20 Years of the Scottish Land Access Code

Two decades ago the Scottish Parliament legislated for the right to roam. What it did was formalise that which had long been practised in the Highlands and other wild areas, and long been believed in by ‘wild walkers’. Responsible access, with a respect from land custodians for the public’s desires to enjoy the wilds, and the public’s respect for the use of the land for economic ends or conservation of special sites.

But was it needed?
I Had always enjoyed a wander, free from parental interference. I loved exploring and soon I loved using maps. I grew up looking over a loch towards what seemed far off and massive mountains, those which mark where the greatness of the Highlands first rise in the west. So taking to the hills became a natural challenge. I think it lies in very many of us, getting to the top, a sense of acheivement, often of awe.

The hills seemed wild and untamed. Locally though we were very used to resrtictions on access, and also used to either working with those physical limitations, or circumventing them. Our area had both the Faslane base and the Greenfields army training camp. The former had high fences and some peripheral areas fenced off, while Greenfields operated a red flag set up for training and by in large avoided weekends I believe.

Later on we would hear things about stalking and restrictions on walking which kind of irked us, but we actually found ourselves by in large visiting national trust hills, or hills were there was no signage about the stalking season. While clubs like local ramblers asscociations or the Glasgow Uni club probably paid attention to stalking activities and spoke to keepers or estate managers, most everyone just took off. Conflicts arose of course because red deer will be hearded away by human traffic, but you could say that they are equally driven by ‘grass is greener’ grazing. They are fickle and it is impossible to own a heard in a cost effective way over such large, wild land areas.

The 1990s
So that was the 1980s. Scotland had few public rights of way, and we just had a sort of democratic demand for the right of way to mountain tops! But into the 1990s we began to see a more aggressive narrative from some land owners. There was more barbed wire. There were a few more No Parking signs. And then there were big signs about no access due to continual stalking activities which appeared to the east of the Cruachan range. I cant remember if this was refering to the stalking season alone, but they were large ugly signs. Unwelcome., Go home. Many chose the northerly approach with a big but beautiful walk in. Locally we saw famers diversifying into, or selling land to new wild fowl shooting concerns and blocking access.

The Unstoppable Force Meets the Immovable Object
So there were two opposing forces at work and it came to a head in a kind of test case , ramblers assoc vs Vlissingen, the Letterewe estate accord. I think had there not been movement to reach agreement then there would have been an inevitable rise in the exlcusion of the public from land areas by a new generation of land owners who had less understanding for the old status quo.
What was the old status quo? Well it meant that some land owners avoided stalking activities on weekends for example, while walkers respected signage and local advice. There were of course conflicts and irate ghillies or managers confronting ‘right to roam’ believers or those with zero respect for land custoidanship.

I can think of only a couple of occaisions where I was confronted and both of those were on land local to the central belt, and drove shooting so were keen to enforce a certain privacy for their economic activity. Two of those times though I was on tracks which had been used in one case for a decade, and in the other in antiquity as a drover’s road.

As the Mountaineering Council and to an extent the Ramblers said, prior to events such as the Letterewe restriction in the 1990s, the issues of access-denial were not in the highlands and true wild areas, but rather in the rural areas around populated areas, from the outskirts of the cities to access even around villages. In principle then we see conflict between two concentrations, economic activity usually farming, and the population and demand to get out from near your doorstep.

It’s the Economy, Stupid….
There were two main, driving economic forces behind the the debate as it arose in the 1990s.
Estates, especially newly founded shooting oriented business models, wanted more revenue and to offer paying guests a garuanteed ‘bag’ of grouse or head of deer. Much of this fraternity or customer base rely on repeat business, and word of mouth to market their offering. What this desire for growth entailed for land managers was concentrating wild life by fencing in areas, and of course killing predators and even species like hare…the ‘vermin’ as old school keepers and lackey’s would call them.
On the demand- side of things from the public perspective, the 1980s saw a big message from the health authorities to go out an get fit. To avoid disease due to inactivity and gain the mentail health benefits of exercise. As in the 1950s, there was a resurgance in people taking to the hills and wild places. Bringing money, and other impact on the rural areas with them. Munro bagging was the in thing, as indeed it seems to be again with an upswing in social media driving ambition and ‘achievment bragging’ plus of course ‘purchase comfort’ with selfies a-top said 3,000ft plus hills. Even the leader of the opposition, the late John Smith took up with the sport.
So here we had the need for compromise between interests which are by nature somewhat diametrically opposed. On the one hand a new generation of owners, often foreign, who did not understand why estates should not be wholly private, or with at best micro managed public access. On the other hand, the ‘Scarpa booted bolsheviks’ who demanded freedom to roam, and even rights of way to every mountian top. The key word in this debate then being ‘responsible’ access. The compromise seems to be mostly on the land owner’s side, who have their ‘economic activity’ as a bit of a foot note to otherwise a free for all……..with the other big wins for the access camp being, er camping…and access for other non motorised methods by land, air and water.

Where Are We Today?
On the plus sides , country walking is worth more than a billion in revenue to Scotlsh highlands according to several estimates. This is big business for small businesses and three times the figure of £350 million the Scottish Game Keepers association publicise themselves. Some small businesses in the highland base themselves on wild experience, while others have an important boost to revenue particularly on a year round basis in the popular mountain areas.
In an over simplified comparison between “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ ” and access to the wilds for visitors, there is a larger market arriving and the concentration of footfall is denser. A deer stallking estate has only so many parties out on the hill in the course of a week, each being a handful of guests. Stalking red deer on open ground is still a very expensive outing and an exclusive ‘1850’ tweeded experience.
Both have then co existed within the legislation for 20 years now. Once again though there is uneasyness on both sides.

Dirty Camping and Wild Fencing
From the land owner and local authority perspective, the one down side of freedom for all is that some people just do not have the respect to act responsibly. I think it is a bit euphenistic to say they lack a little education on responsible access, they are littering, destroying trees, churning up illicit parking spots and bringing music systems to peaceful glens where noise travels far! Such a big problem that the Lomond national park and local land owners have pushed for bylaws prohibiting camping. However there is a difference between wild campers and those chucking a tent out the back of a car and making a fire with the nearest tree and a can of petrol. That being said I have seen Shenaval bothy stuffed with litter under it’s eaves and other signs of post wild camp littering. Even bothies with fairly long walk ins are subject to drunken parties, over use of fuels, and vandalism spoiling for the majority . By in large though, wild campers have a good respect for nature.

Wild fencing though, what is that about? Well here we are back to estates wanting to “manage’ wild resources by coralling them into destinct areas. Previously deer fencing was by in large to keep them OUT, where this is to the reverse. Also there have been fencing of land to exclude public access, using the right to use ‘economic activity’ within the legislation, or so they believe. So we now see long deer fences at high altitude in the Cairngorms, which are unsightly and also outright dangerous for hillwalkers who find themselves in need to descend by the quickest possible route. The Ramblers and Scottish Mountaineering Council rattle sabres here, but it is for the time being quite limited. Also in all the cases i know of, the land owners try to manage access , to corall the visiting public and keep them on the fringe of the hunting or flocks grazing glens and corries. This is kind of in the letter of the law , sort of a compromise, but it isnt really in the spirit of what the public want.

The Motor Vehicle Issue
On mentioning the coralling of walkers and other users on wild land we come upon a real area of conflict in public parks, and munro bagging being a victim of its’ own success. Parking.
When I started walking there seemed to always be a lay-by or wide forrest road access junction to park at. Sometimes you would park in a village at the church hall. Other times you would end up in a non signed parking place, which may have been intended for lorry use or what ever. Sometimes you would see a no parking sign, make a judgement on you causing any harm, and park there in disregard. Only in the most popular areas at high season was there a lot of irreponsible parking. Here i mean blocking access to forrest roads completely, parking half on half off roads, using passing places to park, and the idiotic parking on one lane of a public road.
The latter has become increasingly prevalent I understand from a far. B ut the worse problem is Dirty Parking you could say. People driving onto the verge or surrounding land. Often with heavy four by fours. This leads to unsightly quagmyres but is just very disrpectful and fully illegal.
The point being here that right of access does not extend to motorised vehicles. This has then become something land owners are using to limit or further corall the public, and to a large extent I fully agree that where there is pressure on parking and an opportunity to have a win win on route choice for the land owner to steer folk away from grazing corries for example, or a grouse moor, then this is acceptable. When they then close these or start to charge for them, then there is renewed conflict. I think a friendly,” please contribute to the construction and unkeep of this responsuible parking area” is what is needed and a better revenue model than sending a ghillie up to put notes on windsreens and pursue fines in the courts. Local councils are cashing in on this too, with the Cobbler parking being a money machine for Argyle and Bute. It would be interesting to see what they put back into the hillside and roads, but they are strapped for cash with an ageing population.

To The Future, a Law At Peace With Public And Capital?
There is a sense of unease amongst the community of pro access. The new super rich, are also super arrogant. This may seem like a trite statment. But it is in a context of the gray area of the law so to speak. That the law allows for privacy and the restriction on interference of legitimate economic activity on wild land. Being a little vague here, the legislation has been tested but in fact it looks like the Ramblers are staying clear of litigation, as a collective plaintiff, due to one or more expensive failures in court. Lawyers can bamboozle or worse, set a new precedent for the interpreation of the law which then Land Custodians use to restrict access to wild areas and essentailly curtail some routes.
On the plus side, public rights of way have been established over a stated 22,000km in Scotland now. They were never a big deal, versus England and Wales, becasue there was the old status quo and less pressure on wild areas, or even over farms in the central belt. Now they are secured.

But what else do we need to secure? What issues Remain Unresolved Or Challenging for the Legislation in Practice?

We heve no right to parking as being the major example of an obvious source for conflict, frustration and irresponsilibtility. In the always on line age thought , a number plate is usually a quick way for owners, the police and councils or concerned by passers to set in motion a warning or fine for offenders.
We can be limited in our access by forrestry works, shooting or special conservation interests in straategic areas. Here is a case in hand, that geography and specifically topography have a lot to say. Many hills are fringed by communities and cultivated or graised private land. Road access naturally follows this for walkers. I have mentioned one estate from the 1990s with ‘ Get Orff My Land” in twenty foot high signage, and there is another in central scotland now who have tried to curtail access especially in the stalking season. In both cases a longer walk in from the north avoided their boundaries with roads and could drive deer into their glens if that hill-walker-hearding is to be believed.

