Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (20 page)

So let's see if I've got this straight. If Italy goes belly up, any bank that has lent Mr Berlusconi money will go belly up, too. So will the people whose savings were held there. And all the shops where they used to buy provisions. And the airlines they used to fly with. And the banks from which the airlines had borrowed money. And their customers. And their local shops. If Italy goes, we all go. Plainly, that would be bad.

The experts are sitting around in huddles with their political masters, and the general consensus seems to be that no one has the first clue how to stop this happening. Well, unless I'm being thick, I do.

At present, various bits of British government expenditure are being ring-fenced because, it's claimed, no civilized country can do without them. The National Health Service is an obvious example, but the fact is, we may have been able to afford healthcare for everyone when the most expensive drug on offer was an aspirin and teeth were removed with a hammer; now that we have complex operations and lasers and colonoscopies and people with exotic diseases such as AIDS, we cannot afford it any more.

Nor can we afford an aircraft carrier. Or bypasses. In August alone this country had to borrow £16 billion to meet the gap between what it spent and what it earned. Obviously that's unsustainable.

The problem goes way beyond the big stuff. Because of global warming, or intensive farming, or possibly the satellite that crashed into Canada recently, Britain's waterways are
being overrun with blue-green algae that make them extremely pretty. Unfortunately, if you choose to swim in an affected waterway, your skin will itch and you could end up with a poorly tummy.

You can see what's going to happen next. A small boy with freckles and a cute nose is going to end up on a BBC regional news programme all covered in diarrhoea, and his sobbing mum is going to say that someone should have done something about it. To prevent this public relations disaster from unfurling, water companies are being forced to spend millions of pounds clearing it up. That's millions we don't have being spent on some algae. Just so some kid doesn't end up with an itchy botty.

It's absolutely insane. Over the years, my kids have trodden on venomous stonefish and been attacked by jellyfish and battered to pieces by storm-tossed coral. And I don't complain to the authorities in Barbados. It's one of those things. But now, here, it's somehow become a government's job to prevent it from happening. And to provide lavatories for dogs.

In fact we've become used in recent years to the government providing us with everything. We expect it to protect us from algae and take away our rubbish and educate our kids and look after us when we are poorly and have a bobby on the street corner and fight Johnny Taliban and put up park benches and keep the libraries open and stop planes blowing up and build roads and send round an appliance when we've caught fire and make sure the food we eat is delicious and nutritious and lock up vagabonds and house the poor.

Fine, but have you noticed something? All the countries that share this view are now in a complete pickle while countries such as India and China, where shoes are considered a luxury, are doing rather well.

Last weekend the Labour party said that it would solve all our problems by cutting university tuition fees to £6,000. But that's like Dawn French cutting her fingernails to save weight. It's a pointless, meaningless, futile gesture and demonstrates clearly that Ed Miliband must be an imbecile.

We read all the time about people who borrow vast sums to fund their sports cars and speedboats, and we tut and think that they must be very tragic people with many complex problems. The government is behaving in exactly the same way, fearful that if it actually makes the necessary cuts, the country will be cast into poverty and the chance of a second term will be lost. Well, let me make a suggestion. Screw the second term and ask a question instead: what exactly is poverty?

An Eton schoolboy was once asked to write on the subject, and he began thus: ‘There was once a very poor family. The father was poor. The mother was poor. The children were poor. Even the butler was poor …'

In the olden days you could tell at a glance if someone was existing below the poverty line because they were eight years old and sitting in a gutter with a dirty face, eating a turnip. Now it's more difficult. People claim to be poverty-stricken even when they have mobile phones and a television set and an internet connection. And when you've seen a woman on a Bolivian rubbish tip having a tug-of-war with a dog over an empty crisp packet, it's hard to stop yourself punching people such as this in the middle of their face.

The European Union defines poverty as any household that exists on an income that is less than 60 per cent of the national average. In Monte Carlo that sort of guideline would put Elton John on income support.

Here the average household income is about £35,000 a year and it's said that in the region of one in five exists on
less than 60 per cent of this figure. But it's confusing because many pensioners fall way below the threshold in terms of income but own the house in which they are starving to death.

I read one report recently that says poverty should be measured on how poor you ‘feel'. Well, I was at a charity fundraiser the other night and, trust me, among all the Russian oligarchs I felt very poverty-stricken indeed.

The solution is that we all need to be recalibrated. Not just us, but the whole stupid Western world. We all think that street lights and having the bins emptied are essential. We must start to understand that, actually, they're luxuries. And we can't afford them any more.

