The Blog of Hubbers

I saw this staggering statistic about English public spending in the latest issue of Money Week.

If public spending had only grown in line with inflation since 1997, we could have abolished income tax, corporation tax, capital-gains tax and inheritance tax, leaving the taxpayer £200bn better off.

Governments have gotten very rich in the ten years of financial boom prior to the onset of the credit crunch. In the UK the Labour government has managed to spend it all and nothing was put aside for leaner times like um a global credit crunch.

I suspect people will look back on the UK governments fiscal looseness during the boom and wonder whether they were mad, drunk, on crack or all of the above.

As they say on the rssday.org site:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content. The video below illustrates the process.

The previous owners of “May Day” the communists and other hard core lefties had a march outside my offices in Holborn London in protest.

This morning I got up at 4am and rode to Hyde Park Corner to participate in the Australian and New Zealand Army Core dawn service to commemorate the Aussie and Kiwi soldiers who have gone to war for their countries. The service starts at dawn to match the time that the ANZACs first hit Gallipoli beach in Turkey 93 years ago. Eight months of bitter military stalemate later 2721 New Zealand, 8709 Australian, 33,072 British, 10,000 French and 87,000 Turkish soldiers were dead.

New Zealand has had worse days while fighting for King and country but the Gallipoli campaign was the first.

In 1914, New Zealand’s population was just over one million. When the war began 124,211 men joined up and 100,444 went overseas. This was a staggering 10 percent of NZ’s population. 40% of all men aged between 18 and 45 signed up. Per capita New Zealand made the largest contribution to World War 1.

The last ANZAC dawn service I attended in London was on a hungover Saturday morning in 1998 just after I first arrived in London. That service was at an Australian memorial in Battersea Park and only a few dozen people turned up to hear legendary Australian orator Clive James speak. From memory he talked about how modern historian’s views about the Gallipoli campaign had changed and as he was saying what they had changed to a slow low flying plane flew over and I missed it all.

Today’s service at the new New Zealand memorial on Hyde Park Corner was attended by a much larger crowd as ANZAC commemorations seem to be undergoing something of a global revival. This service was a much more religious affair with lots of prayers and songs to Jesus the so called “prince of peace” etc. I guess it’s hard to tell young men to run towards machine guns if they don’t believe they will go to a better place when it inevitable goes badly wrong for them.

None of my Aussie/Kiwi mates who said they would come actually made the early start. Excuses included: sleeping, over-sleeping laziness trumping patriotism and just getting back from Nam.

Today at lunch I was attempting to change the pin on a Barclays Visa (unsuccessfully) and as guy in front of me left and I stepped up the ATM the machine it issues me with around two hundred pounds in COLD HARD CASH CASH!

Naturally I grabbed the money and tracked down the guy who had just gone into the bank. He took the money without saying a word so I hope I got the right person.

My thoughts

If I got the wrong person he is now telling his mates that he went to the bank and as he left a complete stranger gave him £200!

When did cash machines start issuing cash AFTER the card had been returned? I thought that had stopped years ago because people were much more likely to leave without their card than without their cash.

I am not sure how I have lived in London for over 10 years and have never taken any notice of the London Marathon. This year a good friend ran so we were forced to sit up and take notice. It was an awesome day that was well worth getting off the couch for :)

One of the things that really impressed me is the large number of people who run in costume. Some do it because it is fun but I suspect most do it as part of their sponsorship arrangements. Like the guy dressed as Borat in the photo below.

Through the miracle of public transport we managed to see Cam in three different places during the run, at the Cutty Sark, Canark Wharf and finally at Tower Hill. Every time we saw him we yelled and screamed support and offered beer.

One of the other things that really surprised me was that a lot of runners put their names on the front of their shirts and a lot of spectators yelled support to runner they didn’t know if they though they looked like they needed a boost. That was something that was very cool about the marathon, how people reached out to complete strangers when they were really suffering.

Cam finished his first marathon without stopping to walk once in 4 hours and 13 minutes and he raised £3600 for prostate cancer. An awesome effort.

This is one of the buses in the Olympic Torch procession through London. The were very clever by choosing to play very loud music to drown out the booing and chanting by the protesters. To distract us further the next vehicle to pass was full of dancing girls!

Rachel and I went down to Russell Square to see the Olympic Torch march and associated protests. Hundreds of protesters turned up to make their voices heard.

Naturally the police were out in force to make sure the torch reached it’s goal and to stop any trouble.

What really surprised me was the large number of pro-Chinese people there.

Many of the China supporters were very vocal and more than happy to argue their case. Their arguments came down to a few main points:

• Sport and politics should be separate
• Tibetans kill Chinese people you can see it on Youtube
• You haven’t been to China so you can’t have an opinion

These seriously were the points made by many seemingly educated young Chinese men and women as a justification for the recent violent actions of the Chinese government. The irony of engaging in vigorous debate to support a regime that violently suppresses all dissenting views was lost on them.

Personally I think we are all lucky to be living in a country where people can have a vigorous and heated debate on the side of the road.

This is my favourite photo of the day. It makes me wonder if the huge number of police present are part of the Chinese dream.

It’s going to be an interesting year for all involved and sadly I don’t think we have seen the end of the blood.

Today I made and appearance on Close Up (click this to see the video while it is up) an evening current affairs show in NZ.

Yesterday Cam sent around an email asking if anyone was willing to get up at 6am to head down to Buckingham Palace to participate in a news show about Sir Edmund Hillary. I was the only one dumb enough to do it and was dutifully up at 6am and on my bike 5 minutes later. When we go there it turned out to be a piece about an English guy and a Kiwi girl who dated 27 years ago and are now getting back together. It was kinda sweet and at the same time kinda weird and I got the feeling they were a bit nuts.

My guess is that Mark Sainsbury (the TV presenter with the pink tie and huge soup strainer in the middle) got permission to head to London for the Sir Edmund Hillary memorial yesterday and they decided to make the most of the air fares by getting him to do some Kiwi interest stories for the rest of the week.

If this is Wednesday’s story I think it is going to be a slow news week indeed.

That being said though we met some nice people (of course they were nice they were Kiwis!) and had a few laughs.

Two of the nicest people we met were an English girl and a Kiwi guy who are married couple with two children together who have been together for 5 years. They recently applied for the husband to get a UK visa and UK Home Office said they were faking their marriage to get him a visa and the kids were just part of their elaborate plan. They have no right to appeal. That should have been the news story!

My flatmate manages a Hotel Chocolat on Kensington High Street and today one of his staff found a wallet. Before he could have a look at it the store radio that links all of the other stores in the high street and the police that another wallet had been found. And another. And another …

The wallets had been deliberately dropped by guerrilla marketers promoting a new TV programme Dirty Sexy Money. An interesting idea but probably not too successful unless loads of idiots blog about it.

Twice a day I ride past the Chinese embassy in London. It isn’t well marked so you would never know it was there if it weren’t for the permanent peaceful protest by supporters of Falun Gong. They are ticked off that their government imprisons them and sells their internal organs before they have finished using them. The other give away is the cop with a machine gun across the road.

Tonight the usual one or two man protest was slightly larger as about a hundred people turned up to protest the deaths of a number of protesters in Tibet. Naturally there was a much larger number of police with automatic weapons. The good news is that we live in a democracy where civil rights are protected by the law and the police don’t gun people down in the street who disagree with the government.