There’s a small exhibition at the RA looking at American art during the last great recession. It makes a useful contrast with the Russian Revolution Exhibition downstairs and also an interesting pre-cursor to the American Pop Art exhibition over at the British Museum (much quieter and much better value for money)
It was good but not excellent.
Not something to see if you have to pay separately for tickets rather than being a member or getting some kind of travel deal.
This is great with cheese and cold meats, served with good bread, toasted.”
Ingredients:
Method:
Put the apples, raisins, onion, mustard seeds and ginger into a large saucepan and cook gently until soft. Add the vinegar, beer and sugar, lower the heat and simmer at a mere bubble for 2–3 hours, or until all is reduced and shiny. Decant into sterilised jars and use within a month once open.
Looking through the ONS figures on tax, there are lots of useful numbers to consider.
The richest fifth of households paid £29,800 in taxes (direct and indirect) compared with £5,200 for the poorest fifth.
In 2014/15, 50.8% of all households received more in benefits (including benefits in kind) than they paid in taxes, equivalent to 13.6 million households. This continues the downward trend seen since 2010/11 (53.5%), but remains above the proportion seen before the economic downturn.
On average, households whose head was between 25 and 64 paid more in taxes than they received in benefits (including in-kind benefits) in 2014/15, whilst the reverse was true for those aged 65 and over, as the state pension starts to kick in, the largest single component of the welfare bill in the UK.
Analysis on changes in median household disposable income and other related measures, which used to form part of this report, were published earlier this year in “Household Disposable Income and Inequality, financial year ending 2015”. It looks at the various stages of redistribution of income:
The overall impact of taxes and benefits (especially the latter) are that they lead to income being shared more equally between households.
Looking at individual cash benefits, in 2014/15, the average combined amount of contribution-based and income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) received by the bottom 2 quintile groups decreased, consistent with a fall in unemployment, as well as the ongoing implementation of the Universal Credit (UC) system.
Claimants of UC and JSA are subject to the Claimant Commitment which outlines specific actions that the recipient must carry out in order to receive benefits. This may also have affected the number of households in receipt of these benefits. JSA rates, along with other working age benefits, were increased by 1% in 2014/15, below the CPI rate of inflation. The phasing out of Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance and Income Support paid because of illness or disability and transfer of recipients to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) has seen average amounts received from the former benefits fall in 2014/15, whilst average amounts received from ESA have risen, reflecting the increased number of claimants.
The roll-out of Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for adults aged under 65, also continued in 2014/15.
We are told that these rollouts and replacements are not cost-cutting exercises, that the government is not deliberately targeting benefits to the ill and disabled, yet that does seem to be their impact.
There was a 20.3% decrease in the amount of Child Benefit received by the richest fifth of households, due to fewer households in this part of the income distribution receiving this benefit. This is likely to be related to the High Income Benefit Charge, which may have resulted in some households electing to stop getting Child Benefit (“opt out”) rather than pay the charge. Since Child Benefit claims process is linked to my on-going entitlement to the State pension (Carers’ Allowance) , we decided to continue to claim and re-pay the tax.
Direct taxes (Income Tax, employees’ National Insurance contributions and Council Tax or Northern Ireland rates) also act to reduce inequality of income. Richer households pay both higher amounts of direct tax and a higher proportion of their income in direct taxes.
The majority of this (16.3% of gross income) was paid in Income Tax. The average tax bill for the poorest fifth of households, by contrast was equivalent to 11.0% of their gross household income. Council Tax or Northern Ireland rates made up the largest proportion of direct taxes for this group, accounting for half of all direct taxes paid by them, 5.5% of their gross income on average.
The amount of indirect tax (such as Value Added Tax (VAT) and duties on alcohol and fuel) each household pays is determined by their expenditure rather than their income. The richest fifth of households paid just over 2 and a half times as much in indirect taxes as the poorest fifth (£10,000 and £3,700 per year, respectively). This reflects greater expenditure on goods and services subject to these taxes by higher income households.
However, although richer households pay more in indirect taxes than poorer ones, they pay less as a proportion of their income (Figure 5).
This means that indirect taxes increase inequality of income.
