Fishing Quotas, Simon Armitage, The Rich List

                                                Fishing Quotas

Fishing Boats at Douelan, Henry Moret (1856-1913)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

…When you hear the word fisherman, what picture comes to mind? Someone who looks like Captain Birdseye: white beard, twinkly eyes, sitting on a little red boat chugging merrily across a sparkling sea. If so, your image of the industry might need updating. An investigation by Greenpeace last year revealed that 29% of the UK’s fishing quota is owned by five families, all of whom feature on the Sunday Times Rich List. A single Dutch multinational, operating a vast fishing ship, holds a further 24% of the English quota. The smallest boats – less than 10 metres long – comprise 79% of the fleet, but are entitled to catch just 2% of the fish.

(George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2019)

                    How was all that allowed to happen?



The Poet Laureate

Robert Browning, Rudolf Lehmann (1819-1905)

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London
[CC BY-NC-ND]

…Last week, Simon Armitage was announced as the new poet laureate, replacing Carol Ann Duffy.

Whether we need a poet laureate, I’m not sure. That we need poetry at this time, more than ever – of that I’m certain.

In an age in which we too often desire answers to be black and white, in which we flee from ambiguity and complexity, and in which we find it difficult to see beyond the immediate or to read beyond literal, poetry gives us permission to wonder, permission to find the extraordinary in the mundane, permission to look anew at that which we imagine cannot be seen differently, to wrestle with what may seem unsayable or unimaginable.

…Or, as the poet George Szirtes puts it, poetry “is not a pretty way of saying something straight, but the straightest way of saying something complex”.

(Kenan Malik, The Observer, 2019) 

Embrace confusion, ambiguity and complexity. Question, question, question.

The Sunday Times Rich List

…Resent them as I do, I would still rather that the rich bastards were in this country than not.

If we decided to tax them into exile then we would certainly have a more equal society here in Britain. What Jeremy Corbyn calls the 1 per cent would be gone, on the first private jet flight just before he goes to Buckingham Palace to receive his commission to form a government. The money will have been evacuated in a matter of seconds. But the 99 per cent would scarce notice any beneficial effects.

…The wealth would not be distributed because it would have long since scooted off to Monaco or the Gulf.

Thus, the chances are that the mega-rich would still be in safe possession of their unimaginable wealth. The world would be just as unequal. It might be that some of the very rich would stay in the UK, but simply employ smarter lawyers and accountants to help them avoid, though not evade, taxation. It was how the rich who felt some desire to come here behaved before Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair made the UK the go-to place for plutocrats.

…We should tax the rich, yes, but not to the point of securing a negative return for the state. Instead, we should encourage them to pay their taxes here, spend and employ and patronise the arts, and above all invest in British businesses. It is no good having a more equal society if everyone is poorer.

…We hardly give a thought as to how “the rich” made it on to their famous list – and how to create a society in which equality of opportunity is the focus of policy. How to get rich should be more intriguing than what the rich do when they get there.

It’s about equality of opportunity not outcome. Above all, that means education. But the best-educated workforce in the world needs an enterprise economy and incentives to want to achieve the best for themselves. Barring luck and inheritance, that’s how you get on the Rich List. So if you made your billions through hard work, skill, entrepreneurship, talent, brains, sacrifice, risk taking, then well done. Wish it was me.

(Sean O’Grady, The i, 2019)