How are the mighty fallen

Flicking through the channels last evening, I happened upon a programme called "The biggest loser: Australia".

Disappointing!  It turned out to be some kind of extreme slimming show. Based on the title, I had assumed it would be a review of recent events in the world of sport.  

Failing the students

How very dare they?? The people who mark the UK's public examinations (GCSEs and A-levels) have broken a two-decades-old tradition this year, by slightly reducing the average grade awarded.  Most of the media are hailing an end to the "grade inflation" that has led some universities to rely on their own entrance exams or international diplomas like the Baccalaureat to select candidates, rather than on the established exams.

Teachers, however,  are up in arms, with one head teachers' union threatening a lawsuit, on the basis that the examiners (or the government) have moved the goalposts.  They are apparently appalled that some students have been awarded lower grades than their teachers had led them to expect, especially in key subjects such as English. Well, if teachers knew exactly how their students were going to perform, there wouldn't be much sense in holding the exams, would there?  It's hard to escape the conclusion that the teachers see the exam results less as evidence that their pupils have been educated to the appropriate level, and more as a piece of ego gratification for themselves.

I don't want to come across as a grumpy old man here -- no more than usual, at any rate -- and I certainly don't want to dis the kids, who can only take the exams that are put in front of them.  However, when I read that at one school,  three students achieved A* grades in 13 GCSE subjects, I have to think something is amiss.  Delving back into my old high school year books, I find that most people even in the most academic class achieved between 5 and 7 passes -- that's just passes, not top grades -- at O-level, the precursor of today's GCSEs.

No school would have dreamed of forcing students to attempt 13 subjects back then, but then again, the exams were a bit different.  You commonly had to take two 3-hour exams to get one O-level.  There were no multiple choice papers, and no open book exams. But for those who eventually moved on to higher education,  there were also none of the remedial English and maths courses that even the best universities are finding it necessary to offer these days, a development that you'd think high school teachers might feel rather ashamed about.  The kids aren't getting dumber, but I'm not nearly so sure about the teachers.      

Excuses, excuses!

Another month, another dire set of data on UK public finances.  (BBC story here).  July, normally a strong month for the fisc (because of payments on account for corporate and personal income taxes), saw a surprise new borrowing requirement of £600 million, compared to a surplus of £2.8 billion in the same month of 2011.  The main culprit is deemed (by the Treasury, at least) to be a 0.8% fall in revenues, though some might argue that the real problem is that the Government, for all its fearsome and confidence-shattering rhetoric, is failing abysmally to get any sort of grip on spending, which is still rising at a rate of more than 5% year-on-year.

As usual, there are supposedly mitigating circumstances.  The fall in corporation tax receipts may have been caused by the closure of a North Sea oil field because of a leak.  The Treasury is also suggesting that some tax payments on account may be recorded in August rather than July.  This is such a feeble get-out that you have to wonder if the Treasury's manual of excuses is getting worn out from overuse: there's no good reason why such payments would be tallied later on average this year than any other year, unless everyone was entranced by the opening ceremony for the Olympics.

Borrowing needs in each of the first four months of the fiscal year have been above prior year levels.  Achieving the Government's aim of reducing the annual borrowing requirement ever so slightly this year now looks a very tall order.  You wonder when the Treasury may start to realise that at some point a series of one-off factors, of the type it has been blaming for the shortfalls in recent months, might just start to look like a trend.

George Osborne, no fool he, is off on holiday somewhere, so it fell to one of his juniors, Chloe Smith, to repeat the increasingly untenable party line that "these figures show the importance of sticking to the government's plan".  Interestingly,  on the Labour side, someone actually seems to have looked at the data and realised that the usual bluster about brutal spending cuts is not actually true.  This month the party has offered the much more tenable view that efforts to cut the deficit had "choked off the recovery".

Truth to tell, the state of the UK economy is still a bit of a mystery.  It turns out that Q2 did not see as drastic a fall in GDP as first reported,  employment trends remain positive, and there are still expectations that the Olympic effect will give growth a boost in the current quarter.  The borrowing data are about the only unequivocally weak part of the overall picture right now.  Even so, the government's blinkered view of what it's actually achieving on the fiscal front becomes more ludicrous with every month that goes by.          

