Delivering the goods

In the finest seasonal tradition of ‘no room at the inn’, some late additions to our planned family gathering presented the prospect of three of the younger generation camping out in the dining room on the bare (and rather draughty) wooden floorboards. To avoid giving them an authentic Dickensian Christmas experience, possibly with authentic nineteenth-century ailments to follow, we ordered an inexpensive large rug online; it’s something I hardly ever do, but the lack of suitable local options and the impossibility of fitting the thing into the car left no alternative.

After some delays, the rug was due yesterday evening but the estimated time came and went with no sign of it; instead, we finally received a cheerful notification that it had been delivered half an hour earlier and signed for by ‘Sharon’ -  who? -  with an accompanying picture showing it standing in a puddle beside a completely unfamiliar front door. Fortunately a (somewhat grumpy) phone call to the delivery company elicited an apology and a promise to set things right and the rug finally turned up an hour or so later after its brief unscheduled sojourn in our nearest town.

The whole business left us with several unanswered questions, not least why Sharon, assuming she exists, happily signed for an 8x12ft rug she hadn’t ordered, but the most surprising thing was the matter-of-fact response on the part of Customer Services; their reaction suggested a practised routine for dealing with a common problem, like parcels lost in transit (or abandoned on the doorstep at the mercy of ‘porch pirates’) and the dreaded ‘sorry you were out’ card.32

Presumably this is, in part, the fault of a system in crisis, overloaded by the continuation of habits acquired in lockdown when rapid online delivery became a necessity for some and an indulgence for many. According to a study quoted in the Telegraph, deliveries run into the billions each year and roughly a third of all recipients across all the major companies in the sector experience a problem with the service (44% for evri). Given the working conditions, I suppose it’s hardly surprising:

…many drivers see part or all of their salaries made up of “pay-per-drop” fees – in some cases less than 50p per package – meaning they only get paid for a successful delivery. The structure potentially pushes drivers to dump packages or claim a delivery attempt was made, rather than trying again.

Did our driver, I wonder, decide that on a rainy Friday night he could not afford to make the time-consuming rush-hour drive out of town - the traffic is horrendous in the run-up to Christmas - and abandon the rug at an earlier stop in the hope that the company or its insurance would sort it out? And are customers really so accustomed to this kind of thing - or eager to have their goodies delivered to their door - that they are willing to put up with such abysmal failure rates on a regular basis?

And what will happen when, as is surely inevitable, the whole system finally breaks down and customers realise that the smaller shops which once fulfilled virtually every local need have vanished from Britain’s high streets, crippled by competition from the out-of-town retail giants and the internet and given the coup de grâce by Reeves’ budget plans?

A man with a squirrel on his head

The increasing ubiquity of IT means that, like, I suspect, many of our generation, we spend a fair amount of time attempting to provide long-distance tech support by phone for older relatives baffled by the workings of an iPad or the intricacies of the internet, often because they find themselves with no alternative but to go online for some essential transaction.

By and large, they’re all pretty competent with general browsing, emails and so on, but every now and then something goes awry: the title comes from a particularly surreal recent conversation where three attempts to send a link to an embedded instruction video from a company’s website - a link we had both previously tested ourselves - elicited a baffled “But it’s a film of the weather forecast, dear” and then “All I’ve got is some people on a beach”, finally followed by “Now it’s a man with a squirrel on his head”.

Part of the problem is that the idea of proceeding by trial and error - the essence of learning to handle an iPad, phone or PC - is an alien one to a generation brought up to be careful and to avoid mistakes wherever possible; ‘click it and see what happens’ is not their natural reaction to a problem. It’s even worse for those who had experience of early computers at work many decades ago; they still suffer from the fear of failure learned in the days when a single error in input or timing could crash the whole system.

In a sane and humane world, they would be free to ignore the existence of the internet apart from its usefulness for entertainment or family and social communications. However, the increasing difficulty in carrying out day-to-day interactions with public services and businesses by any other means forces them into using it; companies and government offices alike are striving, to use the revealingly demeaning official term, to ‘drive customers online”.

It’s something I wrote about in 2017 and, since then, the pace has, if anything, accelerated, especially since Covid closed workplaces and obliged customers and clients to deal remotely with isolated workers, many of whom are still working from home nearly three years on. The telephone helplines nominally still exist but these days, if they are answered at all, there’s a strong chance of being cut off or left on hold while someone lets the dog out and no possibility of the call being passed to a supervisor or someone with better information.

It’s all well and good to put everything online and reduce telephone communication to a bare minimum to keep costs down but, in a world of online scams and cyber-crime, to rely on it to the exclusion of everything else is not only cruelly staking the least tech-savvy customers out like captive goats for scamming predators (as well as disenfranchising many with physical or visual impairments which prevent them from using the technology); it is also exposing all of us to risk, defended only by the weakest links in the security chain.

