Captain Ranty's "Legal Fiction"

I have been reminded by the good Mr Wadsworth (here) of a recent posting on the site of the deliciously entertaining but occasionally deranged Captain Ranty (here). In the piece highlighted by Mr Wadsworth the Captain made a bizarre and patently absurd assertion, namely that a judge in a County Court had made a finding in law that there is a distinction between between someone calling himself Roger Hayes and living at a particular address, let's call it 34 Acacia Avenue, and Mr Roger Hayes who has been billed for Council Tax at 34 Acacia Avenue.

The case to which he refers involved a claim being made in the County Court and I infer the local council had issued a summons against "Mr Roger Hayes" and served it at 34 Acacia Avenue claiming whatever sum of Council Tax for 34 Acacia Avenue had not been paid. I also infer that the only adult human being who is both known as Roger Hayes and lives at 34 Acacia Avenue attended court. When there he claimed not to be Mr Roger Hayes and not to be liable to Council Tax for 34 Acacia Avenue because he was Roger Hayes, the human being, whereas Mr Roger Hayes is legal corporation but not comprised of flesh and bones. I don't propose to waste a good keyboard on explaining everything that is wrong with this manifestly ludicrous proposition, save to say it has no merit in law and is almost certainly unfounded in fact (for example, I'll bet you a pig to a pork scratching that the human being has acknowledged himself to be Mr Roger Hayes hundreds if not thousands of times and has benefited from doing so - in passing, I wonder whether he has a bank account and, if so, whether the bank records the account as being that of Roger Hayes or Mr Roger Hayes, if the latter poor Roger would be liable to repay every penny he has ever withdrawn). What I want to explain is what the judge's conduct of the hearing amounted to.

By way of background, I should point out that nothing Captain Ranty or (Mr) Roger Hayes are saying today is at all novel. Every year the courts hear these and similar arguments being put forward in a vain attempt to challenge either the right of the court to hear the case or the very concept of enforceable law. Friday afternoons are reserved for such people by the procedural judges (known as Masters) of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court. The arguments range from demands that the judge provides evidence of his appointment followed by a refusal to accept that the judge is a judge unless he can do so, to assertions that certain Acts of Parliament have no effect because they contravene Magna Carta, to attempts to get one judge to re-hear a case that has already been heard by another judge, and all sorts of nonsense in between. Experience shows that the best thing to do is sit back, let the barmy argument be put and then get on with the case. Frequently this involves adjourning the matter to a later date on the ground that further evidence is required on one point or another or because the court has run out of time due to the spouting, at great length, of unmitigated tosh by the misguided litigant. In some instances these adjournments are made in the hope the nutter will give up, and sometimes they do.

The choice for the judge is to allow the rubbish to be spouted, or to try to prevent it being spouted. No third way exists. Trying to prevent carries risks because the litigants are often either unstable or obsessed or both. Neither County Courts nor the High Court are usually staffed by a six-foot bouncer with a stun gun, instead they have an usher who is more likely to be a lady in her late fifties called Enid with no weapon more effective than a clipboard and a ballpoint pen. No judge is going to put his or her staff at any physical risk if they can avoid it, so the path of least resistance is adopted. This involves trying to dismiss the point briefly in the hope the annoyance will accept the indication and go away, but if that fails it is safer to allow them a "day in court". That does not mean that any credence at all is given to the eccentric theories being expounded, far less does it amount to an acceptance of those theories or that the person arguing them has any legal right to appear in the case at all. It's all a matter of practicalities. Years ago judges tended to be somewhat brusquer on average than they are today, yet even the most robust would show their greatest politeness when faced with a litigant in person barking up the wrong end of a very sturdy tree.

Nothing in the case referred to by Captain Ranty hints for even a second that the judge accepted any part of the fanciful arguments being put in front of him. Rather, it is a classic case of a judge trying to get a nutter to go away and then sitting back resignedly and facing the unappealing fact that the nutter will persist and should be allowed to do so to prevent any unpleasantness and/or the wasting of even more time by another judge being faced with exactly the same scenario at a later date.

We really do need a property crash

I was musing the other day about what FatBigot Towers would command on the "open" market if it's value had increased at the rate of general inflation. Of course there is no way of knowing because there is no such thing as a single rate of non-housing inflation - it all depends what products you include in the calculation. To arrive at some sort of figure I googlised "UK inflation since 1993" and found a fun site that allowed me to find the value in 2010 of any given sum at an earlier date (here). I know not how accurate it is, but it's fun anyway.

