the higher 40% rate while the dual-earners only pay at 20% and you could say we have another inequity right there.
This objection to the child benefit plans, then, rather than highlighting some terrible new unfairness, in fact just illustrates an existing quirk regarding how individuals, couples and households are taxed in this country, and how clunky our system already is. Things are complicated even further once National Insurance is factored in; something that slightly benefits the single-earner household in this example, but more by accident than design, and which in truth provides yet another layer of clunkiness. But it is a clunkiness that universal benefits such as child benefit can ameliorate; they are simple to understand, cheap to implement, given to all so that the deserving* receive them while the undeserving* get them taxed away elsewhere while they’re not looking. The alternative is complicated rubbish that the deserving* don’t claim for while the undeserving* pay their accountants to collect for them. Despite all Iain Duncan Smith’s talk of a universal credit, the direction of travel seems to be towards the latter.
The real daftness about these child benefit reforms is not so much the aforementioned and well-worn scenario of two fictional households, but more the case of an individual who earns just above the higher-rate income tax threshold and who, while paying 40% tax on but a fraction of their income, will also lose all of their Child Benefit at a stroke, potentially leaving them with a lower net income than a supposed lower earner situated just below the threshold. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a negative marginal tax rate, but if there is then this government has just found it. So well done them.
You’d almost think they’d cooked up a nefarious scheme to serve as an object lesson in the value of universal benefits, only they haven’t. This isn’t so much the “cliff edge” problem people have been talking about as some demonic game of financial Snakes and Ladders. Now, the government has stated it is looking into methods to deal with the problems thrown up by their half-baked plan dreamt up overnight to grab headlines during a party conference. But what?
Well I suppose they could concoct some further sort of means test, devise a kind of taper system, this would necessitate implementing an appeals process, and of course a review system when the wrong amounts are paid out…basically bugger about with child benefit until it is as expensive to administer and inefficient as the rest of the benefits system. Alternatively you could leave child benefit as is, and expend your energies instead on trying to make the the tax and benefits system in general more simple and straight forward.
I’d favour the latter myself, perhaps utilising something as a benchmark so we can gauge our progress, that of an actually existing example of a simple and efficient benefit. Child benefit, say?
*There must be some better terms to use here rather than “deserving” and “undeserving”, but I can’t think of them. Intended target group and unintended target group? Optimal and sub-optimal recipients? They sound almost as clunky as the government’s plans for reforming child benefit.
Posted in Economics
Morality Play
After Sunday’s derby match, and United’s defeating of City, a couple of tweets caused some mirth in the obvious quarters. Namely this
The fans, the players and every single person involved with Man City FC were incredible today. Definitely the moral winners of this game.—
Vincent Kompany (@VincentKompany) January 08, 2012
and this
We lost today but in our heads we won! Out team spirit is inspirational! The fans kept us going for 90 mins! Thank u. Ctid—
Micah Richards (@OfficialMR2) January 08, 2012
The mocking responses were many and varied. “Good luck in the Fourth Round of the Moral Cup”, for example. And “enjoy your Moral Cup success”. And, “here’s to the Moral Cup Winners 2012″. And, well, mainly that same joke, really, over and over and over.
And fair enough, I guess. We lost, and claiming a moral victory is pushing it. But our performance was excellent, and the thing is, I know where Messrs Kompany and Richards are coming from; indeed it’s not a million miles away from what I was feeling after the match. To be precise, I remember saying “it’s not quite a moral victory, but it doesn’t feel far off.” And judging by the reactions of the fans in the stadium, subsequent conversations with other City supporters, and even Alex Ferguson’s downbeat assessment following his side’s 3-2 win, I’m far from alone here. (I also knew that, a couple of days later, being out of the cup, that fine feeling would count for nothing. And here we are.)
So damn those players for expressing themselves a little clumsily, if you like; yes, damn them all. And bring on your ridicule and your opprobrium. But we can take it. In fact we can do better than that. The fact that the players and the fans felt so positive in defeat to our bitterest rival, and so in tune with each other despite our cup exit, is something I take as a hugely encouraging sign.
