Was surprised to learn that I am a GEEK yesterday.
That’s if a new book called The Geek Manifesto is to be believed. Find out more here: http://geekmanifesto.wordpress.com/
You might be one too. You can also have a go at calibrating your level of ‘geekness’ using the picture at the side. How many of these features are to be found in your personal space? Be honest now.
The serious side to this is that the Geek Manifesto is a call for evidence based politics and it appears that the Cabinet Office is taking note. They have published a paper on Evidence Based Policies here:
Even though RCT’s (Randomised Controlled Trials) have some methodological and cost limitations, this is certainly a better way to decide what to implement than the opinions of Michael Gove (let them all learn poetry by 5), or Iain Duncan Smith. It could certainly have benefited Andrew Lansley’s tortured NHS reforms. Our local experience (in Camden) is that his new style GP’s have led to massive decreases in user satisfaction – alongside greater difficulties in getting to see a doctor. Funny thing is no-one ever speaks about the emotional well-being and attachments we form with GP’s and surgeries that we have been going to for years, taking ourselves, partners, children to a place that becomes familiar and from that, safe.
We don’t want corporate spin-offs running GP surgeries, however efficient that means. It’s not efficiency we go for, its care, reassurance, information.
It is hard to know where to begin to protest the outrageous non-evidence based policies being advocated in my country!
In an amazing set of proclamations the Convservatives last week attempted to shroud their economic incompetence by demonising a small group of people, the very poor and deprived, and blaming them for our woes. When this runs into trouble as a tactic, as it will since the facts don’t support it, they’ll switch to blaming foreigners (people in Europe) for our ills
Last week, Eric Pickles a man who is clearly not in food-poverty, arrived on our TV screens to tell us that 120,000 problem families were at the root of many of our social ills and that he was going to sort them out. Again, we are told that there are dangerous, unprincipled people out there, our own Al Queda if you like – but not to worry, our good men and true in government will protect us from them.
If you look at the facts more carefully, you’ll see that these are in fact deprived families at the bottom end of our society with few resources.
Here is a more reasoned presentation of the facts:
http://fullfact.org/factchecks/problem_families_costs_eric_pickles-27396
In terms of mobilising support for this condemnation from the majority of us, it is easy to see that in our anxiety about the loss of our well-being and prosperity, it’s tempting to point the finger at those who look scruffy, down-at-heel, and may be poorly educated or otherwise marked by poverty. Much easier in fact than blaming the robbers in suits who have gambled our wealth away while pocketing the huge proceeds as they did so. This latter group have highly sophisticated PR, marketing and litigation machines at their disposal – and at some, childish and primitive level – we are in awe of the super-rich. We are envious. We dream that one day we might win the lottery and become like them and cease having to care or negotiate with everyone else for our entitlements.
And if, like me, you’re a consultant or a researcher, don’t think that our part of it all is exempt from corruption. Here’s a reminder from Saturday’s New York Times:
“Having fallen from respected insider to convicted inside trader, Mr. Gupta has now exchanged the lofty board room for the prospect of a lowly jail cell.”
So said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, after Rajat K. Gupta, former head of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, was convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud.
There is something so cowardly about blaming those who cannot defend themselves that I am ashamed to be a citizen in a country where we pour scorn onto the deprived rather than lending a helping hand, while the rich and powerful across the land push for even greater pay and less regulation of their greedy impulses.
This man is Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and – in my view – the best reader of the current economic ills with the most sensible views on how to turn things around. He believes, as I do, that you can’t shrink your way back to greatness!
Here, paraphrased is his demolition of our government’s favourite metaphor about the need for austerity – likening it to a family who has spent too much. He made these remarks several times while in the UK last week to promote his new book: ‘End this Depression Now’.
So why is the British Government reducing investment and slashing thousands of public sector projects and jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger? Here is Krugman’s answer:
“Over the past few days, I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.
The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?
The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.
So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.
And there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.
And that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”
Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria. These are also countries that are among the happiest in the world, both being in the top 20 for income equality [having low GINI coefficients] and in the top 15 on the UN’s Happiness Index. You’ll find these figures compared with our own country in my next post.
And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describing Ireland as “a shining example of the art of the possible.” Meanwhile, the Cato Institute was praising Iceland’s low taxes and hoping that other industrial nations “will learn from Iceland’s success.”
So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.
The Chinese have a saying: ‘The Bigger the Front the Bigger the Back” and events over the Jubilee weekend in the UK have shown us both our front and back. The emphasis has been on the front, putting a brave foot forward to rejoice in the sense of being united, together and cheerful in the face of adversity: a recreation of the Spirit of the Blitz, for although the blitz this year is not made of high explosives, it is made of bombshells in the form of poor economic results, job losses, struggle and depression.
