Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
So talking to yourself really does work
It is not April 1, so it must be true. According to a report in today’s Telegraph, talking to yourself is actually good for the brain and mental well being. According to Julie Henry, the Telegraph’s Education Correspondent,
Studies have found that “self-talking” can aid concentration, help solve problems and lift depressive moods.
I suppose it may depend upon what you say to yourself. Working in an open-plan office, I cannot but hear one of my partners, who is forever exhorting himself to “Get a grip” and “Come on, get on with it”. Talking to yourself may, as the psychiatrist Paul Horton is reported as having found when carrying out his survey, help to raise glum spirits. I just reckon that my next door neighbour is barking.
Human rights, human dignity and human life
I am not sure which I find more disturbing, the Embryology Bill or the behaviour of Gordon Brown, in indicating that he is prepared to allow his MPs almost (but not quite) a free vote, but only if the mathematics show that the government will win (see the report on BBC News).
“The prime minister is prepared to allow Labour MPs who oppose a controversial embryo bill to vote against pieces of the legislation, the BBC has learned. The votes would be permitted only if they did not threaten the passage of the bill, a government official said.”
The government’s response to the warning from leading Labour MPs that a rebellion is on the cards, is a self-serving mixture of good old-fashioned Stalinism, control-freakery and sucking up to vested interests. I suppose we should expect nothing less of a man who writes about courage but who so clearly lacks it: obsessed by power and its exercise, and convinced that he and his acolytes alone know what is best for us. The arguments paraded are designed to make those who oppose the bill appear as enemies of progress, and unconcerned about our health and welfare. Thus Ben Bradshaw (fast becoming the acceptable face of the Brownite camp):
“This is about using pre-embryonic cells to do research that has the potential to ease the suffering of millions of people in this country. The government has taken a view that this is a good thing.”
We should all, therefore, be reassured? Or should we? For a different view, see Nadine Dorries’ post in Coffee House, The Embryology Bill, cui bono? And the opposition cuts across party lines. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph this morning, Labour MP Stephen Byers – a former cabinet minister under Tony Blair – said the public would “look on in disbelief” if Mr Brown did not offer a free vote, and (BBC News again) “Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy is reportedly prepared to quit the cabinet rather than vote for the bill.”
A turbulent priest
Just when you thought that the Church of England was slipping into managerial mediocrity, a surprisingly splenetic rant in the Telegraph this morning from Peter Mullen, the Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange. He is not a follower of the Rowan Williams’ school of muddled thinking. Read the entire column, but here is a taster:
“We might have expected the Church to resist the decay, but instead it has connived with the destructive sexual and social revolution begun in the 1960s. Back then, I voted for homosexuality to be decriminalised. But this meant “between consenting adults in private” – where “between” meant two, “adults” meant men over 21 and “private” meant behind locked doors. I did not foresee the obscene and coercive “Gay Pride” pantomimes that now disfigure our high streets.
Who would have thought we would live to see the Bishop of Hereford fined £47,000 and made to attend a re-education course because he refused to employ a practising homosexual in his diocese’s youth services? How long before I am carted from the pulpit to the nick for preaching that sodomy is not morally equivalent to Christian marriage?”
Another nail in the coffin of DB
Further to my post earlier in the week, Matching pension liabilities, the story that led the front page of the FT today, Companies face bigger pensions risk levy, points up the problem and choices that employers with defined benefits schemes face. One further thought. Norma Cohen suggests that the effect of proposals signposted by Partha Dasgupta, the chief executive of the PPF could
“prompt schemes to pare the billions they have invested in equities and would likely lead to demands the government do much more of its borrowing in long-term index-linked gilts that mirror the movements in pension liabilities more closely than any other asset class.”
And that will, in time, radically change the investor profile of many of our leading companies.
The death of defined benefit
Although it may still be premature to announce the death of defined benefit pension schemes, their days are numbered. As reported this morning in the FT, another pensions consultancy, Aon Pensions Consultants, has warned that
Final salary pension schemes face their worst ever deficits if plans go ahead for new accounting standards and more generous assumptions about life expectancy.
To the pensions industry this is old news (and the defined benefit scheme has in truth been an inordinately long time in dying: I was advising on changing schemes more than 15 years ago), but there is another and equally important aspect. Most public sector schemes are salary and service related, and the cost of these schemes is already far higher than many people realise. Changing the assumptions for life expectancy will only make things worse. The government recognised that action needed to be taken in relation to the state pension, and whether or not Personal Accounts are the right anwer (I am not convinced), the nettle was grasped. Unfortunately this has not been the case with public sector pensions. It will have to be, because the burgeoning costs of these pensions is a millstone around the neck of the public purse: and the quid pro quo (of receiving below private sector pay but enjoying a full pension promise) is not as persuasive an argument as hitherto. But don’t hold your breath for this government to do anything about it.
