Saturday 11 May 2013

Watch Out for Historical Klingons


I really don't know how the Queen managed to keep a straight face when she made her customary speech at the opening of Parliament this week. Given that its theme was the necessity for cost-cutting, there is hilarious irony in the fact that tremendous expense is involved in the custom and pageantry of its delivery. Perhaps her conscience was assuaged by the recent tiny reduction in the cost of the whole performance: her speech is no longer hand-written on goat-skin vellum with a special ink that takes three days to dry. In these straitened times one must suffer with the people, even if it means having one's speeches inscribed on mere (imitation goatskin) paper.

When Gutenburg first successfully employed his printing presses he could not possibly have envisaged that 560 years later, on a small island off the mainland of Europe, there would still be a solitary scribe labouring over goatskin as if nothing had changed in the intervening years. Nor could he, visionary though he was, foresee that his invention would produce one of the earliest side effects of industrialisation - putting scribes out of work. I do have some sympathy for those scribes - there would have been no job-seekers' allowance (JSA) for them to fall back on - but I would rather praise Gutenburg for his innovation than damn him for the temporary woes of a few workers. And he was himself later put out of work by the banker who lent him the money to build the presses and then confiscated them when the cash failed to flow back quickly enough for his liking. The visionary had not taken into account the fact that he was producing more books than were required by the very small numbers of customers who could actually read.

Reading is now more widespread, but the capitalist model remains unchanged since those days. Any business which cannot pay its way must forfeit its assets, and its directors must suffer humiliation and possible financial distress. Unless, of course, that business is a bank - in which case it is lavished with public funds and its directors are permitted to retire anonymously and in considerable material comfort.

I expect that the scribes of old soon found alternative employment, perhaps as typesetters in the growing industry of printing, but the prospects for today's unemployed are not so promising. The rapacious activities of the banks have laid waste to the economies of entire nations. As a result, businesses are damaged: many are wary of taking on new employees; start-up companies struggle to find backers and unemployment is becoming the norm for young people who should really be climbing career ladders.

But we Europeans are sticking together, helping each other out and jointly laying the foundations of economic regeneration. Only last week I had to transfer money to someone in Spain and discovered that my bank had discounted its fee for that particular transaction. Spain, as we know, is short of money, so I'd like to think it was a 'philanthropic' rate - but no one at the bank was available to comment. Then there is the Cypriot couple who have just become neighbours. Having graduated from Manchester University with more degrees than I had thought possible they now describe themselves, with considerable inventive flair, as "international job-seekers". (Perhaps this enables them to qualify for enhanced JSA subsidised by the EU and known as IJSA).

But, now that Europe is impoverished and the subsidies are on the wane, many Britons have concluded that their flirtation with the Continent has run its course and it's time to retrench. It is, after all, dangerously republican territory. Even in those few countries where monarchs remain they are mere shadows of the real thing. Just look at that Queen of the Netherlands who abdicated last week - without ceremony. She simply signed a form - and I bet it was on A4 copy paper printed out on an inkjet.

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