Putin's butterflies

Back in 1968, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones were put on trial for drug offences.  The judge chose to throw the book at them, which prompted a memorable editorial in The Times.  The paper's editor, William Rees-Mogg, is nobody's idea of a bleeding heart, but he was appalled at the severity of the sentences, and chose to quote the words of a poem by Alexander Pope: "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?".   Rees-Mogg's words had the desired effect, and thereafter the UK authorities increasingly turned a blind eye to minor drug transgressions by rock stars.  (This didn't stop Keef from getting into a similar scrape in Toronto a few years later, but that's another story).

Rees-Mogg, though very advanced in years,   is still with us, but apparently Vladimir Putin has not been taking his advice recently. The "Pussy Riot" trial, and the jail sentences handed to the three young women for their tawdry piece of attention-seeking in a Moscow cathedral, have led to an outpouring of anger in Russia and around the world.  If it hadn't been for the trial, the whole episode would have been forgotten months ago.  Now it stands to be a touchstone for a rising tide of protests against Putin in the coming months, even if he decides to exercise his prerogatives as President to commute the two-year jail sentences.  

As an ex-KGB man,  Putin is no liberal.  Even so,  attempts to paint him as some sort of Stalin redux show little sense of history.  Not many of Stalin's numberless victims had the benefit of a trial, even a show trial, or ended up spending time in prison rather than being bundled into a mass grave.

And if we accept that Putin may not be a nice man, we should perhaps also allow that the members of Pussy Riot are no angels.  The great and good of the rock world (and Madonna*) have rallied to their cause.  Peter Gabriel wrote after the trial that he understood that the three women were all believers, and sincere about their faith.  Given what they did, that seems unlikely: staging a political protest in front of the altar of a cathedral is a stunt designed to shock and offend, and if the Pussy Riot trio are even half as religious as Peter Gabriel imagines them to be, they must surely have known that.  The jail sentence is a draconian punishment, but this was no innocent prank. Think they would have tried something similar in a mosque?

* Madonna's intervention, at a concert in Moscow, prompted one of Putin's supporters to utter one of the insults of the decade:  "Madonna", said he, "should either take of the cross or put on her knickers".        

Ryan hot air

I never know whether to laugh or cry when American politicians decide to take aim at the UK's National Health Service (NHS), that well-known spawn of a socialist Satan.  Remember Sarah Palin a couple of years ago?  According to her, any seriously ill patient's fate at the hands of the NHS was decided by a "death panel".  I tried to get on the death panel at our local hospital but was told there was a waiting list -- typical NHS.*  One has to suppose that the concept of triage is unknown in the US health care system, or at least unknown to Sarah Palin.

Then there was the British guy who got a lot of coverage from Rush Limbaugh and others of that ilk by claiming that he couldn't get dental care on the NHS, and was forced to fix his own teeth with superglue.  I'm sure Rush Limbaugh knows perfectly well that in the UK you can get to see a dentist remarkably quickly if you're prepared to pay for it.  Of course,  the existence of choice between public and private care (which exists in all fields of medical treatment in the UK,  not just dentistry) wouldn't fit the right-wing narrative,  so there was no point in Rush bringing it to the attention of the US audience.

Which brings us to Paul Ryan, newly-minted Republican vice-presidential candidate.  On almost his first day in the "job", Ryan launched a blistering attack on the NHS, arguing (or rather, asserting without evidence) that it caused the middle classes to become dependent on the state, and thereby made it almost impossible to cut public sector spending.  Much better, it seems, to allow tens of millions of people to live without protection against unexpected medical costs, and to hand the whole industry over to the benign forces of the private insurance sector, where every ailment can be waved aside as a "pre-existing condition".  

If the US wants to spend a higher proportion of its GDP on health care than any other nation in the world, while achieving key outcomes (infant mortality, overall life expectancy) no better than in many Third World countries, that's entirely the US's business.  But it really doesn't justify the misleading assertions and outright lies that US politicians regularly see fit to utter about medical care in the rest of the world.

* Unlike Sarah Palin, I'm joking.  