Test and Review The Law Work
We need then there to be further test cases where restrictions due to economic activity are challenged or established. This can then be assessed as to changes in the law which address new or enlarged conflict, and secure a new legal footing for responsible permission to access I would say. .

However we get back to the auld wisdom of the status quo. A slight grudging respect for each other’s needs. You could be asked in no uncertain terms to leave the land, by the fastest route (have perhaps a memory of one such wee contra temps where we carried on as it was shorter to summit then descend a diffrerent route in practice from that point) Currently there are stalking advice telephone lines and web information for example. But owners could well start to swing their weight and fence off areas denying access carte blanche. Then we may be looking for more secured rights of way to mountain tops such that owners cant implicitally deny access. However that is a stick to beat ourselves with because a land owner can manage parking, signage and most of all fencing to restrict access to a single ‘tourist path’ and have a stronger legal footing in their area of ‘economic activity’ to prosecute.
Fencing off in very wild areas with few crossing styles is not very desirable from both a ‘wild beauty’ and access with safety on the hills in being able to retreat, an aspect here. I believe the use of more of this and more coralling onto paths which may not be suited due to wet bogland, wil lead to less respect for land managers, and the active vandalism of fencing.
On the other extreme, I would see that the active prosecution of dirty campers and others who abuse the right to access, acting irresponsibly in littering, disturbing hunting parties, generally breaches of the peace related to ‘bevvying’ and aggression, is something very important. The ubiquity of mobile phones with cameras will help with this aim, and education as how to make an anonymous submission, or to use your material as evidence and stand witness being good. The ranger service in Loch Lomond and Trossachs national park were at their whits end with dirty campers, although they encountered mostly ignorance and not aggression luckily in their encounters with dirty campers.

We see that Scotland is a bit polarised on phsyical health. There is ‘body image’ pressure driving fitness fanatiicism on the one hand, versus defiance of health advice fish suppers for lunch brigade. An ageing population means more leisure hours per capita but does that mean more wild access? We come back to the need for local access around habitation as a big issue which is actually very much being addressed by local authorities and some very welcom private land owner collaborations.

Will we see a rise , or are we at ‘peak munro bagging’ ?
I understand that since I emmigrated, there has been an explosion in Munro bagging and this has lead to paths appearing on all the munros within easy reach of the central belt, and on many more remote hills where once there were no real paths, just some soil creepage points to catch out the poor of navigation into thinking they should follow a bare patch. These mountain paths need unfortunetly management because permanent use of the route leads to perpetual damage and with more rainfall recorded in some areas, greater errosiion and greater water saturation of underlying flat secstions. Bogs and scars. Like Ben Lomond was.
Path repair and managment in itself is a noble aim, but it does then corall people into a single route, with a single parking area on outset. Hopefully where there is need for alternative path routes or on the popular routes, there can be signed access from public transport stops and stations.

About the Author’s Experience
I began hill walking with a jaunt up Ben Lomond on of all things, a birthday party outing for my earlier BFF, Eric Dixon. Think it was 1979. I can’t say I was in any way fit or prepared enough for the tour, and was dragged up, being a hefty and unsporty kid. However at the top, there were patches of snow and the north face was decked in snow, with some kick-in footprints of an ice climber. We rolled easter eggs. Eric’s brithdays had been outdoors affairs, Glen Fruin and the Drover’s Road above Helensburgh featuring. This one though was monumental.
So I joined the Hill Walking Club, Mr.Urqhuart being the leader and my registration teacher making it an easier way in for me and my new best pal Ian. Hill walking prooved tough for me, I think I had some issues with muscles in my body as I was always a tail ender. We did Ben Venue and we did the hill to the west of Ben Na Lochain.
I think we re ascended Ben Lomond before maybe taking on various hills like the Cobbler. My first serisou ascent was Ben Lawyers, main peak, in a blizzard, guided by Peter Nicol my Scout Leader. That gave me the bug for winter walking, and summer cycling.
Munros became a big thing then, but very often the same munro many times, such as Vane, Narnian, Nevis, and of course Ben Lomond the diamond of a mountain which really inspires many to this day, and was my first encoutner with the high top experience…and the frustration of many fals tops while ascending in welllies and as a no very fit chubby kid.
I went on to count over 70 completed ascents, mostly in the southern and western highlands with a few of those, what prove to be ionce in a life time, wild camping tours to the likes of Glen Affric and the Fisherfield ‘Forrest’ . I had plans of completing all then 273 tops, but emmigration curtailed that. Stil in my last year in Scotland, I did manage about ten new tops.
I could be up at least half way by now, but the thing is that I like a sociable walk often, the weather was often fickle of course, I am a bad morning lark, I like to lead other people up hills so they feel safe and that they accomplish something in good hands, and there is the easthetics of doing a great day out on say a Corbett, or a snow covered munro you have been up twice before.

Why The Scanindavian and German Labour Models Work Better than England’s

In the 1990s and 00’s the UK Labour party enjoyed an extended period of power. This was accompanied by a prolonged if moderate period of economic growth.  However the legacy of their economic and employment policies in particular, left the UK vulnerable with a large budget deficit post 2008 credit crash.

Tony Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown, chose flexibility in the labout market as the key for economic growth and employment opportunities. More felxibility would get more people into work. However more flexibility means variable working hours and tenability. When unemployment benefits are a more stable form of income than pay, then a significant number of unskilled  ( or wrongly skilled) workers go unemployed and search jobs which pay better and are predictable income. Hence, Chancellor Brown introduced flexibility in payments of benefits vis a vis working hours, and tax credits for families on lower income. This was called ‘making work pay’ . It has been a disaster for the UK economy outside the south east and some other cities.

Employment and economic policy in Westminster, then as now, is lauded as creating high levels of employment. In fact though the issue is not unemployment per se, it is underemployment.

This manifests itself in two ways. First and foremost, people are underemployed in terms of working hours per week, month or year. They either have part time work, temporary work or worst of both worlds, completely unpredicatble working hours. This is now a major constituent of the regional economies of England. Secondly, people are underemployed by being in very low skilled, low productivity jobs with no opportunity for training and up-skilling.

These jobs are in areas of agriculture, logistics, retail, cleaning and  personal services.  In effect large sectors of the economy in less economically advantaged regions and deprived city areas, are being run on a crypto-keynsian basis. Companies which otherwise would not be profitable because labour would otherwise choose not to work there, gain a supply of cheap labour which is subsidised with benefits or tax credits.

The tax credit issue is particularly difficult,  because it means even average families pay less in tax than they get out from the welfare state. It is the ulitmate social democratic trap, where single people and high earners pay an increasing sum of even average worker’s costs in delivery of health, education, pensions and other benefits.

The two issues of underemployment are of course inter-related. There is a correalation between low productivity and precarious, low skilled work. There is no incentive for employers to invest in productivity, because they can have a supply of super flexible, cheap labour. They can avoid capital costs in automation and the training required to operate a more productive site. Competiing on cost alone towards customers, there is then little innovation in integration to the  supply chain, the services are commodotised at a point price.

Typical examples are working in mail order or retail warehouses, delivery driving and crop picking. However the trend for tenuous work extends into even proffessional services such as accounting.

The trouble with much of this is that in fact these jobs need to be done, and would be done within much more stringent economics of higher worker empowerment by either market shortage of labour or stronger employment laws. These jobs in care, agriculture , and warehousing amongst other things could well suit being part time, but there is no incentive to employ and train people to higher standards of delivery and hence productivity or quality. The work needs to be done, but the lowest common denominator is chosen. The employer has no obligation to diversify or innovate in order to utilise staff on more permament contracts in other areas of the busiess, or to use fewer staff at higher hourly wages who are more productive. In effect regions of England have become more like Portugal, Southern Italy or even third world countries when you compare “GDP”,  or adjust wages for living costs.

In response to higher minimum wage levels, employers are likely to cut working hours or remove hourly based pay making working days longer, esepcially when as intended, the 48 hour maximum working week is removed as is the intention of many Pro Brexiters in the ruling Tory party.

 

Why the Scandinavian Model is Better?

The Scandinavian model would not work in the UK if introduced overnight. It is successful because it has been a long term relationship between labour, industry and the government as mediator, usually on the left of centre in respect of labout law.

The model is that workers will have protection in employment law, affording them working contracts , wages based on skill tariffs, permanency, predictable working hours, right to full time work when it is available.  Such “inflexibilities”  are anathema to UK conservative economists. However, Scandinavia, Germany and the low countries practice these policies to a greater or lesser extent and have lower unemployment and in partictular more net tax payers.

This is the key thing, work pays the bills and for a life outside that. Many of these jobs need to be done in society anyway, and higher costs can be to some extent passed onto consumers who have themselves, higher income. Tax collected helps pay for a well paid, highly trained public sector and invesmtent in innovation, cand automation of public seriviceses,.

Employers of course are presented with a dilemma that labour will become more expensive over time and the domestic market may not tolerate for those tasks provided mostly locally, while international competitiveness is threatened. Therefore they must invest in innovation and improvements in productivity through investing in automation and up-skilling workers.

Now we come to the Luddite proposal, which is now rather ironically adopted by neo conservatives who do not desire such “restrictive” labour laws. They claim that higher wages, and then also the Scandinavian model, leads to greater unemployment. Then they quote the suicide ratein Swedenn and the cost of a ‘pint’in Norway.  However unemployment is low in these countries. Chronic Illness and sick leave is quite high, but that is in large part due to the climate which is detrimental to arthritis, depression and lung diseases.

As in the days of the Luddites, the introduction of automationactually  creates new jobs, by facilliating a better return on investment and more companies taking advantage of skills in the market.  It means those in that industry or service command higher pay and pay more tax than they get back from the state when they are childless and healthy at least.  They spend in the economy and their tax cirulates in the ecinomy, and they compete internationally or provide local delivery in the domestic economy at an affordable price.

Essentially Britain had this choice in the 1950s, but chose to see the issue as a labour shortage rather than a skill and investment challenge. The then conservative government chose to open up to wide scale immigration from the common wealth. For three decades they were a supply of cheap , plentiful labour at often a lower cost than their native compatriots.

Some argue that this is why  UK has voted to leave freedom of movement of labour, both ways, and enter a more restrictive immigration policy, which favours financial services industries, technology industries and R&D. Many ordinary workers expect a market mechanism will afford them better working conditions. However the removal of unskilled or semiskilled foriegn labour is quite abrupt, especially when it regards seasonal working, and the shock of the adjustment will lead to bankruptcies tather than better  working conditions. Employers are locked into cut throat supply chains and many will not adapt to investing in automation or higher productivity through training of workers. Less workers means also less tax returns and less money in local economies.

