Financial & Travel Musings

One of the interesting things on the agenda of the new Conservative/Liberal government was the rolling back of the surveillance culture that we seem to have been saddled with in recent years.

There seems to be a security camera almost everywhere you look these days. In the early days they were placed in places which clearly needed them. Thus shops sprouted them like nobodies business in the hope that it would eliminate shop lifting. The snag is that they then needed to recruit security people to watch the cameras and in many cases one suspects that the losses due to shoplifting were smaller than the wages of the security guards. Of course, these days there are the security tags on the products but although I’ve seen the alarm go off many times as I’ve been going in or out of a store, I’ve yet to see anyone other than legitimate customers being stopped.

It’s going to be interesting to see if they get to the point of removing cameras. Somehow I can’t see it happening.

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Whilst the welfare state was a laudable aim back in the 1940s, trying to support those most in need when they fell sick or lost their job, that aim of support in time of need seems to have been lost in recent years.

The problem is that originally the idea was that people would obviously want to get back into work (and be able to) and wouldn’t want to remain dependent on benefits. That view clearly isn’t held by a number of people these days and these people can take advantage of the lack of limits on the help available. For example, take a typical family of two adults, two children who have become unemployed. Very roughly their entitlement would equate to £60 for the adults and £40 each for the children (neglecting, for the moment, any potential housing benefit etc.). That’s a total of £120 a week or around £6000 a year. Actually, it would be more as there’s child benefit of £35 a week so the total in basic income benefits is about £155 a week, £700 a month, £8000 a year (equivalent to a gross salary of around £12,000). Not a massive income for sure but, potentially, one that the family might live on as, of course, there would be assistance with housing costs, free school meals, and a few others.

However, consider instead a family with 10 children. Each child adds £55 a week so that’s £600/week, £2600/month or £32000 per year. Bearing in mind that the benefits are tax-free this equates to a salary of around £50,000. Even though I’m quite highly qualified, I would find it difficult to get that level of salary.

Now, I accept that people with large families don’t necessarily have them to pick up massive benefit payments but even if they don’t, surely there should be some kind of limit in terms of a maximum benefit payment regardless of other circumstances? If not, it would appear that the best plan would be to pop out kids on a regular basis: it can’t be right that the benefit system seems to be actively encouraging that.

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Wendy has been talking quite a lot about the Baby P trial over on Cultured Views during the course of the last lot of months, using as her sources the various newspaper and TV websites reporting on the case.

This afternoon, we received a phone call from the Metropolitan police telling us that we were in contempt of court and that if we did not immediately remove all information about the case from the website they would seek an injunction to have the site taken down. Whilst Wendy was in the course of removing this material they took it upon themselves to have all of our websites on that host taken down. That’s despite the only one that had anything about that case being Cultured Views and that Wendy had already complied with their request.

However, all of the websites which she used as her sources for the posts remain. Much as we might like to imagine that Cultured Views was the leading authority on the case concerned, in reality the authorities lie among the traditional news organisations such as the BBC, the Mirror, the Sun and, of course, the more new-media sources of wikipedia and answers.com. A number of these go so far as to list the real name of the baby concerned along with a heap of other information which, in the interests of a free society, would be best left unknown. And, yes, in a free society we do need to keep the identity of even the most “obviously” guilty party a secret until they are convicted.

The problem, of course, is that the courts continue to work on the basis that the jurors hearing the case are ignorant of the facts of the case except for those which are put across to them during the trial. In the Internet age that seems unlikely to be a realistic stance in the case of high profile cases. After all, even “deleting” the information doesn’t work when google et al cache so many websites and, honestly, could you really select jurors who knew nothing about this particular case? Surely, it’s better to assume that jurors will know at least some details of the case in advance and allow for that in the trial?

It is good though to see that censorship doesn’t work these days and you still can read the articles in the caches despite the site itself being down.

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