NHS Estates?

I'm intrigued. The Postulant sent me a link to a report which stated that the properties arm of the National Health Service had been turned into a "company" to sell off all the acres of land the NHS owns, but doesn't use. There must be an awful lot of it because the new "company," imaginatively named PropCo, is expected to become the "owner" of land and property valued at several billion pounds. I'm intrigued for several reasons, not least because the NHS is always pleading for more money, yet has apparently had billions tied up in unused property. Secondly, I'm very intrigued by the constitution of this new "company" which appears to have been carved out of the former NHS Estates, the division of the Department of Health which used to "manage" and maintain all the NHS properties.

If PropCo has been set up along the same lines as all the previous "Executive Agencies," I would suggest there is a scam in progress. Under the "Treasury Rules" the Executive Agencies are set up as a "business" burdened by not being permitted to take an overdraft from a bank, saddled with an inflated "deemed mortgage" for any property it is established in (and it isn't allowed to sell those or move to more affordable premises either) and no operating capital. The "deemed mortgage" is also established at a large interest rate, typically anywhere between 3 and 6 times the rate you'd get from a bank, and then blamed at regular meetings with the relevant Cabinet Minister for failing to show a profit. There is a long list of such "Executive Agencies" which have "failed" and been broken up and their assets sold off to "preferred bidders" on the Treasury's List of Preferred Bidders.

I can certainly understand the selling off of unused property. What I find a little less understandable is the settiing up of a "company" to do so. Surely the NHS Estates could have done this directly, perhaps even on the understanding that the money made from the sale was to be ploughed into upgrading existing premises or even renewing or replacing some? Now it seems likely that any money - and going on previous form on matters like this, it seems unlikely there will be any real profit - will simply vanish into the Black Hole called Whitehall to be squandered on some other over budget and out of control project.

One thing I am absolutely certain of. If there is a profit to be made from this, it will be made by whoever buys the properties from PropCo, not by PropCo. So, as the saying is, we will have to "follow the money" to see who, and perhaps what, is behind this. If, as is suggested, PropCo is "privatised" at some point, we can be very certain that it will then be systematically asset stripped, as have all the other Executive Agencies, and the unprofitable rump will then be allowed to die an unnatural death by a thousand cuts.

As ever, the taxpayer will pick up the cost.

Corpus Christi

Is kept as a public holiday in Germany, one of many "religious" holidays no longer kept in the UK, though the feast is marked an kept by the Anglican Church. The feast is a marking of the institution of Holy Communion, not a popular one in anti-catholic cicles since there is always an argument between Protestants and Catholics (Note; I include all churches with the three "orders" of clergy, that is Bishops, Priests and Deacons, as "catholic.") as to what the Holy Communion actually is.

One of the stumbling blocks for Protestants is the concept of Christ's presence in the consecrated Host and Wine. Probably deliberately, the Calvinists, Knoxists and their offshoots, misrepresented the concept of "transubstantiation" and played down the importance of the Eucharist. Even now, there are many who misunderstand the concept of "transubstantiation" and what it represents. Theologians do NOT suggest or believe that the bread and wine are somehow 'magically' transformed into physical flesh and blood. Nor is that what Christ himself meant when he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper. To understand the origins of what he did and the significance of what he said, we have to look at the Judaic "Friendship Offering" set out in Leviticus. Essentially this is a meal shared between a man and a priest in which elements, primarily bread and wine, are first offered on the altar before the tabernacle in thanksgiving, and then consumed as a "meal" before it.

Reading Leviticus one sees a long list of sacrificial "offerings" to be made for atonement or thanksgiving for an equally long list of actions or events. In the Last Supper, Christ swept all of this away, making himself the ultimate sacrifice, offered once and for all time for everything and everyone. Hence his command that we "do this as often as you eat/drink it in memory of me."

So what is "transubstantiation" all about. In the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest invokes the Holy Spirit, using words to the effect of (there are a number of different forms for this prayer) "send down the Holy Spirit upon these your gifts of bread and wine so that they may become, for us, the very spiritual food and drink of Christ's Last Supper." In so doing, catholic theology infers that Christ is present in spirit in the consecrated bread (referred to as "The Host") and in the consecrated wine. In every form of the consecration prayer (and in every language)  Christ's own words are used as the Words of Institution; "this is my Body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me" followed by "this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sin. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me."

One thing to be aware of here is that this doesn't suggest that every time we eat bread or drink wine we are essentially having communion. It is only when it is in the context in which Christ performed this action that it is. The Last Supper followed the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal at which the women first bring light to the table at which all the family, friends and servants are gathered. Prayers are offered for the light and for the home. The head of the household then give thanks for the bread, blesses it, breaks it and shares it with everyone at the table. That is followed by the meal and finally a special cup of wine is brought to the table, thanks offered and the cup is shared by everyone present. The Early Church followed this sort of pattern for probably the first 200 to 300 years, but gradually the gatherings became too large and the Eucharist took place outside of the context of a meal. In some ways this is a pity, but we must also acknowledge that it was probably the only way to keep the sense of the special nature of the Eucharist without losing it entirely in a sort of mega-dinner party.