Because, ultimately, I think it all comes down to whether or not you believe there is more to football than merely winning matches. I certainly do, and I don’t believe you’re a true football fan if you don’t. Real supporters know the thrill of a tightly drawn game, and the boredom of a functional victory; they recognise how a battling defeat can give hope for the future, while a fortuitous win may merely paper over the cracks. Not surprising, then, if for certain United fans – the kind, say, who equate a lack of trophies with a lack of history – this is a concept they they simply fail to grasp, and so find ripe for mockery. Gratifying too that, despite our recent influx of petrodollars, it is something that so many City fans do still understand.
For now, at least.
Posted in Sport
Divide And Rule
The worst thing about yesterday’s strike by public sector workers was the fact that you just knew it would give rise to some people trotting out a load of tired old bollocks in the ongoing private sector versus public sector ding-dong; and you were right, witnessing the testing of the “little knowledge is a dangerous thing” motif to destruction by people missing the point by several counties. You know the sort of thing, so I won’t go into detail (although, for what it’s worth, I’m beginning to deduct points for those who refer to the private sector as the wealth-creating, productive part of the economy, as that’s just too hackneyed and ignorant to ignore any further).
That said, one of the complaints I read, numerous times over, was the furious assertion that don’t you know it’s the private sector that pays for the public sector in the first place, providing the slackers with their pensions, and their wages?! Now this, it seems to me, is undeniable. It also doesn’t appear to be a problem. Where does this sense of grievance come from, I wonder?
Put another way, rather than clefting the nation in twain and labelling us as either public sector workers or private sector workers, why don’t we use the terms government workers and non-government workers instead? Lest we forget that it’s the non-government workers who are the ones who pay their taxes to finance those wages and pensions for government workers? It’s a disgrace I tell you, something must be done!
Oh really? How about, just for fun, we cut the pie a different way? Talking of pies (and pasties!) how about we divide the country into Greggs employees and non-Greggs employees? Did you know that it’s down to the non-Greggs employees to hand over their hard-earned cash to feather the beds of those pampered Greggs workers, with their wages, and their pensions, and their natty uniforms! It’s an outrage! Oh…er…hang on; that doesn’t actually sound unreasonable, does it? More like a mere a statement of fact, in fact. What’s the difference?
Basically, nothing*. Taxpayers pay for government, customers pay for Greggs. Otherwise, it’s as you are. The reason they are considered differently is down to ideological oafishness. No one would dream of getting angry at Greggs workers for having a decent pension paid for by the likes of you and me. And yet…and yet…
…we get the common sight of newspaper columnists, sneering down their noses at public sector workers who earn a fraction of their salary, and demanding they endure a shittier retirement. And incidentally that, if anything, is the problem with Jeremy Clarkson’s comments. Not that he’s said something controversial (yawn†); he made a joke, and as is his way, it wasn’t all that funny. It’s the suggestion that behind the joke lies the unsurprising lack of self-awareness of a pampered rich man looking down on others while pocketing a handsome cheque from the state broadcaster. He’s a tit.
In summary, then, yes; it’s the private sector that pays for the public sector. But that isn’t a matter to feel aggrieved about; it’s a matter of bookkeeping.
PostScript: Another post! And a vaguely topical one! Good God! Can I keep it up?
*You get further points deducted for stating that we can choose to shop at Greggs but we’re forced to pay for government. True, but irrelevant.
†This, for what it’s worth is the correct response to whatever Clarkson says or does. For heaven’s sake don’t complain. It just makes you look silly.
I Have Nothing To Offer But Blood, Sweat, Gravy And Egg
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this blog has entered the terminal stage of its weary life cycle; indeed, you may believe it’s exited that stage and is done and dusted already. And you may be right. But the road to hell is paved with intentions, good and bad, and I intend to “reboot” this place, if reboot is the right phrase, and starting now. Or nearly now.