2 October 2011

Over breakfast at a 700-year-old Indian fort that had been lovingly converted into a wonkily wired, no-smoking youth hostel, I met an Englishman who was planning to drive all the way across the subcontinent in an electric Reva G-Wiz. This seemed an especially pointless thing to do.

It turned out that he worked for the British government and was setting up a team to advise the emerging economic superpower on how best to cut its carbon emissions. As you can imagine, I had many questions for him on the matter.

Starting with: right, so you walk into a meeting with Mr Patel and you say … what exactly? ‘Hello. I come from a country where everyone has musical loo-roll dispensers and patio heaters and enormous televisions, and we recognize you'd like some of that action too. But we feel it would be better for the polar bear and the Amazonian tree frog if you stayed in the Dark Ages.'

I imagine that Mr Patel might not be very sympathetic to this argument. Especially if his next meeting was with a representative from the German government who was going to say exactly the same thing. And doubly especially if he had hosted similar meetings the previous day with the Americans, the Canadians, the French, the Italians and so on.

The idea that Western governments should lecture India on how to conduct itself is absurd. It's like Simon Cowell popping into the terraced home of a lottery winner and telling them it would be better for the planet and their soul if they gave the jackpot to charity.

There's more, too. As we know, the government in Britain is cutting many services as it desperately tries to reduce the nation's debt. The streets are packed with homeless ex-librarians whose places of work have been boarded up in the never-ending quest to save cash. We have the prime minister on the Tube and the mayor of London on a bicycle, the lights are out at Buckingham Palace and BBC2 is showing pretty much what it showed in 1972. We understand that there is a need for all this. It makes sense. And we like to think that, day and night, every single government minister is sitting in a candlelit office, in mittens, desperately thinking up new ways of getting the debt down.

So what in the name of all that's holy are we doing funding a team of people whose job it is to tell the Indians to stick with their oxen? No, really, I mean it. How can we be turning off our street lights and planning to kick-start the Olympics with a pigeon and a box of sparklers when we are running a climate change department in Delhi?

What is Chris Huhne thinking of? I realize that the energy secretary is jolly busy dealing with his speeding ticket and the recent World School Milk Day but I urge him to have a long, hard look at the team in India and think: ‘How can I be responsible for putting a million people out of work in Middlesbrough while funding this claptrap on the other side of the world?'

Of course, there are those who think that global warming is the greatest threat to humanity and that if any spending is going to be ring-fenced over the next few years, it must be money used in the war on carbon dioxide. They would abolish the army, the National Health Service, the north and those who live in it if they thought it would keep the polar ice intact. They would even seek to make it a crime to disagree with them. But that hasn't happened yet, so …

For sure, the air quality in India is extremely poor. When you come in to land at Delhi airport, it's like descending into a big airborne cloud of HP Sauce. At ground level, life's better – the air is like a consommé – but after a day it still feels as though you've been sucking furiously on a lozenge made from crude oil.

Sadly, though, air you can eat has nothing whatsoever to do with carbon dioxide. If you want to make it go away, you don't send climate change experts. You send mechanics to service the buses properly.

I also recognize that India is committed to reducing its emissions – well, that's what it says in meetings – and that there may be a couple of businesses here that could make a bob or two from popping over there and helping out. But India is a country on the move. And if we in Britain want to make a few quid out of its growth, isn't it better to sell it our jet fighters and our diggers and our bladeless Dyson fans? We should be milking its growth, not trying to stifle it with pious words and Uriah Heep hand-wringing.

It's rare that I actually get cross about something. But I am cross about this. The high commission in India has an important function. It is there to help British nationals who have lost their passports or who have become so incapacitated by diarrhoea that they've just excreted their own spleen.

It is there, too, to promote British business and, most of all, it is there to foster good relations between India and Britain. How are any of these things helped by a team of mean-spirited eco-ists who want to stand on the hose that's fuelling India's growth?

I don't mind that my taxes are used for schools I don't use, street lighting that doesn't shine on my house, hospitals I don't need and a police force that most of the time is
a bloody nuisance. I understand that this is how the world works. I pay for a system in which I play no part.

But I really can't get to sleep at night knowing that some of the tax I pay is being used to fund a climate changist to drive across India in a G-Wiz. The only good thing is that it will take him several years, during which time India can choose life, choose a career, choose washing machines, cars, compact-disc players, electrical tin openers, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance and a nice set of matching luggage.