The ‘front’ was impressive – a refusal to be bowed or cowed by adversity, a willingness to find some good and things to applaud among the bad news.
Meanwhile in the back, Cameron and his wife were clearly in the audience in front of the Palace last night and were ignored by the commentators. His significance dwindled as the nation turned to tried and trusted emblems of stability and connectedness like the Queen. We even had ‘three cheers for Her Majesty’ – responded to with gusto by the thousands in the Mall and at parties all over the UK.
However, on Wednesday morning we troop back to work and face once again the reality of our situation. Double-dip recessions are extremely rare in the UK. It is quite common for the economy to falter during a recovery with one quarter of negative activity but you have to go back to the mid-1970s, when the first oil shock of 1973-74 was followed by stagflation in 1975, to find a genuine double-dip downturn.
In the past, even during the 1930s, recoveries have been well under way by now. This time, despite the massive stimulus that has been chucked at it, four years into the deepest depression of the post-war era Britain is going backwards. Output is more than 4% below its peak in early 2008, living standards are falling and there is no sign whatsoever of the much-heralded rebalancing of the economy.
This is a terrible blow for the coalition, which now stands accused of over-cooking austerity – as predicted on these pages – and thus killing off the tentative recovery that was under way when Labour left office almost two years ago.
There is a way forward – advocated by the world’s leading economists – the stimulation of growth by the government rather than the ill-fated Quantitative Easing which has been seized upon by the banks as a way of building up their balance sheets and has not been distributed where it could do good – among the SME’s across the land. Osborne’s Thatcherian ‘I am not for turning’ is looking increasingly like the ‘out of touch with reality’ ravings of the Red Queen in Alice. When will they wake up and help us?
As Facebook writhes amongst its riches it is difficult to resist a sense of deja vu. This was a tool for people talking to people, a peer to peer site much beloved of those who found it a window for self-expresion and a way of staying in touch.
In a world that has become increasingly isolated, where many of us do not know our neighbours – or if we do – still wish to talk about what’s on our minds, the site seemed to offer a safe haven that was not a corporate ruse for separating us from our money.
Inevitably, to sell such a social ideal meant that money had to be made so that investors could enjoy some proceeds from our conversations and the invidious banner ads started to appear. For me, it all changed then: I began to smell a rat.
I found myself ignoring these ads or spitefully dismissing them – even though to do so meant I had to give some reason why I didn’t like them. Truth was I didn’t like them because they were there!
Today we reach a position where the young man who invented the site is now being sued by thousands of people who feel ripped off because they were denied the knowledge that the forecast income for Facebook had been revised downwards, due to the growth of smartphone access to the site (where ads and marketing are not visible) which makes no money for FB. According to those suing, these downwards forecasts were only revealed to huge, elite corporate investors or those involved with the flotation like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs [again!]
If you create something that is a contribution to humanity that is what it must remain – a contribution. You cannot expect to get rich on it. None of the world’s great contributors from Jesus to Gandhi have banked riches from their gifts to the rest of us. Mark Zucherberg will find himself poorer not richer and though he may laugh on the way to the bank it will be gallows laughter.
It looks as though it was worse than I thought. What was clearly an overpriced shambles might have involved a conspiracy to fleece the public. It seems that one of Morgan Stanley’s analysts actually reduced his forecast for Facebook’s earnings as the shares went on sale and this wasn’t reported to the general public.
Within three days of the fanfare, shareholders have filed a lawsuit at the Manhattan district court accusing Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg and his advisers, including Morgan Stanley, of concealing from them a “severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts. On Tuesday, a similar suit was brought by a different investor in a California state court.
My moniker Loss of Face(book) has been replaced by a better one: Fadebook.
Facebook’s first day as a public company ended with the company narrowly avoiding the embarrassment of its stock dipping below the $38 (£24) starting price, in one of the most frenzied share sales in history. Insiders speculated that Facebook’s own bankers had intervened in last minute panic buying to prop up the shares to avoid a fall below the offer price. Sam Hamadeh, founder of the analysts,PrivCo, calculates that the banks who underwrote the share sale stepped in and bought $300m worth of shares to stop Facebook dipping below $38, a move that would have marked Facebook as a “busted IPO”.
This has all the symptoms of a bubble, don’t expect the shares to hold up. They will fall more next week and the week after. Facebook’s revenues were $3.7bn last year. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, had revenues of close to $29bn and is valued at half Facebook’s current value. Apparently, founder Zuckerberg is so focused that he hasn’t noticed that he’s become the world’s xth Richest Person. What a guy!