Today, Theresa May has committed to not increasing VAT in the forthcoming parliament though obviously the highest rate set is already far in excess of the EU minimum. She obviously hasn’t committed to not extending the reach of VAT, to move more consumer goods into the VAT charge rate.
In 2014/15, the richest fifth of households paid 15.0% of their disposable income in indirect taxes, while the bottom fifth of households paid the equivalent of 29.7% of their disposable income. Across the board, VAT is the largest component of indirect taxes. Again, the proportion of disposable income that is spent on VAT is highest for the poorest fifth and lowest for the richest fifth.ce for National Statistics
Grouping households by their income is recognised as the standard approach to distributional analysis, as income provides a good indication of households’ material living standards, but it is also useful to group households according to their expenditure, particularly for examining indirect taxes, which are paid on expenditure rather than income. Some households, particularly those at the lower end of the income distribution, may have annual expenditure which exceeds their annual income. For these households, their expenditure is not being funded entirely from income. During periods of low income, these households may maintain their standard of living by funding their expenditure from savings or borrowing, thereby adjusting their lifetime consumption.
When expressed as a percentage of expenditure, the proportion paid in indirect tax declines less sharply as income rises (Figure 6) compared with the level of indirect taxes paid as a proportion of household disposable income. The bottom fifth of households paid 20.1% of their expenditure in indirect taxes compared with 17.6% for the top fifth. These figures are broadly unchanged from the previous year.
After indirect taxes, the richest fifth had post-tax household incomes that were 6 and a half times those of the poorest fifth (£56,900 compared with £8,700 per year, respectively). This ratio is unchanged on 2013/14.
The ONS also considered the effect on household income of certain benefits received in kind. Benefits in kind are goods and services provided by the government to households that are either free at the time of use or at subsidised prices, such as education and health services. These goods and services can be assigned a monetary value based on the cost to the government which is then allocated as a benefit to individual households. The poorest fifth of households received the equivalent of £7,800 per year from all benefits in kind, compared with £5,500 received by the top fifth (Effects of taxes and benefits dataset Table 2). This is partly due to households towards the bottom of the income distribution having, on average, a larger number of children in state education.
Overall, in 2014/15, 50.8% of all households received more in benefits (including in-kind benefits such as education) than they paid in taxes (direct and indirect) (Figure 7). This equates to 13.6 million households. This continues the downward trend seen since 2010/11 (53.5%) but remains above the proportions seen before the economic downturn.
The trend seen for non-retired households mirrors that for all households, except that lower percentages of non-retired households receive more in benefits than pay in taxes, 36.9% in 2014/15, down from a peak of 39.7% in 2010/11.
In contrast, in 2014/15, 88.7% of retired households received more in benefits than paid in taxes, reflecting the classification of the State Pension as a cash benefit in this analysis. A retired household is defined as a household where the income of retired household members accounts for the majority of the total household gross income2. This figure is lower than its 2009/2010 peak of 92.4% but is broadly similar to the proportions seen before the downturn.
There are a number of different ways in which inequality of household income can be presented and summarised. Perhaps the most widely used measure internationally is the Gini coefficient. Gini coefficients can vary between 0 and 100 and the lower the value, the more equally household income is distributed.
The extent to which cash benefits, direct taxes and indirect taxes together work to affect income inequality can be seen by comparing the Gini coefficients of original, gross, disposable and post-tax incomes (Effects of taxes and benefits dataset Table 10). Cash benefits have the largest impact on reducing income inequality, in 2014/15 reducing the Gini coefficient from 50.0% for original income to 35.8% for gross income (Figure 8). Direct taxes act to further reduce it, to 32.6% in 2014/15. However, indirect taxes have the opposite effect and in 2014/15 the Gini for post-tax income was 36.4%, meaning that overall, taxes have a negligible effect on income inequality.
If March was all about the daffodils, then April is all about the tulips from the modest survivor saxatilis to some of the more showy ones planted just last October.
Even deep in the dark under the wisteria pergola, the tulip planted last Autumn have come through and are looking beautiful.