I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to find the time, inclination and trousers with which to blog, and so at the turn of the year decided to go on a hiatus, and to make the most of the remaining time I had left with the kids until they were both in full-time education. So I set September as my intended return date and put my feet up. In May I had my latest and last dust up with some phishers trying set up home in the hidden nooks and crannies of my WordPress.org self-hosted blog, and so I also resolved to leave the cuckoos to it and move over to WordPress.com, which I’ve done, and which explains the exciting fresh new look to this site. Now, with the kids in school and the removal of the distraction of having to maintain and update my own website, I reckoned I would suddenly have plenty of free time in which to write stuff and put the world to rights. Yet here we are in November, and nothing; not a word.
Oh I’ve got excuses, but they’re not interesting. And during my absence I can’t say I’ve exactly been straining at the leash to break my self-imposed abstinence. There was a brief moment when I thought I’d write about the summer riots, but before long I was so fed up with the claptrap being spouted by all sides, with people, as ever, proclaiming an absolute knowledge of the unknowable which conveniently also fully vindicated their existing prejudices that I completely withdrew from all news and comments programmes and turned off twitter because it was pissing me off (in particular the views of people I habitually agree with pissed me off, which I find really depressing; the David Starkey’s of this world can just be dismissed as twats.)
But I do like to write, and so I intend to return. And if nothing else I have rafts of drafts; posts which I had abandoned because before I’d finished them they’d stopped being topical; the world had moved on and I felt I’d run out of time. And now I have the time, theoretically*. I’m also, to my mind, the master of l’esprit de l’escalier; or in my case more like l’esprit de l’escalier, l’entrance hall, la rue extérieur et alors dans mon maison avec un cup de thé et un croissant, et quatre jour après le fact. You see, an event will have been in the news, but rather than have something to say there and then it’ll be days later when I’m still mulling it over that I suddenly come up with a killer line, or what I feel passes for a killer line. But I’d think it too late, now, to come over all smart, a bit silly to revisit old news, and so I’d let it slip. So from now on, on this blog, it’s never too silly to revisit old news, as long as I think I’ve got a feeble comment to make. And a draft is never too long in the tooth that it can’t still be published. If I think I’ve got something interesting to say then you’re going to get it, right between the eyes, and topicality be damned. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
And that, more or less, is that, for now; a tentative new mission statement for the all new Obscurer. Same as the old Obscurer. Stick around if you fancy your chances. This could go either way.
*Just re-read that line. Doesn’t really make sense in this context. Oh well. Fuck it.
Posted in Fimbles
Break
Well, that’s me for a fortnight. Two weeks in Cornwall seems just reward for the hectic blogging around these parts recently. So just so’s you know, if this site isn’t updated between now and the 10th of June it isn’t because I’ve given up, but more likely that I’m busy eating a Cornish cream tea, albeit probably not one using Rodda’s clotted cream.
So, see you in a couple of weeks!
And a bit…
Posted in Admin
Taken For Granted
In announcing 2,000 redundancies, Manchester City Council was in no doubt about where the blame really lies.
The unfairness of the government’s financial grant settlement for Manchester, one of the five worst in the country, has been widely reported.
We now have to find £110m in savings next year – £60m more than expected – because of front-loading and the redistribution of money from Manchester to more affluent areas.
The accelerated cuts mean we can no longer achieve the staffing reductions we have been forced into through natural turnover, which is why we are proposing a time-limited offer of voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement.
Quick as a wink, local government minister Grant Shapps shot back
Labour hypocrisy on this issue is breathtaking. They admit there need to be cuts but can’t say where they would fall. Ed Miliband needs to go back to his blank piece of paper and come back with a plan.
We have been quite clear that if councils cut chief exec pay, join back-office services, join forces to procure and cut out the crazy non-jobs, they can protect frontline services. Yet Manchester has a chief exec on a pay packet of nearly a hundred thousand pounds more than the prime minister who won’t lead from the front and take a pay cut and a Twitter tsar on nearly £40,000.
