Cast List

Every blog has recurring themes or characters of grumbles.

• London Fashion Week
  & similar schemes cost over £35m a year to the UK taxpayer and loose more jobs than they gain by diverting media attention away from struggling UK employers towards what some politician or civil servant has dreamed-up.  I'm among the people who looses work, because UK suppliers to my rather run-down UK web shop specialises in UK-made stuff or stuff made in democratic welfare states.The money comes to government labelled "European Regional Development Grant". I would not mind if they spent it on pensions or healthcare, but they seem to keep it in a similar category, but spend it to reduce development or not to develop any region of Europe; it would be better if they did nothing at all than to spend precious tax on the vanity projects that they spend our money on now.The goods promoted by schemes like London Fashion Week are made in places like China and Bangladesh.


• Bangladesh
  A country teeming with people who work in sewing factories, often in tax-free trade zones which are not even subject to Bangladeshi employment law. For example they have no right to join trades unions. In the UK we have a right to join feckless trades unions, but many people in Bangladesh have no right at all.A country with no national insurance, let alone a welfare state. A country where large amounts are spent on aid by westerners, including government and private help from the UK, and where the Bangladeshi government declines to spend much on similar schemes but diverts money instead to an export subsidy which helps dump under-priced clothing on European and UK markets and to put people in the UK out of work while they pay taxes or make donations to help people in Bangladesh. Each year there are a lot more people in Bangladesh because, as in the UK a hundred years ago, fear, intimacy, and lack of money lead to a lot of children or a high "fertility rate" in the jargon. So Bangladeshis are forever poor, except for the richer ones with Mercedez cars who lunch with aid workers and manage government there.There are a lot of countries in the world, and a lot of poor people in them, and a lot of grand issues to discuss about poverty or climate or such. So for simplicity I hope to make Bangladesh the main country to blog about. I will fail because lots of countries are interesting and because experts from the aid trade tend to do tours of them with phrases like "look at Brazil" or "these Ugandan beads", and also because I have not travelled much and like to show that I can google even if I have not travelled.


• Dfid
  A UK ministry called Department for International Development, taking-over work that used to be done by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. UK taxpayers spend 0.7% of gross domestic product on aid, recently withdrawn from some countries like Niger and India and controlled by very high-paid country reps who draft country plans and are too grand to have much down-to-earth information to make public on government web sites. UK taxpayers also spend huge amounts on stress and loss of jobs caused by dumping of goods from countries with no welfare state into the European market - goods which are bound to be cheaper than European goods because no tax is paid towards shools hospitals and other social insurance for the people in the country where the goods are made. Bangladeshi textiles are a good example.  It may be a coincidence that highly-paid UK officials have little need to know about the UK welfare state and that they meet officials from other countries who know nothing about it or hold it in contempt. A consensus builds-up which is based on the views of rich ex-pats and the counterparts in third world government. I think. Although the work done is probably still great. I am not so much against spending money via Dfod as in favour of rigging tarrif rates to make sure that third world governments do their share as well, which is a much bigger share than anything Dfod can do if goods from those countries should sell at a zero tariff into the European market.

• Will add more of the cast of characters as time goes-on