What I found is that the rates of inflation used at that site indicate FatBigot Towers to have increased in "value" by almost two and a half times general inflation. That really is an absurd state of affairs, not that I mind because free money is free money and I might get around to cashing it is in the not too distant. One factor that needs to be borne in mind is that I purchased my modest hovel at a time when prices had fallen substantially and the market was extremely flat, prices could well have been below a fair market price due to suppressed demand. The vendors, who were and are friends of mine, had found their ideal property and beaten the price down substantially, they also had not needed to use estate agents, so it might well be that I paid a bit under the odds. Even so, FatBigot Towers would seem to be "worth" well over twice what it would have cost today had house price inflation been roughly in line with general inflation.

I can understand why the current government feels it would be politically dangerous to allow the property market to correct itself. We had a decade of Blair and Brown telling people they were rich because their houses had gone up in value, boom-and-bust was a thing of the past, caution was thrown out of the window and a lot of debt additional to house-purchase loans was secured on homes. That sort of thing gives rise to expectations. The government had made them so much richer than they were before, they thought, and if they still hold that view there is every likelihood that they will consider the government to have made them poor if prices crash to a sensible level.

The position is a little different to that of twenty years ago. The price bubble is much larger than it was then and far more people have dipped into the bubble to pay for holidays, cars and electronic goodies. Although a lot of loans have been repaid since things went bang that process has itself made people feel poorer, so adding a drop in house prices to the pot would risk adding insult to injury. There is also the psychological effect of the sums of money involved. Twenty years ago a property previously priced at £200,000 might have fallen to £140,000, that's £60,000 and no one sniffs at that. By contrast, today the equivalent sums for the same property might be £400,000 and £280,000; £120,000 is so much more, not least because it is six figures rather than five. The general inflation calculator I linked to above says £60,000 in 1991 is equivalent to £96,000 in 2010; for the loss to be £120,000 not £96,000 gives the impression things are worse even though the same percentage of bubble has been removed in the two examples.

Looking back to the early 1990s I cannot recall any significant political backlash as a result of the property market collapsing. It had collapsed by the time of the general election in 1992 but the incumbent government won a majority (albeit much reduced). All the usual suspects were bleating on about people losing their homes but when details were given it became apparent to all that the genuine stories of bad luck were accompanied by many more of people borrowing more than they could afford to repay. In those days that seemed to be considered the fault of the borrowers rather than the lenders. Interest rates soared because base rate reflected the state of the government's finances and the ERM farce had rather pissed in the soup in that regard. Nonetheless, the government got back in and, not least because bad debt had been written off rather than carried over, it took only a few years for the nation's finances to be on a very sound footing.

The whole mood seems to be different now. No doubt it is due in part to so much of life now being tied into government activity. Never before have so many been dependent on government for so much of their income - due in large part to the evil tax credits scheme. And never has government presented itself as having magical powers to solve all ills as it has over the last ten years or so. A problem arises and government appoints someone to deal with it and/or throws money at a quango to solve it. The problem usually doesn't go away and the level of amelioration provided in return for the taxpayers' buck is pitiful, but the problem is now in the hands of government. No other solution is affordable because no one has the money government has, and failure to solve the problem can only be explained by not enough tax having been thrown at it. And we are led to believe that more and more of life's problems are under the control of government because they have outlawed this, regulated that and have an army of day-glo jacketed wardens imposing fixed penalty notices for everything else. No solution exists other than government. Two consequences follow. First people believe government can control things it actually has no ability at all to control and, secondly, any problems that remain are placed firmly at the door of government whether or not it is realistic to do so.

Allow a collapse in the bogus wealth contained within the house price bubble and government runs a huge risk to its chance of surviving the next election. Or so it thinks. Maybe it is correct in that thought although I have my doubts. I talk to lots of people about these things, not just fellow pompous barristers but ordinary people doing ordinary jobs to support themselves and their families. The only people I hear supporting government involvement in everything are the "liberal" Islington chatterati who seem to have the view that only they are capable to supporting themselves and everyone else, all the little people, need a massive network of support and counselling in order to boil an egg. The people doing ordinary jobs just want to be taxed less and left alone to look after themselves. It does not, however, follow that they would vote for a governing party that withdrew all the nannying unless it also reduced their tax bills.

