What was rather worrying about cashing a cheque in this branch of Barclay’s bank was the apparent need for a sign to tell customers that guns were banned inside. Just how many customers have they had who come in with a Walther PPK, Grumpy mused ?
(Unless of course James Bond was shacked up with some lovely somewhere locally…)
No guns ???
… for the last train home and the booking office is shut.
Ok, so now what ?
What on earth was the guy who posted the later of these two notices thinking? I thought only the TSA employed folk of this capability.
In these economically depressed times, Grumpy is having to modify his food buying habits, and look out thicker jumpers to wear after turning the heat down.
Sadly, I am not in receipt of the inflation protected, salary related, largesse I would have received had I spent my life working for the state or some quango. [Of course, at one time, large companies would also have had such pensions until it became clear that they were unsustainable by any affordable contributions and withdrew them.]
Rather, like most other people in the private sector, I set aside whatever monies seemed prudent at the time in a ‘money purchase’ (or ‘defined contribution’) pension and live on income from that together with the interest on my modest savings. I’m not going to complain here about the reality that monies from my increasing taxes go subsidise my fortunate fellow pensioners from the public sector, on the basis that if their unions were astute and powerful enough to negotiate their deals and governments were weak enough to pay them, then there is a certain market logic there that I salute.
No, my annoyance is directed towards the libo-conservacrats and hence towards their once fresh-faced leader, Mr Cameron. Although he is maybe too young (and, of course, far too wealthy) to have experienced the real, every day, corrosive effects of inflation, it is something which he must be acutely aware of.
The simple fact, however, is that we have a Conservative prime minister presiding over a combination of record low interest rates and high inflation, which is destroying the savings of a generation of pensioners like Grumpy and eroding their quality of life in the autumn years.
In 1976, when Dave was 10, we were ruled by ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan (of “Crisis ? What Crisis?” fame), and inflation was in double digits at 16.5% , as it was in much of the period from 1973 to 1981. However, the then equivalent of the Bank of England rate was as high as 15%; In consequence it was at least possible to protect against the erosion of value of cash savings.
Now, under a Conservative leader, there is simply no way to hold cash in an interest bearing account which produces a positive inflation adjusted return before tax, never mind after Mr Osborne removes a substantial slice, going in part to pay for the golden pensions of the civil servants in his department. Setting aside the abject failure of the Bank of England to execute the primary task Gordon Brown charged them with – managing inflation – the coalition does not seem to have a strategy for dealing with the impact of this on the rapidly crystallising issue of an ageing population.
This Grumpy could maybe accept on the basis that they were dealt a bad hand by messrs Blair and Brown. However, one of the very first acts of George Osborne on taking office was to cut the income of pensioners with ‘drawdown’ schemes by 17%, and increase the tax on transfers in certain circumstances of the same by 20%. So just as the income from private pensioners savings disappeared in real terms, Osborne kicked them in the nuts by slicing a fifth of their pension income – compare this with the modest revisions in the public sector which have caused the most extensive strikes for 30 years. A Conservative government!
Grumpy will be having more suppers of bread and cheese (albeit with HP sauce for flavour); it will also mean that the next time a conservative candidate calls to canvass for his vote, the conversation will be short.
I had cause recently to send two letters using a service from the UK Post Office called ‘Recorded Delivery’ which is a tracked, ‘signed’ for service.
Sadly, neither document made it to their respective destinations, and I checked back to remind myself how previous use of the service had fared. In fact, of all the documents I have sent using this Royal Mail facility in the past 3 years, over 65% never arrived.
I’m happy to accept that this public, union dominated, relic of 1950’s statism is bloated, inefficient, ineffectual and completely devoid of any notion whatsoever of customer service. It’s how such organisations are.
What raised Grumpy’s ire is the pointless framework for seeking redress; irrational barriers are raised against the wronged claimant so that there is no economic logic in making a claim.
The whole point about a tracking system is that Royal Mail knows whether an item has been delivered or not. Since (as shown clearly on the tracking site) my items had not been so delivered, it is irritating to have to complete two pages of claim and submit original documentation in support of this self-evident fact. The simple outcome is that the time spent on conforming with these procedures to claim the postage of £1.23 renders it meaningless.
In fact, in a previous spate of vanishing deliveries I did submit a claim just out of irritation, complete with the forms and original documentation, which I sent by (you guessed it) Recorded Delivery. Predictably, that was lost as well. Now we get to the real catch22 – I sought to resubmit the claim, but of course now had no original receipt. The claim was accordingly rejected, even though they in fact lost it. Beyond belief.
This is an organisation that was granted £1 billion of taxpayers money in 2010. No wonder the union, the CWU, opposes any attempts to introduce market discipline by privatisation into this out-of-control gravy train .