And that, of course, is before the inexplicable glitch, the solar flare or the cyber-attack which brings the whole thing crashing down; one day, firms - and government and health agencies - may have cause to regret putting all their eggs in the online basket. In the meantime, while it’s all still working, spare a thought for everyone unwillingly compelled to negotiate the mysteries of the internet and ending up with a man with a squirrel on his head.

Political Kryptonite

I’m afraid I have shamelessly stolen the title from a comment at A K Haart’s place in which Sobers points out that simply cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance for higher-rate taxpayers would not have raised enough revenue to justify the administrative costs:

‘It was always an all or nothing decision, total abolition raises a decent sum when you have pay rises for well paid 'public servants' to be paid for, the question really remains which bright spark in the Treasury suggested it, and what on earth made Reeves not dismiss it as obvious political kryptonite?’

I agree with Sobers that it may be paving the way for future tax increases but, leaving aside the fact that Reeves appears so far out of her depth she should be obliged to address the House in a pair of inflatable armbands (this is, after all, the woman who ‘found it hard to manage’ on a salary of £94k - to say nothing of her husband’s income - and had to get professional help with her tax returns), I suspect that the input of the numerous think tanks, pressure groups and lobbyists behind Labour’s policies also has a lot to do with it.

We have repeatedly seen an apparent lack of concern for the facts or hard data in favour of campaign statistics, theorising and figures seemingly plucked from thin air; the WFA cut, VAT on school fees and the inheritance tax for farmers were all proposed within a few months, apparently without any attempt to carry out impact assessments or in-depth research (take the case of Bridget Phillipson, who actually boasted of her refusal to visit any independent schools or meet their representatives while planning to impose VAT on the sector).

This is, of course, standard practice in opposition, where it’s all hypothetical and no one checks your workings. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Reeves, Starmer & co have fully grasped the fact that they are now responsible for the welfare of actual human beings rather than cyphers in the game of political rhetoric, fair game to be lavishly denounced for their presumed opinions (especially on Brexit) or castigated for attempting to give their children a head start.

In the case of the WFA, it is, I think, not impossible that Treasury thinking was influenced by the statement, frequently repeated in news articles and comments, that ‘one in four pensioners is a millionaire’ (a misleading over-simplification of ONS figures which double-counts the shared assets of couples while, at the same time, grossly over-estimating house values outside the capital). It took a while to track it to its source, a 2022 press release from a high-profile campaign group calling for ‘an end to intergenerational unfairness’ (with, naturally, a vested interest in dramatically overstating the wealth of the elderly).

A significant proportion of pensioners on low incomes are homeowners still occupying the former family home - many of them because of Right to Buy - and the Intergenerational Foundation wants them to sell up and move to more ‘suitable’ accommodation, potentially freeing up tens of thousands of houses for young families; it’s easy to see how, encouraged by the strident campaign against under-occupancy and facing a massive housing shortage, the government might seize on the opportunity to cut their WFA and effectively increase their heating bills as a sharp incentive to downsize.*

At the same time, Ed Miliband’s net zero people must have been casting around for new and exciting ways to stop people using energy. Given the blinkered approach which has led to target-driven initiatives with no thought for potential long-term consequences (and rookie errors such as basing costings on maximum potential output instead of real-world performance), I find it worryingly plausible that a single-minded zealot in the ranks might have managed to convince the high-ups that paying pensioners to turn on their heating was a Bad Thing.

With both these angles being persuasively pushed - and, as theTavern’s wise woman has frequently observed, growing contempt for and demonisation of the elderly in the media for their supposed outdated values and opinions (remember Ian McEwen blaming Brexit on ‘a gang of angry old men’?) - it’s easy to see how a certain limited mentality could entirely miss the political Kryptonite aspect and, instead, see cutting the WFA as a golden opportunity; gain £1.3bn, save the planet, free up housing and give rich, racist grandma one in the eye to boot - what’s not to like?

 

*Recent ONS figures for property ownership - some 80% of pensioner households with an annual income of £20k a year or less own their own homes - might also explain why Labour are now ignoring their own 2017 assertion that cutting the WFA would lead to extra winter deaths; if asset-rich elderly homeowners choose to turn off the heating to save money, adverse consequences can be attributed to their own miserliness rather than laid at the government’s door.

A brief rumination

Much fuss has been made recently about Bovaer, the feed additive designed to reduce the methane emission of dairy cattle, and the concern about its effect on milk for human consumption due to its ingredients (silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol).

To read the triumphant trumpetings of its developers (or, for that matter, the BBC verify ‘fact-check’ article), you’d think the development of the supplement was a gigantic leap forward for science and the answer to a hitherto insoluble and world-threatening problem - it’s almost the stuff of science fiction: who’d have guessed that feeding anti-freeze to cows would save the planet? (As they say, I think I’ve seen this movie; it doesn’t end well…)

This seems odd since, some fourteen years ago, researchers at Newcastle University found that adding ground-up coriander, turmeric and cumin significantly reduced methane emissions in sheep by 40%, 30% and 22% respectively (comparing favourably to Bovaer’s estimates of 35-45% in cattle). It sounds pretty sensible - all natural, no need to worry about getting the dose exactly right and very much in keeping with a wild-grazing animal’s varied intake of plants.