 

UK employers at this end of the market will be tempted to break the law by employing at less than minimum wage per hour, or  take advantage of higher unemployment though ‘work fair ‘ schemes whereby people have to work to get their benefits and employers get a free ride based on the notion of work experience and training.

 

Strong employment laws are vital to break the poverty cycle which Gordon Brown tried to do with ‘making work pay’.  Too many jobs which need to be done in the UK, are now subsidised indirectly via benefits and tax credits, without which employees could not make a living wage. Indeed the changes in benefits assessments undertaken mean that work is no longer paying, and debt is rising amongst that sector of the employment market as small, transient but significant. People are not making ends meet.

There is also a knock on economic effect, Skilled workers cannot retract their labour to work in a less demanding menial job, so in the laisez faire system with union and workers rights supression, their wages have not being rising despite productivity going often up in many industries. In the UK, as in many countries, the lion’s share of national tax revenue  comes from income tax and employer contribution taxes.  So low wages and tax credits mean less tax is returned from the lower half of incomes.

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Just What Are the Economic Benefits and Pitfalls of Brexit?

Brexit is upon us both in the UK nations and for ex-pats.

We will come back to the reasons a large minority voted to win the brexit referendum and then the BoJo election landslide, but what are the benefits to the UK, especially the North of England who swung to the conservatives to get-brexit-done.

Benefits:

 

Dregulation, or rather Re Regulations

 

THe EU have various regulations for products and fiscal policy , but the benefits to the man in the street are not exactly obvious.

Products and Produce:

What are the benefits in having british standards ?

 

Well labelling was of course mentioned, so British only products can be labelled much more simply than those for EU export. However if you want to export you will still have to conform to labelling for the EU, or the USA or of course, translate into Chinese or Urdu or what ever.

The boring little CE mark may not mean anything to you, but it means that not only the labelling complies to free sale actross the EU, but that the quality conforms to one of those straight banana idiotic standards. For quality, durability, safety and recylcing. Hmm remember the BSI   , the British Standards Institute and the KITE mark ?

So is there an economic benefit in having different standards on produce and products?

Well you can have cheaper products or those with higher margins because they are lower quality than EU demands on qaulity.  Or you could have more imports from outside the EU and export more to other countries, who do not comply to the ISO system or other agreements on things like agriculture and animal welfare and hygeine, Enter Chlorinated chicken and Amonia Beef which will take several weeks to reach the UK from the USA. And genetically modified crops and animals.  Not only on sale, but large companies like Monsanto will be able to apply pressure on Government and then farmers to adopt their products. Once in an area, they act aggressively in detecting GMO products which have spread to other non GMO fields, and accuse the farmers of theft. Perhaps the Laws of the UK Nations will protect us against that.

So the benefits to products are that some may be cheaper to label, or produced by cheaper methods. The benefits for produce will be that well, the UK can do what they like and the US will, as is already clear in their rhetoric around a trade deal, dictate what they can export to us, which is not only produce itself, but technology and economic methods. UK Farming can go its own way, with higher standards if you like, but in reality if they want to sell into the EU they will have to comply, and sheep farmers in particular are reliant on the EU trade to make good profits.

 

Trade Deals though, trade deals ??

New trade deals means the UK is free to negotiate with who ever they want, without the EU interfering, Yippee. Now can a relatively small market with a slow growing economy and slower growing population, buy and sell produce with other countries. Will they ever get a better deal than the deal they get through the EU in terms of produce?

Climate change is real, man made or what ever the sceptics want to blame this warming on, so in future it will not just be about trading, it will be about securing food from outside the borders. The EU was famous for its excesses in having wine lakes, butter mountains, milk oceans and beef more than you could shake a stick at. Over supply in a subsidised market. That was 30 years ago now, and the move to market economics within some quotas and agreements has been long and slow. The reason there were lakes and mountains of produce was that the EEC was too successful in curing the ills of the 1930s and 1940s – plentiful, affordable food for all. A terrible goal eh?

WWII revealed to Britons that they were not a self sufficient island, far from it, they needed the convoys of produce to supply them when their European suppliers got rudely cut off by Adolf Hitler. The UK then became dependent on the EU, and you can say that is in part due to the CAP and the subsequent cuts in qoutas, but that wouldnt be quite true. The UK continued to be dependent on net imports post war, and more so as the demand for non seasonal produce, fruit and veg of all forms in winter , became a large consumer force channeled through the massive buying power of the big 5 supermarket chains in the UK.

Good for the Green party who will have us eat British, short travelled, seasonal available food.

The deal with the EU to be developed will not allow any special rights and they will be making that very clear in order to bolster the position of the EU against other separatists. Some UK politicians and persons of the street blah blah nature, believe that the EU is more dependent on the UK than the UK is on the EU. THis is clearly not true.

 

Take BMW , who allegedly sell 800,000 vehicles per year in the UK. Which makes the UK the second single largest current market behind the USA, where they make some of their cars anyway. That volume represents 20% of their ecxports. So the Brexit cry on that, as on Gucci shoes, is that we will burn your trade if you dont accept our terms which are better than we had when we were in. Unfortunetly, UK BMW dealers make substantially more profit from the life cycle of their vehicles, in sale margin and in profits from servicing , than BMW germany makes.  So what then , now there will be Tariffs on highly desirable products going to the UK market, 80% are already sold quite happily under tariff agreements. THe UK dealer, and consumer loses. A trade war on these things will only lead to the EU retaliating in ways which hurt the UK more than the EU is hurt.

 

That is the perfect example of trade deals and how the UK is now no more special than other markets, and in particular Turkey , India, Malaysia and China

What is special about the UK, now not the 5th but 6th biggest economy behind India now, and soon to be 7th behind Malaysia ( sooner with the inevitable post brexit adjustment period ) The UK has been a nice cash cow, but mostly for the companies’ themselves.

The belief that the UK is some very special, important market is going to be put on trial.

So far, and you can look this up, we have a row of fiascos already brewing up before negotiations with other nations begin

 

1. Huawei 5G    Here we see the UK going against advice from their allies in the USA, the CIA and Trump telling them no. We are assured sensitive parts of the system will not be contracted out to Huawei . 5G is a massive infrastucture and largely a single supplier deal the government were looking for. Why? to pit the EU suppliers against China, and to play politics towards a trade deal with China. In fact the deal with Huawei already threatens the forthcoming UK-US trade deal and may limit some aspects of export of products or conduction of services for the USA.
2.  New Frigates. Remember all those frigates Scotland was gauranteed to get if they voted No in Indyref take 1?  Well the UK delegates from  defence and british aerospace have been selling the advanced and affordable frigates to places like Australia and New Zealand  where some of the vessels sold, if not all, will be built there as a softener. This is very much linked to trade deals. …..and of course, moved some production capacity from the Clyde to Merseyside.  Building all the new warships in Scotland would mean an expansion in capacity at Yarrows, Govan and maybe a new site in say Greenock or  more at Rosyth. Too good for the Scots, thanks for coting No, now shut up and be gratefuil for what Yarrows have.
3. Chlorinated Chicken , Amonia Beef Burgers. GMO crops. Corporatisation of UK agriculture.  Enough said above.  A key US politician has already called EU and hence UK farming as arcaic and a working museum. Agriculture is massive business in the US, and the EU has done its best to support local farmers against the might of them. The US subsidises crops and therefore beef production as in particualr they allow the bad practice of feeding beef on corn, which is linked the the rise in deadly Ecoli 0157. Cows eat grass,  they do not eat maise naturally. It can be said that most beef production is dependent on cattle feed rich with soya, but the major part of cows diet across the UK and Europe is grass or sileage.

THe down sides then of Brexit

 

1. More expensive produce and imported wares due to tariffs, quotas and the devaluation of the pound which has happened already. THings are going to cost more of your English Pounds Sterling sonny jim.  Boris Johnson cannot offer UK farmers an assymetric deal, where EU produce is not lumped with tariffs in order to avoid inflation. UK Farmers tend to sell higher margin products abroad, like top qaulity lamb, or are able to do volume deals at better prices than the UK supermarkets will pay.
2. A slowing down in population growth.   UK mothers wait too long and have too few kids. This is a fact. THe last census figures I looked at were not the stereotyped 2.4 kids of the 1960s and 70s , but the 1.7 of the 90s. This means that couples on average are not making two kids – i.e. they are not even replacing themselves , let alone growing the population. Everyone talks about the ageing population and the pensioner wave crashing as the baby boomers enter senility, but the reason for this is that there are not enough new births. Women have careers, houses cost more than three times a single salary, people do not have jobs for life. Instability is a driving force behind the large pro Brexit minority who have won the day.  However the UK population WAS growing even in the bad “twenty tens”,  due to immigration and the vast majority of that was from the EU, and the largest portion (minority) was eastern europe.  East european mothers give birth younger, and often have more than 2 children.  Now the East Europeans in particular have been the cause of much of the unrest in the North of England which resulted in the tory landslide for a firm, fast brexit.  Employers and probably prospective employees will have added beaurocracy and decision making may be arbitrarily permissive or restrictive because there is not the bureacratic infrastucture in place to tackle this within the next two years. Tens of thousands have left the UK, perhaps it is transient flux with no one now planning to take their places. Or perhaps they feel unwelcome in northern towns with British Nationalist nazi graffitti and verbal abuse from locals . This is the great white hope of brexit, at the illimination of free immigration will release jobs, wage rises, better working conditions and new training at work opportunties for younger and poorer people in the UK. That is what the consrvatives have to deliver on, and I am afraid to say that higher wages and better working conditions for the working class, bar an anomolous minimum wage hike, are not the bread and butter of Tory politics.  What is bread and butter is current DWP ( dept work and pensions) is forcing people to accept jobs in areas they dont live in, on wages they therefore cannot live off because dear reader, Amazon and the vegetable picking companies dont pay relocation and advances.
3. Letting in the Rest of the World’s Talent. Well this means immediately that the elite institutions will be prioritised at the home office for special fast track work visas. The banks and financial services, then Universities and high tech. Given how many foriegners they employ now, whcih they have selected as talent, then perhaps that volume alone of applicaitons and extensions will clog up the home offices bureacracy, poor old Farmer Giles not getting his seasonal pickers from Poland.  For talent further down the line, when Farmer Giles PLC starts to falter and small businesses have trouble with recruiting and retaining UK nationals, and god help us, wages go up to a living level and produce is more expensive reflecting this, then the Tories have a long history of making deals for importation of new workers from where ever is cheap. Now that will be linked to trade deals of course.  Give us a trade deal, and we’ll take some of your unemployed to ambitious types. i 1950s UK could have gone down a Scandinavian route faced with a limiting labour force. Higher investment in modernisation of plant, automation and enabling workers to command higher productivity via training and retooling. THis becomes then a virtous circle with the unions, as in Germany and Scandinavia, that they understand that better productivity leads to better pay, and more workers is not always the answer.  However in the 1950s the UK had an empire and could arrest wage rises at the lower end of unskilled and semi skilled work by mass immigration.
4. Better Trade Deals than the EU gets – well this is a case in hand, that UKIP were glad to tell Norway and Iceland on their EEA agreement, that the UK can get a better deal because it is big important and is actually therefore Great Britain.  The plus side is though, tha the UK can make special bargaining which the EU as a whole could not because not all nations could be in agreement on these. These are special concessions in return for favourable deals which make Bojo and his team look good.  This is one reason that deals will quite possibly not be under examination of parliament until they are, ahem, a done deal. That they are either just achieved withint parliamentary definded parameters ie they comply to what they intended to get out of them, hurray arent we clever , or that they are not subject to scrutiny because the conservatives have such a large majority they can just vote on them and fillibuster the oppostition out the way.
5. The UK has been