23 October 2011

As I'm sure you know, it is very difficult to get planning permission these days. Unless, of course, you are a Freemason. Even if you want to add a small side extension to your kitchen, the council's inspector will raise all sorts of issues about the neighbour's right to light, the need to protect the original style of the house and what provisions you intend to make for off-street parking.

And even if you cover all these bases, he will usually find a bat in the attic, and that'll be pretty much that.

So imagine how hard life must be if you are a developer and you want to build a 1,000ft skyscraper in the middle of a big city such as London. You'd need to be the Duke of Kent, or at the very least a grand wizard, to stand even half a chance.

And even if you manage to convince the local council your design is sound, that the foundations won't impede progress on the District line and that no bat will need to be rehoused, you will still have to get past the man I met at a dinner last week. The man whose job is to protect ‘the look' of London. This must be the hardest job … in the world.

Because it's all very well saying now that London is perfect, but what if someone had done that in 1066? ‘I'm sorry, William, but you cannot build a tower on the Thames because it would spoil everyone's view of the inner-city farm on Watling Street.'

It's like those morons who have decided that Britain's countryside was absolutely perfect in about 1910 and that
every effort must be made to keep the dry-stone walls and the hedges and the village idiots.

Or, worse, the climate. The temperature has shifted dramatically over the millennia, so which crackpot has decided that it's correct now? Because it absolutely isn't if you live in Sudan.

Then there's the case of Scotland. It began life as part of America, although at the time this was down near the South Pole. Gradually it broke away from Iowa and began its move northwards, until around 400 million years ago, when it sank just off the equator.

What if someone had decided then that the world should be preserved just as it was? We'd have no tarmac. No phones. No penicillin. No Highland bagpipes. No bolshie trade unionists. No Labour party. So, on balance, it wouldn't have been all bad.

Of course, at the other end of the scale, we have the problems of rampant development trampling all over the bedrock of history. Cape Town springs to mind here. From the sea, this used to be one of the world's most attractive cities, but now your eye is drawn to the World Cup stadium that sits in the view like a giant laundry basket.

Then there's Birmingham. Such is the prominence of the Selfridges building that you no longer notice the tumbledown, smoke-stained old factories or the canals full of shopping trolleys.

The history has been obliterated by something that appears to have come from the opening credits of
Doomwatch
.

The man I met at the party wholeheartedly agrees that balance is everything. He knows that new buildings are necessary but has to temper that with various established views and sightlines that should be preserved for the good of our souls.

For example, when you climb up Parliament Hill in the
north of London and turn round, you don't want to be presented with a city that looks like Manhattan. You want the London Eye but you also want to be able to see the things that your forefathers saw. Apparently, it is writ that visitors to Richmond Park in the south-west must be able to look down an avenue of trees and see St Paul's Cathedral in the City. And it doesn't matter how much wizardry developers deploy or how silly their handshakes, that's that.

Here's a good one. As you may know, the Americans decided quite recently that it simply wasn't possible to butcher Grosvenor Square any more and that it was time to move out of their current fortress to a new super-embassy on a five-acre site in Nine Elms, south of the Thames. Everyone was very supportive of this. It would provide many jobs and keep alive the special relationship in which they decide what they'd like to do and we run about wagging our tails, hoping that if we look sweet, they will give us a biscuit. Frankly, if they'd wanted to build their new embassy in the Queen's knicker drawer, we'd all have said, ‘Oh yes, Mr Obama. And can we have some more Winalot?'

Happily, however, we have a man in charge of ‘the look', who pointed out that if you stood on Vauxhall Bridge, the new embassy would sit slap bang in the sort of view immortalized by Turner. He saw no problems with the building they were proposing but realized that it would undoubtedly have a flag on the roof. So right in the middle of this much-photographed all-English scene would be the Stars and Stripes.

I'm sure the Americans find this objection very petty, and that Mr Cameron has been made to sit on the naughty step, but would they let us fly our flag in between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument? My guess is … probably not.

That said, I do wish London were a bit more high-rise. Out in the east there are a few tall buildings shielding us like giant glass leylandii from the views of Essex. But there are nowhere near enough. And there won't be any more because of London City airport and the problems of coming in to land between Barclays' boardroom and the executive fourty-fifth-floor bogs at HSBC.

We need to look elsewhere and find a site where designers and architects can run amok with their gigantic cathedrals to capitalism. A site where there are no snails and where there are no ancient views to worry about. A site where we don't worry about what's been lost, only about what we have gained. And I think I have just the spot: right on top of my ex-wife.

30 October 2011