Perhaps subsequent research discovered unexpected problems with using curry spices - rather sadly for the cows, who might have enjoyed the flavour - but a cynic would be forgiven for thinking that it is unlikely anyone could claim a monopoly on bovine garam masala and so, outside the ivory tower of academia, real-world laboratories persisted in the search for a new, unique and above all patentable formula.

With some 9 million cattle in the UK and an estimated cost of £70 per year per animal, the developers of Bovaer are clearly keen to get a head start in the race to harness the cow that laid the golden cowpats, although they do have some competition, including a seaweed derivative, a blend of citrus and garlic  - I’m really not drinking any milk from those cows: remember the butter with a “twang” in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’?  - and, most bizarrely of all, a sort of yashmak which converts methane burps to carbon dioxide.

Like so many ‘green’ initiatives, there’s the potential for a wonderful exercise in distraction; after all, the planet did just fine, apparently, when 70 million bison roamed the Great Plains. In fact, there’s an idea; rather than just sitting back and watching the money roll in, maybe the Bovaer scientists should be obliged to run lengthy field tests in person on an assortment of American bison, musk oxen and Cape buffalo, preferably on camera, before they are allowed to tinker with our precious livestock.

(For an impressively clear explanation of Daisy’s internal workings and some interesting views on the subject, I suggest a visit to Leg-Iron’s place: https://underdogsbiteupwards.wordpress.com/2024/11/29/the-fart-of-doom)

“It’s the way I tell ‘em”

In what must be one of the most inappropriate speeches ever to (dis)grace the benches of the House of Lords (text in full here), the Archbishop of Canterbury’s valedictory address turned out to be a truly astonishing example of crass, self-righteous egotism and ill-judged humour, complete with a gag about who won when ‘revolting peasants’ played football with the severed head of one of his predecessors.

I’ve been torn between rage at his failure to take full responsibility for his ‘lack of curiosity’ and ‘tendency to minimise’ the problem in the case of John Smyth, especially in the wake of numerous other poor decisions and errors of judgement, and a certain horrified amusement at his spectacular failure to read the room or the mood of the country at large. That I have given way to the latter and tried to capture the bizarrely incongruous tone of the speech in music is in no way intended to trivialise or disrespect those who have suffered as a result of Welby’s actions (or inaction).

I’ve stuck pretty closely to the content of his speech and yes, along with the egocentric and tastelessly facetious opening remarks - and after referring to the Church of England’s past safeguarding failures - he really did make a light-hearted comment about being unable to find his way around the Palace of Westminster and using the carpet colour to navigate.

(There’s an incisive take on this story at Eccles is Saved.)

(The Archbishop of Canterbury kicks off at 2m14s.)

My lords, it’s said quite often

- A cliché, yes, but hey,

With my Archbishop’s hat on I am still allowed to say 

That God finds it amusing

When planning goes astray;

I bet he’s up there laughing as I speak to you today.

My diary secretary has had a lot to do;

All that rearranging has left him feeling blue,

But for the Church’s failures

A head must roll, they say,

And I’m in charge so that is why I’m bowing out today.

Whether I am culpable depends upon your view,

But resignation’s called for, so that’s what I have to do.

I still get lost around here

So, once I’ve had my say, 

Please show me the red carpet and then I’ll be on my way.

A

The Sunday Songbook - ‘Oh Mr Miliband!’

“Our department will be at the heart of the new government’s agenda […] to make Britain a clean energy superpower with zero carbon electricity by 2030, and accelerating our journey to net zero.”

Ed Miliband’s speech on his appointment as Energy secretary 

Lately I’ve been thinking of what Miliband has done: 

All those solar farms out there have hardly seen the sun, 

A week of turbines idling when the wind refused to blow 

And most of Britain freezing under early winter snow. 

A thousand miles of pylons will soon march across the nation, 

We’re told to put in heat pumps and to throw our boilers out.

Peddling his net zero lie, 

Decarbonise and don’t ask why;

From every cold and lightless home up goes the shout;

Oh! Mister Miliband, what did you do? 

You committed to renewables, now watch us all turn blue; 

Heading for net zero as quickly as you can 

Oh Mr Miliband, you’re a silly, silly man! 

As Ed’s net zero minions preach, in every way we must  

Reduce our carbon footprint; they’re sure we’ll all adjust,

Though to tell a lass in labour that gas and air is barred

Or taking away inhalers from asthmatics sounds quite hard.

It’s a very different matter when they fly the whole world over 

From conference to summit talks and then back home again, 

But what’s three million miles of flight 

When you are on the side of right?

Never mind the populace who cry in vain:

Oh Mr Miliband, what did you do? 

You want to save the planet so you fly off to Baku,

Hopping on the next plane as quickly as you can: 

Oh Mr Miliband, you’re a silly, silly man!