My main contention is that Great Britain is no longer so very great. It lost it’s empire and failed to modernise its free market manufacturing industries, value added production now being predominantly politically determined industries,  like defence and pharma with their direct and  hidden subsidies. At the end of Empire, the UK needed the EEC more than the EEC needed them, and this enabled the UK to access markets on an increasingly easy basis as the EU developed into the worlds largest regional single market economy. London benefitted hugely, becoming the city of choice for becoming listed on a european stock exchange. Big bang and the technological data revolution made london over cook twice. Corruption, and let us not mince our words, but lies and corruiption in the global credit system almost collapsed the whole capitalist system in the west.  Somehow, the EU got the blame for this in many households across the UK, partly because yes indeed, a small country could upset the Euro enough as to threaten the whole system. But so what, without government subsidy, dressed up as quantitative easing, the stock markets of the dollar, yen and pound could have collapsed and brought those currencies with them.

;Many ardent brexiters expect now the EU to collapse. One argument has been the refugee crisis. In response to their election in Italy, and the real threat of Alt Right Fascism rising again, the EU has put in much more stringent measures to reduce migrant and refugee entrant and residency from outside the EU. The other argument has been using the Euro across several disparate national economies. The benefits of a single currency in avoiding transactions, and when one state is weak its value can be upheld by others perfomring better, outweigh the issues of rogue states like Greece. Legislation in the EU and banking practices in the central bank, and the IMF globally, are in place to hinder that such situations happen again, and this indeed damns Greece within the EU and Euro to decades of paying back their corrupt debts. Greece would benefit perhaps from a Grexit, but knows that the strong economies of the North are actually bolstering their economic chances by free trade, movement of people and investment.

Like football, the English expect to win because they invented football, and are Brittania rules the waves. Well Brittania now waves the rules of market economics and free trade. When they dont win, elements tend to get rowdy and throw street furniture around.

 

The BBC did a whirl wind report from the once rust belt, now blue tory hope belt of the north of england. They avoided the main Brexit question completely , that of immigration.  The BBC will now sweep that under the carpet as it doesnt fit with the vision of a prosperous, forward looking UK. Until riots errupt when the promise of Brexit falters and EU immigrants who have made new ives in the North of England, are targeted by the mob.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is Poverty?

What is poverty? Why are some people ‘poor’ and how do you even begin to define poverty in western societies when much of the world lives in squalor and disease?

Poverty has an arbitary definition in the west. Relative poverty measures are used as official poverty rates by the European Union, UNICEF, and the OEDC. The main poverty line used in the OECD and the European Union is based on “economic distance”, a level of income set at 60% of the median household income.^[89]

“Poverty is being actively swept under the carpet in the hard right western societies so as not to twing the consience of the middle mass of voters. “

This definition damns though a lower proportion of society to the definition, whether or not they can afford to feed and clothe themselves, given that most European societies offer medical assistance and at least assisted housing to the poorest in society.

David Cameron took a swipe from his Eatonian Ivory tower, in following up Gordon Browns disasterous economic policies of helping people in work with tax relief and paid benefits. Cameron’s government firstly wanted to deny that those in work are in poverty, because of Brownist neo liberal policy in appeasing the part time, temporary nature of work in many service industries. The Cameron government then went on to remove the policy of erradicating child poverty from the UK.

“In the UK, more people are on government benefits and tax deductions who are in work than unemployed, sick or disabled”

Fundamental to conservative, neo liberal and new hard right thinking , is the notion that poverty is a choice people make in not working or progressing themselves,  an outcome people deserve for their lack of economic initiative. Many prominent Conservatives and Republicans came from very poor, troubled families and see themselves as of course the self made example that capitalist society has opportunity for those prepared to advance themselves. Poverty is then a natural result and punishment for not working hard enough. It is a state of discomfort to be worked out of.

“ (to neo liberalists and the new nationalist right )….Poverty is then a natural result and punishment for not working hard enough. It is a state of discomfort to be worked out of.”

A state of discomfort to be worked out of. Yes that is a very good starting point from any political stand point in fact. Discomfort. Not being able to feed you and your family enough calories, protein and other nutritions to grow normally and healthily. That would be the very base line. Discomfort and hunger , to be fought out of in social unrest and revolution. Discomfort has different levels. Not being able to work because there are no job opportunities where you live, and you cannot afford transportation, and if you moved you could not  break even in the places there are work because rents and mortgages are too high. Metropolisation. Discomfort in not being able to keep up with the Jones’- not affording foreign holidays, the latest iPhone , designer label clothes for our kids?

“We need to steer clear of the concept of total social equality as a policy goal in order to actually tackle poverty by means which are acceptable in common sense grounds to the voting populace of the middle ground.”

The uberliberal would like the state to provide the social equalising material goods however, that is bound to feed the furnaces of the new, hard right wing in being able to show money from hard working, struggeling families is going via tax to those who have given up, and worse, immigrants and refugees. We need to steer clear of the concept of total social equality as a policy goal in order to actually tackle poverty by means which are acceptable in common sense grounds to the voting populace of the middle ground.

Poverty can be defined by statistics, and I have blogged earlier about this in ‘ a new definition of poverty’. Here we looked at some ucomfortable truths for politicians. Net incomes less than 60%  of the average, for example, That the poverty line is a net function of the cost of living and mean incomes over time. The ‘proletariat’ and insecure nature of employment means that more people dip in and out of poverty. Some can take on debt or down size, while others find themselves locked into longer periods of income not covering the basics of living.

We have a simple break even, where housing and energy are the two key variables (they may seem like fixed cost overheads, but are variable). Will the free market provide? Well the simple answer to that is before Social Democratic policy and social engineering, capitalism did not provide because it does not need to plan for poverty. In itself, capital invests in housing and gains a return on that from sale and rent, it only acts to uphold profit. Yes it can and does act restrictively so that less housing is built, such that profits are kept high and risk is reduced. That is the nature of capital. It will never solve problems of income not covering out goings for the lower element of society because it does not seek to.

Capital will campaign and lobby to be free of legislation which alters this affair. Extra taxation of undeveloped land, rent tribunals and fair rents, the building of social housing. However when welfare (benefits) payments can be converted via rent into private equity then they are keen not to interfere, or actually promote policies which flow tax payer’s money into this.

Will the utopian, free neo liberal society free people from poverty by there being boundless economic opportunity, and ample charitable acts to cover those unable to participate? Like lennist marxism, the Neo Liberal utopia is becoming a dystopia in the lands it is most fervently followed, while the rise of globalisation of advanced industries once the preserve of the west, has lead to less economic opportunity for many workers locked into the ‘proletariat’ of low skill, low income, temporary work. Social Democratic policy for its failings, has delivered an over educated society with a glutt of  graduates, where accordingly necessary practical skills are locked into a self serving educational system with access denied for those without any qualifications or too poor grades to enter. The neo liberalist utopia is essentially what we had in the 19th and early 20th century. A chaotic free market, with nationalism re emerging as a potent power to offer hope to disaffected workers, and create conflict over resources and empire. It should be no surprise that history is repeating itself at the end of a decade of economic chaos, as in the 1927 to 1939 period.

 

The failings of both Capitalism and Social Democracy meet in the poverty line, where it does not pay to work, but rather to be sustained by benefits. This is the arch evil of Neo Liberalism, and also of socialism in fact. Work not putting food on the table. Capital argues for more capitalism to solve this, socialism argues for more socialism. THe compromise was Brownism – ” Making work pay”, while in effect this was making uneconomic service industry business models pay, and feeding more money into rental investments because higher rents could be extracted from this set up. Brownism was petrol on the flames of the laisez faire, anarchy which capital is. It lead to a removal of the term ‘uemployed’ in the UK today, from anyone employed for more than one day per fortnight. 

What of econmic opporunity then? The dynamic that people can and will work themselves out of poverty? The goal of Neo Liberalists was to remove the notion of safety net, and let all be free existential beings rewarded fairly by the free market for their labours, and picked up in their invalidity by ample private initiative and charity. Cameronites have argued that poverty figures reflect a transience, like unemployment, that by the time you have measured it, people have exited poverty and new people have fallen temporarily into it. In itself this is not a terrible outset for policy making. Accepting that there is a churn, that the economy will create more jobs and net wealth for all if it is free to employ on a temporary and part time basis, which then allows people to interact economically and progress themselves. This has however not be borne out in the reality of Brownism or ten years of austerity. Poverty is being actively swept under the carpet in the hard right western societies so as not to twing the consience of the middle mass of voters.

Poverty requires the definition within this picture, because in defining it correctly and understanding the cause of the inequity between income and outgoings, between basic need and ability to work and between planning and controlling legislation and freedom for economic activity to flourish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Referendumdrum

Often described as emotive and even labelled divisive,  the continuing campaign for Scottish Independence in the context of the  Westminster government’s push for Brexit, throws up questions on what is democratic choice and rightful decision making based upon it?