But quite how full is the government’s “piece of paper” when it comes to the cuts? In the main it seems to consist of a series of percentages, the size of which is dependant upon the individual minister’s proximity to the centre of influence and their negotiating skills with the treasury, and with the detail on what is actually to be cut generously devolved away, along with the blithe instruction to “do more with less” and that “you must protect frontline services you simply must”. So, lucky Messrs Gove and Lansley get smallish cuts to education and health (presumably because they have expensive departmental rejigs to waste money on) but weak negotiators or gleeful masochists like Theresa May and Eric Pickles are looking at 25% budget cuts in the home office and local government, but with the decision on “how” to be made elsewhere.
Now, I have no issue with the “how” being made as near to the coalface as possible, that is as it should be. The problem is that the “how much” figure seems to have been cooked-up in an ivory tower in Cloudcuckooland. And, as with Manchester council, when those cuckoos come home to roost and the departmental percentage for cuts is translated into actual losses of jobs and services, central government adopts a “not me, guv” attitude, and blandly asserts that savings of wasteful back-office paper-shuffling jobs can be made and the front line saved, but with no indication at all of how it can be done. So we should perhaps be grateful that on this occasion Grant Shapps has shown us the way, put some meat on the bones, and pointed out an efficiency that can be enacted; namely the sacking of that wasteful and indulgent Twitter Czar. (I prefer Czar to Tsar, because it’s nearer to the word Caesar; but you may say it as you choose.)
Except Manchester City Council don’t employ a Twitter Czar, or even a Twitter Tsar, do they? That much should be blindingly obvious to anyone in a state of consciousness, or so I thought when I heard the allegation on the afternoon news. Sure, they’ll have an internet communications manager or something, who will, among his or her other responsibilities, ensure a presence on twitter (an excellent idea, in my opinion), but you’d have to be pretty jaundiced, or moronic, or, apparently, a government minister, to believe that they employ someone on £40k whose sole responsibility is to tweet all day (which means, sadly, that there’ll be plenty of people readily lapping up that crap in blogs, and message boards, and, apparently, cabinet meetings).
Confirmation came during the PM programme, where it was announced
In the item earlier in the programme, you’ll remember, about 2,000 job cuts at Manchester City Council, we quoted Grant Shapps, the local government minister, saying the council employed a ‘Twitter tsar’. Well the council have been onto us to tell us they’ve have never employed such a person, though they do have a website manager which the Daily Mail referred to as a ‘Twitter tsar’ last October.
Okay, but that doesn’t mean the Daily Mail is wrong, does it? Perhaps Grant Shapps and the Mail were using the same, accurate source for this Twitter Czar claim? Eddie Mair continued
We’ve checked with Grant Shapps’s department and they said the newspaper report is what he based his comments on.
Brilliant. Tell me this isn’t representative of the wider picture. Tell me this doesn’t show, even in part, how the government has formed its theory about what cuts are or are not deliverable. When those actually responsible for effecting central government’s cuts complain, are their complaints really being dismissed based upon bullshit stories from the Daily Mail’s agenda-book? And is Grant Shapps so stupid that it didn’t occur to him that the Daily Mail story was a nonsense, here as elsewhere? Or does he simply not care, knowing that the reality won’t get as wide an airing as the convenient myth?
But perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Grant Shapps. He had to come up with some figure for local government cuts, and with the scrapping of the Audit Commission I guess thin air is as good a place as any. If he can’t himself specify where cuts can be made and has no idea what can genuinely be delivered, what is he to do but to work from Daily Mail headlines? Perhaps if we knew a bit more about Manchester council’s expenditure, if their processes were a more transparent, then he’d be able to make a statement that isn’t a bundle of idiotic gibberish piggy-backing upon a twisted tabloid half-truth? For as he also says
It’s equally disappointing that the council has so far failed to put all expenditure over £500 online so it can exposed to full public scrutiny.
