Beginning to See the Light: Boredom!

 

‘I’ve taken this extravagant journey

So it seems to me

To arrive from nowhere

And to go straight back there’

 
If it appears I write the same things every week, blame the government who keep making the same mistakes!

I will refrain from commenting on this weeks’ Cop-26 climate change summit, not because the situation isn’t serious, but because I don’t believe the people involved are.

Today there was a reported 49,139 new cases of C-19, the week-on-week increase is +17.2%; no doubt the government will continue to act when it’s too late, and attitude that has permeated their response to the pandemic; last week reports showed that not cancelling the Cheltenham Festival in March 2020, or the Liverpool v Atletico Madrid football match led to C.70 covid related deaths.

Of course, the Tory’s have previous form in the needless death of citizens.

Recent research by the University of York, showed that policy of austerity inflicted by Cameron / Osborne, including cuts to the NHS, public health and social care was linked to the deaths of 57,500 more people in England than expected.

The report also found that a slowdown in life expectancy improvement. Whilst this rose in most places during the first decade of the millennium, from 2010 in some areas it started to decline. By 2014 that deterioration had accelerated with life expectancy falling for women in 18.7% of communities, and for men in by 11.5%.

The worst-hit areas were typically in urban areas in the north, including Blackpool, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle.
 

‘Not because the situation isn’t serious, but because I don’t believe the people involved are’

 
The findings, worse than previously thought, were revealed in the journal BMJ Open.

Returning to the Liverpool match, the day before Johnson had talked on national TV about ‘taking it on the chin’ and ‘allowing the disease, as it were, to move through the population’.

These foolish comments align with a society that hasn’t moved on, continuing to invoke the ‘blitz spirit’ every time anything resembling a crisis happens.

It isn’t just tiresome, it’s stupid; what was so great about huddling underground in tunnels, staring at the ceiling as above you bombs are dropping, wondering whether your family and friends are alive; whether, if you do re-emerge into daylight again what will be left?

Last week Iain Duncan Smith (‘IDS’), in the Mail on Sunday, suggested civil servants need to get back into the office, saying ‘When I think of all the brave civil servants who went to work in the 1940s, determined to do their bit regardless of the threat from falling bombs, I wonder what has happened to us as a nation.’

Iain, you were born in 1954! Secondly, we now have something called ‘broadband’.

When you look back the main positive of the ‘blitz spirit’ was consideration, empathy for others, enduring hardship and discomfort in pursuit of the greater good, and cheerfully getting on with things. Hardly the traits of the British public today.

What is more typical today is nasty vindictiveness from people with short memories Why else would the government, the Daily Mail, and its collection of rather dim readers be turning on the NHS that, whilst at breaking point, continue to function through the pandemic.

I see this at first-hand. In my wife’s surgery patients regularly turn-up without masks, coughing everywhere. Only yesterday she was told ‘masks aren’t needed anymore its over’. They then complain if they are turned away.

It should come as no surprise that GPs use telephone or video consultations, or stagger appointments for the rest so that the unknowingly infected don’t mingle with the frail or immunologically compromised. Behaviour that has led to ‘malicious criticism’ from some press and politicians who have branded them shirkers.

This strategy is straight-out of Johnson’s populist playbook, finding an enemy to distract voters from the chaos his government causes, amply support by his cheerleaders at the Mail and Telegraph.

What I do find disappointing is the behaviour of the new health secretary, Sajid Javid, who, I had expected, would know better. Instead after telling social care workers to ‘get out and go and get another job’ if they didn’t want the Covid vaccine (compulsory from 11 November for working in a care home in England), has turned on GPs’.
 

‘What was so great about huddling underground in tunnels, staring at the ceiling as above you bombs are dropping’

 
In return for a pitiful £250m of additional funding (£250m is a rounding error in government spending terms), there will be rights for patients to insist on seeing a doctor in person. Data will be published allowing lagging surgeries to be named and shamed. In addition, social-distancing rules in surgeries are to be scrapped. Clap really has turned to crap for carers, and in such a short timeframe.

People always expect more from the NHS that it can deliver. There has long been a gap between the health service we want and the health service we are prepared to fund. This is a reality neither politicians nor voters seem capable of facing up to, therefore it is easier to spray the blame around, even if that means blaming the people risked their working lives on the frontline and spent their days off volunteering at vaccination centres.

Of course, there are lazy GPs, there are good and bad in all professions, but said often enough it deflects attention away from the real issues; mis- management and under-funding. The legacy of 10-yrs of Tory misrule that led up to ‘one of the worst public health failures’ in British history, as last week’s joint select committee inquiry described the handling of the pandemic.