Against that background I can see why the current government will not step aside and allow property prices to fall to affordable levels as their predecessors did two decades ago. Ironically, the one thing they want to achieve is more economic activity in the country and a thriving property market helps achieve that because moving home always involves the purchase of new stuff for the new abode. A thriving property market is one in which there are many transactions and has nothing to do with the nominal value of each transaction. At the moment the complaint of those involved in the business of property is that few transactions are taking place. Were prices more realistic it is reasonable to infer that there would be more. The other side of the coin is that some would be lumbered with negative equity and would be unable to move or would even face insolvency. It happened before and things soon recovered. You cannot set economic policy by trying to protect everyone from ever making a loss on a deal - well, actually, you can but you would create something nearly as bad as the mess Gordon Brown left the country.

In this respect, as in many others, I despair at the lack of guts displayed by the current government. They know houses are grossly overpriced and that the result is the current generation of young adults being priced out of the market completely unless their families already have money. They also know that all sorts of businesses benefit from property transactions - builders, painters and decorators, carpet suppliers, white goods suppliers, garden centres and a host more; their trade is suppressed if the property market is suppressed. Although it would be a short-term political gamble, a government of principle would say it is the right thing to do and would explain why. My money would be on that position being accepted by far more floating voters than the number who reject it. In any event, and I know I am dreaming here, I wish that just once we had a government that looked to the interests of the country rather than to its own electoral prospects when deciding policy.

Today's bad word - "diversity"

On Thursdays the Times newspaper has a Law section containing snippets of legal news and gossip, the profile of a lawyer who has been involved in a recent newsworthy case and a main article dealing with an issue likely to be of interest to members of the legal profession. This week's article highlights concerns expressed by the Lord Chief Justice (the conveniently named Lord Judge - incidentally, we also have a Court of Appeal judge with the surname Laws) that too few solicitors from high-powered city firms are applying to sit as judges and too few people of high quality are attracted to criminal and family work because the pay is poor.

The article appears under a sub-heading reading "The Lord Chief Justice is worried about the diversity of the Bench" and was illustrated with a column listing the number of women and former solicitors sitting at the different levels of the judiciary. I cannot speak for Lord Judge but I think both the sub-heading and the illustrative numbers are misleading. Not only can I not speak for Lord Judge but I do not know him personally and can interpret comments he made only against the background of his well-known reputation at the Bar. Somehow I doubt that "diversity" of itself is his desire. Indeed, I think it impossible that diversity could ever be his desire although it could be a pleasant consequence of the system of judicial appointments. My point is about the whole concept of "diversity" and the way it is interpreted in the article in the Times because I believe it has been misinterpreted.

Let's take a heart by-pass operation as an example of what I mean. If you need one, what would you expect of the surgeon assigned to carry out the procedure? Well, that's simple, you would expect him or her to be at least basically competent at heart by-pass operations. That's all. Male or female, dusky-hued or blotchy pink, old or young - all irrelevant; they should be able to do the job. Then let's ask who should be appointed to a vacant cardiac surgical post. That's also simple, it should be the applicant who is best at the job. Male or female, dusky-hued or blotchy pink, old or young - all irrelevant; ability should be the only guide. It is only by appointing the people best able to do the job that the customer (patient) can have the greatest chance of being sliced and spliced by someone who is likely to do it well.

So also with the judiciary. Different types of judges deal with different types of work, some of which require a vast amount of technical knowledge of relatively narrow fields of law and others of which are more concerned with the management of evidence. If the Chancery Division of the High Court needs a new judge because an established expert in company law has retired or been promoted it would be no surprise to find an expert in company law appointed to fill the gap; you would not find a criminal law practitioner being appointed because, no matter how brilliant he or she might be in their chosen work, the skills and knowledge they have developed in practice would not make them suitable for such a specialist judicial post. The only question should be "which of the applicants will do the job best?"

Whether the result is that heart surgeons or judges comprise the same proportions of men and women, dusky-hueds and blotchy pinks and fortyishs and sixtyishs as the population as a whole is neither here nor there.

That is not to say we should not ask "why are so few women / ethnic minoritists applying to be judges?" Of course that question should be asked because there might be something about the application prodecure or the judicial work itself which deters suitably qualified people and that the obstacle is especially high for women, the darkly pigmented or, indeed, any other category of potential applicant. The only way to deal with such an issue fairly is to amend the procedure or introduce different working practices for judges so that suitably qualified people of all types can apply and know they are competing on a level playing field. This is to approach the issue of "diversity" from an inclusive frame of mind. You keep the quality standard and do what you can to ensure as many people of the required quality are involved, no matter who they are.

It is a different thing entirely to start from the premise thay we must have a judiciary that is "diverse" and treat that as an end in itself rather than a desirable consequence of a fair recruitment system that always appoints the best candidates regardless of any minority label that some might wish to attach to them (or that they might wish to attach to themselves). To treat diversity as a criterion for selection is, necessarily, to exclude some better candidates because they carry no such label and that is a worse vice.