The Indicative vote for Brexit was as we are reminded, 17 million voted to leave. Experts in the economy Herr Gove will have us believe. However of course 16 million voted Remain and in fact only 37% of the total electorate voted Leave.¨

Now let us put this back into context of 2014 , the “indyref”, where a solid No was 55%, on a relatively high turn out of the electorate. What if this indyref, or a future one, achieved a 52%  Yes, as Leave had?  There would be no end to the bickering then about what weight for politicians to decide this national divorce,  could  be placed on such a slim majority.?

Referendums (referendii to be latinly correct)  need an overhaul to have the punching weight to be more decisive tools for governments across Europe. Otherwise we risk the tyranny of the minority which we have with Brexit today. That a minority government, as in fact the UK has been for many decades with the first-past-the-post electoral system and three main party system. Furthermore we now have a minority parliamentary government due to May’s disastrously misjudged snap election which is being propped up by a strange, “special interest” minority from the region which is Ulster!

PR ( proportional representation )  isn’t much better than first past the post in many ways, it can lead to indecisiveness, and over representation of minority interests, which we otherwise rarely encounter in the UK,  but such of course as the DUP ‘s lever they exert on public spending in Northern Ireland now.

Referendums are good things, we haven’t had that many in the UK or Scotland, but they are useful as indicators of public opinion on very important issues, or on such issues that are cross party and of course as with Cameron’s choice, divide parties internally and need to be opened for a more direct level of democracy which is then indicative to our elected democracy via law making in Westminster. In fact it has to be asked why Tony Blair didn’t give the country a referendum on the second Gulf war? After all it exposed more British citizens to danger and death than the EU ever has or will.

Back then to indyref, and what if that momentum had carried on from 37% start, up and beyond to 52% on a turn out of well over half the Scottish electorate, but not 80% say? If this had been the 2014 context then there would have been no end of bitter fighting over it, and the SNP being a liberal party would have not only this to cope with and sooth say and deliver concession and reasurement to the large 48% minority, they would have had the Oil Price Crash of later that year to contend with too. It would have been a hell time with attempts to appease the baying crowd of mixed English white settlers, war veterans, Orange Lodgers and general project fear believers. Doubt can be raised with retrospect, if there was any chance of an indicative Yes in 2014 ever coming to fruition.

Far wiser the SNP would have been if they had for seen the Leave vote of 2016. However that kind of crystal balling was impossible given the opinion polls, and even Nigel Farage was “resigned” to losing half way through the night, with a wry smile, and when they won he looked positively nervous. No more being the over-paid, filibustering cynic and clown in the EU parliament. The SNP failed to make a good enough economic case for security and self sustainability, which is now being made over time and with the better input of industry who no longer think they need to worry about a second IndyRef, or at least a successful one, and for some in industry, confronted with Brexit, the option of Independence in Europe with a slight uncertainty of gaining entry to the club for a while, is preferable to being locked out the club by the ruling conservatives for several parliaments.

 

Really what we need in referendums ( referendii to be correct ?)  can be found in the constitution of many sports clubs, local trade unions,  community organisations and probably the scout movement. We need to have first and foremost a quorum of the electorate to validate the vote as something binding and not just indicative for parliament to take to debate and law. This should probably then be around 75% turn out. Less than that we start to get into questions about how valid not the overall vote for or against that wins is, but how valid the margin is. So in the Brexit vote, 72 % turned out and of those, just over half voted Leave.

 

We then have that methodology so wanted by the Tories to be imposed on the trade union movement, but something they themselves would never accept for their own party, parliament, the house of lords or any other organ of power or capital. Qualified majority voting, where by only a majority large enough is binding to leadership to act upon. This is sometimes taken as 66% or two thirds, and this is the Tories’ vision of imposing a leash on Trade Union power to strike. This seems to take us away from the principle of democracy that yes, there are losers as well as winners, and they should accept two key aspects of British democracy. First past the post in the constituencies, and 51% of the votes either in parliament or via the referendum mechanism we are all a bit tired of.

How then do we qualify a majority from a referendum? Should it not maybe be a majority which represents all the electorate, ie you must get 50% of the entire potential vote? So in this case Leave would need 23 million votes , or a 69% Leave? Or do we take the mean general election turn out to be quorum for a  simple 1 % point majority to be accepted for example ?

 

Or do we factor in some kind of variance in turn out and availabiluity to vote? For example bad weather, or natural variances in turn outs, and stipulate a percent point majority via some statistical model for eliminating variance? Or should we in fact have a referendum on whether say 55% ie a ten percent point difference, becomes a mandatory threshold below which enough of the voters are so disgruntled that they wont need to accept the vote anyway?

 

Here we come back to the solid, brick wall safe NO vote of 2014. This to many was done and dusted, until Brexit came to mind. In the NO stats, there was a majority of 600, 000, which is more than 10% of the population as a whole. However there were a significant number of EU citizens in that vote, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 who were afraid of losing their rights in new nation excluded from the EU. Also those who are UK nationals but had major reservations on this issue? Plus then now, those who see the potential loss of money due to Brexit and an unsure trade deal future?

 

The author’s preferred option then is to have a qualified majority which is set arbitrarily at 55% but reduced by a percent point at a time for every x % points nearer the total votes cast gets to 100% from a base of 75% turn out. We take a presumption that we will never get 100% and probably never over 90% turn out, so we then elect to take three thresholds up to 85% – five divided by three for each 5% above 75% who turn out, reducing the winning vote from 55% to 53.34% then 51,7% and for an 85% turn out, 50,1 %.  The logic in this is clear. We reflect the will of the majority of the people who bothered to vote, tempered a little by the proportion of those who could vote who then bothered to vote. A low turn out means a higher winning margin is needed, in case there were many Don’t Knower’s out there or there were other factors such as bad weather, a football match, an unfair , or indeed illegal argument going viral.

There are more complex statistical methodologies and some clever clogs will no doubt wow some of the politicians some of the time with something they have to sell along these lines. But a kind of common sense appeal, that as you reach a presumed maximum turn out, your majority over 50% can decrease thus making the absolute margin a sizeable number of people rather than the 1 million who made up the majority for Leave the EU.

 

It’s been an emotive time as was the Indyref. Brexit has uncovered many things. Perhaps just how insecure England feels about her place in the world and the homeland economic opportunities. It does seem that Poles and Latvians come over with their trade and do well, while British youth don’t get apprenticeships in building or mechanics. On the other hand, does UK youth turn their back on trades, and would they work for the pay and conditions the eastern Europeans do anyway? Trades in the UK has long been peed on in a push to technocise the population of the future and turn us into a knowledge economy, Only the UK’s economy is more and more dependent on rentier economics, turning round not on production and export, but purely on our needs for a roof over out heads and to consumer foods and wares to keep ourselves feeling human.

 

To me Brexit is a symptom that 30 years of Neo Liberal economic policy has failed. The welfare state now pays for people to be in underemployment, thus subsidizing marginal cappuccino café business models in the service sector, and seasonal labour in production. As in Soviet Russia, ordinary people in the street are so taken in by the allure of the politicians pouting the so called free market economy, that they believe in market solutions to most ills, and they see that too big a market, the EU, with too federal a governance and especially, too much emigration from abroad to the UK, is a bad thing.

Neo Liberalism has failed larges sections of the communities in the UK and USA, the countries where governments practice the ideology most loyally of all major economies. However it rewards the upper third very well, and keeps much of the main majority in good credit with lowish interest rates, in such a way that it can win and win again.

However post finance crash, a lingering tumour resulting from too much free market, free for all anarchy , bullshitting and corruption, the right needed a new posture and that was back to Nationalism. Rally the troops behind fear of the foreign. People feel dispossessed, wages stagnant or even falling, while they see be it Mexicans or Poles making what looks like a good living in construction and services. Here you have brexit and an 8 billion dollar wall or is it a fence ?

 

 

 

 

 

Feeding the Beasts of the Economy

Modern western economies have made an odd transition away from production industry and over to the realms of funny money and the whole mortgage and real estate pyramid. The amounts which were used to subisdise production and innovation in industry are a fraction of the bail outs of the banks have recieved in the last decade post crash of 2008. Now it is apparent the recovery in this new era,  is really all about feeding the same beasts again.

Wealthy countries of  notable populus, have by in large significant natural resources and  effective, private primary extraction and agricultural sectors. This underpins a certain stability and certainty in the economy and the currency. Above this though, there was always a tacit acceptance that the tertiary service economy would grow to overshadow the production sector, the secondary economy, post the period of hyper inflation in the 1970s in western countries. Even in China, that industrial Mega factory, services now outstrip production industries as a proportion of GDP.

We are now locked  into feeding a tertiary economy, mortgage debt fuelled escalator to sustain growth in the economies of a large proportion of western countries. Every house owner’s goal is that of building captial value in property well above the rate of currency inflation. It is a self fulfilling economic prophecy, fuelled by growth in the population, metropolisation and by a reluctance to sell if the return on investment is weak, yet the mortgage repayments are still afforded.  This is the new, seemingly inescapable beast, but it is a monster which is diseased deep to the bones and vital organs, and fundamentally unsound in its cerebral processes. When it rages, there will be a new financial crisis.

This  beast is made of pure rentier based economics – we all need a roof over our heads and in other tertirary services like transport, we need to get to work. There is no coincidence that  the costs of commuting and parking are now largely privatised, and largely free from price control. The rentier beast feeds from our need to exist and be economically and culturally active as is our human condition.  In our unavoidable sickness and old age, Health services are also on their way to being fully private, with either a direct to consumer franchise or the government tendering processes we see being rolled out today in the UK.  Privatised and in the realms of profiteering yet with restrictions  placed on supply, such as monopolies, and resrtictions placed upon the consumer’s ability to choose and arrest price rises,  and create a true free market.

Like Leninist Marxism, the Free Market is a utopian vision, in reality it is subject to monopolisation, price parity and  worse than this, outright collusion and political corruption. At its’ fringes of supply chain in the third world, its’ ends are served by slavery and child labour.