GPs working part-time has allowed them to absorb the ever-intensifying pressures on them without feeling driven to hang up their stethoscopes. Research by the King’s Fund in 2017, confirmed this, whilst there were several reasons cited to explain the situation, it boiled down to GPs trying to avoid burnout. Some were using their supposed ‘days off’ for paperwork.

Logically, the fewer hours that GPs work, the more GPs we need, a simple fact that proved too difficult for the Tory government to comprehend. As a result, we now have 1,900 fewer doctors than in 2015, who still manage to see record numbers of appointments. The British Medical Association report this summer warned, GPs ‘we’re working too hard, we’re burning out and we’re terrified of making mistakes’.

The health secretary should remember that doctors aren’t easily browbeaten into submission, he will need all their goodwill to get through a potentially difficult winter. Also, when they leave, it can take up to 7-yrs to train their replacements.

As many of the disgruntled patients have fond memories of the blitz, even if they weren’t yet born, I thought it interesting to see what the situation was for their parents The NHS as we know it started in 1948, before that:
 

• ‘General practice covered workers under Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act of 1911, but not their wives and families, whose proper demands were curtailed by the need to pay fees for service.’

 
Source: www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chapter/inheritance#general-practice-and-primary-health-care
 
Baby boomers’ parents may have the resilience demanded by the blitz, whereas their off-springs merely feel entitled. And yet they now refer to the young as ‘snowflakes’, perhaps an apt term for the self-entitled might be ‘selfish’.

A good number of these entitled selfish, wood-be war heroes are the ones who inflicted Brexit on us. Perhaps that was their way of melting the snowflakes.

Brexiteers promised us cheaper food, easy trade deals, £350m extra a week for the NHS, etc. Many voted ‘leave’ based on little more than ‘hope’.  They weren’t bigoted or nasty, merely grasping onto the promises that things might get better. Brexiters had droned on for years about the EU being a drain on our money, and this coupled with the parallels he draws between Brexit and ‘levelling up’ keeps Johnson hopeful that they will remain loyal to the cause.

Despite this a recent YouGov poll indicates that only 21% of respondents think Brexit is ‘going well’ (that many!), while 53% think it is going badly.

Brexit highlighted a breakdown in the electorates trust of the ‘establishment’ caused by scandals such as MPs’ expenses scandal, and the Iraq war.

The latter was caused by the deceptions and half-truths from politicians, which should have led to a rethink about how politics and power operate. Interestingly, some of the key support for the war came from Conservatives including Johnson, David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood and Michael Gove. All of which then used the following collapse in trust that they had contributed to, as part of the foundations of Brexit. In July 2016, Davis used the publication of the Chilcot report to accuse Tony Blair of being a liar. Three-months later told the House of Commons that if leaving the EU went to plan: ‘There will be no downside to Brexit at all, only a considerable upside.’

Johnson has survived because, to date, he has benefited from the chaos he causes, wrapping himself in the union jack and blaming the French and Germans.
 

‘He has benefited from the chaos he causes, wrapping himself in the union jack and blaming the French and Germans’

 
To overcome this the opposition, specifically Labour who seem determined to forget Brexit, must speak out, and highlight the failed promises, and what life outside Europe is doing to us.

I read an interesting article drawing parallels with Brexit and the Suez crisis of 1956. The upshot of the latter was for Macmillan, who had replaced Eden as PM, to realise that our future lay in closer ties with continental Europe. Whilst his own efforts to join were thwarted by the opposition of France’s President de Gaulle, by 1973 his realisation had become reality.

There is little doubt that, apart from the geopolitical advantages of being members of the EU, our economy benefitted. Growth improved, and, in economic terms, we essentially became a region of the EU under rules, such as the single market, rules that we helped to draw up.

When, in 2016 we opted to ‘leave’ Lord Frost wrote, ‘Even the best-case outcome can’t be as good as what we have now.’ This is the same Lord Frost who is trying to rewrite the Brexit agreement he himself negotiated.
 

‘Even the best-case outcome can’t be as good as what we have now.’

 
For those of you hoping for a happy ending, you will have to look elsewhere, as I once more turn my attention to the Chinese property market and the ticking timebomb that is Evergrand.

Evergrand’ seemingly inevitable default suggests that China’s long housing boom is over, which will have knock-on effects for the domestic economy, and the rest of the world. This week, China’s growth fell to 4.9%, stellar for most, but raising fears of a recession there.