Another reason to dispense with Jeremy Hunt is his ill-informed prejudice against the poor. Hunt argued before the general election that long-term claimants had to “take responsibility’ for the number of children they had, adding that the state would no longer fund large workless families. But it is all based on myths. Just 3.4 per cent of families in long-term receipt of benefits have four children or more.
The Tories transformed a crisis of capitalism into a crisis of public spending, and determined that the most vulnerable would make the biggest sacrifices. But taking away support from the disabled, the unemployed and the working poor is not straightforward. It can only be achieved by a campaign of demonisation – to crush any potential sympathy. Benefit recipients must only appear as feckless, workshy scroungers, living in opulent quasi-mansions with wall-to-wall widescreen TVs, rampaging around the Canary Islands courtesy of handouts from the squeezed taxpayer. Benefit fraud does exist – according to Government estimates, it is worth less than 1 per cent of welfare spending – but the most extreme examples are passed off as representative, or as the “tip of the iceberg”. The reality of struggle and strife is all but airbrushed out of existence.
That really for two reasons: the first is that it simply makes us uncomfortable to think of the abject misery perhaps no more than a stone’s throw from our own homes. The second is that we too, in the middle class are struggling and afraid: our real incomes have diminished steadily since the late 1970′s. We need someone to blame for our growing discomfort. It is too threatening to blame those wealthier and higher up the status ladder than we are: they might fire us or crush us or otherwise disturb our complacency. So we pick on the poor, the weak, the immigrants, the defenceless and create campaigns like those of the Pub Bore Richard Littlejohn in the Mail.
Next, comes fascism and joining together to take measures to punish the feckless scroungers among us. Your unemployed neighbour next year. You the year after?
I first predicted problems for the Government’s austerity programme and their ‘marketing’ of it in this post from August 2011.
“It is indisputable that the Government have used the power of fear and nightmares to mobilise the population into acceptance of a desperate situation. For a year now we have been hearing tales of how dreadful it is…how we must cut the deficit…how unsustainable our debts are. How everyone has to take some losses – even those who have next to nothing to start with.
This, I believe has created a cloud of anxiety across the land and no-one has listened to the more reasoned voices of two of the world’s greatest economists, Paul Krugman and Joe Stigliz who have consistently pointed out that in a period of very low interest rates and low inflation, debt is not the problem, stimulating growth and job creation is the issue. Have a look here:
http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/Crisis.cfm
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/”
Since then, the growth predicted by Osborne in response to his austerity measures has failed to materialise as these writers predicted. Not only that, sensing the deep unfairness of holding the ‘little people’ to account for these problems driven largely by the greed of the rich & the inefficiency of the state, social unrest and polarisation are blossoming in politics across Europe. Neo-Nazis have taken 7% of the vote in Greece, while the richest 1,000 persons in the UK have increased their wealth by £155 billion over the last three years. That is enough for them alone to pay off the entire UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30 billion to spare. These people have not been subject to any tax payback whatsoever commensurate with their gains.
This is not an anti-capitalism polemic; it is an anti-inequality one. Some 77% of the budget deficit is being repaid by public-expenditure cuts and only 23% by tax increases. These cuts hit the poor the hardest, as does the increase in VAT. Despite the biggest slump for nearly a century, the 1,000 richest are sitting on a cash pile even greater than that at the height of the boom. Their wealth now amounts to £414bn, equivalent to more than a third of Britain’s GDP. The increase in their wealth has been £315bn over the past 15 years. Much of that has been accrued relatively free of taxation through complex accounting and avoidance schemes. If they had been taxed even at the going rate of Corporation Tax of 28% it would yield enough to pay 70% of the entire deficit.
It seems though that virtually the entire population of Westminster – on both sides of the house – cannot turn its hand to recovering tax from the powerful: much easier to cut Sure Start, Tax Credits and benefits from people with small voices. More riots are inevitable unless the Government turns its attention towards growth & claiming tax back from those who can afford it.
Veiled beneath the tricks and clicks of smartphones and technology, more and more people across the world are recognising that these technologies are being used to subjugate rather than free them. Try phoning almost any large organisation and you will find yourself forced to ‘verify’ yourself, after hanging about pressing 1 or 2 or 3 on your phone keypad for five minutes – usually in response to ‘choices’ that don’t relate to your call. Then you’ll have to provide personal information, passwords etc. while the anonymous operative at the other end remains unknown to you. This, apparently, is in your interest. Why then do I feel so irritated and abused?
