I really
don't know how the Queen managed to keep a straight face when she made her
customary speech at the opening of Parliament this week. Given that its theme
was the necessity for cost-cutting, there is hilarious irony in the fact that
tremendous expense is involved in the custom and pageantry of its delivery.
Perhaps her conscience was assuaged by the recent tiny reduction in the cost of
the whole performance: her speech is no longer hand-written on goat-skin vellum
with a special ink that takes three days to dry. In these straitened times one
must suffer with the people, even if it means having one's speeches inscribed
on mere (imitation goatskin) paper.
When
Gutenburg first successfully employed his printing presses he could not
possibly have envisaged that 560 years later, on a small island off the
mainland of Europe, there would still be a solitary scribe labouring over
goatskin as if nothing had changed in the intervening years. Nor could he, visionary
though he was, foresee that his invention would produce one of the earliest side
effects of industrialisation - putting scribes out of work. I do have some
sympathy for those scribes - there would have been no job-seekers' allowance
(JSA) for them to fall back on - but I would rather praise Gutenburg for his
innovation than damn him for the temporary woes of a few workers. And he was
himself later put out of work by the banker who lent him the money to build the
presses and then confiscated them when the cash failed to flow back quickly
enough for his liking. The visionary had not taken into account the fact that
he was producing more books than were required by the very small numbers of
customers who could actually read.
Reading is
now more widespread, but the capitalist model remains unchanged since those
days. Any business which cannot pay its way must forfeit its assets, and its
directors must suffer humiliation and possible financial distress. Unless, of
course, that business is a bank - in which case it is lavished with public funds
and its directors are permitted to retire anonymously and in considerable material
comfort.
I expect
that the scribes of old soon found alternative employment, perhaps as
typesetters in the growing industry of printing, but the prospects for today's unemployed
are not so promising. The rapacious activities of the banks have laid waste to the
economies of entire nations. As a result, businesses are damaged: many are wary
of taking on new employees; start-up companies struggle to find backers and unemployment
is becoming the norm for young people who should really be climbing career
ladders.
But we
Europeans are sticking together, helping each other out and jointly laying the
foundations of economic regeneration. Only last week I had to transfer money to
someone in Spain and discovered that my bank had discounted its fee for that
particular transaction. Spain, as we know, is short of money, so I'd like to
think it was a 'philanthropic' rate - but no one at the bank was available to
comment. Then there is the Cypriot couple who have just become neighbours.
Having graduated from Manchester University with more degrees than I had
thought possible they now describe themselves, with considerable inventive
flair, as "international job-seekers". (Perhaps this enables them to
qualify for enhanced JSA subsidised by the EU and known as IJSA).
But, now
that Europe is impoverished and the subsidies are on the wane, many Britons have
concluded that their flirtation with the Continent has run its course and it's
time to retrench. It is, after all, dangerously republican territory. Even in those
few countries where monarchs remain they are mere shadows of the real thing.
Just look at that Queen of the Netherlands who abdicated last week - without
ceremony. She simply signed a form - and I bet it was on A4 copy paper printed
out on an inkjet.
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