Who to believe?

If you believe the government, the chances of our children living as long as us is not certain. For example, according to the Department of Health,

Obesity is associated with many illnesses and is directly related to increased mortality and lower life expectancy. Tackling obesity is a government wide priority.

But how should we reconcile this with the information coming out of the Pensions industry. See two recent reports in the FT, Companies face up to the real cost of pensions and Proposals to add pressure on pension funding. The evidence is that we are all living longer, and will go on doing so (pace the Department of Health).  What perhaps concerns the government is that illness will not kill us so quickly, so the cost to the next generation will be greater.

A father’s grief

Listening to Mohammed Al Fayed, one’s first reaction is that the man is mad. You only have to read the report on the BBC News website. But the man is mad with grief: “Those who mourn may mimic madness to the observer’s eye” [Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xiv (1914 – 16), (Hogarth)]. He wants the world to know what he thinks is the truth, but my only feeling is that there is something almost indecently voyeuristic in the reporting of the Diana inquest, and in our obsession with the events of a decade ago. Enough truly is enough: it is not the cost, the huge fees being earned by people who should know better, the titillation, the toe-curling revelations from the likes of Paul Burrell. It is, rather, seeing a deeply unsympathetic character, the pantomime villain, gripped by a madness that there but for the grace of God each one of us may suffer.

Darling won’t use the N-word

After the rumours, final confirmation this afternoon that even though Alistair Darling was unable to bring himself to use the N-word, Northern Rock has been taken into public ownership. The Chancellor was at pains to stress that the Government’s intention is that this should be temporary ownership only, and that deposits and savings will “remain safe and secure”.  In his post The nationalisation of Northern Rock on Coffee House, Peter Hoskin asks whether we can really trust the Government to run a bank. George Osborne certainly does not think so. According to the FT he told Sky News:

“We have had months of dithering and delays and ended up in the catastrophic position, on a Sunday afternoon, of the chancellor announcing this decision to nationalise Northern Rock. They have dithered for months and months trying to create a private sale that was never really there.’’

Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper on the Channel 4 News was far from convincing in her support of the embattled Chancellor. This story has legs. If you were thinking that Alistair Darling’s reputation for competence was damaged by the non-dom ‘crisis’ then the Northern Rock debacle will bury it.

Another betrayal of trust

Another reason for disliking Gordon Brown. Watching Friday’s BBC News on the coroner’s inquest into the death in action of Captain James Philippson in Helmand Province, I was most struck by the juxtaposition of a film of a grinning Gordon Brown meeting troops in Afghanistan, and the interview with Anthony Philippson, Captain Philippson’s father. According to the BBC, Mr Philippson said,

“He [the coroner] laid into them [the MoD] particularly badly for the lack of equipment. I do hold the MoD responsible for James’ death but it is not just the MoD, it goes much deeper than that. The Treasury and the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, will be really to blame for what happened. The MoD was starved of cash by the Chancellor”.

He was in fact far ruder about Gordon Brown, and the written report on the BBC website not only doesn’t give any feel of Mr Philippson’s cold fury, but edited some of it out. What he actually said (and the video is on the BBC website) was:

“It’s not just the Ministry of Defence, it’s the Treasury and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, our present Prime Minister, the miserable, parsimonious Mr Brown. He’s really the person responsible for what happened.”

When recording a narrative verdict in which he said Captain Philippson was unlawfully killed, Mr Walker, the assistant coroner for Oxford said:

“They [the soldiers] were defeated not by the terrorists but by the lack of basic equipment. To send soldiers into a combat zone without basic equipment is unforgivable, inexcusable and a breach of trust between the soldiers and those who govern them.”

The organ-grinder’s monkey

The non-dom story that has been running all week points up a couple of unattractive features about the present government. First is the impression that senior ministers are mere cyphers, and that the only person who counts is Gordon Brown. Secondly, that when things go wrong, the responsibility is never the government’s. Rather, it is invariably portrayed as the failure of a government servant, and usually a very junior one at that. Fessing up is not something this government does.

For a balanced view about the matter, read What did you do in the non-dom wars in this week’s Economist.

“Calling the retreat [as Alistair Darling ‘backed away from the most contentious of his plans to tax rich foreigners living in Britain’] a “clarification”, the Treasury claimed that many of its proposed new rules had been drafted in error. The deflection of responsibility was reminiscent of earlier attempts to make an unidentified “junior official” a scapegoat for losing millions of citizens’ tax details.”

and

“The crisis may have passed, but the non-dom wars have left their mark. Foreign financial folk do not feel quite as welcome in London as they did, or quite so sure that the government knows what it is doing. One casualty may yet be Mr Darling himself, whose reputation for competence has been sorely strained. But was it really his fault or Gordon Brown’s?”

The problem for Gordon Brown is that the buck for a lot of what is happening, will eventually stop somewhere. Like it or not, it will be with him.