It's been a triumph

I've used this blog to say some sour things about the Olympics over the past couple of years,  so as the Games draw to a close, it behoves me to say that the event has been a massive success on just about all levels.  Londoners have risen to the challenge brilliantly.  The weather has mostly cooperated (though it was maybe a bit chilly for the late evening beach volleyball sessions).  There have been few complaints about transportation, the patched-together security arrangements have worked just fine, and even the initial griping about empty seats at the venues seems to have died away.  And of course the sport itself has been marvellous.

So, aside from the medallists, who are the winners here?

The biggest winner of all, and it hurts a bit to say this, has to be Lord Coe.  Give him almost £10 billion to play with, and he can put on a heck of a show for you.  Of course his ego, never far from view, must now be big enough to eclipse Alpha Centauri, and he's setting his sights on even bigger goals.  David Cameron has already tapped him to manage the UK's Olympic legacy programme, but Coe has hinted that the job he really wants is to be head of the global governing body for track and field sports, the IAAF.  I hope their budget is up to the strain.

Then there's the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.  BoJo wan't actually mayor when London was awarded the Games -- that was Ken Livingstone -- but he's been an enthusiastic booster, and now that it's been a big success, he stands to reap a lot of the glory.  David Cameron's star as Prime Minister seems to be waning fast, and the media are focusing more and more on Struwwelboris as the man in waiting.

The BBC has had a good Games.  Its decision to set up an array of digital TV channels in order to show every single minute of sport live has surely set the standard for all future Olympiads.  It's sad to hear that NBC, which has been broadcasting the Games in the US, has been using an old fashioned, commercial-laden pick and mix approach. They even showed the men's 100 metre final on a delayed basis, in order to broadcast it in prime time.  It's to be hoped, or indeed expected, that nobody will dare to do anything like that when we get to Rio 2016.

Sports commentators have emerged as winners.  Those we heard were generally well-informed and enthusiastic without being jingoistic, though the BBC did shoehorn some of its contracted staff into some unusual locations -- Jonathan Edwards, triple jumper, seemed very uneasy commentating on the white water kayaking events.  We also learned just how much we have come to depend on commentators, because on may occasions, for the more obscure sports, the BBC opted simply to show the pictures with no commentary at all.  Trying to figure out the differences between the various martial arts sports, without the aid of a guy with crib notes on a clipboard, was a real challenge.

What about losers?  Apart from pre-Games Cassandras like yours truly, there really haven't been many, but I will give a mention to newspaper columnist and sometime TV pundit Matthew Syed.  Matthew, as he never ceases to remind us, was himself an Olympian, in table tennis.  Oddly, however, a large part of his contribution to our understanding of these Games has been repeated and tedious references to how much sex all the athletes try to cram in once their events are concluded.  There's something almost Victorian about that obsession, which I'm sure is the exact opposite of what he's trying to achieve.

Once the big party's over, a hangover must inevitably follow.  It won't be long before we start carping again about how much it all cost, or how it didn't provide the promised boost to the economy, or the uncertain fate of the main Olympic stadium (prediction: if West Ham FC move in, they'll be screaming/litigating to get out within 5 years), or the slow progress in turning the Olympic site into a new neighbourhood. But all that can wait: at this point, we can only compliment the organisers, the volunteers, the spectators and most of all, the participants on a really great show.            

They're all doing it!

US regulators seem to be taking it in turns to tee off on UK banks at the moment over alleged money laundering.  First it was HSBC aiding and abetting the Mexican drug cartels, now it's Standard Chartered flouting restrictions on dealing with (shudder!) Iran, thereby apparently leaving Uncle Sam exposed to terrorism.  HSBC has, reluctantly,  sort of fessed-up, but StanChart is, at least for now,  strenuously denying the charges.

It's a bit of a mystery why it's mainly UK banks in the frame here, though since the BP-Horizon disaster, ill-informed Brit-bashing seems to play well on both Wall Street and Main Street.  In addition, there's more than a little suspicion that US regulators, especially the ambitious new New York State guy who's going after StanChart,  may be using their muscle to try to curb London's pre-eminence in international finance.

