MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ah well, another year and another December. The moment you’ve all been waiting for.

The advertising scene has restored my faith in human nature, well nearly anyway. You may recall I complained about an advert that said that gigahertz computers gave a faster Internet experience. After weeks I got a letter, which had been diverted to surface mail due to insufficient postage, which said they were looking into it. Much to my amazement some weeks later (unfortunately after my Xmas 2001 publishing deadline) I was informed that my complaint had been upheld and the perpetrators told to remove their inaccurate and misleading advert. Maybe we should all complain more.

On the other hand, I wonder if I’d get anywhere complaining about offensive and disturbing ads commissioned by the Irish government? There’s one over here, in fact a series, that show road accidents in graphic and horrifying detail. No 9:00 p.m. watershed for this stuff. My kids all yell out ‘change the channel!’ the moment it starts. Frankly I suspect that you’re going to be less, not more, safe if you’re driving in a state of shock brought on by having recently viewed horrifying images, but maybe that’s just me.

World news review. Hard to know where to start this year. I guess we’ll look at the UK again and take advantage of the fact that ‘thumper’ Prescott is still around.. just. He’s out of transport, and so is his successor, but I really can’t resist having another go at him. (Visit http://www.egg-prescott.co.uk for exciting pictures and facts) Estimates vary, but someone wrote that he’d built no less than 6 miles of motorway in his last year. I did some brief arithmetic and do you realise that this is enough space for all the cars bought in the UK? Bought in a day and a half that is. And, oh by the way, enough space for them when parked. Which they will be. Even members of his own party are now admitting to 5 wasted years. Unfortunately this does not seem to have been an ‘eye catching initiative with which Mr. Blair could be personally associated’. All this is finally too much for Blair in this era of delivery. Due to later than average publishing deadlines this year we already know that that, and again estimates vary, some £2 billion will now be spent on the roads in the UK. This is around 5% of the amount of tax taken from motorists in a year, or, to put it another way, around 1/3% of the amount which will be taken over the period of the plan, or around the estimate for 1 Iraqi war (up from £120 million this time last year).

Fortunately he’s not gone altogether. Due entirely to other factors he’s beaten the gallant firemen into submission. Maybe. Much more interesting is why he might have been persuaded to do this. Well, for this eye-catching initiative we can thank the poor.

How so? Well you need to understand that in yet another eye catching initiative our £2 billion Blaster Blair proposed to make like Canute. The poor, it is said, are always with us. It is also said that a fool looks at the world and says “why?”; a wise man says “why not?”. As regards the poor Blair said ‘why’. Clearly the poor are a ‘bad thing’ and it should be stopped. This leaves him with a problem and to understand why needs a small amount of statistics. Now stay with me here. Poverty is defined in relative terms. Basically if your income is less than 60% of the median income, you are poor. Here come the stats. Median is NOT half way between the maximum and minimum salaries as the daily Telegraph reported a month or two ago. If it were the median salary would be several million pounds, and poverty would start below a few million. ‘Median’ is, in effect, the most popular salary. You break down all salaries into, say, £500 increments and ask which segment contains most people. The definition of poverty was invented around the late 50’s and effectively defined the average industrial wage. This is because of national collective bargaining and the fact that every union claim was focussed around what another union had just got. So large numbers of union members got the same wage, and each union leapfrogged the next by a small amount. We all laughed at the union leader who apocryphally stated ‘we will not rest brothers till we are all above the average wage’. In fact if he’d said ‘we will not rest brothers till all of our members are above the median wage’ he would have been defining his ambitions very specifically. All this was well and good till 1979. At that point the destruction of unions was started and, in addition, the heavy, countrywide industry where they found their membership also started to decline. In their place we got a myriad of jobs, with different salaries across the country. So, instead of a nice sharp peak, occurring at the industrial wage, you get a fairly flat distribution, with the actual peak numbers only a little higher than the numbers earning different salaries over quite a wide band. What this means is that quite a small change in salary, for quite a small number of people can make a significant difference to the median wage. And if the median wage moves up 10%, then so does the poverty threshold. So suddenly the number of poor can increase quite rapidly, in a way that is largely independent of what you do for the poor themselves. Tony could bung a bunch of cash their way and find that even more poor were with us. Definitely the oops scenario. And what could cause this? Try a herd of firemen getting 40% (followed by a bunch of me-too claims). So we witnessed a government showing just a little more steel than we might have expected. But the risk remains, small changes could raise the number of poor very easily. Watch for a redefinition of poverty. And expect, that like pensions, it will become index linked, not earnings linked to build in a tendency for the numbers to reduce.

Ok rant over. I’m sure you’re all agog to hear how the kiddiwinks are doing.

Stephanie is now in her 20^th year. Frightening isn’t it? Well into her second year of pharmacy studies at Trinity and apparently working very hard. Last year she took offence at the suggestion that she might be studying for a degree in having a good time and maybe I was a little hard. She spent the summer working in Edinburgh, and then spent most of the earnings in a trip round Italy and France. Glasgow to Verona for £3.94. Plus taxes. (Which made it around £25, but still ludicrously cheap). Of course we always get people complaining. Swampy, and the people who tell me not to eat eggs, are now saying that cheap flights will lead to the end of the world. Frankly it could well be a price worth paying assuming that swampy is really a terrestrial being.

Sophie will be 17 in January and by that time a year later should also be away at university. This, of course means, that she has leaving cert (A levels) in just a few months. I have to say that she is taking this very seriously indeed, and working very hard. Even better is the fact that her teachers seem to have noticed. We had our last parent teacher meeting recently and it was a real pleasure to hear the good reports coming back. If she keeps this up there should be no major worries, but that doesn’t stop me crossing everything that will cross.

Sebastian is not under so much pressure this year. It’s only his second year at secondary school (14 next March) and there are no national exams until summer ’04 so we have to keep him motivated. We find a large whip extremely valuable in this regard. In the meantime he’s becoming world champion at all playstation 2 games, just to pass the time. I’m still waiting for him to bring the string of nubile 16 year olds home, but I’m a patient man.

     Peter and Annie Barwich