Privatised services such as health and transport,  become highly inflationary to government and consumers as demand rises, yet mysterioulsy this does not by in large translate to inflationary pressure on currency. There has been was is called the great moderation in the consumer price index as the old RPI is now called. Are then production based, secondary based economies with unions and internal inflation bound to collapse then, and we must all pray to the pyramid-selling, mortgage beast ? This vision for a utopia of small, weak government and corporate freedom?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” -Benito Mussolini
byu/honkytonkdragon inpolitics

The answer to the question of a production based economy being doomed to inflation and diminishing returns, is  both yes and no. Contradictory to the inevitability,  you can see fairly clearly that the (western) German economy has thrived on manufacturing in a land with relatively limiting natural resources since entering  this new century.  They have focused on qaulity engineering, high value products and niche technical business and consumer market sectors. On the flip side of the tiger industrial nations in the post war era,   Japan has reached some natural limits on resources, and is in a period of ‘de-growth’, yet ironically this has not seen an actual reduction in standard of living, in contrast to austerity UK and US where average employees have seen their spending power eroded in the decade post the great casino crash.

Moderate growth, and moderate inflation are two of the keystones of the Neo Conservative economic policy, but another fundamental had been the mantra of global free trade. This has become the other great beast and has lead perhaps inevitably to the vast trade deficit between the USA and EU economies and Asia, following the rush to Low Cost Countries, mainly meaning China.

This is where the vast hipocrisy of the Neo Conservative era has come home to roost, and lead us to the Post Neo Conservative agenda, which we will come back to. We see very clearly that in the most ultra Neo Conservative countries, UK and USA, this so called ‘free trade’ with a command capitalist country run by the communists, has lead to the rust belts and resulting sentiment which ushered in the concurrent farces of Trump and Brexit. More on that Alt Right later as well.

China and to some extent the other asian tiger economies, have become the new production sites for even advanced, innovative products which we were promised by Neo Conservatives in the 1980s,  would be enabled in our home lands. By freeing ourselves from the heavy industry and unionisation of the past, we could realise new super productivity in the knowledge based, production economy.

The Beast from the East arose instead of a science based secondary economy. Even companies making reasonable profits in the west, are relocated to China by their boards who pander to investor demand for higher profit margins from lower production cost, via of course cheap labour. China , where of course the economy is almost a Tito Market Socialism, or Neo Keynsian model where the banks print money yet inflation is tagged by price controls and means of increasing supply via government steered national and global supply chain strategies.

Neo Liberal poltical-economies rely on cheap consumer items subject to low inflation and high competition in order to keep workers satisfied with their spending power on those meagre and often stagnant wages, and to fuel that other great monster of course the credit card beast, and for larger purchases, the remortgage / equity release credit supply.

However what is interesting here is that the secondary sector has remained constant yet if you look at its’ sources of income, government has in some countries become the biggest direct buyer or first link away customer, funding these industries via purchasing. This is in areas of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, military, transport, IT where the government is a major buyer. Secondary demand to this are things like Medicare where the government is either directly paying employees contributions, or a large source of income is from public employees.   That is what was acceptable to investors upon privatisation. Further  we  then branch over to the keynsian nature of services, recylcing money from a very great deal of public sector spending and wages, and of course the primary sector is moved to rentier services such as commuting, and housing. So for example commuting for governmental employees to the metropoles,  which now is by in large in fact along monopolised transport corridors, or subidised roads for personal cars.

So we have these Beasts, we accept them as if they are necessary evils, and know that they are always hungry. No one can make them go away, because that would be upsetting the cosey way things work.  The way it all works, yes. That an upper third of society in terms of wage income and multiple property ownership,  feel they are free from oppressive tax regimes, while the middle third would like to be that top third, but have such high medical insurance and educational costs that they never will, and the lower third are just proletariat service sector and unemployables who are useful due to their aggregate demand as a portion of society.

All the time a top few percent in society can perpetuate their greed in actually owning the means of extracting wealth, and evading taxation,  from national economies.  While in the UK many hourly wages have stagnated for a decade and take home pay for many is reduced, the wealthiest 2% have been able to triple their capital value since 2008. Pure Marxist comment? Yes but you play the game in the economy where you will in full knowledge of this is how it works, and you just accept that this is all as said, necessary evil. Beasts we must live with and can never change.

If we dont feed the beast of property and capital values, then the whole economy breaks. If we don’t reap the benefits of cheap, inflation free products from China – the beast from the east – then we get retail inflation. Most of all if the beast of consumer credit is not fed by a rising population, then economic growth stops up.

The last point is the back to basics core of the whole rentier philosophy behind Neo “liberal” Economics. That industry is no longer important in the west when the lowest common denominator in labour costs can be found globally, and that very lowest is subsistance living and indeed slavery. That capital value, and in particular real estate, can grow without creating currency inflation, in fact the reverse, currency can gain value offsetting other consumer and supply side driven inflationary pressures. Capital can then do nothing in particular which is more than living off our existence, our basic needs. Or rather it does very much indeed to ensure some key drivers are in place for this.

Firstly metropolitisation driven by government policy of centralising services and administration, and awarding contracts to larger players in the metropoles. Hence demand for housing can be focused, and the ladder of escalation of value exploited more efficiently at a lower risk to investors.  Secondly the privatisation is not in fact reducing inflation as far as the government or consumer is concerned. The best examples of this are in power and railways in the UK, where price rises have risen ahead of underlying inflation yet subsidies to infrastructure and innovation are also higher than three decades ago when adjusted for CPI inflation. Thirdly the removal of irksome legislation – worker’s rights to organise as unions and associations, and collectively bargain ; environmental protection laws which add costs; freedom of speech which leads to demonstrations against corporates. Just this week we see the Scottish Police’s Special Branch have labelled Anti Fracking Demonstrators as ” domestic extremists”  .

The term ‘rentier’ used to have its’ own Wiki entry, but not has been subverted to being soley associated to Karl Marx, in an attempt to marginalise its’ meaning by adding the long term negative sentiment about ‘Marxism’. You can eqaully well call Margaret Thatcher a ‘Marxist’ because she understood how the mechanisms of capitalism can be used to explout a work force and render the ‘entitles’ richer while wages could slow in growth and stagnate for even average workers.

We Now Live Under The Rule Of A Rentier Capitalism by Paul Street

There were two inevitabilities from feeding the beasts of the western rentier economies. Once was the massive trade deficits, the other was the crash of 2008. Eventually such a crypto keynsian cycle of private debt stimulating demand, would collapse due to some small bugs along the way which would reveal the corruption in the credit pyramid and erode confidence. The consequence of these inevitabilities is the disaffection of the the lower third of society and the realisation amongst mid income earners that their prospects for personal capital were being threatened.

The political answer to this was the end of Neo Liberalism. The end to small government, rather a new form of big, corrupt government serving the corporates. A new ultra arrogant political era came to be with that old chesnut, xenophobia as the rallying call to the disaffected. Blame immigrants. Blame assylum seekers. Use fear of terrorism, of cultural conflict, of overpopulation diluting wages. Build a wall to keep the people out who have been giving you cheap gardening, house building harvesting, and food processing for years.

Brexit is finally looking like the farce many warned it would be, but it is not until the little Britain , or rather sleeping electorate, start to see that their pockets are being drained of money while the rich just move their capital over borders. In polls amongst the highest brexit stronghold constituencies, it was immigration which was the major concern, yet those self same north of england places had the lowest levels of immigrant workers living there. Xenophobia, fear of the unknown, and scapegoating – blame some other poor sod just not the rich who are so pleased to feed all the beasts. It was an assylum seeker who forced you into a zero hours contract.

Even ultra social democratic Norway is at the beginning of a slow journey towards realising a Neo Liberal political economy. The cuts in budgets to local authorities and now hospitals, plus the senseless competitive tendering betweeen one state’s rail company and another, are moves along the way, with the 30 billion Euro series of tax cuts to the wealthiest in Society being the gold rush.

But the trouble is that you can’t feed all the beasts all the time, and when you actively call those beasts, as Trump and Brexit have, then you start to play with fire. The key driver of that rather dull but secure economic growth in the UK has been a rising population. Demand for the necessities of life increase, and capital value grows on a multiplier due to the loan-thrice-income escalator.

In the UK though, hat steady growth is not coming from indigenous Britons. They are not anywhere near having that stereotypical 2.4 kids, they were by the early 00ies down at 1.7 and some believe it is now as low as 1.4 per arbitary couple . That means the UK population would decline, and in the course of two generations be half of that it was in 2000. However immigration has abated this, especially from the EU, and in particular eastern europe. They bring with them too a culture for women having children earlier, having over two on average by age 32 when married, and focuising on motherhood and not career.

‘Wetherspoons boss and leading Brexiteer Tim Martin: “We’ll need a significant level of immigration over the next 10, 20, 30 years to keep growing the economy.” #r4today’
by inukpolitics

Why hasn’t the economy crashed as those terrible Remoaners would have had us believe? Well Brexit has not YET happened and all the signs are that this week, the chicken run has begun in earnest. Banks are bowing to the laws on capital holding in main trading zone, ie EU not UK, and moving jobs to the continent. Major companies are moving their HQ out. Inward employee migration is halting.  Warnings about supply chain disruption and resulting factory closures and food infaltion are abounding. The threat of an Irish veto on any hard border or fake open border is present. The most pro EU member state representatives may want a more restrictive and therefore  punitive deal, like that between Canada and the EU. Those trade deals with ‘over half our exports outside the EU’ are now so desperately needed by politicians, that concessions and poorer terms than the current EU umbrella deals offer. Also a great deal of that trade, both export and import,  is linked to supply chains and logistic centres in the EU.

The average conservative MP is now a very wealthy person, with  both capital interests and strong connections to corporates which will offer them a career post parliament. Most don’t have to worry about a crash in the pound, they can transfer much of their liquid wealth to other currencies or assets abroad. Their inland capital wealth, in homes and estates, is a relative wealth which barring complete catastrophe, will remain relatively high value when seen outside the international context. You either own a bit of Belgrade or you don’t darling.  They don’t have to care about the short term effects of Brexit, they play to international corporates who are looking to gain a fifty first state of the USA where they can extract value without having the difficulties of ‘restrictive’ democratic policies in employment, environment and off shore profit exporting ie tax evasion via ‘loan and import’ mechanisms. They are securing the privatisation of the NHS in England as the brexit farce plays out, a long term major gain for their silent corporate sponsors.  Distraction politics.

In effect the Neo New Right, the Alt Right and its’ normalised political power in the UK, Hungary, Spain and of course the USA, have been able to divert a potential class war which was brewing, into a Race War.

 

Immigrants are a very visible force in a local economy, when they are the ones who go knocking door to door at employers and work long hours with little if any time off for sickness. They come with practical skills often in short supply as the culture for a (often useless) University education rolls throughout society. They work cheaper sometimes, but often they go self employed and soon are competing with their old employers on building sites for supplying labour and whole contracts.

