The Productive Pessimist

  Flags strung up from lampposts,  with minimal effort ( why be patriotic enough to climb a ladder when you can just cruise along in a cherry picker... which it would suit your stated aims more to use helping out British farms with the harvests you don't want "immigrants" to do.) Rupert Lo we ruining the one attractive part of his constituency, and driving off most of the likely winter visitors in a to wn which relies heavily on tourism, by forcing staff members to go out and litter the entire promenade with St. George crosses - not , tellingly, Union Jacks; no; this man doesn't want the Scots, Welsh, or Northern Irish in "his" part of England, either - in the middle of a named storm. He then had the nerve to claim he was "confronted and threatened" by a Labour MP with a Palestinian flag - no, Rupert; you decided this was a war; the way wars work is both sides get to wave flags about. Unite the Kingdom et al are nothing short of domestic ter...

  " Woke" is an appropriated term that, like most appropriated things, has been completely altered from what it originally meant. Originally used by African-Americans to communicate the warning that "unexplained" deaths of African-Americans were almost certainly the result of white violence and racial intolerance, the invocation to "stay woke" was a gesture of concern and compassion, a reminder that the world was not a safe place for people whose faces didn't fit. It still isn't a safe place for anyone who is visibly "different" - no matter ho w subtle that visibility is: from the size and shape of a nose to an accent, from the spelling of a name to the texture of a curl. From someone's height to the pitch of their voice, from the way they hold themselves, move, or speak, to the amount of support from others they need to manage day to day life. No w, ho wever, " woke" has been appropriated by the Left to mean "having...

  The Bank of England is expressing significant concerns about Britain's "ageing and ailing workforce", harmonising to the government's tune of how the long-term sick are responsible for the UK economic challenges, and how "necessary" raising the State pension age is. Those two songs have been a more or less constant refrain from various shades of UK governments since 1997 - almost 30years.  Pretty much my whole life, and the entirety of my life as someone old enough to vote. Of course, work is necessary.  Countries have essential core services which require vast workforces to provide and administrate. Governments should be generating national income by exporting from the manufacturing, STEM, creative, and knowledge economy sectors, all of which require their own skilled and specialist workforces, and the workforce of their respective administrative and marketing functions. Continuous income, to cover the unavoidable payment lags in exports, is necessary fo...

This morning, LinkedIn was being very Monday, very LinkedIn, not very demure, not very mindful. A woman, whose profile suggested she works in recruitment, responded, quite aggressively, to a disabled man asking why companies were still  engaging in discrimination against disabled individuals with: "Because disability is a liability, it costs money, and businesses can't expect to run up their costs to an infinite degree whilst tiptoeing around every single need people could ever possibly have." This isn't an isolated thought.  It's not often said out loud in the UK - but it always has been elsewhere in the world, and it very much is being shouted from the rooftops of the USA. And it's not just recruiters and executive leadership; it's ordinary people, meaning that, even with the most inclusive, welcoming, accommodating leadership, disabled people will still be encountering hostile environments courtesy of the able-bodied people they have to work with  on th...

                                            On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around t...