Up at the top they hide the daffodil leaves as they go over and fill a gap waiting for the roses to come into flower. Next year maybe I should add some “blacks” to the mix. Maybe not.
Unfortunately I can’t remember what varieties I bought and dug into the soil so will have to look them up on my account. Always assuming I can remember who I bought them with. One day I will organise my gardening, but probably not this year.
There’s always a few “Shirleys” in there and some “Queen of the Night” but thanks to the mildest of Winters, tulips bought to be staggered and arrive in sequence have all arrived together.
I seem to have bought some fancy shapes in as well, some lily tulips and doubles that look more like roses than anything else.
As for the yellow striped number, I’m pretty sure that’s courtesy of the squirrels digging and replanting. Would I have bought a striped tulip deliberately?
Yet again I prove a total inability to produce elegance and must settle for pretty – not a bad place to settle.
The perennial wallflower erysimum bowles, having flowered even through the Winter is now come into it’s own and is brightening up the borders.
The blossom on the pear has gone over but suddenly the red leaves of the maple open up. They will add colour all through the year to one final burst in Autumn. Sometimes it seems too easy to forget foliage as a useful colour to the garden.
In the shade at the back, the dry has been almost too much for some of the plants, The large ferns are at their most bedraggled and only the euphorbia is really happy.
Still the wild garlic is at least up and about and useful for recipes. I have no idea what a chimichurra is but I’m all for having a go. 
In the forgotten bits, the campion and forget me nots are finally flowering away.
Up on the gravel roof, almost every day something new pops up it’s head. It’s shocking really how the combination of dry with sun is so very much easier to deal with than dry shade.
The phlox is in it’s element with flowers everywhere in a glorious mound of lilac
And with the occasional shower (though much fewer than a normal April) the auricula is out and flowering.
The dodecatheon have poked through though not in good numbers – too dry a Winter probably
And the rhodenthemum is bristling with daisy flowers
The alpine erysimum is in full flower too though it won’t last as long as the one below in the borders.
The sedum will grow forever though, turning redder than red in the Autumn along with the maple leaves.
Towards the end of the month, the bluebells (apparently inferior Spanish ones but beautiful nonetheless) have finally popped up their heads.
It means the slugs and snails cannot be far behind so the nemaslug has to go down even if a cold snap might make it pointless.
And although the blossom of my pear tree has gone over all too quickly, my neighbour’s decision to allow one trunk of the hawthorn hedge to grow into a tree is paying dividends.
There are small pleasures in all the corners of the April garden.
From the raindrops on alchemilla to the dancing blue bells.
And where there are surprising bare patches, it turns out less surprising when you find the favourite hideaways for the beasties of the household.
Down in the bed closest to the house, the solomon’s seal is sprouting up not yet eaten away by slugs nor grubs.
And at the midpoint of the garden, the wisteria is just about flowering after a very hard pruning at the end of last year.
A bit barer than usual but so incredibly beautiful it makes me happy.
1) May had said she wanted to talk not just Brexit but also world problems; but in practice it fell to Juncker to propose one to discuss.
2) May has made clear to the Commission that she fully expects to be reelected as PM.
3) It is thought [in the Commission] that May wants to frustrate the daily business of the EU27, to improve her own negotiating position.
4) May seemed pissed off at Davis for regaling her dinner guests of his ECJ case against her data retention measures – three times.
5) EU side were astonished at May’s suggestion that EU/UK expats issue could be sorted at EU Council meeting at the end of June.
6) Juncker objected to this timetable as way too optimistic given complexities, eg on rights to health care.
7) Juncker pulled two piles of paper from his bag: Croatia’s EU entry deal, Canada’s free trade deal. His point: Brexit will be v v complex.
10) EU side felt May was seeing whole thing through rose-tinted-glasses. “Let us make Brexit a success” she told them.
11) Juncker countered that Britain will now be a third state, not even (like Turkey) in the customs union: “Brexit cannot be a success”.
12) May seemed surprised by this and seemed to the EU side not to have been fully briefed.
13) She cited her own JHA opt-out negotiations as home sec as a model: a mutually useful agreement meaning lots on paper, little in reality.
14) May’s reference to the JHA (justice and home affairs) opt-outs set off alarm signals for the EU side. This was what they had feared.
