The papers are full of enthusiasm for Barak Obama. The young voted for him overwhelmingly, seeing in him a route to a better life for themselves and their fellow countrymen.
I am rather less enthusiastic. I have almost lost hope in governments making our lives any better, certainly in comparison to the cost of them in terms of taxes paid. To my mind, governments always always stand in the way of progress. I have recently found things I wanted to do blocked by governments. I am very cross about the need for me to have an audit for one of my companies at a cost of about twenty times the cost of the bookkeeping that is to be audited. I feel frustrated that I am not allowed to see my pension fund's bank account balance except through a very occasional paper statement. I am frustrated that the law requires me to make a mark with a pen on a hard copy version of my accounts when all the accounting that went into producing them exists in digital form. My heart sinks when my accountant gives me the soft copy of my accounts as a scan of the signed printout.
My bank still requires me to communicate to them 'in writing', which means that I have to print out and entrust to a very unreliable postal service the most important instructions I will ever send them. Because I no longer own a fax machine my bank told me that the only way I can arrange CHAPS or SWIFT payments is to send them a letter. In order to re-establish my company's ownership of a domain name I am required to fax a request to Nominet on 'the companies letterhead', even though the company has never never had any requirement to communicate by headed letter throughout the twenty-two years of its existence.
I am advised by a Barclays call centre operative that for my protection my 12-digit customer number for use in telephone banking has to be different to my similarly-12-digit customer number for internet banking. When I state that I can see no situation where my security could be improved by having different customer numbers for the two means of accessing a common account (identified by a six-digit sort code plus an eight-digit account number, both unrelated to my two 12-digit identification numbers) my comment is met with incredulity.
Security is one of those goods that is priceless, a human right that must be provided regardless of cost. This way leads to the war in Iraq, the 'war on terror', the absurd expense of the department of homeland security, the incredible difficulty these days of doing ordinary transactions, and, spectacularly the use of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 to seize the assets of Landsbanki in the UK, which seems to have passed without serious comment from the press or the public.
This article, based on the Analysis programme to be broadcast tonight on R4 shows how in modern political debate no problem must be acknowledged to be difficult or impossible to solve. In fact politicians require every possible political problem to be solvable by a policy capable of being expressed in a soundbite of a handful of easy-to-parrot syllables. And Hazel Blears wonders why bloggers' responses are cynical.