The fact is that the state and big business have more resources to spend on technology than you or me. And more time to spend establishing elaborate protocols to manage ‘call volumes’ than we do. To pay my tax on line I must quote a 17 digit number which changes every month. There is, underlying these new technologies a groundswell of disrespect and lack of consideration of the customer/citizen, so much so that nearly everyone dreads having to call local services, government departments or financial institutions of any type.
Surely, this is just a minor aspect of modernity?
I suspect not, I suspect that beneath this technology driven disrespect there is a growing contempt among the powerful – reflected among those working for big organisations – for the little people. Recently riots were sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan – an incident that has still not been explained. Casual violence against citizens seems commonplace among the police. Here you can find the video of the assault in Peterlee,
The attack was condemned as a form of torture by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). But no-one was sacked: one officer was fined £40.
This is not an isolated incident. A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted. According to a watchdog’s report, prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers based on “relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect”, but none resulted in a guilty verdict.
Meanwhile, on planet Earth where most people would be proud to stand on Jeremy’s head, the IoS this morning leads with the shocking and yet somehow unsurprising news that former News of the World editor Andy Coulson ‘called the bluff of the Tory leader and George Osborne by refusing to sign a confidentiality clause as part of his appointment.’ It is quite extraordinary to think that a bloke with not only no security clearance but also a closeness to media mogul Rupert Murdoch was allowed to bluff his way through that one. Perhaps Camerlot figured that, as Roop more or less told Blair to invade Iraq, it was unlikely Newscorp didn’t know everything secret already anyway.
Republished from the Slog with thanks to John Ward.
This morning on Daybreak, Danny Alexander tried the yabber/blabber technique much beloved of politicians nowadays. This relies on talking so fast that the interviewer can’t get any observation or questions in…like, why have the Coalition lost so many Council seats?
Apparently, [yabber/blabber] it’s because ‘any government – including Tony Blair’s expects a big downturn in the middle of their period in power’. As if that was a natural law, rather than the inevitable outcome of overclaiming, broken promises, self-serving policies and poor decisions. Most worrying of all, everyone is begininng to know it – turnout down to 25%. Three quarters of us don’t see any point in voting…that is really worrying. It means more and more of these fools for years to come! Get out and vote even if you spoil your ballot!
In an astonishing series of announcements it turns out that our beloved NHS has sent no fewer than 240,000 patients home between the hours of 11pm and 6am. What can these people be thinking of? Certainly not the well-being of those in their care I suspect. More than 35% of these patients will be going home in the night to a cold place where they live alone. Not something I would relish after a stay in hospital. The figures don’t tell how many were picked up by friends or relatives so it’s hard to say at this point whether this is a piece of media hype or a genuine hole in our services to the sick. Watch out for this story, there is gathering gloom in the NHS as the government attempts to push its agenda onto doctors and nurses who don’t want it!
What the papers said:
As I watched the Budget and saw Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Alexander I got that “What do they know about anything?” feeling which, polls suggest, is doing the coalition harm.
Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph
The Chancellor and his rich cabinet colleagues cannot begin to understand what it’s like to be so hard-up that a sharp rise in the price of a pasty will hurt.
The Sun editorial
Cameron has little time to put things right – once the public has made up its mind, no force on earth can change it. The proxies and cronies must go.
Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph
The tax has ignited a political firestorm… leading the posh British prime minister, David Cameron, to claim — not all that convincingly — that he, truly, is an aficionado of the pasty (which rhymes with nasty).
Landon Thomas Jnr, New York Times
A pie-eating contest between Cameron and Miliband would perhaps be in order. We cannot wait.
Tina Kaiser, Die Welt
It is time Mr Cameron and his Chancellor realised how disconnected they appear from the people they purport to rule, and whose votes they seek.
Simon Heffer, Daily Mail
And so even the right leaning press starts to swing against the Cameron Chums; look out Dave, time to start planning to get rid of George. Don’t let what happened to Blair/Brown happen to you!
Always keen to bring you a deal, it turns out I can save you a cool 75% on schmoozing with Dave. It’s actually on sale here, for £50K. Presumably all the rest was going straight into Crudd-ass’s pocket.
And you don’t have to eat the prawn cocktail! You can just get drunk at the booze-ups, sorry – receptions, like everyone else.
The link is here, but I republish the text in case you can’t be bothered to scroll to the bottom of the page:
http://www.conservatives.com/Donate/Donor_Clubs.aspx
The Leader’s Group
Annual membership: £50,000 Chairman: Howard Leigh
The Leader’s Group is the premier supporter Group of the Conservative Party. Members are invited to join David Cameron and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches.
