Well, we may not have had much bread but today we had the circus.

I was glad of the day off but I can’t say I feel any better for it. The next few years are going to be rough economically. The Government has done the exact opposite of what was required to ameliorate the recession.

Still, nothing like a bit of pageantry to distract the plebs, eh?

I wish the couple concerned nothing but well for themselves but the advantages they have will (bar the revolution, and perhaps even in that remote likelihood) ensure they want for nothing. The bride in particular seems to be much more in tune with her new husband than her groom’s mother ever was. In the bits that I saw there was a perceptible warmth between them; a warmth entirely absent from Charles and Diana’s relationship. Their marriage might have a better chance of long term success as a result.

Diana was a lamb to the slaughter; a sacrifice to (some of) the British public’s appetite for figureheads and royal babies to bill and coo over. Her tragedy – if it was a tragedy – was that she didn’t realise it, at least not until it was way too late, and then she didn’t accept that noblesse oblige.

The purpose of a royal consort is to provide an heir – and spare. Once Diana had done that she became an adjunct, decoration, window dressing. Her personality couldn’t cope with that nor that Charles had never been interested in her beyond his dynastic responsibilities: before their marriage they had met very few times.

She did however carve out for herself a niche as an object of glamour, a celebrity.

I don’t think the new Duchess of Cambridge (and Countess of Strathearn) is as innocent, and there is no doubt that she has had a “normal” courtship with her husband. Ten years is enough to get to know anybody.

Doubtless the dynastically necessary babies will be along soon enough.

Our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, showed himself in his true colours today when he tried to put down a Labour MP who was heckling him.

His phrase, “Calm down, dear,” is all very well for Michael Winner (he, after all, is only doing commercials) but ill becomes the head of the UK government. There’s a video on You Tube here. Note the glee too with which it was greeted by the MPs behind him and the insufferable George Osborne beside him.

This is the true face of “Call me Dave.” A person who thinks others are not worth a degree of respect in his dealings with them and who deploys casually dismissive, arguably sexist, language as soon as his guard is down.

One of the many people who have taken out super injunctions – that reprehensible state of affairs where the press is not allowed to publish, and hence the public is not even allowed to know, that an injunction against publication of certain material has been obtained – has turned out to be none other than BBC journalist Andrew Marr.

This is almost unsatirisable. A journalist takes legal steps to ensure other journalists may not publish something? Bizarre.

At least he seems to have come round to the realisation that hiding things is the opposite of the business he is in. It’s not as if he’s a politician.

But, to lower this to the level of the flippant, does anyone else think that a strange part of this story is that Andrew Marr has somehow managed to be attractive to more than one woman?

More than several fliers with respect to the Scottish Parliament election (upcoming on May 5^th) have landed on the doormat recently.

The usual suspects; Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, SNP, Green, UKIP. The last two of these were for the list vote only.

The UKIP one mentions their Scottish team; Donald, Brian, Mark, Mitch, Anthony, Otto, Bill.

Wait a minute. Otto? Otto?

Fine old British name; as the Pub Landlord might not have said.

As part of the Government’€™s response to the financial crisis they have introduced an acceleration of the already planned increase in the age of retirement (or, rather, of the age when entitlement to a state pension begins.) Okay, people are living longer and thus pensions will eventually cost more overall – but in the short term, when unemployment is swinging upwards, and doesn’t look set to fall any time soon, it seems counter-productive to me to reduce the opportunities for youngsters to get a job by making potential retirees stay on in their posts. Of course the posts may just be left unfilled anyway, making things worse still.

Among all this there has been a lot of talk in government and newspaper circles about “€œfeather-bedded”€ public service pensions.

Let’s be clear about this. The vast majority of public service employees are by no means well paid. [There may be exceptions in the police, the very highest echelons of the Civil Service, judges and Army, Navy and Air Force officers (as opposed to squaddies, ratings and aircraftmen/women.) Even these remain dwarfed by the salaries and bonuses of company executives and the bankers who got us into the present financial straits yet somehow still continue to benefit while the rest of us pay the price.]

In effect public provision has for years been got on the cheap. Any pension entitlement accrued during public employment was some sort of a recompense for this low pay. Yet it seems this explicit contract is to be cast aside.

Here I quote the view of a former public servant (taken from his blog which is private, for legal reasons.)

I think I was fortunate to retire from the Civil Service when I did, in respect that the pension arrangements are more or less what was promised throughout the 30 years that I worked in the Civil Service.

But I had a pension.

One more thing.