China’s real estate market is C. $55tn, twice the size of the US, and four times larger than China’s GDP. Including construction and other property-related goods and services, annual housing activity accounts for C. 29% of China’s GDP, far above the 10%-20% typical of most developed nations.

Except for the so-called ‘ghost cities’, the property sector prospered in the 2000s and 2010s as Beijing promoted it to underpin growth and the formation of a propertied, urban middle class. Developers were able to borrow heavily because credit was freely available, supported by a belief that the government would always support the market if needed.

By 2020 when the pandemic struck it was clear that there had been overinvestment. Some 20% of China’s housing units now lie vacant, often because they are too expensive for the population, 40% of whom earn barely 1,000 yuan (£115) a month. For second and third homes, the vacancy rates are higher still.
 

‘A US recession alongside a property-induced slump in China does not make for a happy ending’

 
Beijing’s attitude towards housing has changed, in 2017 Xi Jinping told the Communist party congress that ‘houses are built to be inhabited, not for speculation’, and that action would be taken to curb demand, overbuilding and rising home prices.

Last year, regulators tightened regulations on developers designed to curb debt, preserve cash, and limit overbuilding. The government is sensitive to high housing costs, which are deemed to be excessive and a disincentive to larger family size. This has left the sector hugely over leveraged and has put the housing bubble centre stage.

Household debt has risen from about $2tn in 2010 to more than $10tn last year, the ratio of debt to disposable income is C.130%, significantly higher than in the US. With incomes rising slowly, especially in the gig or informal economy, which now accounts for C. 60% of employment, households are likely to remain weak.

Demographics, especially the low 1.3 fertility rate, are also working against the economy. China’s working age and main home buying age groups are declining. The number of prime-age, first-time homebuyers, those in the 25-39 bracket, is expected to fall by 25% in the next 20-years from 327 million to 247 million. The urbanisation rate, which doubled to 64% between 1996 and 2020, is bound to slow. There will be fewer marriages, fewer children, and lower household formation.

As we saw in 2008, it is hard to predict the outcome should China suffer an overall fall in house prices over any length of time. If prices fall nationwide, as was the case with US house prices nationally from 2006-2009, then we can expect to see big problems for Chinese banks and consumers as negative wealth effects spread among the urban population.

The root cause of 2008 was unrestricted credit in the US fuelling an unsustainable bubble which, when it burst, caused global mayhem. Whilst there are numerous differences between 2008 and Lehman, Evergrand has too many similarities for comfort.

Two-days ago, Professor David ‘Danny’ Blanchflower, ex-Bank of England economist and Monetary Policy Committee member, made a telling comment about the new BoE Governor Andrew Bailey is pushing for a rate hike at the November 4th MPC rate-setting meeting – dismissing every single rate hike since 2007 as a ‘policy mistake’.  He also thinks a deep recession is about to hit the US, based on his analysis of consumer anxiety and fears.

A US recession alongside a property-induced slump in China does not make for a happy ending.
 

‘One man on a lonely platform

One case sitting by his side

Two eyes staring cold and silent

Shows fear as he turns to hide’

 
‘This week has a ‘samo’ feeling to it; Covid coming back, and hollow climate change promises – it feels as though Philip has neatly summed up the week in a single sentence.

In fact today’s new infection rate climbed yet again to 52,000 yet there seems no likelihood that ‘Plan B’ will be dusted off – probably because nobody has thought it up yet.

‘These prompted me to revisit the so-called Blitz spirit, often cited by those who weren’t there. Let’s be honest it wasn’t great, being bombed. If it did anything it showed consideration and empathy. Alas, as the government trains its eye on the NHS and GPs as its new enemies, we see that spirit dies out years ago. Clap is now crap!’

There’s no doubt things are getting ugly and Winter could see a very large number of people very discontent indeed; how’s Boris going to ‘save’ this Christmas if the shelves are empty, Covid comes back with a vengeance, the NHS is sliding under the waves and energy prices are going through the unlagged roof?

The fact that Philip has returned to Evergrand should be taken very seriously; as he points out ‘a US recession alongside a property-induced slump in China does not make for a happy ending’.

But then the climate crisis is hardly going to end well with Bloviating Boris trumpeting the UK’s world leadership in tackling climate change whilst supporting new coal mines, roads and airports and telling the rest of the world now its their turn. The Earth Dies Screaming.

Two tracks, just for fun – The Buzzcocks with ‘Boredom’ and Visage with ‘Fade to Grey’. Enjoy!
 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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