Men's Body Nonsense, Land Tax, Education and Mental Health

                                           Men and their Bodies

Old Joe, The Newcastle Match Seller, unknown artist

Photo Credit: Brampton Museum [CC BY-NC]

Men your body is a battlefield. Your skin is sagging. Your hair is thinning. Your insides are screaming for holistic renewal. This is ageing – breathe, it’s natural – but it’s war nevertheless, and the common moisturiser has become too basic a defence. Need new strategies? Fear not, reinforcements are here! 

Call up your super anti-ageing serum (£265). Enlist your seaweed cleanser (£34). Recruit your biotin vitamin gummies (£12 for 60) “Your future self will thank you,” say copywriters employed by the men’s health and wellness brand Hims, which sells the gummies and has hired, it seems, at least one clairvoyant. It is time to be well!

…the male market is exploding. For the most part, it is an explosion that does not involve new items so much as a rebranding of existing products, many long marketed to women. The intensive pore minimiser. The charcoal face wash. The glycolic cleanser. Under layers of packaging, the gloop is the same.

…My father did not have a self-care regime above a daily shave, but many of my friends, tail-end millennials in their 30s, are taking all the help they can get.

(The Observer Magazine, 2019)

Perhaps, just perhaps, your dad might have been the wise one?

 
Land Tax

Balmoral, Autumn, Joseph Denovan Adam (1841-1896)

Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

…A report on land, its use and its treatment as an asset, commissioned by the Labour Party and written by George Monbiot, was released this week and, where it was not ignored, was greeted as evidence of Labour’s desire to tax the nation until the pips squeak.

…The analysis in the report is hard to fault as a diagnosis of policy predicaments that need to be faced: an uneven distribution of wealth, inflated asset prices and too great a reliance on financial services for tax revenue, with all its susceptibility to periodic crashes.

…The report has a series of astute recommendations on publishing details of land ownership, the right to roam and farming subsidies, but the ideas that really bite are about taxation.

…It [land] is static, unlike income or profit which can both be moved and hidden. It is usually owned as an inheritance rather than the upshot of clever entrepreneurial work. As a rule, a liberal democracy ought to tax work and enterprise as lightly as possible. At the moment 45 per cent of tax raised is levied on income.

… So let’s tax land. Land now accounts for 51 per cent of Britain’s net worth, compared with 26 per cent in Germany. The land owner receives a benefit whenever his patch is developed, even if the public exchequer picks up the bill. Some of that windfall value should be taxed…A tax of 1 per cent would raise £50 billion.

… If we were brave enough to levy a tax on land at 2 per cent, we could abolish council tax, stamp duty and business rates, fix the disaster of social care and pay for care for all children between the ages of two and four.

… Quite apart from the monies raised, land taxation would change the incentives for housebuilders, who are quite happy to sit on their land banks in the sure knowledge that the value will rise and the wealth will fall idly into their mouths as they sleep.

…there are some serious proposals in the report and they deserve better than the alternating silence and scorn with which they have been greeted.

(Philip Collins, The Times, 2019)

Some really interesting ideas are raised in this article. Unfortunately, you can bet they will be judged in the usual tribal manner by the politicians.

                            
Education and Mental Health

Siobhan Lowe, the head teacher of a 1,400 pupil academy in Surbiton, southwest London, voted “outstanding” by Ofsted, the schools inspectorate.

…When I was at school you were just naughty. Now you’re not naughty, you’ve got a disorder that is linked to mental health. Which I can understand. We know far more about it now, so we’re labelling it. When I was at school you were just unhappy or going through puberty or having your period. Now it’s been given a name. I often say to parents, “Is it the time of the month? Have you actually looked at the pattern?” and they say, “Oh, I never thought of that.”

So we’re medicalising things?

Yes.

Isn’t that a good thing?

No. It’s absolutely appalling, but the provision to sort these things out has been massively cut.                        

Nearly 40 per cent of Lowe’s sixth-formers and almost half of those embarking on GCSEs suffer from mental ill-health, she says including self-harm, eating disorders and depression.

The Confidante, William Gale (1823-1909)

Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

“They just find life really difficult.” She used to have six student support workers to help them; now there are three, and trying to get pupils referred for specialist help is a hopeless task.

“We’re almost playing pass the child. We go to the local authority with what the student needs – mentoring, coaching, one-on-one support, special education needs support – but they haven’t got the people. It’s like a roundabout. We put them in the system to ask for help, but the local authority hasn’t got it, so it kicks them back to us.”

…She will be cleaning the loos again the night after we meet and vacuuming and dusting. She can’t afford cleaners after hours, but the school is having an open evening and she wants it to look its best.

…“Every school in this borough is facing financial crisis,” she says. “I used to say to the girls, “You’re really lucky to be at this school, you’re getting a free education.” Well they’re not getting a free education now, are they?”

(The Times, 2019)

It was reported in the following day’s paper that Siobhan Lowe had received a £10,000 pay increase last year. I bet she’s worth every penny.