For teachers it used to be the case, and may still be, that, actuarially, they would die within three years of retirement if they stayed teaching till aged 65. (In effect they never got back the money they had paid in to the pension scheme.) If retiring earlier – with the concomitant reduction in pension since their total contributions and thus entitlement will be smaller – they could expect to live for a few years more. It follows that, if the age of retirement for teachers is raised, more will die before really benefiting from even the reduced pension it is proposed to allow them than if things are left as they are now.

Neat trick that.

I see our PM, the inestimable Mr Irresponsible wants to use our already overstretched military forces to become embroiled in the situation in Libya. (There is by the way a fantastic typo in the headline of that link.)

Has he learned nothing from our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? And he’s just downscaled the RAF’s training programme, the very service whose input will be most required in the most likely operations in Libya.

Any use of UK military force in Libya is liable to backfire as it did in those other countries. Can DC guarantee no innocent casualties from such a development? Even deaths or injuries to those loyal to Gaddafi, those in the firing line in other words, could be a provocation too far.

If Gadaffi subsequently goes their families will resent the fact they were killed/injured by foreigners. If he stays his regime is not going to be enamoured of us. Either way our national interest is weakened.

While I personally would like to see him gone Gadaffi’s destiny ought to lie in the hands of Libyans.

DC’s survival is unfortunately not in the hands of us Britons. We won’t get the chance to chuck him out for another four years (think about it) by which time the damage he and his smirking side-kick George Osborne – have you ever seen such a smug, irritating so-and-so, he outranks even Kenneth Baker in that regard – will have done to the fabric of British life will be unrepairable.

Where are the Lib Dems when you need them?

Forgotten they’re supposed to be jointly in charge, it would seem.

I see Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has said it’s time to stop banker bashing. I saw a clip of him on the television news claiming this in the House of Commons.

This might be considered a little hypocritical of him coming only one day since he levied a tax on banker’s bonuses. A tax at which said bankers were said to be “livid.”

Except I don’t buy it. It’s much more Machiavellian than that.

Do you believe for a minute that these bankers were not aware this tax was on the cards? Cue much confected outrage.

These people have some nerve considering they bankrupted the country and continue to reward themselves handsomely for it while the rest of us mere mortals will be the ones paying the price.

By the way; do you get a bonus from your work? (I certainly don’t. Moreover, I don’t expect one.)

And why should you?

Why should anyone?

Your salary is your remuneration. You knew what it would be when you took the job on. Just exactly who needs a bonus to turn up and do their job?

And don’t give me this rubbish about going abroad if the money’s not enough. Let’s call that threat by its proper name. Blackmail.

Back to George Osborne.

He said that because of a deal he’s cooked up with his banker cronies – the deal which he says means it’s time to stop banker bashing – that there would be, and I quote, “less bonuses.”

Not, you’ll note – as I did – “less paid in bonuses” and certainly not “fewer bonuses.”

So much for an expensive private education.

George; you’re not much of an advert for Eton, nor for Magdalen College, Oxford.

I really don’t know what our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, thought he was doing (beyond echoing Angela Merkel) when he said multiculturalism had failed in the UK.

To me he seemed to be saying that all minorities ought to become the same as the rest of us.

This demands the question, what rest of us?

For there is no single British culture. For a start there are four distinct national areas in the UK and the “culture” of each differs from the others. Even within each of the four areas culture differs from place to place. It differs within any city. Even within a town. Or village.

Now, I would agree that people who fail to learn English are going to struggle to come to terms with life in the UK and they should be encouraged to do so, by all means. (If I went to live abroad I would make every effort to learn the language.)

I would also agree that anyone who seeks to commit, or carries out, acts of indiscriminate murder (or murder of any stamp come to that) ought to be prosecuted – but that applies to anyone, not just to “minorities.”

In any case, the problem – if it is a problem – is not existential. A few disaffected, and misguided, youths are not a threat to the fabric of the UK nor to the British way of life; whereas laws implemented in over-reaction most certainly are. Neither have the 7/7 attacks on London Transport nor any subsequent actions been as extensive as those of the IRA were.

[By the way, we are all immigrants. There were no humans in Britain till our ancestors migrated via Europe from Africa. As a consequence, none of us has the right to say that others should not come to make their homes here. What we do have is the right to expect and insist that they obey our laws.]

As for the rest of it, the Prime Minister seemed to me to be suggesting that perhaps everyone should be (let’s take an example) members of the Church of England. This is a strange way to try to win over people who may be disaffected as a result of their perceptions of the prevailing attitudes of most Britons towards them and their religious affiliation. To tell them that to be accepted they must abandon what they think defines them is not going to persuade them that they are wrong. Quite the opposite.