Quite right too. Let’s get this stuff up on the website, so everyone can decide where the cuts can be made, so we’re not having to operate in the realms of guesswork and fantasy. Let’s do it, and yesterday.
Hmm. I wonder whose job it is to put all that information online?
Posted in Politics
Enigma Variations
I’m well aquainted with the format used in the Liberal Democrat leaflets round our way; for one thing, I used to deliver the things during my formative years. They never used to waste much time fannying about with criticising the Labour party (or “Labour can’t win here”, to give them their full title). Even when Labour was in power in central government, those Liberal Democrat leaflets would concentrate their fire on the Conservatives. Sure, Labour would cop a bit of the flak and rightly so, but it was the Tories, being the main opposition on the local council as well as the challengers and former incumbents of the parliamentary seat that the Lib Dems would focus on. And this suited me fine, being a generally pro-Liberal but definitely anti-Tory kind of guy.
Which brings me to the latest Liberal Democrat leaflet, which dropped, through my door the other day. And what do you know? Now it seems that all of the world’s woes are Labour’s fault after all, while of the Conservatives we hear nothing much at all. It’s an understandable air-brushing of course; now that the Liberal Democrats are part of the national government in coalition with the Conservatives it’s no surprise that the tune has had to be changed. But seeing as this leaflet is billed as a “Local News Extra” (my emphasis) it would be nice if it perhaps featured some succour for locally born-and-raised rabid Tory haters such as myself.
But no, instead we learn about how the “Liberal Democrats in Government have been working hard to tackle the shocking legacy of debt left by Labour”. Which is fair enough. But I must have missed the bit where the Lib Dems continually complained about the gradual growth in public debt under Labour prior to the recession, then opposed the fiscal stimulus afterwards. I certainly remember them explicitly stating before the election that we should wait a while before tackling the budget deficit lest such a fiscal tightening should snuff out any nascent recovery. In all, it’s hard to see how the level of the debt today would have been all that different if the Lib Dems had themselves been in government for the last few years. So what has changed since the election and now? Oh, yes. Power.
Nowhere, I think, better shows the logical contortions that being a Liberal Democrat now necessitates than when the leaflet comes onto the subject of the Nimrod aircraft programme, which employs (or employed) hundreds of highly-skilled workers at the BAE Systems factory in Woodford within the Cheadle parliamentary constituency. Says local Lib Dem MP Mark Hunter
I am bitterly disappointed that Labour overspending has led to the MRA4 Nimrod Project being cancelled. It makes me so angry that people in this area are having to shoulder the burden because Labour spent and promised money they didn’t have.
But as it says elsewhere, “Mark has consistently supported the Nimrod project at BAE Systems in Woodford”. Doesn’t that mean that he himself has consistently supported at least that part of Labour’s monstrous overspending, which has led to that “shocking legacy of debt”? If Nimrod is an example of Labour spending money it didn’t have, why didn’t he oppose it all along? Unless, of course, he doesn’t consider Nimrod itself to be a waste of money, in which case why the hell is the coalition cutting it? Why not continue to support Nimrod since it is an example of good spending by the last government, oppose its cancellation by this current coalition government, and campaign instead for those many and varied wasteful projects to be cut instead?
Can you have it both ways, really? Is Nimrod a waste of money or not? If it is, why did you support it in the first place? If not, why are you cutting it now? Oh, who cares, let’s just blame Labour and be done with it.
As I said, locally the Conservatives are the Lib Dems electoral opposition; as you can see above, the leaflet even includes a handy graph to show you just what that means. So, while tediously predictable, it still seems daft that in a local leaflet the Conservatives get such a free ride; Labour, meanwhile, get both barrels, despite the fact that they don’t have a hope in hell of winning here at the next election. But then, if my current voting intentions are in any way indicative of wider opinion, neither do the Liberal Democrats.
Posted in Politics