 

 

The Malts, they are a-changing…..and not all for the better

I am a mere hoi palloi amongst malt whisky drinkers. I began on standard was it 10 or 12 year old Macallan and that was a fine tiple in its time, and moved onto Aberlour and other Highland styles from the NE corner. I dont collect whisky, I enjoy it the way it was meant to be enjoyed. I have though an axe to grind. No-Age-Specified malts.

A tour through the Islay Malts, which I used to avoid due to the irritating sasenachs so proud of their bottles of ‘Leapfrog’ , lead me to a very nasty night , an OD on a fine middle aged Bowmore which meant smoke was off the menu for several years due to the matters described by Pavlov, Hughy and Ralph. Now it is back, but I am very glad for the continuing journey through Ben Riach and Glen Dronach county where I happened to live before I took up with anything better than bog standard Glen Morangie. Auchetoshan, far from a Romantic western isle idyll, produces a fine la’land whisky

That whiskies from the stable could vary not just by age was a discovery on a flight somewhere where my boss was tucking in to a wee green bottle of Glen Fiddich. Usually I find the standard product to be a peppery item, a little devoid of true character and living off its’ brand name and three sided green prism. Howevver the ‘export’ at a little stronger 43% was a far superior product, with a richness and depth that left me pleasantly surprised.

Now though things have changed. Malt whisky could one day soon displace blended mash crap whisky in value of sales. But the expansion is driven by greed and the marketing guys and accountants have been able to koibosh the blenders and expert tasters into making a far inferior product.

It started with Macallan. Their wonderful bright flavoured, sweet nectar of years gone by was first hidden away by the oak finish and other releases, and around the late naughties it quietly became a far inferior product at the 10 yo or was it 12 standard product. To my palate it became a nothing whisky with the 18 being an interesting side show, but not the sherry finish perfection of what was a whisky which did what it said on the bottle, it was Macallan. Insiders toldme it was the shortage of not only sherry barrels, due to aunty bertha loosing her taste for the later afternnon tiupple and container-donor, but also good enough sherry barrels to facilitate the economic production of a mid priced 12 yo. All sherry barrels are not created equal and Macallan no doubt found themselves competing for a diminishing supply of the best. They then have an issue. Double the price to keep it the same , or decrease the ahem, user experience. I would have been brand loyal and gone to 80 quid a bottle my self.

Some say that Macallanin Japan is the good ol’ girl we all knew.

Anyway that was then and several standard products like Oban or Dalwhinne have actually improved, and the malt content of some blends seems to be so high that you could , when the palate is otherwise overloaded, satisfy the wee heid mellowness with a double-cheap-skate after that vindaloo.

What grinds my gears is also not the silly brand blended malts of unknown origin. Things like Monkey Shoulder. They are smooth enough, cheap and cheerful. They also have soemthign of much higher valuie to eduicate the pallate. They have a slightly sickly , barley sugar and camphor ‘finger print’. These malt scotches are to my knowledge, mostly no age statement. That means they are based to some extent or not , on a young 3 year old spirit, the minimum legal age for Whisky in the UK. The plot would suddenly thicken. ProfessorPlumb, in the library wiht the barley sugar candle stick.

I only remember it was Bowmore of all wee dear places of pagodas and craftsemen, was out without an age statement as goes the single malt marques. I actually think the taster I go I tasted seemed much better, in terms of concentration and length of taste, than the bottle I took home and opened. Maybe my palate was more in the mood at Glasgow Airport’s tax free.

It seems many more distilleries, or rather their conjumated marketing power dressers, have siezed the concept. Brand by suggesting something almost spiritual rather than branding on the age of the spirit. Where as an earlier gentleman’s agreement that Malts would be only sold over 8 y.o. maybe existed, it has been blown away and single malts are wrapped up in a travesty which is maybe in the direction of a nightmare based upon cutting open the stomach of the golden goose to get the eggs out quicker.

The economics are there, if you can make a pallatable product which in particular, reaches new users, 30 somethings or frequent flyer business folk, or dare I say woman folk, and gets them buying malts. Establishing a franchise with the brand. Buying into the heritage via a short cut fancy brand name on a cheaper product in terms of maturation and all the high costs and risks in that.

Barley sugar. A slightly sickly and a wee bit citrus taste, with a decided camphor or sandal wood note in it. A good sweetness and roundness like what good malts should have. But there you have it, a sickly taste with a little after effect which is not all that pleasant.

What have they manage to achieve? What frankensteins monster will destroy the franchise with loyal, 10 to 12 y.o. Malt whisky-drinkers? Who else will enter the market with 3 y.o. sherry and burbon finished concoctions ?

I don’t quite know what they have got up to in the stills, the nosing and tasting room and the blending buildings. The barley sugar is the fingerprint. I have just opened a bottle of Limited Cask, or Casg Annamh, Aberlour and it is not a bad drop,. It is a dark colour, which is promising, a kind of ruby brown rust, a nice brightness to it. At 48% they are near cask stength for an older whisky with a nice pair of figures on the bottle, like 12 , 15 or 18. It has character and is reminiscent of the stable product, but it has those little notes underlying it.

I would not have bought it myself, it has no age statement. I am no longer buying malts with NAS, unless they are a tenner at the barras. What have they done with Malts ?

Well an insider who is not involved directly with the process of blending or tasting, tells me that those processes concerning no age statement batches have become a more hush hush affair than in years gone by, perhaps asking how it was going with the 12 and maybe being invited in for a dram or just a nose after coffee break. Conspiracy, the smoking gun being locked doors and sealed lips.

I suspect and this is with the disclamier to my palate’s experience of these, that they have found a way to make a 3 year old carrier scotch which blends ‘well’ with select casks of well matured malt. I have heard that some barrels of 18 plus are undrinkable on their own, but used in small amounts add a mystique to the blending process ( very few ‘single’ malts are marketed as single barrel. Rather they are blended at one single distillery from various barrels and on an age-declared malt, the YOUNGEST is that age by law) . We are in effect getting a vodka whisky with some extra flavour in it from good barrels. Rather than dilution per se, we are carrying a good tune on a rather rubbish casio keyboard.

This is actually so far as the sharp suited marketeers are prepared to boast about. That not being tied down to an minimum og age maturation, frees them to make exciting products picking from select flavours in the library of barrels they have to hand. They claim they can then present a better, more intriguing product at the key duty free price point of about 50 -80 euro bucks or so per bottle.

I’d say good luck to them, not for me, but good luck BUT, there are two rather large flies in the ointment. Firstly these sly products eat up shelf space and tasting lines in that key duty free shop, where I buy about half my Malts and most of the higher price ones in that. Secondly someone pointed out on a forum, these hipster facsimilie bottles are stealing from the malts of the future.

What do we mean with this, stealing from the future? Well it has to be said that there MUST be a significant amount of 3 y.o. carrier spirit in these malts, vodka whisky if you like. It means that the margin equation can be worked on in capturing people into the brand, but will those punters become franchised into loyalty and up-buying? Or do they want to have wee orgasms of selling to churn customers wandering like sheep through the globe’s tacky taxless shops?

Back to the future, maybe they plan to have a more expensive 12 y.o. upgrade from these , but surely it is plain and simple economics that you can turn over more from your capital assets pushing out at three years rather than 10 or 12 for your volume product??

Some say that todays 3 yo cast up in a funny name brand NAS, is tommorrows loss from the shelves of 12 yo and up over. I suspect worse, that this carrier spirit is a little different in fact from the product which would be matured to 12 years. Perhaps it is better in some way, a smoother distilliation, more select concanamers, a more careful or longer mashing the ‘wort’??

The answer to this dear distiller, is to let me taste three year old malts, or indeed if it is so good as a standard product, bloody well market it Age Statement on the bottle. What is wrong with following the micro distillers and doing some smoother, light matured Gins instead? Or like classic and new cola, is the whole thing a subetfuge to get more shelf space and more excitement going in duty free and super markets.

I might like it if these new, “ageless” malts could debunk the pseud’s and reveal that the product is good as gold without it needing all those damp, dark days in the bond maturing until it makes the magic number which is in consumer’s minds only a sign of quality and brand equity. Unfortunetly many of us and right proper aficionados have lived with the age declaration and loved its vargieries, and lamented some products sliding while others came with new wonder bottlings like Glen Dronnach 18 yo. Malt whisky has been marketed upon a minimum age per batch and bottle for very good reason, because that is when it is best.

As whisky gets older, beyond 15 and 18, it gets much darker and the chemistry developes in new directions, and in fact I am not all that keen on the 18 plus I have tried which are rather dear and not to my pallette, a bit like Malbec versus a matured Bordeaux, I dont like leather and too much dried fruit in my red wine, I like fresh and bright, and yeah ok, some green pepper corns or some tobacco smoke, but I like a fruit in the body. The same goes for Scotch, I love good 10 to 12 yo, a light inspiring drink which takes me back to mellow moments and the odd flirt in my home land of West Scotland.

On my third dram of Casg Annamh and it doesnt grow on me. It is a fantasy whisky made up as a limited cask, with a good colour, but it is not a true heritage malt,. In fact I prefer their standard 12 yo, but this is different and offers something once a tea spoon of water is in it. But I wouldnt buy it myself not just on principle but because I have tasted enough of these NAS malts to be fed up with it all, and like any cheap product, the after taste soon takes away from the initial flattery on the tongue.

Lumix LX 100 mark 1 musings…..

A month in and I am still loving the camera….

but first the drawbacks

First up is the default lens extend when on, which renders the camera cumbersome and it mneeds to be shut down to pop backin a pocket True it does seem to keep the last settings up and there are a lot of hard dial operatiuons I use. I find it annoying between viewing . I will look into all this, it gets all hard and pointy out at the merest tap on a wrong button!

Secondly there is the zoom reach. It is about 30mm short of ideal, which would be a camera with a 24 /105 mm reach. That would be a bigger camera, cannae defy the laws of physics if you want to maintain say f 1.7 to f 4 in that range,. I suppose the camera would be even more pleased to see me when it auto extended.

Here is though where the new Mark II comes in, with bags more megapixels, it makes post cropping more attractive. But I think 24 /90 would be a magical camera.

Thirdly there is the wifi transfer which is awkward and I see it delivers compromised jpges!!! They are down at 2 megabytes. Raw needs direct exchange of body fluids.