In the "Great Thanksgiving" prayer the "elements" are transformed spiritually to become, for the faithful, the outward visible sign of the inward spiritual grace to be found in Christ's spiritual presence. Now we come to were the various factions part company. To a catholic, once consecrated, the bread and wine remain consecrated and therefore Christ is present even after the service is over. To a Protestant, it is purely symbolic and you can tip it all in the bin or down the sink afterward. As a catholic, I find that abhorrent, but I recognise the difference in perspective.

Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) means different things to different people, but the celebration of the Eucharist is, quite possibly, the single most significant act of worship for any and every Christian.

A fritzed internet connection ...

We've had a little battle the last couple of days, between us and our FritzBox router. It suddenly refused to connect to the internet, even though everything else on it was functioning. Our internal LAn, the WiFi parts - just no internet. We traced everything, connections, jack plugs, reset the thing and no joy.

So, today it got replaced. Bingo. We're back. Normal service resumes tomorrow.

Some Interesting Insights

Over the last couple of days I have been helping a friend who is writing a biography for her sister. This has meant doing a lot of reading from a variety of sources of different perspectives on the brief history of the country once called Rhodesia. The reason is quite simple, my friend's father was probably the first clear victim of the terror campaign and her mother and youngest sister, then aged 4, were in the vehicle when it happened.

What I have found fascinating about the documents and different perspectives I've read on the history of the country, the events leading up to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the subsequent Bush War, Lancaster House Agreement and the handover to the best worst candidate who has done exactly what the much maligned white "settlers" were afraid would happen, has been enlightening to say the least. As one political commentator put, Ian Smith was not as cynical as those on the British side. He believed that an agreement had to be honoured, whereas the people he was dealing with would offer and agree anything - then calmly deny everything and tear the heart out of their discussions as soon as they faced a different audience.

What also became very clear as I read - and I was reading accounts from both sides of the fence - was that the British negotiators didn't give a brass farthing about the legitimate fears and concerns of the "settlers" (most of them second or third generation), had no intention of offering them any kind of lifeline and saw them merely as a nuisance to be thrown to the lions of political expediency as quickly as possible. This certainly becomes very clear as the media propaganda campaign wound itself into high gear and reads emotive words like "treason," "rebellion" and "illegal government" or, best of all, "corrupt kangaroo courts" as a description of the murder trial proceedings involving my friend's father's murderers. What became very clear was that the UK regarded the white population in Rhodesia (and this carried over against the white South African population) as a small handful of rich, parasitic individuals who had stolen the land, the infrastructures and even the cities from the poor downtrodden indigenous population.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The first white settlers entered the country that became Rhodesia in the 1880s and found - by the British government's own estimates -  a few hundred thousand people, members of warring tribes. The British South Africa Company, chartered by Westminster to settle and develop the land, found itself with a major problem right from the start. The Matabele, a break away of the Zulu nation in South Africa, had arrived barely a decade before the BSAC and immediately set about subjugating the indigenous Shona. The first task the Company had to tackle was to bring peace to the tribes. That uncovered another problem - a thriving slave trade with the Arab held ports in Tanganyika and Kenya. It took 10 years and Regular Troops from Britain and India to eventually suppress this ghastly trade and put an end to the genocidal wars between the tribes. The Royal Navy even had to send three small gunboats overland to patrol the waters of Lake Nyasa and keep the peace.

In 1896 a Lord Carrington drew up the original documents dividing the land between the tribes and the settlers and drawing the boundaries for what would become the colonies of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi). One of the ironies of the tragedy that unfolded between 1960 and 1974 is that it was another Lord Carrington that paved the way for the psychopath Mugabe to take control of the country. It is another common fallacy to state that the black population were , as in South Africa, excluded from the ballot box. They were not, but ZANU, ZAPU, the ANC and the "Patriotic Front" enforced a boycott of every plebicite the government held and promoted the idea that they could not take part as this would "legitimise" the "regime." The truth, again. is even more complex. They were not interested in any compromise, or in any settlement which protected the rights of the white minority to security, property ownership or citizenship. For them it was everything or nothing. No compromise, no accommodation - hand it all over and get out.

My friend's family became the first casualties in the political game played out over the trial of the murderers. In the UK Press they were portrayed as abusive farmers and it was even suggested that the victim had beaten and evicted people from "their" land to "steal" it and add it to his farm. These lies have never been withdrawn. The Crown even "pardoned" the murderers (The Rhodesians ignored it and hung them anyway.), but at no time was any expression of sympathy, regret or condolence offered to the family.