One reason Lord Judge is the Lord Chief Justice is that he is a hugely fair man. Over his long career in the law there has never been a hint that he would treat someone less fairly because they happen to be female, dark-skinned or have non-standard sexual tastes. Nor would he treat a blotchy-pink heterosexual male less fairly than anyone else. He is, in my view, someone who looks on "diversity" of the judiciary as a desirable end of a selection process based purely on merit. Indeed, in order to be based purely on merit it is necessary for the process not to discriminate against anyone by reason of them falling into a numerical minority for one reason or another.

Having spent some time mulling-over the column of judicial statistics, I am hard-pressed to see its relevance. What it shows is that only 1 of the 11 Supreme Court Justices is female (actually it's 1 out of 12), 3 of 37 Court of Appeal judges, 16 of 108 High Court Judges, 87 out of 680 Circuit Judges and 110 out of 448 County Court District Judges (there are also 143 District Judges who sit in the Magistrates' Courts but no figure is given for the number of those who are female). On the face of these figures women could be said to be discriminated against; but who are the applicants who have been refused appointments because of their gender? Who are the potential applicants who wanted to apply but did not because the process was obstructive to women? My adult lifetime has been spent in the law and I have never met such a person. These numbers don't really tell us much.

There are all sorts of reasons why we have so few women judges. In order to gain an appointment it is usually necessary to have at least 20 years' experience and usually more, so what follows relates to those who qualified two decades and more ago. First, there are far fewer female lawyers than male lawyers. Secondly, the proportion falls as they reproduce and either leave practice for ever or take a long break to supervise the fruit of their loins and then return to work part-time. Thirdly, those who return to work full-time once the last speck of vomit has been mopped from the nursery floor miss several years of experience and feel that gap means they are not yet ready to apply. Fourthly, those who still have dependent children sometimes feel the relative lack of flexibility over working hours (and days) would be inconvenient. Fifthly, many are not the primary earner in the family and are not particularly career-minded. These points are relevant more to those who might be considered for positions as Circuit Judges and District Judges than to the high-flyers who would aim for the High Court bench but they are all derived from my own experience of the very many senior female lawyers of my acquaintance.

Before the Harriet Harman fan club pelts me with rotten tomatoes and chants "sexist pig, sexist pig, sexist pig pig pig" to the tune of the William Tell Overture, I must remind them of one thing. Female lawyers are a tough breed. They take their own decisions. That those decisions deprive simple Harriet of the statistics she wants is her problem not theirs. I know not whether the Times' legal editor is of the Harriet Harman school, but I do know that including bare statistics about the current numbers of female judges when discussing future judicial appointments is, at best, an irrelevance.

This whole exercise illustrates something about the bad word "diversity". In the wrong hands "diversity" means discrimination - discrimination of the worst type, discrimination based on pigmentation and gender. In the right hands it is a useful watchword against which to assess whether admission to certain positions is open to all regardless of pigmentation and gender. "The Lord Chief Justice is worried about the diversity of the Bench" is a classic formulation from the wrong side of the fence and does not match what Lord Judge said. He is definitely on the right side.

Double-dip dementia

The world of modern politics is so dominated by form rather than substance that we can hardly be surprised when a piece of total nonsense becomes the benchmark for success or failure of a particular governmental policy. This week we have seen the threat of a return to recession dominating the feeble sparrings of the frontbenches in the House of Commons. The problem with this is that recession is treated as an unmitigated ill when it is anything but because, as always, it depends on what is actually happening.

I know this is old ground but it is worth examining again what a recession is. The conventional definition is that it is two consecutive quarters in which Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declines. So, what is GDP? It is in answering this question that we see why recession cannot always be considered a bad thing. GDP can be measured in various ways but they all amount to pretty much the same thing, GDP is the amount the UK spends on goods and services within the UK plus the amount spent on investment within the UK plus the value of exports minus the value of imports. The amount spent on goods and services comprises both the amount spent by consumers and the amount spent by government. GDP is not a measure of profitability nor of sustainability - it tells us nothing about whether the amount of spending that has occurred was affordable.

