Fairy stories

My first fairy story is adapted from the Guardian.

Once upon a time it was thought that it would be a jolly good idea to sell the British Rail to private operators. They would make a much better job than the tossers who were doing it before - and if they made a bit while they were at it, so much the better. And so it was. The railway network was broken into lots of different bits (apparently because John Major was nostalgic about outfits like the 'Great Western Railways' of his youth) and off they went.

After a while, the outfit running the railway network - the tracks, the signals and all that kind of stuff - got into a bit of a pickle and that bit was quietly taken back into the public sector. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it provides a handy vehicle for the discrete subsidy of all the companies which actually run the trains on the network, a subsidy in the form of bargain basement charges.

In parallel with that change, a lot of those operating companies were taken over by state railway companies from elsewhere in Europe, companies who were delighted with the profits they could make here as these could be used to subsidize the fares on their trains back home. So the good old British taxpayer winds up paying for all those foreigners to go on excursions to the seaside. Worse still, we are chucking our public money at someone else's public sector. For heaven's sake, have we not yet learned that public bad, private good?

No idea how true this is, but it makes a good story for an old lefty.

My second fairy story is my own.

The City of London is home to a very large financial services industry, in which we take great pride and about half of which does useful things like providing insurance services and banking services. We really do need all this kind of stuff. But the other half is charging fat commissions on flogging off great chunks of this green and pleasant land to another lot of foreigners, a flogging off which, inter alia, means that we can balance our balance of payments books. They don't much bother about the fact that one day the golden goose is going to peg out, that there will be nothing left to flog. Lots of nice eggs in the meantime and the rest of us can jolly well look after ourselves. Nothing to do with them.

Whereas I bother about how long the present state of affairs, with us running a stonking great deficit in the trade of goods and services can last, living beyond our means in a way which ought to have the grocer's daughter turning in her grave. Bothered to the extent of turning up the publication known as the 'Pink Book', the authoritative guide to our balance of payments from ONS. The good news is that I was able to find and download this book in a few minutes. In a few hours someone at the ONS had answered my email about getting longer runs of data than the twenty five years or so which appeared in this book. What happened in the bad old days of the Labour Government in the sixties when balance of payments was the great big deal it has never been since?

But then things start to get difficult. It seems that one needs to be an expert, or at least quite knowledgeable, to make proper use of this sort of data, whereas I got nicely tangled up in all the various bits and bobs which go to make up our balance of payments. So tangled up that I dare not offer a chart by way of illustration, even though it seems reasonably clear that the current account deficit is presently both huge and volatile.

PS: part of the tangle being my complete failure to get Excel to display a nice chart from two of the data columns from ONS, with the first column being the year and the second being a value. The best I could do was a scatter plot which looked very tatty. And I had thought, at least, that I could do Excel.