What no one on the anti-Rhodesia side has ever acknowledged or addressed is what did they think the white population, admittedly a minority, a mere 250,000 individuals in a population of 3 million would do or where would they go? Remember, they were there because the forefathers of those in Westminster and Whitehall saw a chance to make money out of them and the land.

It does strike me that there is a very similar campaign being waged quietly against Israel. Poisonous reporting in the UK media is driving some serious anti-Jewish feeling. Every dead Palestinian terrorist brings forth masses of column inches and hours of coverage on television - but the daily bombardment of Israeli civilians is never mentioned - unless it happens to hit something they can't avoid reporting. The same thing went on against the Rhodesians. They were all painted as brutal killers, devious white supremacists and land grabbing thieves. Every time the "talks" they were enticed to collapsed, it was reported that they had refused to compromise. When you actually look at some of the real documents that are in the Public Records and available from a number of sources now, you quickly discover that the British Government was looking after its own interests very nicely, playing both sides off against the middle to keep the African members of the Commonwealth happy and the white Rhodesians made a convenient whipping boy. A classic example was a new Constitution for the country which would have increased Black representation in the legislature and received the approval of the populace in a referendum. When it reached Westminster, instead of accepting and approving it - Westminster altered it, entirely without consultation with the people it affected.

The truth is that Westminster never has liked dealing with people who want a say in how they are governed. The same pattern can be found in their dealings with the American colonies in 1776, in Ireland in the 19th Century and early 20th, in Israel and India in 1945 - 47. Promise things they know they can't or won't deliver, place a "final solution" on the table with a take it or leave it and then walk away leaving a trail of victims they've demonised and pilloried behind them. Only the Americans, the Indians and the Israelis seem to have succeeded in salvaging their countries from the potential wreck. The Rhodesians are and were the victims of the forces of demographics, changing ideologies in the corridors of power and the "new morality" of those whose wealth was built out of the labour and efforts of those they shipped off to the colonies in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Like the 6 million white South Africans now, they are the casualties in the philosophy that drives our political masters - "Some must always lose out so that others can benefit." Funny how its never those who utter this who are among the losers.

There does seem to be a bit of irony in the fact that the same activist groups who campaigned to have the white minority in Rhodesia and South Africa thrown to the lions, now campaign tirelessly to protect any and every "minority" - except any white minority - from "oppression" or "persecution."

National Minimum Wages ...

An article I read here on Yahoo, suggests that scrapping the National Minimum Wage may stimulate business and boost job creation. I don't think it is anywhere near that easy. For one thing, the NMW has already pushed prices and expectations up, but it has, it must be admitted, also cost jobs and, as I was recently reminded, things like fruit crops are rotting on the trees and the ground, because the price paid by the supermarkets is below the cost of harvesting them at the minimum wage.


This is a very complex issue, not one that can be addressed in 'sound bites' or with all the attendant emotive utterances that usually accompany any attempt to address it. The principle of a "fair wage for a fair day's labour" is one that Marx identified and which is also found in Adam Smith's treatises. The problem with Marx and Jung's ideologies is that they make no allowance for a more mobile society and do not recognise the manner in which a dynamic society changes. They failed to recognise that, as even they wrote, the economic situation of the growing echelons of the upper end of the working class and the even wider spectrum of white collar workers was already hugely different to the position of their parents and grandparents and that process has accelerated through the 20th Century.

The concept of setting a minimum wage sounds good in theory, but in practice it forces employers to adjust ALL wages and salaries upwards. As a former 'employer' in my role as Church Warden of a very large Parish Church with a big staff necessary to maintain it, it became a nightmare each time the Chancellor generously gave the Minimum Wage Earners an increase, I had to make an across the board adjustment of all wages paid to the whole of our staff. In the end we had, as our income was declining and our other costs rising, to make redundancies - and if you want to see an expensive way of shedding staff - try that one! 

The effect of the Minimum Wage is to drive wage inflation. By pushing wages up, you drive costs up. Increasing costs mean a rise in prices and the vicious circle begins. As prices rise, so do the demands for a rise in wages ... In any given business, the cost of labour is always the largest single charge on the business and the largest single part of the price charged for the goods or services provided. That is a simple business fact. Nor is it simply a case of paying the employee. The government adds some charges to this in the form of "Employers Contributions" for National Insurance and State Earnings Related Pension contributions which add between 30% and 40% to the cost of employing a worker. 

Sadly, history shows that any attempt to level the playing field in terms of wealth by "redistribution" through tax or through government regulation of the wage market inevitably fail and wind up destroying economies and impoverishing many more than they help. I now live in Germany, anyone who wants to know how "successful" the 50 years of communist economics was in the former GDR, Poland, Hungary or Romania, need look no further than their levels of unemployment, government borrowing and the out dated and totally inadequate infrastructures left behind for those nasty, evil Capitalists to replace and rebuild ...

