Growing number of water customers find bills unfair or even unaffordable
May 8th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The statuary consumer body for water and sewage services is CCWater and it commissions each year a survey of how customers feel about their services and their bills.
The latest annual tracking research report from CCWater is published today and the key findings include:
• One in five water customers say their water bill is not affordable (up from 1 in 8 in 2012);
• Few than six out of ten water customers consider their water and sewerage charges to be fair;
• 93 per cent of customers are satisfied with their water supply, and 87 per cent with sewerage services; however,
• Only 70 per cent of customers are satisfied with the value for money of those services.
The press release which provides more highlights is here and the actual report can be found here.
I am particular interested in the CCWater findings because I am the independent Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water which supplies drinking water to 2.1 million customers in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire.
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
OMG. Jack’s back – and he’s here in London
May 7th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’ve just watched the first two episodes of the new series of “24” entitled “Live Another Day”.
I saw the first four series but then dropped out. I was attracted to the current series because it will only be 12 episodes and it is set in my home city of London.
So far, it’s pretty good. I especially like the idea of Stephen Fry as the British Prime Minister.
Apparently the various London authorities were very co-operative with the producers of the new series, but insisted that there be no scene of someone jumping over the ticket barrier on the London Underground in case it gave customers ideas.
I’m sure that no London fare dodger would ever have thought of the notion and that Jack Bauer would always buy a ticket first.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Which was the largest empire in world history?
May 7th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Recently I watched a television programme about Genghis Khan and this raised in my mind just how large was the Mongol Empire whose creation he started?
I had assumed that the largest empire in history was the British Empire and, on checking out the relevant Wikipedia page, i find that I am not wrong. In terms of both geographical size (33.2 million square kilometres) and population (458M), the British Empire was the biggest.
BUT it is possible to make a case that really the Mongol Empire was the greatest. First, in geographical terms, at 33 million square kilometres it was almost exactly the same size at the British Empire. Second, in terms of the proportion of the world population of the time, the British Empire was 20% but the Mongol Empire was 25.6%.
The iranians could argue that, if we are going to measure size by the proportion of the global population of the time, then the largest empire ever was the Achaemenid Empire or First Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great which had 44.48% of the total population within it.
See further data here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
South Africa goes to the polls tomorrow, so here is a short guide to the country’s political system
May 6th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
South Africa is the 12th country – the first in Africa -about which I have chosen to write a short guide to its political system. You can read it here.
I will update it when the results of tomorrow’s general election are known.
If you are interested in the political systems of other major democratic countries, you will find some useful essays here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
How three remarkable women of whom you have never heard produced our modern classification of the stars
May 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) was an American astrophysicist who worked to capture the spectra of multiple stars simultaneously, supported by the so-called Harvard Computers or “Pickering’s Harem”, a team of women researchers under Pickering’s mentorship, to catalog the spectra.
This team included Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), who developed the stellar classification system, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921), who discovered the means to measure the distance from a star to the earth by its spectra, later used to identify other galaxies in the universe.
Later, this team included Cecilia Payne (1900-1979), who developed a good friendship with Cannon; Payne’s thesis based on her work with Cannon was able to determine the composition and temperature of the stars, collaborating with Cannon’s classification system.
The work of these three remarkable women was highlighted in the most recent episode (number 8) in the brilliant television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey“.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Two reviews of “Pompeii”
May 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
You can read the novel [my review here] or see the film [my review here]. They are actually different stories but it’s the same volcanic eruption.
Footnote: My late Italian mother was born and brought up in Naples overlooked by Vesuvius and experienced the last major eruption in March 1944.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Two reviews of “The Book Thief”
May 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
You can read the novel [my review here] or see the film [my review here]. It works better on the page than on the screen.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Thomas Piketty: the French economist bringing capitalism to book
May 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have previously done a posting about “Capital In The Twenty-First Century” by the French economist Thomas Piketty which is a stunning critique of the capitalist system. I explained that few lay people will read it because it is more than 700 pages long with footnotes, graphs and mathematical formulae.
So it is good that economists like Larry Elliot are writing pieces like this one for a general audience.
He summarises the work:
“The gist of Piketty’s book is simple. Returns to capital are rising faster than economies are growing. The wealthy are getting wealthier while everybody else is struggling. Inequality will widen to the point where it becomes unsustainable – both politically and economically – unless action is taken to redistribute income and wealth. Piketty favours a graduated wealth tax and 80% income tax for those on the highest salaries.”
The message is far from universally popular or accepted:
“Piketty finds the right’s hostility strange. Despite the title’s echo of Marx’s magnum opus, he is a mainstream European social democrat rather than a Marxist. His argument is that the world is reverting to the Belle Epoque of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when conservatives such as Bismarck and liberals such as Lloyd George, Keynes and Roosevelt knew that change had to come.”
The book has attracted the attention of people who are in a position to do something about the inequality which it describes:
“Lord (Stewart) Wood, special adviser to Ed Miliband, says it is a “really important book that has hit a nerve with its scale and scope”. Wood is impressed by the way it exposes sweeping historical trends and has shone a light on wealth as an issue. Admiring the analysis is one thing; accepting the policy prescriptions quite another. Labour will steer clear of some of Piketty’s more radical suggestions, although the author of Capital can’t see a problem.
In Britain, the poorest half of the population owns just 3-4% of the wealth. It must be possible to do better than that, Piketty says, brushing aside suggestions that a wealth tax would destroy capitalism. “You can’t say that 1% off the wealth of the richest will kill the economy,” he says.”
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
Why is there no limit to the size of the House of Lords?
May 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I was recently asked this question by an Australian observer.
I explained that there is no fixed number of members in the House of Lords, but currently there are almost 800 active members – many more than in the House of Commons, more than the combined houses of the American Congress or the Indian Parliament (although both of these nations have a federal system), and the second biggest legislative body in the world (after the Chinese National People’s Congress which is effectively a rubber-stamping body).
The number was actually halved to 666 in the reforms of 1999 but, since then, succesive Prime Ministers have been adding new life peers much faster than members are dying. Indeed the current Government has added over 100. Ironically the size of the House of Lords continues to rise at the same time as the House of Commons has legislated to reduce its size.
There is no justification for not capping the size of the House of Lords except that political leaders do not want to limit their opportunities for patronage by nominating new peers. It is a nonsense.
You can access my short guide to the British political system here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller
May 2nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have previously done a posting about “Capital In The Twenty-First Century” by the French economist Thomas Piketty which is a stunning critique of the capitalist system. I explained that few lay people will read it because it is more than 700 pages long with footnotes, graphs and mathematical formulae.
So it is good that Paul Mason has produced this short guide to the work.
He explains:
“Piketty’s argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father’s bank/ministry/TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally.”
How important is this analysis?
“Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics. If the underlying cause of the 2008 bank catastrophe was falling incomes alongside rising financial wealth then, says Piketty, these were no accident: no product of lax regulation or simple greed. The crisis is the product of the system working normally, and we should expect more.”
What is to be done?
“Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards. He calls some of them “utopian” and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them.”
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)