To see the limit of GDP as a measure of substance it is possible to isolate one household and see what effect it has on GDP. Mr & Mrs Ordinary have take-home pay of £500 a week. They spend £400 and put £100 in a biscuit tin under the bed. They contribute £400 a week to GDP from their own spending and thereby allow the recipients of their spending to have more to spend and this adds to GDP and the recipients of that spending also spend and so it goes on. After three months they decide the biscuit tin is sufficiently full and not to save any more. The next week they spend £500. GDP has gone up. After three months they change their minds and start saving again, but only £50 a week rather than £100; they still spend £450. GDP has fallen. The next quarter they have further concerns about spending too much and cut their spending back to what it was before so they spend £400 and start stuffing a second biscuit tin. GDP has fallen again. Oh woe, we are in recession. But what is the reality? A family that could afford to spend £400 and needed to save £100 in order to provide for its future started overspending, then they reduced their spending again in instalments to get themselves back on an even track. The reality is that the rise in GDP caused by spending more than they could afford was an illusion, it should never have happened and if it had not happened there would have been no wailing and gnashing of teeth. As it is, panic has set-in simply because spending that could not be afforded has been removed from the system. In fact there should be a sigh of relief rather than panic. At the start and end of the exercise they spend what they can afford, in between they overspend. The problem is not the return to affordability, the problem is the unaffordable splurge between the start and the end.

The position gets even more absurd if Mr & Mrs Ordinary borrow £100 a week while they are spending all their income so that they spend £600 a week on an income of £500 a week. GDP goes up even further and it falls even further when they come to their senses and decide to live within their means. In this situation there has been a GDP bubble - like every bubble it is full of nothing but air, there is no substance to it. Deflating the bubble reduced GDP and we should say "about bloody time too".

Similarly, because GDP includes government spending on goods and services, all unaffordable spending by government boosts GDP. In particular, spending borrowed money on goods and services boosts GDP. Spending money they have gleaned in tax will always be pretty much neutral in terms of GDP because if not taken in tax it is likely to have been spent by the taxpayers (of course some could be saved, but that which would be spent would undoubtedly be spent better than government spends it).

Government could borrow £10billion a year and spend it on two gangs of workers - one gang to dig holes in the morning and another to fill them in again in the afternoon. This pointless activitiy boosts GDP because it leads to more money sloshing around the economy but it is utterly pointless in any other respect. Were the exercise to end GDP would fall; again it should elicit a sigh of relief. As things are we don't yet have gangs digging and filling holes, but we have the modern politically-correct equivalent in an army of public sector naggers, snooper, counsellors, fake charities and form-fillers who are not necessary, provide little if any benefit and yet are retained and paid for from borrowed money. What does that additional GDP mean? It means no more than the additional GDP derived from Mr & Mrs Ordinary spending borrowed money, it is bubble GDP and tells us nothing about the state of the economy as a whole. Remove it over a couple of years and we could find ourselves in the longest and deepest recession in history, a situation that would bode extremely well for the future because the future would not include the wasteful and unnecessary expenditure that boosted GDP artificially.

"Artificially" really is at the heart of the matter. GDP is boosted by government borrowing to fund pointless activities that achieve nothing other than to boost GDP. If you look only at GDP you can be fooled into an illusion of perpetual motion. Borrowed money can increase GDP therefore we must borrow more and more. Nonsense. It omits the other side of the equation which is that borrowed money must be repaid and commands interest in the meantime. If you pay 5% on the borrowed money the benefit of spending the borrowed money must be more than 5% to make the exercise worthwhile. Even a benefit that can be measured as 5% of the borrowed money only allows you to stand still, it does not repay a penny of the capital sum borrowed. That there is an increase of GDP is irrelevant because it only looks at one side of the equation, it does not take into account the cost of borrowing the money. It fails to acknowledge the broken window fallacy.

We shouldn't fuss about whether GDP is up or down this quarter or the next, it really doesn't matter. What matters is that money is used wisely because the unwise use of money eventually results in retrenchment if not bankruptcy. A decade of it being used unwisely can thrust GDP into the stratosphere but that tells us nothing about the health of the economy. GDP was never higher than before the recent recession started yet the economy (to be more accurate the government's finances) was in a complete mess. That recession has not yet ended.

Of course it has ended according to the artificial measure called GDP and we might re-enter recession according to the artificial measure called GDP, but the reality is that we still have government overspending by about £160billion a year and we will be in recession until the resultant debt is eliminated. We will be in recession because ordinary people will continue doing what they are doing now, namely paying-down debt and putting aside some money for fear of unemployment, rising taxes and rising fuel bills. All they are doing is returning their own economies to a sound state. If GDP plunges but people are in charge of their finances rather than their finances being in charge of them the country will be in better shape.

A classic case of Northern Crock

Someone I know has to sort out the estate of a friend of his who died last week, the poor fellow had cancer and was only 35. He has been making enquiries into his friend's assets and liabilities. Apart from a few hundred in the bank and normal household effects the only major asset is an ex-council flat originally bought some years ago under the right-to-buy legislation, the deceased bought it four years ago for £170,000 with the assistance of a loan from Northern Rock. It is a classic example of why Northern Rock is known as Northern Crock.

The deceased was a hairdresser earning around £30,000 a year gross in 2007. He had been renting all his adult life and wanted to buy his own home but had very limited savings, so he searched for a 100% mortgage. Northern Rock advanced not only the £170,000 needed to buy the flat but also a £10,000 unsecured loan. The mortgage was repayable over 20 years but no mechanism was put in place to repay any of the capital and the borrower was not required to take out any life assurance to provide Northern Rock with a lump-sum in the event of his death. All that is pretty sloppy, they lent £10,000 more than the property was worth, a sum equivalent to about six-time the borrower's gross income, to someone who would have no obvious means of repaying the capital at the end of the loan period. Their only security was the property itself, and that is where the whole thing becomes a true crock.

Because the flat had originally been bought from the council some years before, the lease had only 57 years to run. These days leaseholders have certain rights to extend the period of their lease but it costs money and only happens if the leaseholder gets round to asking for it. In the meantime the property is worth only what it can be sold for in the open market. Flats with less than 60 years left on the lease are not accepted as security by most mortgage lenders (Northern Rock was one of the few foolish enough to lend against such a property), although an extension can be obtained it must be paid for and when the lease is running short it can cost many tens of thousands of pounds plus conveyancing costs and valuation costs if the freeholder does not agree the figure - all these costs must be borne by the leaseholder. In the case I am discussing the lease now has only 53 years to run and I would estimate the cost of gaining an extension to be between £20,000 and £30,000 (I claim no expertise, but that is my best estimate). This affects the current value of the property enormously because it excludes the vast majority of the potential market from being able to buy the flat. Only cash buyers are in the market and they are unlikely to buy an ex-council flat for their own occupation; the real market is professional landlords looking to extend their portfolio. They will only buy through an estate agent if they can get a real bargain, otherwise their money will go further by buying at auction. The reality in such a situation is that the open market value is the forced-sale auction value. In this particular case the open market value of the property on a long lease of 90 years or more is around £190,000-£200,000. As it is, anything in excess of £120,000 would be a good price for the vendor, it wouldn't be at all surprising to find the flat sells for no more than £100,000.

His executor will sell his household possessions for a few hundred pounds to off-set funeral expenses and, if he is sensible, will simply surrender the flat to Northern Rock - there is no point him engaging estate agents to sell because he would have to pay their fees himself. Northern Rock will recover a flat worth at most £120,000 to cover a secured loan of £170,000 and an unsecured loan of £10,000. Their loss is likely to be at least £60,000 - no less than one third of the total amount they advanced.

One might think they could have protected themselves through insurance. I do not know whether any part of the loan was insured against default but the life of the borrower was not. Had they insured part of the loan itself (using what is usually called mortgage indemnity insurance) they might be able to recover 10 or 15% of the secured loan but their loss will still exceed £30,000.

Although this is just one example, it illustrates the folly of the sort of high loan-to-value mortgage loans for which Northern Rock was famed. No one knows how many similar bits of trash sit on their books.

Resigned or frustrated

I find it hard to write anything these days. It's not that there is nothing to write about, just in the last couple of weeks we've had the EU bullying Ireland at the behest of Germany, a multi-million pound talking shop farce in Mexico, the first guilty plea from a former MP who defrauded the public purse, the strengthening of the food police and people rioting about nothing in London. Yet I haven't been stirred to action. I'm trying to work out why.

When the new government limped into office the mere fact that the risible Gordon Brown and his cohort of contemptible dictators had been ousted caused me to breath a huge sigh of relief. Whatever the new lot did could not possibly have made things worse for the country than the carnage wreaked by their predecessors - carnage of a structural kind which left our society split into bitter factional interests as well as carnage to the economy. They've gone. It cannot get worse. No need to rage about things. Both my regular readers will be aware that the policy programme of the new government is miles away from what I consider in the best interests of he people of this country but at least it is a yard or two closer than poor Gordon could ever have taken us.

That can explain a quiet period while we wait for the coalition's positions to be formed clearly but it cannot explain a lack of complaint once their positions were set so closely to those of the failed Labour government. Perhaps the explanation is dispair. Because so little is different now there is, perhaps, little point in repeating my observations of the last couple of years. With the exception of Eric Pickles I have detected no current Cabinet minister prepared to pop-up above the parapet and challenge the ever-expanding State. Michael Gove did so for a fleeting moment with his proposal for schools to be run free of political involvement, then ruined it by giving detailed guidance on curriculum and examination standards. There was even a tiny hint from Andrew Lansley at the Health Department with his idea of getting rid of layers of bureaucracy only for him then to retain within the remit of the NHS every aspect of nannying that had been added over the previous two decades. Only Mr Pickles has had the guts to say he's only a politician and doesn't know how to run things on the "front line". Faced with only one obvious supporter for my views on how "public services" should be run it's easy to give up commenting on matters at least until another election is in the offing.

Or it might be that I am still in shock that so many people voted for the Labour Party at the General Election in May. More than seven months have passed since then and all the while a thought has been gnawing at what is left of my brain. Could there be a third or so of the population of this country that was both pleased with what the Labour government had done and wanted more of the same? That a fifth of school leavers were either functionally illiterate or functionally innumerate, or both, was not of sufficient concern to them that they would vote against a governing party that had interfered in schools like no government before. That there was still structural unemployment in some areas of the country was not of sufficient concern for them to vote against a governing party that claimed to be concerned for the poor above all others. That the economy was on its knees, as at the end of every period of Labour government, was not of sufficient concern for them to vote against a governing party that directed and regulated all aspects of economic activity in more detail than even Stalin managed in the USSR. Could they really think the state of the country on the 6th of May was despite Labour having been in government for thirteen years and not because of it? Could they really believe the problem was too little State interference rather than too much? Just that thought is enough to drive anyone to distraction and to the conclusion that there is no point being sensible when so many are so utterly devoid of critical faculties.

Part of me has been hoping the coalition will find the courage to join Eric Pickles in saying that government must do less. As each week goes by I see fewer and fewer signs of this happening. They still seem to be stuck in the view that government is the answer to every ill, so much so that problems caused by too much government can only be addressed by more government. Against such a background it is hard to stir the enthusiasm to comment because it feels as though you are just running into a wall. Perhaps I am resigned to the massive State now being a permanent feature, perhaps I am frustrated that the difficulties caused by government are given insufficient recognition or perhaps I am just not prepared to repeat myself too many times. Who knows.

Having said that, a couple of topics have piqued my interest so I hope to be able to add to this year's miserable number of posts a few times before the turkey is carved.

Salt, happiness and Jocky Wilson

The magnificent Mr Puddlecote has posted with his usual perspicacity on the latest scare from the health Nazis (here). The topic is salt. It is a topic that has heated my urine for many years so I'd like to chip in. Since I've been quiet for a while it seems sensible to add another current topic, the Happiness Index, although, being the cunning old boy I am, I include it because it is directly relevant to salt.

First things first. Forget any notion that science can tell us a single thing about the consequences on our health of the ingestion of a given amount of salt. There is no universal maximum or minimum daily amount, there is no way of measuring the amount which is either needed or excessive for any individual, there is no accurate way of measuring how much is being ingested, there is no accurate way of measuring how much is being expelled from the body and there is no way of measuring whether a physical condition that might be caused by excessive salt consumption has in fact been caused by that. All they can ever do it seek to evaluate average needs - no doubt this (if done properly) is a difficult exercise and takes considerable knowledge and skill, but once it's been done it is of absolutely no use to anyone because there is no way of measuring whether any given person is average, below average or above average in their need for salt or in their susceptibility to harm from salt.

For decades it has been peddled that excessive salt consumption can cause high blood pressure and other medical nasties. That might or might not be true, I am sure I once came across a blog dedicated to exposing salt scares that challenged the hypothesis but I can't find it now. Let's assume it is true. We have to be very careful about exactly what we are assuming. Because we all need different amounts of salt in our diet for our bodies to perform efficiently, only consumption above the level we require can be excessive. That is not necessarily the same amount of salt all year round because we sweat more in summer (or in the presence of Joanna Lumley) and will secrete more salt than in winter (or in the presence of Harriet Harman), to maintain a working balance we must take more in summer (Lumley) than in winter (Harman) - unless some other factor interferes to require us to take more in winter. Some claim that we simply pass excessive salt when we dispose of used beverages and they might be correct but that doesn't mean that regular consumption of more than we need cannot have adverse consequences because harm could, in principle, result from that excess quantity being in the body prior to joining gallons of second-hand beer on the floor of the gentlemen's facility at the Dog and Duck.

And then, merely physical need tells only part of the story of human life. The human body is a machine. It takes in fuel and gives out waste products, just like a motor car. The difference between the human body and the motor car is that it is far more than a machine. It has feelings, senses and emotions that are essential parts of life and not things to be left to one side while we deal with the machine only. Food and drink are part of the feelings, senses and emotions aspect of life just as much as they are fuel for the machine. If old Auntie Enid likes a whole shaker of salt on her roast potatoes and would have a miserable Sunday lunch without it, how are we to assess the salt content in her diet? Excessive - because her body didn't need that much to function - or just enough because it gave her a happy time when otherwise she would have felt excluded from the family jollity going on around her?

When thinking of this subject my mind often goes to Jocky Wilson's lager. No, I'm not joking, the point is absolutely serious. Jocky Wilson was one of the great darts players from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. In order to play well he needed to be relaxed and, for him, that required lager. Quite a lot of lager. Once he reached a certain level of intoxication he was almost unbeatable, he had the necessary level of relaxation and concentration to allow him to play as well as anyone in the world. It wasn't something that could be measured. Some days it might be just a few pints, on other days it was measured in gallons but however much was required on the day he strove to continue his consumption in order to keep the level just right. As alcohol was burnt off it had to be replaced and failure to replace it would cause him to be unable to continue playing so well. Other players could perform well without a drink or with less drink but that was irrelevant he wasn't them and he wasn't playing for them. He needed a lot of booze in order to ply his trade at the highest imaginable level - did he drink too much? It depends what you mean by "too much". In each tournament he played his consumption was too little, the right amount or too much, depending on how it affected his throwing arm on the day. In the context of his long-term health it could well have been too much but any less and he would not have been World Champion twice and revered as one of the finest exponents the game has ever known. He is now entirely out of the public eye and is reputed to be living in poor circumstances at least in part because of his fondness for the sight of an empty barrel. One could isolate the booze and say he shouldn't have drunk so much, but that would ignore his achievements which would have been unobtainable without a liver quiverring quantity of drink.

When I was at primary school lunch sometimes included mashed swede. I absolutely hated the taste and I hate it still but the addition of enough salt would allow me to shovel it down and avoid the wrath of the scary dinner lady. Was that "excess" salt (and believe me, it took a lot of salt to mask the taste) bad for me or was it good for me because it allowed my little body to enjoy the benefits of mashed swede? Was the benefit of not being harried by a harridan outweighed by the taking of more salt than was good for my young blood pressure? There's no way of knowing, it cannot be measured.

Mr Puddlecote points out that the great Delia recommends using salt in the preparation of a number of ingredients of a Sunday Lunch. She is, of course, absolutely correct. Vegetables other than legumes, particularly root vegetables, boiled in unsalted water do not develop their best flavour because the temperature is not high enough whereas salted water boils at a higher temperature and that little difference in boiling point makes all the difference to flavour. We are all happier to have flavoursome food than bland food. If the trace of salt in vegetables prepared in this way has adverse health conseqeuences, how are they to be compared to the additional pleasure given by eating a tasty dinner rather than a less tasty dinner? It goes without saying that it cannot be measured. Even the amount of salt in vegetables prepared in that way cannot be measured because some will absorb more than others.

Our Prime Minister believes it wise to spend taxpayers' money on surveys of happiness. It goes without saying that it will be a complete waste of every penny involved for two reasons. Surveys can never measure anything accurately because they only give a snap-shot of opinion on the day the questions are asked. Not only can opinion change the next day but the questions have to be vague to avoid 90% of respondents saying either "not applicable" or "don't know". Secondly, and more importantly, you cannot measure happiness by reference to factors over which politicians have any control.

In relation to salt-consumption scares, try these two questions. "Are you happy that old Auntie Enid enjoyed her day out from her care home, The Coffin Dodgers' Lodge?" Of course the answer is yes. "Are you happy that old Auntie Enid had three times her maximum total daily allowance of salt on her roast potatoes?" The answer might well be "it doesn't matter at her age" but underlying that answer will be acknowledgment of the scare; the full answer would be "yes but she'll probably die before it kicks-in." How does that rate on the happiness meter? Ten out of ten for the first answer and maybe seven for the second. The second question is completely irrelevant to anything other than government statistics. All that matters is the first question because old Auntie Enid only has one life and if that involved an ounce of salt to make a meal just as she likes it she will smile her gummy grin until her final gasp. And the second question need never be asked.

What matters is the quality of life. It is an ephermeral thing, different for everyone at any given time and different for everyone from one moment to the next. Is a longer life more desireable than a second helping of pudding or a good shake of salt on Sunday roasties? That's up to the individual to decide. Time might prove their decision to be right or wrong or it might provide no answer. One thing that is certain is that their happiness will be increased by letting them decide for themselves.