It looks as though you get drinks and lunch as well…and there is a new verb in the vocabulary – Daveing – which describes the activity of sticking your head up…well you know the place!
I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that some elements of our society are sick, while everyone else is OK.
Let’s think about what happened in the last few days without getting caught up in emotional responses of repugnance, revenge or retribution.
Many thousands of people, in what appears to have been a series of events spread by contagion and mimicry, across the country in more than 25 locations, have suddenly decided to break the rules, ignore the consequences and help themselves…that last phrase is important; it is the core of the rioters’ behaviour.
Some of these people are young and black (and therefore a recognizable ‘other’ culture) but many are not. Teachers, graduates, females and professionals are also involved.
Where did they get these ideas from?
I think this behaviour is merely a street version that they have internalized and regenerated based on what they have seen the elite of society doing. Here are three ‘educational’ events that suggest you can help yourself and get away with it:
The investment bankers & traders earning millions in bonuses and fees from selling dubious, often worthless instruments to their own clients. This is explained and detailed at length in the Cannes Prizewinning, ‘Inside Job’. You will get the entire summary here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk
Here’s a little graph showing the rise in bankers’ ‘earnings’ versus you and me. Many of those on the streets didn’t have any earnings at all:
Next learning experience – their own elected representatives, the MP’s. For 2 months or more last year the Telegraph gradually released details of the extent of the stealing (called expenses fiddling) by MP’s. You will find a complete list here:
Obviously there are matters of degree and dispute just as there will be with our rioters, about who did what and how serious it was. But just scroll down the list, it is very, very long! So far I have been able to find only three custodial sentences and of those, one MP is out after serving just 4 months of a 16-month sentence. No wonder people get the idea that the consequences for helping yourself may not be that bad!
Also, if they were so intent on just stealing, why did so many fires get started and so much violent destructiveness occur? It was as if they were so desperate they wished to burn down the very world they lived in and strike out at anything that represented the establishment. How did they become so frantic?
That brings us to the third educational event – the Government’s austerity programme and their publicisation of it. It is indisputable that the Government have used the power of fear and nightmares to mobilise the population into acceptance of a desperate situation. For a year now we have been hearing tales of how dreadful it is…how we must cut the deficit…how unsustainable our debts are. How everyone has to take some losses – even those who have next to nothing to start with.
This, I believe has created a cloud of anxiety across the land and no-one has listened to the more reasoned voices of two of the world’s greatest economists, Paul Krugman and Joe Stigliz who have consistently pointed out that in a period of very low interest rates and low inflation, debt is not the problem, stimulating growth and job creation is the issue. Have a look here:
http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/Crisis.cfm
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
All we have heard is how bad it is, how it’s getting worse and may not get better for a generation. Unsurprisingly the young feel abandoned and dismissed, especially those who did not get their 3 A*’s at A level. Finally, the markets have picked it up and have sustained the greatest sequence of successive losses since 1929. Who has been telling them all how bad it is? The bloke in the picture at the top of this post is certainly one of them.
Make no mistake, I’m not condoning violence but I don’t think these people just generated their riots out of poor parenting and bad habits – or because they are inferior in some way. This is a tempting rationale – to descry & portray them as ‘atypical’ elements. The truth is more sinister; they are simply copying their betters.
Miraculously YouTube has allowed me to post videos of more than 15 minutes length. So over the next few days I will re-organise those I split into parts back into complete films. Here is the first, Shaun Woodward on political brands with some telling points about the Tories austerity strategy and their deviation from rebuilding themselves as the nice, charming Tories that you no longer had to fear.
I couldn’t say it as well, but Will Hutton (see link below) points out with unerring clarity the importance of the state in all our lives. It is simply hogwash to decry it as useless, out-of-date, inferior to ‘private’ organisations. Who will clear up the Southern Cross mess? Why, it will be you and me, via the State.
Who will support the less well-off students through Uni? Us again, via taxes and the State.
Who will look after you when you’re old. If you haven’t pissed them off too much, it will be your family – if they have the resources. If not it will be the state who provide some element of care for you from health to meals to residence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/12/will-hutton-economy-coalition-capitalism
I would love to hear ideas on how we can collaborate to support appropriate behaviour by the state/bureaucracy in these days of inter-connectedness. I cannot see why I can have lively relevant exchanges of information with 200 friends on FB but can’t get one single thing across or talk to the same person with my local government issues – schools, roads, refuse collection – you know the stuff. The state is hated not just because it holds the cards, but because it treats people with so little respect, humanity and consistency.