Britannia rules the waves

We celebrate this week the passing of the last flickering of our great power past, a flickering which managed in its time to power the great adventure in the South Atlantic, a great adventure which has and which looks to continue to cost us a great deal.

Perhaps appropriate that the Guardian should have majored in recent weeks on another vestige of our past, the havens we operate, or at least allow to operate, for the criminal and greedy of the world, most notably the British Virgin Islands. As with arms, we no doubt mount the morally feeble defense that if we did not do it there are plenty out there who would. But I would prefer to live in a poorer country with cleaner hands.

Not that one should overdo the poorer country business. According the OECD website, we are still very firmly in the top ten in so far as GDP is concerned and we are still very average as far as GDP per head in proper countries is concerned. We are not doing that badly, even if our financial and tourist services sectors account for a bigger share of the total than one might think prudent: the coalition is right in that we need to get away from virtual production and to put more time into more real production, even if they are not having too much success in making the move.

And thinking of our wonderful financial services sector, the Guardian also spilled much ink on the incompetence of the banking knights who ran HBOS. Not only did these chaps get paid indecent amounts of money, they were not even any good at what they were supposed to be doing. Which brings me back to one of my hobby horses, the moral decline of the once proud and mutual Halifax Building Society on their watch. A moral decline which allows them to rack up the housing insurance premiums of their regular customers on the basis that most of them are too idle or too ignorant to do anything about it. I mourn the passing of the days when one could trust one's building society to treat one decently without having to bother about it. Without having to wade through the thickets of so called information published far and wide for our convenience, for our customers whose experience matters o so much to us.

Not to mention the thickets of information in the various online bills I now get from the various utilities. Not quite impenetrable, but a lot less easy to understand than the much simpler bills which used to come through the letter box. All part of the same tendency to keep the man in the street firmly in his (or her) place with information overload masquerading as customer service. Capitalists and computers have a lot to answer for.

PS: in the interests of fairness, I suppose I ought to acknowledge the growing number of insurance scroungers (that is to say people who make false or at least dubious claims), many of whom read the 'Daily Mail' and get very excited about benefit scroungers.