The plain fact of the matter is that every bank of any size in the world, regardless of where it's domiciled,  is undoubtedly laundering money every day of the week.  Even with the best possible internal controls, it's impossible to detect every single attempt at using the banking system to clean dirty money.  There are just too many ways to do it; compliance departments, which have become massive in recent years, simply can't keep up with all the tricks of the trade.

It's a different matter if a bank is wilfully disobeying clearly-defined national laws,  which seems to be part of the case against StanChart, though one which the bank itself denies.  The activity itself is, however, essentially unstoppable, as every New York bank smugly watching HSBC and StanChart getting put through the wringer knows perfectly well.

The US could, of course, put an immediate stop to money laundering by drug barons,  by legalising and then controlling the distribution of drugs.  After all, just about all the money being laundered originates in the US anyway.  It's been clear for years that if there's a "war on drugs", the drugs have won.  Just don't expect anyone to admit that.  

A move and a hiatus

As some readers of the blog may already know, we are in the process of moving from the UK back to Canada, with a target date of mid-September.  I'd forgotten how hard moving house is, and it doesn't get any easier as you get older!

Because of this, I will have less time free to spend on the blog for the next several weeks, so the frequency of postings will dwindle.  I will, however, try to make time to comment on any really important or especially annoying events that may happen during that time.  Things should get back to normal by early October, but it will be a "new normal", with more attention paid to things Canadian and less griping about the UK.  Maybe.  

Antichrist on a bike

Big excitement at the Olympic Velodrome (aka the Pringle) yesterday evening, as the GB men's cycling trio won the team sprint event in a world record time.  Medal safely in hand, however, the team's lead-off rider, Philip Hindes, made a surprising admission. In the preliminary round he had got off to a bad start, and therefore deliberately fell off his bike in order to force a restart!  The team brass were quick to cover his tracks (so to speak), saying variously that his words had been misinterpreted, or were meant as a joke.  The media, happy to see Team GB moving up the medals table, seem willing to accept this.

Here's a thing, though: Hindes was born in Germany, and until a couple of years ago could have chosen to represent that country in international competition.  Can you just imagine how the UK tabloid press would have reacted if Hindes had in fact been riding for the land of his birth yesterday, and had diddled Team GB out of a medal through such tactics? It hardly bears thinking about.

Anyway, after a hard day's Olympic watching yesterday, I decided to flip through the channels in search of something entirely unrelated to sport.  There on the excellent Sky Arts 1 was the world's smuggest man, the conductor Andre Rieu, coming to us from an outdoor stage in Maastricht.  He brought onto the stage a gorgeous African soprano, and announced that she would be singing JS Bach's Ave Maria.  In his most confiding tones, Rieu let us know that "with the passion she brings to this piece, it becomes like a prayer".  You don't say?  I wonder if that was the composer's intention.    

Ghost town

Well, there's a surprise!  After all the fears and horror stories about the inevitable transport chaos that would blight the London Olympics and embarrass the city in front of the world,  the trains and Tubes are coping quite well.  Even the expected mayhem on the roads has failed to materialise, to such a degree that some of the hated "Zil lanes" set aside for the "Olympic family" are being reopened to regular drivers.

How come?  Well, in a development that will have shocked nobody who has looked at recent Olympiads around the world, the combined threat of chaos and ripoff prices has deterred non-Olympic visitors from coming to London, and Londoners themselves are staying the hell out of the way.  The overall number of tourists in the city is way down on normal midsummer levels.  Theatres are half-full, hotels are slashing their rates,  and some restaurants have seen trade fall by as much as three-quarters.

It must be really embarrassing for all the "essential workers" who demanded (and got) bonus payments to compensate them for the added burden they would be shouldering to keep the city moving.  Tube and train operators, bus drivers, even the people who run the "Boris bike" hire scheme -- they all used the threat of strike action to extract payments of £500 or more just for showing up, in addition to all the lovely overtime they were going to get paid anyway.  Think they'll be lining up to hand it back, now it turns out they got it under false pretences?

So much for the boost to GDP that the Games were supposed to provide.  Still, if that doesn't materialise, at least we won't have the "triple dip" recession that the media were starting to salivate over. We'll just have an even longer double dip.