DRAMA

is a good guess for completing the missing letters in the word D??MA. Wordle enthusiasts will probably be aware that there is another good guess.

Hums and Haws

 

Since 2001 the koala population of Eastern Australia has halved. They are under constant threat from the destruction of their habitats, bush fires, drought and disease (especially Chlamydia). The government has designated them 'endangered' to raise public awareness and support various initiatives to protect them.

Fairer Franchise

Democracy may be the best of a bad bunch of forms of government, but can be very regressive. The grey brigade (to which I belong) is a powerful voting lobby. A political party that seeks to redress the grossly unfair share of Government resources it receives (see previous post) does so at its peril. A young voter may have 60 or more years of life ahead of them whereas I can expect to live only another 6 years on average. It surely cannot be just that my vote carries equal weight in determining my 18-year-old son's future.

I have a simple remedy to reduce my power at the ballot box as I get older and make it more likely that future Governments will be motivated to study the interests of younger generations. The crosses of electors between the ages of 18 and 50 (say) would count as one full vote. Thereafter the weight our votes would tapered in a linear fashion down to zero for anyone over 100. Thus, for example, the vote of someone aged 75 would carry only half the weight of of the vote of someone of 50 or under.

It has to be admitted, however, that since the electoral success of the Conservative party depends heavily on the grey vote, my modest proposal will have to wait for a more progressive alliance to take it up.

Tax me more, Gov

In The Economist this week the columnist Bagehot points out that 'shrinkflation' -- a stealthy commercial device for raising prices without the customer noticing by reducing the weight, volume, quantity or quality of standard items -- is also used by Government when they discreetly reduce, or even remove, benefits and services without raising taxes. Legal aid is cut, the Police, with Government connivance, largely ignore the crime of fraud, while the NHS eats up an ever larger fraction of the State spending, with its share likely to reach 44% by 2024 compared with 27% in 2000. As we have seen with the impending rise in National Insurance contributions, eventually something has to give.

Even more shocking is how this diminishing State munificence is unequally shared among the voting cohorts. The British Government currently spends £20,000 per year on each young person and £40,000 per year on folk like me in their late 80s; the current figures of around 3m over-80s is expected to rise to 4.4m by 2030. Unless politicians take unpopular measures to dramatically stimulate economic growth, some of us will need to pay more into the Exchequer's coffers. While people living only on a State pension are struggling desperately to make very modest ends meet in the face of 6--7% price inflation, there are many like me with an index-linked professional pension and significant assets who live a life of middle-class comfort, to a large extent cushioned against the vagaries of market forces. I believe we should contribute more for the unfair share of the nation's wealth we receive.