I'm now a Pensioner, living on a small Pension after almost 50 years of employment, paying into a non-existent fund mismanaged by the same political classes and civil servants now desperately searching for new ways to raise money they have promised, but don't own. No government in the world "owns" the wealth of the nation or that of any individual within them, that belongs to the people. The only money a government has is what it can legitimately charge through tax for the services it provides in return - and we have now reached a point where the charge on the individual exceeds the benefit we receive in return. Those who think that all wealth in a nation belongs equally to everyone should reread Marx, that is not what he says and certainly not what he meant.


Perhaps, at this point, a better solution to this wage spiral would be to make it illegal to award "across the board" increases based on percentages of an individual's wage or salary, since this only widens the gaps between top earners and those at the bottom. A fairer method of evening things out would be to introduce a median increase based on a percentage of the average between top and bottom scales. That would ensure that the lowest paid would get a larger boost than those at the upper end and it would, over time, also reduce the disparity and self level so that the "steps" between scales would still be maintained. Logically it makes more sense than imposing a "Minimum" which simply impacts all the way up the tree - and, as many commentators on the article point out, has now become a "maximum" level for everyone in a particular field.

Sixty Years of Service

The Monk would like to congratulate Her Majesty on the sixty years she has given in service of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. She has weathered the varying storms whipped up by a venal Press pack, politicians attempting to cover up the cost of their follies and the "civil" servants who cost the nation an arm and both legs, but hide their extravagance behind sneaky releases of the "cost of the Royal Household." Long may she continue, and long may her heirs and successors continue the exemplary service they give the nations of which she is head.

The First Elizabeth reigned during a period of religious and social upheaval, and set the scene for the start of the British Empire. The Second has had the misfortune to reign over a nation which has lost its Empire and perhaps its way, but that is hardly her fault - that lies squarely with the self-serving political classes who have pursued nothing but their own enrichment and self-interest since the reign of Edward VII, her great-grandfather.

The Royal Household costs the taxpayer a fraction of the cost of the Prime Minister's Office and, put alongside the cost of Whitehall, is a mere pittance. Her Majesty is worth every penny, unlike the rest of them.

God save the Queen!

Long may she reign!

A date to Remember?

Yesterday we left the coast of Jutland for the drive back to Germany. The previous evening we'd taken a walk along the dunes just north of where we'd rented a holiday cottage and, near Norre Lyndvig, came across a memorial to two wrecks that occurred in 1811, the 64 gun Fourth Rate "St George" and a second ship, a frigate of 36 guns. 1400 men died in these wrecks and the bodies washed ashore all along the Ringkobing Fjord coast. Over 500 were buried beneath the dunes where the memorial now stands, but, as I stood and looked out to the site of the wreck of the "St George" the place and the date took another focus.

From this spot, in 1916, I would have heard the gunfire from the battle between the two greatest Battle Fleets ever to meet and engage in a ship-to-ship duel of gunnery. This took place in the late afternoon of the 31st May. The British Grand Fleet met the slightly smaller German High Seas Fleet in a long awaited battle. British losses were horrific - three of Admiral Beattie's Battle Cruiser Force blew up with the loss of almost all hands. His own flagship, HMS Lion, almost shared their fate, but was saved only by the dying action of the Royal Marine Major commanding 'Q' Turret. As the cordite around him ignited, he ordered the flooding of the magazine, drowning everyone in it, but saving the ship.

From where we stood we might have been able to see at least some of this, and certainly the muzzle flash and smoke. With over 500 ships charging about and the major units firing their 11, 13.5, 14 and 15 inch guns it must have been an awe inspiring and possibly frightening sight and sound for the inhabitants of this area.

The German Fleet did not escape unscathed, though, through disasterously poor communications, it escaped Jellicoe's hoped for "Glorious First of June" he spent the night preparing his ships for. Through bold handling and leadership, the High Seas Fleet managed to pass through the tail of the British Fleet during the night and return to its base. Though they were sighted and engaged by several ships, no one thought to send Jellicoe a signal about it ...

May 31st, 1916 stands in history as the date of the last engagement between two massive battle fleets and, unlike Trafalgar, Copenhagen, the Nile, or Admiral Howe's "Glorious First of June" it is best described as inconclusive. It is true the High Seas Fleet never again challenged the Grand Fleet, but it is a mistake to think it did nothing else. It found plenty of action in the Baltic and all but destroyed Russian Naval forces in a number of engagements and performed admirably in support of the Army against the Russian land forces and later the Bolsheviks.

Standing on the windswept dunes I could only wonder what the men engaged in that clash of the giants would think of the world we have created from the peace they won with their lives.