16) “The more I hear, the more sceptical I become” said Juncker (this was only half way through the dinner)
19) Davis then objected that EU could not force a post-Brexit, post-ECJ UK to pay the bill. OK, said Juncker, then no trade deal.
20) …leaving EU27 with UK’s unpaid bills will involve national parliaments in process (a point that Berlin had made *repeatedly* before).
21) “I leave Downing St ten times as sceptical as I was before” Juncker told May as he left
22) Next morning at c7am Juncker called Merkel on her mobile, said May living in another galaxy & totally deluding herself
23) Merkel quickly reworked her speech to Bundestag to include her now-famous “some in Britain still have illusions” comment
24) FAZ concludes: May in election mode & playing to crowd, but what use is a big majority won by nurturing delusions of Brexit hardliners?
25) Juncker’s team now think it more likely than not that Brexit talks will collapse & hope Brits wake up to harsh realities in time.
26) What to make of it all? Obviously this leak is a highly tactical move by Commission. But contents deeply worrying for UK nonetheless.
27) The report points to major communications/briefing problems. Important messages from Berlin & Brussels seem not to be getting through.
28) Presumably as a result, May seems to be labouring under some really rather fundamental misconceptions about Brexit & the EU27.
29) Also clear that (as some of us have been warning for a while…) No 10 should expect every detail of the Brexit talks to leak.
30/30) Sorry for the long thread. And a reminder: full credit for all the above reporting on the May/Juncker dinner goes to the FAZ
Free speech is held up as an inherent good, an invaluable bastion of the democracy, the freedoms of the Western developed world.
We are told that modern day “snowflakes” contest this self-evident truth and look to curb our everyday freedoms but in fact what is often contested is not the right to free speech, but rather the definition of free speech. What does it mean?
At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the woman recounted her harrowing personal account of the Holocaust to make the point that the film failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors. When she finished, Lanzmann waited a bit, and then said, “Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”
Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analysis over personal memory. In light of his painstaking research into the Holocaust, his comment must have seemed insensitive but necessary at the time. Yet ironically, “Shoah” eventually helped usher in an era of testimony that elevated stories of trauma to a new level of importance, especially in cultural production and universities.
Widespread caricatures of students today as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding.
The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, examined the tension between experience and argument in a different way.
Instead of defining freedom of expression as guaranteeing the robust debate from which the truth emerges, Lyotard focused on the asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments.
His extreme example was Holocaust denial, where invidious but often well-publicized cranks confronted survivors with the absurd challenge to produce incontrovertible eyewitness evidence of their experience of the killing machines set up by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Not only was such evidence unavailable, but it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that had systematically denied their humanity.
Lyotard shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good.
Some things are unmentionable and undebatable, but not because they offend the sensibilities of the sheltered young. Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.
All people must be free to speak, if we are to have free speech, and that is self-evidently not possible if one group is excluded from being “people”. Freedom applies to the rights of all people to be included, as well as what is said.
The recent student demonstrations at various campuses can be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship.
Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. Yet when those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.
The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to underestimate. But it has been too easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth.
We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.
Because the idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate as fully recognized members of that community.
Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — can never mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.
The recent controversies over the conflict between freedom of expression and granting everyone access to speech hark back to 1963, when Yale University had rescinded an invitation to Alabama’s segregationist governor, George C. Wallace. In 1974, after unruly protests prevented William Shockley from debating his recommendation for voluntary sterilization of people with low I.Q.s, and other related incidents, Yale issued a report on how best to uphold the value of free speech on campus that remains the gold standard for many other institutions.
Unlike today’s somewhat reflexive defenders of free speech, the Yale report placed the issue of free speech on campus within the context of an increasingly inclusive university and the changing demographics of society at large. While Yale bemoaned the occasional “paranoid intolerance” of student protesters, the university also criticized the “arrogant insensitivity” of free speech advocates who failed to acknowledge that requiring of someone in public debate to defend their human worth conflicts with the community’s obligation to assure all of its members equal access to public speech.
What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse.