Then there are the luxury issues………

Depth of Field.

As you can see the camera offers a wonderful shallow depth of field wide open. However that leads to a luxury problem, quite a few shots look like they have camera shake, because SO much of the image is unsharp!

See below for what I mean.

Here the image looks unsharp beccause the edges of the lead are out of focuis. With no edge cues to help the eye , it fights to find some ‘hard ground’

The other luxury problems are in choice paralysis, but luckily menu and settings resume make for some easy progress when you are a little innatentive.

Next non luxury issue is the ISO and associated to that the dynamic range. High ISos of 1600 upover, are to my eye, unusable in jpeg mode. Perhaps RAW work can save that, bnut you are in the realms of ‘documetning something happened’ like the dgitial crop zoom.

Dynamic range is ok, It is better than many cameras from ten years ago, and better than most all mobile phones until the latest ones which cost twice that this camera does. The HDR mode does not use wide enough a bracketing to do anything more than tickle the scne, and my two year old mobile does a better job. Manual work after bracketing for hyper dynamic range, but for my preferred extended dynamic range, there is plenty detail and little noise in the three quarter tones *light shadows , so you can easily lift the dynamic range to that of APSC standard like the D7000 series for example. Which is very nice.

I hear that the Mark II has better dynamic range so that is better again. Not that I would rush out to buy it. I am very pleased, and know what I wan.t. An FZ1000 type bridge camera with the same sensor !!!

Canon have come oh-so-near to trumping the lx100 witheir G1 X , but it doesnt live up to what it could, is expensive and much bigger.

The Lumix LX 100 Mrk II – Panasonic Follow Sony’s Strategy

With today’s launch of the mark II  LX 100 from Panasonic, it seems a lot of people are disappointed and not going to be replacing their LX100 original anytime soon, But they are kind of missing the point completely.

I like it. A mark II rather than a new distinct product, l.ike the imaginatively divised LX200 could have been. I don’t recall Panasonic having done this before, but it has long been used by Sony in their benchmark RX100, which is around the same ballpark as the LX100 i.e. an enthusiast’s compact. They are following Sony’s communication and product lifecycle management pretty much to the ‘t’,  in sticking to the ‘form factor’ . Like Sony’s iterations of the RX,  most of the hardware and human interface are still there, same old same old, so panasonic are evolving the camera rather than revolutionising it.

Within panasonic there is though going to have to be internal conflict because the product managers were allowed to reveal that the LX100 uses an mFT chip, all be that cropped in on a smaller light circle from the obviously more compact lens. They must surely be worried about cannibalisaiton of their mFT compacts and furthermore, lenses because as fast a zoom lens as this from their range costs twice as much as the outgoing price tag on the ‘100.

In effect this is an update, a minor upgrade, a getting up to where mFT cameras are these days with a higher resolution mFT sensor which is reported to demonstrate lower noise characteristics. A touch screen is added, and the rest it seems are very minor new features.

Amongst these new features which will work emmenently well with a touch screen, are two new focus modes. One is focus stacking, very useful in macro photography and hopefully also when you are doing things like HDR montage using a wide open lens to build up a landscape or street shot with a marked depth of field from very near the camera to infinity. Within the set up for then what is focus bracketing, which I presume builds a single image vis a vis stacking, availability in RAW outputther is probably absent. In addition to stacking,  they have perhaps thrown in ‘post focus’ based on the same software as stacking.  ‘Post Focus’  I am presuming is essentially an autobracketing of various focal points as single images, and you then touch select which area of the photo you want in focus most, and that image is chosen on screen and the others duly deleted. A bit like poor man’s light field camera. This is actually a really useful feature for things like foliage in the way, and candid shots of people when there is movement and varied light. As I say though, this probably isnt very fancy pants,  because it will be no doubt restricted to jpeg output, and wont work in combination with for example exposure bracketing, which could make for some really cool macro and HDR shots.

While on consumery stuff, never having used much filter in camera myself, there is an improved BW choice there, and I wonder if they have done anything with their HDR mode, because it was pretty rubbish and you are better off exposure bracketing and using either your home PC ‘s weapon of choice, or even some on line offerings for merging layered exposures. I quite like my HDR Mode on my mobile, it suits a roughly 35 mm lens with foreground and a lighter background working good enough for social media.

The dust devil is maybe addressed with this camera, but the so called bete noire of the LX100, is actually a pretty common bug bear on compacts with zooms and medium sized sensors. Not that it ISNT a concern and that it ISNT always easy to get a service job by Panny where you may actually live.

 

Disappointments for me personally are that they havnt stretched the focal length of the glass to 90mm. I would then like a sister camera with a range of say 40mm-200mm which could be a bit bulkier, but is based on the same sensor and user interface. Or maybe they should do a video optimised version in a different body?

Another little pandering to the phillistines in the LX100 is the digital zoom, which is only useable if you want to document something happen, like the martian invasion three houses up the street. The mark II will have much better digital zoom in the portrait and sports critical focal range of 90 to 120 mm, due to the higher resolution sensor.  So I am guessing without having done the maths, that around 100mm crop zoom will be the same resolution as the LX100 at 75mm full optical legnth (?) .  Now that is very useful for portraits, and any loss of blurry background can be made up with layering those post focus shots in your software at home.

With a price point to maybe try and keep to, guessing around €/$ 750-950 at launch, then why need to retool the whole production line, when you can upgrade and entertain new buyers who are downsizing from APS-C DSLRS or upsizing from their mobile phones?  The three big main asks from the moaners in internetland are tilt screen, weather and dust sealing and a longer reach lens, and all of those require majore retooling and alterations to the supply chain.

Why change a winning formula? Sony hasn’t done it with the RX100, Canon had the 5D, and now Olympus are also at it. It says something to the market, that this brand is so strong a franchise of qualities that we are sticking to it. Also it allows for a fancy assed, and may I remind the bitches and flamers, larger camera, with a mic jack point and a big super zoom lens and a whippy, flippy screen etc etc . Not a bad camera, just not an elegant, jacket pocket one.

I hope people who are disappointed with the Lx100 Mark II  stop in the evolution of a very good camera, and just go off and buy one of the APS-C offerings from CaniFujiKon or who ever makes them. I dont need a tilt screen.

2HFVA Nøkkel Læring II Helse GH1

Behovsirkelen  / Behovspyramide

Fysiske, Psykiske, Sosiale og Åndelig Behov

Psykiske behov – øverst er TRYGGHET  –

• TRYGGHET følelser at fare eller andre trusler er fraværende.  Følelse av å være tatt vare på og i stand til å takle utfordringer.
• KJÆRLIGHET  – og OMSORG av familie, venner eller hjelpepleiere
• INKLUSJON  – å bli sett og hørt i familie, sosiale krets og inkluderte i samfunnet

Sosiale Behov  –

• SAMSPILL OG DIALOG MED ANDRE MENNESKER ,
• RESPEKT I KRETS OG SAMFUNNET- besøk av familie og venner, kontakt utenom besøk, å bli i et nettverk av mennesker,

Åndelig og Kulturell Behov

• Trosfrihet – rett til å praksisere troen din
• Å føle felleskap og at begevelse og meninger bidrar til positive virkninger i sammfunnet  ( tro og politikk )
• Delta i og erfarer kulturelle begivenheter
• Erfarer det estetiske i kunst og musikk

Maslows behovspyramide viser at fysiologiske (dvs biologisk) behov er grunnlaget for liver og danner bunnen av pyramidet.  Ovenfor det kommer våre behov for trygghet som husly, så sosiale og så kultrurelle, og på toppen er det anerkjennelse for våre tilværelse og bidrag til samfunnet eller familien og krets, og så selv realisering gjennom yrket, det sosiale eller gjennom tro.

Levekår

Ytre Rammeverk rundt våre livet.

Objektive og nokså bestemt som en forutsetning.

Trygghet skapt av felleskapet. Samfunnets systemer, lover, moralske grunnlag og sosiale velferd og tilbud.

Økonomi – muligheter for arbeid og tilrettelagt systemer for tilgang til bolig , velferdstjenester osv.

Demokratiske Lovverket, politi og rettsystemet. Brannvesenet og Helsevesenet. Rett til skolegang og videre Utdanning og sosiale tjenester.  Tilrettelagte muligheter for trening og fritidsaktiviteter.

Livskvalitet

Livskvalitet er mer subjektiv enn levekårene man befinner seg i.

Livskvalitet er hva enkelte mennesker mener og opplever som positive eller negative i sine liv.

God livskvalitet dreier seg om trivsel i hverdagen. Det er å oppleve livet ditt som noe godt med glede og mestring når det gjelder utfordringer eller ferdigheter.

Det er bygget på personlige omstendigheter og følelser

• Å være Aktiv
• Å ha sosiale relasjoner
• Å ha positive selvfølelser og selvbilde
• Å kunne få glede fra livets hverdagen alt ovenfor

Personlighet er en del av det som bidrar til livskvalitet.

Livskvalitet kan måles ved bruk av spørreskjemaet og observasjon. Skandinaviske land og andre land med statlige ordning for velferd dvs høye levekår formidlet av staten i en  demokarti, er de høyeste når livskvalitet måles.

Mennesker med sykdom eller nedsatt funksjon kan opplever forholdsvis bra livskvalitet og å opprettholde en så god livskvalitet som mulig,  er et stort formål i helsepleie, vernepleie og omsorgsarbeid generelt.

Levekår og Livskvalitet?

Livskvalitet er mer subjektiv enn levekårene man befinner seg i.

Livskvalitet påvirkes ofte av Levevilkår i et samfunn, men enkelte kan mene eller erfare negative påvirkninger fra samfunnets regelverk som ellers er til felles godt.

Noen kan mistrives til tross for at det finns veldig bra levekår i deres samfunn. Livskvalitet  er bygget på personlige omstendigheter og følelser . Det er da basert på hvordan man som enkelte opplever livet innenfor levekårene omkring.

Gode muligheter for helsetilbud, skolering, videre utdanning og jobb bidrar veldig til livskvalitet.

Livskvalitet kan måles blant annet ved bruk av spørreskjemaer. Skandinavisk land og andre land hvor staten har gode ordninger for utdanning, helsetjenester og hvor det er lav arbeidsledighet og fattigdom, er høyeste i poengsum år etter år i flere store undersøkelser som utføres av anerkjent organisasjoner.  Dermed er det en klar sammenheng mellom levekår, velferd og de enkeltes livskvalitet.