This is a Tory playing to the Tory right – and giving succour to the more extreme right wing. I am strongly reminded of the remarks of Margaret Thatcher (of unblessed memory) about “swamping.”

I have two words here for David Cameron.

Guy Fawkes.

Four hundred years ago it was Roman Catholics who were disaffected and the terrorists of their day (albeit the then government knew every detail of the Gunpowder Plot.) Excepting Northern Ireland (and there any dissidents’ wishes are particular not general – and not in any case dedicated to the overthrow of the British state) most British RCs no longer have a grievance against the government – no more so than any other Britons anyway – and would not resort to violence to relieve themselves of it.

Just give it a few hundred years; problem solved.

It was a US citizen, Thomas Jefferson, their third President no less, who said that, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

That may be the price, but what is the cost?

Looking at the shooting of US Congresswomann Gabrielle Giffords (and 23 others, six of whom died) then it might be said that the cost of freedom is the loss of human life.

US citizens have a remarkable range of freedoms, not the least of which is that of free speech. They also have the freedom to own and use weapons. Both of these are, I understand, constitutionally guaranteed (or at least people believe they are.)

The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may, however, suggest that these two freedoms might be incompatible.

In June 2010 a website associated with prominent Republican Sarah Palin published a set of targets of Democrats who had voted for President Obama’s health-care reforms and highlighted each of their districts with the cross-hairs of a rifle.

Giffords’s Republican opponent in the recent elections, Jesse Kelly, went further, publishing as a campaign message, “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (The punctuation is his.)

Now this may have been a simple invitation to some “harmless” target practice with the candidate on a Saturday afternoon….. but it reads like incitement to murder. And Mr Kelly should have seen that possibility and therefore avoided the phraseology. On the other hand, perhaps he didn’t care.

Taken along with the crosshairs poster (see link above) his invitation becomes more of a (sorry about the pun) smoking gun.

There has been an unfortunate coarsening of political discourse in the US over my lifetime, to the extent that now the levels of vitriol are insane.

I mean that last word literally. (People have taken leave of their senses if they believe their present President is not a US citizen; or come to that, that he is a Muslim.)

I have mentioned this before when I predicted prior to his election that Barack Obama would be subject to non-stop hounding, and worse, if he were to be elected. What has occurred subsequently has, incredibly, surpassed those expectations of mine.

I repeat here that the problem seems to be that Republicans do not seem to accept the legitimacy of Democrats elected to office.

Democrats are somehow or other deemed to be un-American. (The echoes of McCarthy are not coincidental) and consequently demonised.

I realise that the problem of freedom and guns is not altogether new. And in my lifetime in the US political arena it has been Democrats, or those who could be thought not to be Republican, who have been the victims of assassination (the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King.)

President Reagan was shot, yes, but that did not seem to be a political act. Plus he survived.

Amazingly the same President Reagan seems to be the source of another quote about freedom:-

“Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.”

Note that.

Every individual life is precious.

It follows that you should not go around shooting people.

No matter what your disagreement with them.

The price of freedom is not only eternal vigilance, it is also restraint.

I saw this story on the television news last week.

Cue much in the way of shock! horror! reactions – especially from the Pensions Minister – but my first instinct was to disbelieve it. It is only a projection after all. (A less kind interpretation would be to say it is an estimate, even less kindly a guesstimate.)

Who is to say that the increase in numbers of those living beyond 100 will be sustained in the long term? Who knows all the factors that contribute to it?

Some certainly – better medical care, fewer diseases, fitter lifestyles – but all?

And what of the ongoing obesity epidemic of which we hear so much? Is obesity not a factor involved in shortening of lifespan? Is this not likely to render the estimate unreliable? One might say totally unreliable. And what if a more virulent strain of AIDS or BSE were to strike?

I would perhaps have given the concern over these projections more weight had it not come from the Department of Work and Pensions, an organisation which seems bent on increasing the age at which people become eligible for receiving the UK state pension. Doesn’t this estimate play perfectly into their hands?

By all means encourage people to save for their retirement. But…

In a time of high unemployment and job losses – a time which we are surely entering given the Coalition Government’s policies – would it not make more sense to reduce the pension age? That would have the benefit of freeing up jobs which younger people who would otherwise be unemployed could then fill. At the very least, until happy days are here again (and when will that be, if ever?) do not exacerbate the problem.

But of course the Government is not in the least concerned with unemployment. It is actively stoking it after all.