The issues to which students are so sensitive might be benign when they occur within the ivory tower. Coming from the brexit campaign trail and now the US White House, the threats are not meant to merely offend. Like President Trump’s attacks on the liberal media (or indeed right wing press attacks on the British judiciary) as the “enemies of the people,” these insults are meant to discredit and delegitimize whole groups as less worthy of participation in the public exchange of ideas.
The weather has turned cold. It was inevitable as soon as ur plans had been set for a trip to buy bedding, just like the day of our first tennis match is always (and I mean always) rained off. So we headed off to buy begonias safe in the knowledge that once home they would need to be bundled up and stored for a week.
London rarely sees the snow but temperatures are definitely down to just above freezing for the night. There hasn’t been much frost but I suppose it’s still early days.
Perhaps more frustrating it’s also a problem for my garden’s latest biological weapon – nemaslug! It arrives in a packet (sealed) and you are asked to dissolve it into a 10l watering can and then further delete it 1l into 10l before watering it out onto your beds. The solution contains nematodes a parasitic worm that essentially eats young slugs alive. Gruesome but hopefully effective apart from the condition that the ground mustn’t get too cold ie. no frosts.
I’ve never used it before so won’t know whether it’s the temperature or my incompetent watering that’s to blame if it fails.
Mostly though the garden is looking good. I have that enthusiasm that aways arrives before making up the hanging baskets and gradually fizzles away as the reality of my incompetent watering schedule dawns, year after year.
As well as bedding I have some perennial geraniums to plant out underneath the new roses (blue Rozanne Gewat) and some verbena lollipop bonasiensis to top up the border on the gravel garden. I need to dig some of the many self-seeders out of the gravel path up to the gravel garden before they really dig deep. Plenty of primroses and maybe some violets could be moved along quite easily. I’m not so sure about the iris and fritelaria but they’d certainly be no worse off.
As always each success and failure in the garden brings a new item to the list for next year. The dwarf narcissus underneath the hedge worked well but now I’m left wondering what can be put around them to carry the season forward a little, maybe white mascara, or woodruff or possible some small tulips that naturalise.
As yet I’m undecided about the huge alliums in the fritelaria bed. They’ve obviously dried out at various stages so the leaves have become scorched but maybe their flowers are worth it. they’re about to open into (hopefully) huge white balls and I’m quite excited about what may happen.
But overall the bed seems meagre: just too thin. Like the bed at the back, it could be doubled in width and benefit. One side effect of this would be to make the carrying of the lawnmower all the way up to the back lawn even more difficult. The end of the bed is already being squashed and mangled as the machine is shimmied over the plants, something that I’m unhappy about but the answer has to be long term, probably sinking stepping stones down into the middle of the gravel.
Projects beget projects.
The tulips planted at the back are beautiful and have been a delight this year. Maybe next time I should top up with some of the white and darker bulbs but in the front, some shortish pink bulbs would look lovely. I’d like some more anemones at the front of the rose bed also.
Next time I’m offered some white forget-me-nots I need to accept and stick them in my pots for the early spring. And maybe I could plant up a few more snowdrops.
At the same time, I’m going to start pulling up and getting rid of the comfrey. It grows well in the dark shade but isn’t that pretty. I’m coming around to the bugold though.
And the other thing I need to work on, which might actually help with the hanging baskets is putting together a watering system using some small plastic bottles buried into the compost in pots, specific beds and baskets. I have a whole range of watering globes that basically work on the same system but if I could bury small 330ml bottles into the pots, surely i could achieve the same result by creating mini reservoirs?
And then wandering through the various on-line catalogues there are always new sweeties in the shop…
Supper tonight and I’ve decided to go with three salads and a “bread and butter” pudding made out of the left-over panettone like Easter cake. It might be described as a left-over meal but that sounds cruel.
Either way I’m now left with not quite enough time to do everything so am writing lists.
Mostly it’s a question of time in the oven or on the hob rather than effort.
Some fresh bread would probably be a good thing. Plus there’s a sad lack of alcohol in the house.
The kids will need some pasta and an early supper to free up the space for my mates.
I will need to stop myself over providing and just try to keep it simple. Raspberry muffins are calling me.
