Ring II

So on Easter Monday Kate, Dorani and I went up to the Blue Mountains for a walk. As is the way with these things, we took a good while getting ourselves together: getting a picnic together, driving up there, buying a meat pie. And the first thing we did was go to see an Aboriginal rock art site which involved a boneshaking drive down a dirt road for 30 minutes each way; the rock art, while unusual in the Sydney area because it involved ochre hand prints, wasn't that amazing if you've seen some of the proper stuff around Uluru.

So finally we headed out on a walk that was meant to go along the side of a creek to a pool in which you could have a dip. After a steep descent into the creek gully and a scramble through about 50 metres of vegetation-choked shore, it became apparent that the path had long been washed away and that the fittest rambler would need to do a bit of swimming to complete the route. Given that Kate was about 20 weeks' pregnant at that point, there was no way we were going on so we stopped to catch our breath.

Well I was probably overinfluenced by reading The Wild Places late last year because I decided the trip would not be wasted if I had a little dip in the creek. The water was still as glass where we stopped, teatree brown and dappled with eucalyptus light dropping down from the edge of the gully. So I stripped down to my cossie and slipped in from the edge of a rock.

No sooner did I hit the water than I felt a lithe, lightning movement from the second finger of my left hand. My wedding ring! I peered into the water but it was all stirred up from the splash when I'd hit the water. The ring was definitely not on my finger. So odd, and frustrating, to actually feel it come off! If I was the superstitious type to believe in water sprites, I would have been convinced they'd hustled it from me. For several minutes I peered fruitlessly at the bottom trying to find it, but it was late in the day and we had to get home.

The next Saturday I hired an underwater metal detector and went back, armed with a snorkel and mask and some neoprene boots. Metal detectors these days are pretty smart: this one could tell the difference between different metals just by the sound, so I was quite optimistic about my chances. Wrongly, as it turned out: the first telltale squeak from the detector turned out, after much digging in sand and silt, to be a crushed drinks can. The second, which was very persistent indeed, was a 60cm piece of iron tubing; the last one was a copper pipe-joint. But no ring. Presumably, in the intervening week it had buried itself so deep in the silt that the detector could no longer pick up its presence. Either that, or it really was the water gods, getting back at me for not making a more modest offering before jumping in.

Cutting the UK's deficit - not so hard after all

There's a spiffy interactive graphic on the FT's site giving you the opportunity to act as chancellor of the exchequer and decide which bits of the UK's budget you'd cut so as to balance the books.

One of the things that strikes me after playing around with this is that, considering these issues are all "third rail" ones for British politicians (ie, as with train tracks' third rail, "you touch it, you die"), I didn't find it very difficult to make the necessary cuts. I realise that no politician likes to go out during an election campaign and say unpopular things, but given the level of doom and gloom about the impossibility of Britain ever balancing its budget I was quite shocked how easy it was to win at the game. (That may be because it's only asking you to save £44bn, rather than the £100bn-odd you'd need to eliminate the medium-term UK deficit without faster-than-expected growth or higher-than-expected taxes).

Anyway, it's a fun thing to play around with. The choices are, I guess, a lot easier for me because I'm just some schmo sitting at his computer playing prime minister, rather than a party leader with fellow MPs and advisers and interest groups and voters to worry about. But here's what I went for:

• Ringfence schools and hospitals spending (quite a big handicap, given how much of the budget they eat up)


• 2.5% levy on public sector pensions (yes, there will be angst, but they're absurdly generous compared to what the rest of us will ever get. This long-term liability alone risks toppling the whole budget - and if you can't bite that bullet now in this rather limited way, when can you?)


• Cut public sector jobs to reduce pay bill by 7% (Not an easy one, but this would come mostly from a hiring freeze. Again, everyone is having to freeze new hiring at the moment, and it's not like you couldn't raise it again in future. The police, to name one area of the public sector, are absurdly overstaffed in my experience with them)


• Means test child benefit and disability living allowance (As someone who could in theory be drawing child benefits in about four months time, I still think it's a waste of money. I understand the hallowed principles behind social insurance and non-means-testing, but I think all benefits really ought to be safety nets for the poor, not handouts to the middle class. I can't see why a childless person on £10,000 a year should be subsidising a with-child couple on a combined £100,000 a year)


• Cut police and prison population back to 1997 levels (the police are, like I said above, ridiculously overstaffed and the prison population is a social problem in its own right that should be cut even if it didn't save us money. We shouldn't be putting so many people away. This probably is a bit of a third-rail issue - imagine the gyrations of the Daily Mail during a police strike - but I've got some backup plans, see below)


• Cancel building two aircraft carriers (why do we need these? I mean, seriously?)


• Cut armed forces personnel by 25,000 (ditto. We should drop all this nonsense about being a second-tier power. What are they for? Defending the Turks and Caicos islands?)


• Stop school building for three years (I used to cover construction, and the contractors are making a mint out of the schools building programme. What matters is teachers, not buildings, and if it's only a question of delaying a programme in the grip of a fiscal crisis then I think we can handle it)


• Cut spending to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by 10% (I presume this refers to the transfers under the Barnett formula, by which some of the UK's poorest boroughs in England subsidise richer ones elsewhere. I'd probably keep the spending in Northern Ireland for the sake of both peace and general deprivation, but if it hastens the push for independence by Scotland and Wales - seriously, Wales? - bring it on)


• Withdraw concessionary fares for pensioners (as with other benefits, this should be means-tested)


• Delay Crossrail for 3 years (no one expects it to be built on time anyway)


• Halve spending on road maintenance and upgrades (if it makes driving less attractive that's no bad thing)

I realise there's some politically risky stuff in all that, but there's really nothing that I could see making life much harder for the worst-off in society. If anything, most of the cuts rebalance spending by cutting elements of rich welfare and the law 'n' order 'n' military side of the budget. All that said, there's not such a huge amount of fat there that I'd find it easy to cut much deeper.

OK let's get this started again

I've been a bit absent from this blog for a while. No particular reason - just that blogs are habit-forming, and not blogging is also habit-forming.

So please press here to watch the blog restart: