The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born

So...Brexit then... I have to say (along with everyone else in the universe) I did not expect that.

I admit that the last four blogs I wrote on this topic were penned (fingered?) firm in the certainty that Remain was going to win and that the status quo ex ante would soon reassert itself like it always does.

Except it didn’t.

Brexit as it has come to pass is an abomination. I didn’t have to be, but it is. There is seemingly no plan for what to do now, despite the Eurosceptics having had 30 years since the passage of the Single European Act to prepare for this moment.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear

He was funny in American Pie

So said the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who would surely have interpreted Brexit as a “morbid symptom” like fascism was in the aftermath of the First World War.

Oh, there he goes - how far did we get before he mentioned fascism again?

But I think that it’s a valid comparison at the sociological level (if not the practical political YET) because this vote is only a vote FOR the UK leaving the EU on the surface. Its true nature is not a vote FOR anything, but a vote AGAINST everything. It is a vast NO - a howl of rage, frustration and anguish at the perceived state of our society from a whole host of different and often incompatible perspectives.

In the brutal light of hindsight, it was entirely rational – if utterly cynical – of the Leave campaign to avoid putting forward any visionof what a post-Brexit UK would look like. Not as cynical as admitting within hours of the result that they had no intention of keeping the promises that were made, but getting there.

Only as a purely destructive force, an instinctive lashing-out could Leave have won. Any positive programme would have given the game away and alienated a part of their angry brigade into making a more-or-less rational choice between commensurable options, instead of just putting on a Halloween party for the collective Id.

But here we are.

Well, ok Leavers – you’ve smashed the system. You’re in charge now. What are we going to do?

Perhaps this will release the pent-up energies of that half of the British population who have been excluded and downtrodden by the EU and the political elite. Perhaps we will see a flourishing of creativity as we, the people, take the initiative and start to forge a new destiny.

Or perhaps not.

I fear not. Ever experience to date suggests that - rather than being capable of rising to the challenge it has set itself - the British public is like a toddler who has (i) been denied a second packet of crisps, and (ii) has then shat in his hands, (iii) wiped it on his face and the furniture and (iv) is screaming “MUMMY CLEAN ME UP NOW!”

I feel it’s only fair to point out that this scenario has never happened with my kids – in all of its details.

Who do they expect to make everything better? Who exactly is going to run this country you’ve taken back?

Postwar consumerism and our collective inability to realise that the party is over have generated such a sense of entitlement that we take for granted everything we have and see everything we don’t have as a conspiracy against us.

And when it doesn’t get better – because Vote Leave don’t deliver any of the things the Brexiters voted for; because the immigrants are still here, offending you by speaking Polish; because there are even fewer jobs to go round; because all the hospital staff have left to work in Germany – who will be the first to cry “betrayal”?

Even if Brexit doesn’t end in disaster, it will get worse before it gets better.

I might manage to be constructive about this next time and think about how we can all pull together to make the best of it - because there are opportunities alongside the risks and at the end of the day we are all stuck with each other for better or worse. Part of me wants to look be constructive, part of me wants to take the piss out of the tantruming Remainers who are now ironically keen on overturning democracy - and part of me wants to entitle this blog "I For One Welcome Our New Dipshit Overlords". I guess this is my compromise.

For now, as we prepare to turn London in the Pyongyang of Europe, I will leave you with these thoughts from 19th Century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot:

A people never hears censure of itself. No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

Don't Make Me Think!

Along with “when is ODHSNM coming back?” and “what are you doing behind those bushes?”, the question I have been asked most in recent months is “how should I vote in the EU referendum?”

Long-time readers will recall that this blog has been on the wrong side of every major political controversy of recent years – from proportional representation, through Scottish independence, to Albania’s 2011 Eurovision entry.

As such, the hordes of journalists, pundits and other halfwit gobshites that make up “the media” have been clamouring (so far fruitlessly) to elicit the views of Roger of Sicily – knowing, of course, that whatever he says will be precisely that thing which fails to come to pass. Like the political inverse of Paul the psychic octopus.  

My molluscular counterpart

Well, before I give you your instructions, let me talk about the two campaigns for a moment. Last year, I said that the 2015 general election campaign was depressing, but never have I seen a more dismal spectacle than both sides of this EU referendum debate.

Remain appears not to have a positive case to put for EU membership, or if they do they are afraid to make it, and so fall back on increasingly laughable and outlandish claims about how terrible the consequences of not voting for them will be.

Leave, in turn, seems to have gone beyond making any sort of argument for its point of view and just wants to stamp its feet and shout about how everything is unfair – like a surly five-year-old up long past his bedtime.  

Both campaigns – like the Donald Trump phenomenon in the USA – show how we are now in a post-factual political culture. I’m not claiming that coinage – I got it from this article, but it’s probably been around for ages. As Ronald Reagan said (or maybe he didn’t) “facts are stupid things”.

To the partisans of both sides, facts are only facts to the extent that they support their particular point of view. Claims of fact that contradict it are not simply mistaken – they are wilful, deliberate lies put forth by the selfish (if not outright evil) opposition to manipulate you, you poor innocent dupe.

There are good arguments to be made for staying in the EU. And there are good arguments to be made for leaving the EU. Some of those arguments - on both sides – are based on true facts about the world. Some of them are based on value-judgments, which I don’t believe can ever be true or false. I’m kinda old fashioned in believing that the world we live in is a mixture of facts and values, that aren’t always compatible with one another.  

There are good arguments on both sides of his referendum debate, but no one appears to be making them. We seem to have reached a point where every genuine point of disagreement devolves into “culture war”, which is an infantile kind of politics. It comes from the same place as the ever-growing enthusiasm for conspiracy theories – and that place is simply intellectual laziness.

It’s laziness that’s the problem with “the public” – it’s not stupidity.

Because it’s hard to deal with a situation where both sides can be partly right and partly wrong, and you have to choose between options that aren’t simply black and white, isn’t it? And it’s even harder to take responsibility for your choice!

It’s a lot easier to say that you are right because your heart is in the right place; that facts that don’t fit are lies; and that people who disagree with you are not just wrong but also bad.

Not the answer

Just like it’s a lot easier to say that everything is controlled by corporations or the Jews or space lizards than it is to admit that the world is complicated and maybe – just maybe – you don’t actually understand all of it.

Just like it’s so much easier to say “they’re all the same” than it is to listen to what the differences are and take the responsibility of judging and justifying your judgement.

What depresses me the most is how this line of argument (if you can call it that) has been taken up by ordinary people. My Facebook news feed (for example) is full of people I otherwise like and respect, on both sides, making the most ridiculous claims – not about the merits of their own opinions, but of the malign intentions of anyone who holds the opposing view. Again and again, I see the opinion-cart put in front of the fact-horse, without regard to the stable door of complex, imperfect reality.

I’m as bad as any of you. I’m sitting here behind my ironic facade – does he really mean it? Or is he joking? Who will be the first to pose the immortal question “U OK hun?”

No, I’m not going to tell you how to vote. I don’t know how I’m going to vote, and when I do, I will take responsibility for it.  Just vote however you’re going to vote for the right reasons. Don’t vote against anyone. Vote for something.

It's Not You - It's Me

“In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve,” said Joseph de Maistre. He didn’t mean it in a good way.

I have lived through quite a few general election campaigns and paid good deal of attention to the last few. I have never witnessed one this depressing.

It has, however, at least given us something new – alongside the traditional all-you-can-eat dogshit buffet – in the form of parties campaigning on the basis of who a vote for them would exclude from a future coalition government.

That the political parties and the media have utter, naked contempt for us – the voters – is not new.

But in the past, the voters have always at least been allowed the “king for a day, fool for a lifetime” privilege of being treated as though it was them who choose the government. Not this time. Now we are being treated to the spectacle of post-election coalition wrangling before any ballots have even been cast.

As anyone who voted Lib Dem or Conservative in 2010 – and cared – will have noticed, you can’t be sure that what it says on the tin bears even the scantest resemblance to what’s inside any more. Not, of course, that you ever could, I suppose. It was a “coalition” of a different sort that inflicted the Iraq War on the world.

I'd much rather have than one of these than a school for my kids

It’s a common lament that the political media focuses too much on personalities and not enough on policies. That’s true up to a point: apart from being pretty sure that whoever wins, taxpayers like me will be expected to stump up £100 billion for Trident (the most expensive sock stuffed down the underpants in human history), I have very little idea what else the various parties are offering. Or rather are pretending to offer right now in the hope of fooling enough of us peasants into putting them in power so that – much like Charles I – they can do whatever the fuck they like without reference to us for five more years.

OK, so the political class despises us and we despise them. But considering how many needy neurotics the British public is clearly made up of, it surprises me how rarely anyone seems to wonder “what if it’s not everyone else – what if it’s me?”

What if the public gets held in contempt because it never disproves that it is WORTHY of contempt? In the past, people could kid themselves that it was the papers shoving “who is the best-dressed leader’s wife?” articles down their throats – now the analytics will prove that THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT, if they have to have politics at all.

So what’s the answer? Well, clearly not voting isn’t it.

A year or so ago (back when I used to blog regularly...) I wrote in praise of Russell Brand and his anti-voting point of view. Actually, it was less a blog about Russell Brand and more of an opportunity to quote long passages from HG Wells, with whom I was then obsessed.

Over a hundred years ago – A HUNDRED YEARS AGO! - Wells said that democratic elections give ordinary people “an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control”.

All that’s changed is the number of party organisations.

Best-dressed party leader, 1922

Churchill said:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

I sympathise a bit with the idea of refusing to participate in a charade of democracy. But then I have no doubt whatsoever that the people who make it most frequently and loudly are precisely those who would shirk the responsibility of an active, participatory democracy most vigorously.

It IS much easier to criticise than to come up with a constructive alternative - and it's even easier to parrot criticisms other people have thought up for you. 

That doesn’t mean that your criticisms should be ignored just because you don’t have all the answers. But if all the carping about politicians all being the same etc was put to some constructive use – who knows? – maybe an alternative that doesn’t equate everything that is not precisely what we have now with totalitarianism or dictatorship could be figured out.

We get bland mannequins like Cameron and Miliband because we demand them. We have earned them. 90% of government is administration and the remaining 10% is presentation (mostly making out that the other is Hitler or Mao or whatever).

Come on! The difference between “destroying the NHS” and “saving the NHS” is a fractional difference in budget and private sector involvement AND YOU KNOW that any promise made on these points will be treated as negotiable in future. What we are seeing on a large scale is the narcissism of small differences literally played out in all its tribal idiocy.

They don’t believe it. You don’t believe it. So why are we doing this at all?

OK Bye Now 2014

OK, so you probably thought I’d just given up writing this blog by now, right?

Yes, it’s been nearly three months since I put anything on here. But just because I haven’t been writing it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you, ODHSNM.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been really busy at work. I forgot the login details. Plus, the world in 2014 is so ridiculous there’s very little I can add to it here. This picture – from the quaint North Yorkshire village of Hutton-Le-Hole – sums it up for me, pretty much.

I’ll do better next year, I promise. Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end or nuffink.

So, I will bid you farewell for this year my second photo summing up the year, from a kid’s playground in Wrose. Have a splendid Christmas you magnificent bastards!

The Horn

​If your car does not have a properly functioning horn, it will fail its MOT.

I find this rather surprising, insofar as the only function a car horn has is to declare to the listening world that the driver sounding it is a wanker.

Let us consider the full range of situations in which any driver in the UK has ever used their horn:

Situation 1
Intended meaning: “You just behaved in a way which caused me a slight inconvenience and/or to caused me to turn my steering wheel/slow down when I didn’t want to – I am unreasonably angry about that”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 2
Intended meaning: “Someone is breaking into my car. Hopefully this noise will scare them off rather than encourage others to join in”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 3
Intended meaning: “The traffic lights have changed and you have not noticed it as quickly as me”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 4
Intended meaning: “I recognise you! Hello! Oh dear, you have had a heart attack”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker”

Situation 5
Intended meaning: "Get out of the way pigeon - no, THAT pigeon, not all of you in a 500 metre radius"
Meaning actually conveyed: "I am a wanker"

Situation 6
Intended meaning: “I am sitting outside your house. Come out, because I am not coming to the door”
Meaning actually conveyed: “I am a wanker. And also a taxi driver”

A Conspiracy against the Laity

This is what George Bernard Shaw calls “the professions” – those self interested cabals dedicated to keeping their respective shops closed, in the name of keeping standards up.

Of course, a free market would imply that any fool can set himself up as a doctor and charge whatever he can convince others into paying, whether he has any medical training or not – with the principle of “caveat emptor” putting responsibility onto the customer to be happy that the person removing their appendix knows what they are doing.

This is one of the reasons why a completely unrestricted free market is hard to defend. I do not particularly object to doctors having to adhere to some sort of common standards.

What I do take exception to – as I have said before – is the privileges accorded to the legal profession.

And remember boys and girls, the word “privilege” comes from the Latin for “private law”, meaning an arrangement to the advantage of particular individuals which is not available to everyone – which is in conflict with a key principle of legal theory, vis equality before the law.

My business’ landlord and I recently agreed to renew our lease, literally by just changing all the dates on the old lease. We want to stay. He wants us to stay. Simple.

OH BUT WAIT.

For some reason, I have to go and get a solicitor to administer an oath under the Statutory Declarations Act 1835 in order for the paperwork to be legit.

The derivation of THAT word points to the circularity going on here: only if a solicitor (or other Commissioner for Oaths) has made me read out a line of text in front of him and signed the paperwork, would my landlord or I be able to engage other lawyers to sort out any disagreement we might have in the future.

What if we all just...stopped?

I have often thought that if everyone stopped believing in financial markets, they’d disappear. If we all stopped allowing the legal profession to take on the role of authorising everything we do, made the law our servant rather than the other way round and took responsibility for ourselves, wouldn’t they vanish too?

Now We Are Three

It is three years on Tuesday since I started writing this blog.

Looking back, I see that I used to write a lot more serious social and political stuff - “a lot more serious” by own standards, I mean. I honestly don’t have opinions on many of the sorts of news events I used to comment on. It’s not that I don’t care... well, actually it is.

I feel like “the world” one sees through the mediation of the media (that’s what it does – hence the name) as opposed to what I see through my own eyes is too nauseating to think very hard about.

Another riot? Another massacre? More corruption? Impending doom? Meh.

What good is another opinion, echoing something someone has already said? What could I add to any debate?

Knowledge isn’t power – knowing just makes you realise how powerless you are.

Where’s the point of satire when reality is already beyond parody or is just so awful that to make a joke of it would be sickening?

And so I have written more and more about my life and my own perspective, throwing in a regular bit of bathos to make it amusing. Every time.

What am I doing this for? For the same 40 or so of you – for which I am very grateful, I might add – to carry on reading it week after week?

In the words of Emo Philips (who my wife hates, but who I think is a genius):

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

Space Raiders

I have never bought a pack of Space Raiders, nor do I know anyone who has. I am nevertheless very familiar with the image to the left.

Which led me to wonder – or “got me to thinking” I might say, if this was “Sex and the City” and not “Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.” – why are there empty packets of this low-price, corn snack in my back garden?

And outside Tancred’s nursery?

And – in fact – every damn place I ever look, why is there a discarded pack of Space Raiders?

They say that in London, you are never more than 6 feet away from a rat. I’m not sure if this is true. It would probably be true if you substituted “a rat” for “a dickhead”.

Well, I would hypothesise that between you and the rat – or dickhead – there is at least one screwed-up, indestructible, radioactive-smelling bag with a picture of an alien on the front of it, which the rat (dickhead) is avoiding.

They’re everywhere. I can feel those over-sized, black, almond-shaped eyes on the back of my neck right now.

I have two theories about this.

The first is sociological.

• Premise 1: Space Raiders are the crisp of preference for the sorts of people who throw empty crisp bags on the floor.
• Premise 2: Space Raiders are cheap.

You may be wondering how, unless I handle these empty crisp bags – which is, to me, only marginally less revolting a prospect than handling discarded underwear – I know this.

Well, I did actually Google Space Raiders this morning. That’s the problem with the internet. You come up with all these ideas about what things might be and why they might be, then you Google it and you find out the truth (or something like the truth).

It is the death of the imagination and of memory, when you can just find out the reasons for something or what something you half-remember was really like with a few keystrokes.

Marcel Proust would have had literally nothing to do with his life if he’d lived in the internet age. He could have just Googled “Madeleine smell” and got four million results.

Anyway, I disgress. I learned from the Space Raiders Wikipedia page that they are:

“A British cheap snack food, intended to fill the same niche market as crisps”

Which seems to the untrained eye an unnecessarily cautious description.

So Space Raiders are cheap and are eaten by people who drop litter. You do not see anywhere near as many discarded packs of, say, Waitrose Hand Cooked Sea Salt crisps.

Get to the point: Space Raiders are prole feed. They are eaten by people for whom a tracksuit is formalwear and whose bin is the great outdoors.

Malevolent little eyes...

OK, that’s theory number one. Coherent? Well-reasoned? Yes, but theory number two is MUCH more ambitious.

Space Raiders packs are not the abandoned containers for low-cost crisp-style corn snacks AT ALL.

They are in fact an invasive species of fungus or algae with astonishing powers of mimicry.

Stay with me. Let’s assess the evidence (you will by now be familiar with what I call "evidence"):

• No one I know or who you know has ever eaten any.
• No one knows how they got where they are.
• No one is willing to touch or remove them to find out once and for all if they are what they appear to be.

I believe that back in the 1980s Space Raiders were a real brand of crisps, featuring cartoon intergalactic pirates and shit like that. Natural selection has favoured members of this invasive species which encourages people to leave it alone – and so they have grown gradually to resemble the most unpleasant kinds of litter, re cheese-stink plastic bags.

They’re an algal bloom, spring from the contaminated earth like a red tide. That alien face is the plant world’s crude attempt to replicate the appearance of a Monster Munch monster – and it has succeeded to the degree that no one wants to look closer as soon as they have established what they think they’re looking at.

Do not touch, or it may release its spores in your face

I find it astonishing that mainstream science has not recognised this. We are all in terrible danger. Space Raiders are coming. 

My Vasectomy – Part 1

I went to see the doctor today and I am being referred for a vasectomy. I’m not sure when it will actually get done, but the ball – if you will excuse the pun – is now rolling.

“Oh, I preferred it when he didn’t blog about his testicles as much as he does these days,” you may be saying. Well, if that’s what you think, I suggest you go and read something else for the next few months.

That is because I am going to write a series of posts about this experience – an experience that many men of my age will be either going through or considering. I hope that I can help them or at least amuse them – and others – by providing a non-medical commentary on the whole thing, from decision time to aftermath.

So, I’m not just talking about my plums (Anonymous commenter – calm yourself...). I am performing a public service.   

This is, if you like, the prologue.

Elvira and I have two boys – Roger Jr (aged 4) and Tancred (aged 2). Despite a few quibbles, they are quite satisfactory. And as they say, two’s company – three’s a crowd.

Neither of us want another child. Two, as I say, is plenty. The end of the whole nappy era is in sight, Roger Jr will be going to school later this year and – who knows – we might be able to start living the lives of normal adult human beings at some near point in the future.

The thing about the whole experience of early parenthood is - like The Shard - it’s one of those things that look better the further away from it you stand. 

And we want to look back fondly on it – forgetting the bad parts and remembering the good parts – not relive it.

Indeed, one of the benefits of our children getting older is that Elvira and I might be able to resume some kind of a sex life. We’re not so concerned about them interrupting us “at it” as we are about the risk that one of them might wake up at 5am – and this, as you can imagine, has a dampening effect on our mutual enthusiasm for anything which delays going to sleep.

However, as many of you may know, baby production is one of the side-effects of sex. That is a bit of a bind. It’s almost as though evolution doesn’t want us to have sex very often.

One way round this risk is for one or the other of us to get “done”. And I drew the short straw on that front.

Now, I must say, it seems rather unfair to me. Apart from the whole impregnation-threat aspect of it, the only unwanted side-effect of me remaining “intact” is an occasional bit of a mess – and apparently even that isn’t affected.

With Elvira, however, there is the whole monthly crazy-woman thing, which – to be frank – I would certainly rather be rid of and I am sure that all other things being equal she would too.

Nevertheless, a hysterectomy (or is it an hysterectomy? I don’t know) is a major procedure, while I will be able to walk away from a vasectomy. Walk away like John Wayne, but you get the picture.

So the way it goes is this:

1. You make an appointment at the doctor’s and tell them you want a vasectomy.
2. They give you some leaflets and say that if you really want a vasectomy, make another appointment and ask again.
3. This no doubt puts off a lot of people who can’t be arsed to go to the doctor’s twice or who die of old age in the meantime.
4. If you do go back, however, the doctor gives you a few warnings (“may contain nuts” kind of boilerplate...) and they write to the bloke who does it – ie consultant urologist – to put you on the list for the next time he comes round with his big elastic band.

Easy innit? And free! God bless socialism.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that I would have some reservations about all this. Last night, I expected I would have had some Freudian dream about castration-anxiety. But as it was I dreamed about how a gibbon would be the perfect assassin: giant powerful hands, but completely innocent-looking.

No doubt, when the fatal day arrives, I will be feeling a little bit more anxious. And I will pick up the story then. No turning back now. 

...

Well, actually there is ample opportunity for turning back. But you know what I mean.

Postscript:

Thanks to all the people who got in touch to tell me I used the word "tupping" incorrectly in the previous draft of this post. I feel like a proper eejit now. 

Ooh, you are lawful

Every aspect of popular culture is very keen to tell us how interesting and exciting the legal profession is. The books and films of John Grisham and others and endless TV series – like Elvira’s favourite “The Good Wife” – all paint a picture of lawyers as Ubermenschen.

They’re cleverer than you and me, they’re richer than you and me, they’re harder-working than you or me, and they’re either more ethical than you or me or more ruthless than you or me. Sometimes both. 

Because sometimes, doing the right thing demands a lack of ruth.

Ordinary people (like you or me) are mere cattle to these soaring beings. Only they can protect us, save us or vindicate us, poor victims that we are – only they can enter the Holy of Holies and look The Law straight in the eye.

Which is why every encounter I have ever had with the legal profession has been such a crushing disappointment.

When I did jury service last year, the barristers were very well spoken but they were utterly pedestrian in questioning witnesses and presenting their cases. It was extremely unsexy.

Nevertheless, some of my fellow jurors were not disabused of their preconceptions of these titans walking among us. To them, the sheer impressiveness of these bewigged posh boys was utterly convincing, notwithstanding what they actually said. They were thrown into confusion by the fact that one said one thing, while the other contradicted it. Fortunately, there was a nice, posh, old man in an even bigger wig who told us what to do.

But at least that bore some resemblance in outward form to the mental picture of the legal profession we have all built up.

I await eagerly John Grisham’s upcoming “The Conveyancer”.

As previously mentioned, the Sicilies are moving house. After Stamp Duty, legal fees make up the second largest expense of the average house-mover.

Has anyone ever met a conveyancing solicitor? I haven’t. In all of my house moves, I have never once seen face-to-face the person who I paid to do this work.  

And what does this work consist of? Sending me letters asking me to get things for them, waiting a few days, and then passing those things on to another solicitor, who will write a letter to the other party (after a few days), as far as I can tell. Being a conveyancer must be much like being a personal trainer, insofar as it involves getting paid to make the person paying you work.

On one occasion, this involved Elvira and I driving from Woking to Oxford on a weekend to put some paperwork through the letterbox of a locked and closed solicitor's office - just to make sure they had it on Monday morning. 

If you pop down to WH Smith, you can pick up a DIY Last Will and Testament kit for a few quid. Go back 20 years or so and if you wanted a will, you had to get a lawyer to do it for you – no doubt at the cost of several hundred pounds.

Today, most conveyancing seems to get done in glorified call centres by unqualified or semi-qualified legal executives, overseen – on paper at least – by an actual solicitor.

And it can, because much like making a will, conveyancing appears to be a semi-skilled bit of administrative work which has been mystified by the self-interest of the legal caste into yet another tax on getting anything done.  Godspeed the day when you can print a DIY conveyancing kit off the internet and this professional closed shop is broken up.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s really just like it is on TV. But somehow, I doubt it.

I know that my own line of work is little better than the fleas that plague the vultures feeding on the rotting carcass of late capitalism, but if a tree fell on the whole legal profession and no one was there to see it, would anyone care?

I Stamp on Your Duty

Of all the parasites that clamp their jaws onto the body of a home buyer, surely the worst is Stamp Duty.

The five figure sum I am going to have to hand over to the government when I buy my new house dwarfs every other vig I have to pay up put together, coming as it will at 3% of what I’m paying.

And for what?

A stamp. Possibly not even that.

Without wishing to arouse the teabag crowd, resistance to the Stamp Act 1765 on the grounds of “no taxation without representation” was one of the major catalysts of the American War of Independence.

Well, I can’t complain about not being represented in juridical terms – I have a vote and I usually use it, for what that is worth – but for its naked rapacity in expropriating people of money in return for absolutely nothing whatsoever, I don’t think Stamp Duty has changed much in 250 years, even if we do call it Stamp Duty Land Tax now.

I am going to have to give all of the House of Sicily’s savings – built up over the years, with all due tax paid before I got it and then again on anything the savings earned – to the government.

For nothing.

For them to simply say that what I am doing is not against the law.

OK, it's not the highest percentage tax take imaginable. Sure, VAT gives the government a 20% cut of everything you buy. On road fuel that’s around 65%, because not only have you got fuel duty, but you’ve ALSO got VAT! Don’t believe ministers when they blame oil prices.

But when it comes to reminding you that there’s rarely much difference between taxation and racketeering – when you have to wipe yourself out ALL OVER AGAIN after buying a house – it’s hard to beat Stamp Duty.

Did I mention that we’re moving house? Please expect more on what a horrendous process this is over the coming weeks and months.