Timothy 5:18

So is the labourer worthy of his hire?  We've been down this road before, but it's come up again because Vince Cable has apparently criticised the One Direction boy band over their reputed earnings of £25m between them last year.  Of course. as the grandfather of three girls, I know that it is a definite no-no to say a word against the "fab five", and Cable has back-pedalled furiously saying that he misunderstood what he was being asked, but the question he posed remains valid - given the austerity in which most people find themselves these days, is it acceptable that some individuals are receiving what by comparison seem obscene amounts of money for doing what appears to be not-a-lot?  And the answer is as it always was - if you have a particular skill which is in demand - be it making music (I use the word loosely), playing football or investment banking, then your remuneration will be determined by the market - you will receive what people are prepared to pay you. There is nothing to be gained by comparing what you get paid with what they get paid - apart from making yourself envious!

Ding dong...

As a follow-up to yesterday's post. I rather think Mrs Thatcher would be pleased that there are those who are openly celebrating her death.  OK so some of what's going on is puerile and crass bad manners, but at least it shows she made an impact. Better to be hated than ignored, perhaps?

Where do you stand?

So - while I was away, the obvious big story was the death of Margaret Thatcher, and the description of her which kept cropping up was "divisive".  Well she sure divided our house.  My wife never forgave her for - as she saw it - destroying the industrial West Midlands as the manufacturing heartland (or at least one of them) of the country, and you can certainly still drive round here, particularly in the West Bromwich-Dudley-Wolverhampton area and see whole tracts of wasteland where there were once thriving factory estates.  Me?  I  perhaps took a rather more pragmatic approach of being thankful that we at last had a government who were prepared to take on the powerful unions who, in my book at least, were far more responsible for the decline in local industry by making unreasonable wage demands which priced our goods out of the market.  There is so much that one could say, but I think that it is at least arguable that Thatcher was the product of a situation of economic decline rather than the cause of it.

Back with you.

Nice week away although the weather could have been kinder - perishing cold for the most part.  And Seabass did us no favours - came in 13th I think it was.  Ah well - you win some and you lose some - and that goes for holiday weather as much as for bets on the gee-gees.

Taraa!

Off for the traditional family Easter holiday - the Gower this year.  Just time before I go to give you my crazy system pick for today's Grand National.  So get your money on Seabass - or maybe not?

Safe as....??

I have a friend with family in Cyprus who now face losing a significant slice of their hard-earned savings as part of the bail-out "deal" arranged between their government and the EU.  Strictly speaking they won't lose this money - what will happen is that it will be converted into shares in the bank where their money is. Problem is that these shares will be worthless and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.  So apart from feeling sorry for them, should I be concerned? What does worry me is that a precedent has been created - up until now it seems to have been accepted that any pain caused by a country being in financial difficulties should be shared by everybody - i.e. dealt with by raising taxes and/or cutting services and such-like.  But here for the first time a specific group of people are being hit much harder than everybody else, and it's difficult to see how they could be in any way considered specially responsible for the mess Cyprus finds itself in. So, a worrying precedent.

Doesn't do what it says on the tin?

So the Government are proposing a second toll motorway?  It may well create jobs and possibly help the country's overall economic situation, but if the experience of the M6 Toll is anything to go by, it will not in any significant way act as a relief road taking traffic off the M4 motorway which it is to be built next to.  See my post of 13/1/06 for the reasons why this is so.  The charge on the M6 Toll by the way is now £5.50 for a car.

Join the dots - what dots??

It's depressing to have to say - here we go again.  Sunderland have appointed Paulo Di Canio as their new manager - presumably on the basis of his footballing credentials.  We can argue about whether or not his credentials warrant the confidence the club have put in him, but what is it that the media want to talk about?  His politics!  The fact that several years ago he described himself as a Fascist.  So what's the connection?  Unless he intends to have the team goose-step onto the pitch to the strains of the Horst Wessel-Lied, there just isn't one.  Get a life, folks!

Levelling the playing-field?

Somewhat ironic that Lord Carey (ex-Archbishop of Canterbury) should complain of Christians feeling "persecuted", when throughout the centuries, the past masters of persecution have been the Christian (and other) churches.  I think in great part the current complaints of religious leaders about "secularisation" is down to their irritation that they no longer wield the unquestioning authority which they have been used to.

The six storage lockers of Henry VIII?

I'm quite taken with a couple of American TV programmes shown over here - Storage Wars and Pawn Stars.  Both are concerned with people looking to find (Storage Wars) or buy (Pawn Stars) something of value, and thereby make a killing - sort of Antiques Roadshow crossed with Ocean's Eleven.  Good entertainment, but what I can't understand is that - over here - they are shown on the History Channel.  Just what have these programmes got to do with history??