The Autumn Statement?

Remember Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, calculated by an enormous supercomputer over a period of 7.5 million years? Like the enormous supercomputer's answer '42' the government is not going to like the answer because it has been asking the wrong question.

How can we create an environment where we can deliver income tax Black Friday give-aways just before the election so we can get in again?

The question the government should be asking is, how can we regenerate demand? They don't ask this question for two reasons. 

1. They won't like the answer
2. They see low paid working families benefiting as being anti-recovery.

The answer to our problems, in part, is to increase demand. After this has been achieved, the government can quite rightly focus on reducing the deficit and debt. 

For demand to increase, a very sizeable number of extra people have to be earning a lot more than the National Minimum Wage. The 2014 (current rate) is £6.50, with 18-20 year olds receiving £5.13, under 18 year olds receiving £3.79 and apprentices receiving £2.73 per hour.

Add to that, the number of people on either temporary, short-term and of course zero hour contracts, then it is small wonder that such a large number of people are effectively frozen out of the plan to move Britain forward. A Britain fuelled only by Black Fridays. And it is small wonder that the economy is so slow to move out of recession into a recovery, of sorts.

There is a compelling business argument to move people up, in these income brackets, to receive what is called the Living Wage. The UK Living Wage for outside of London is currently £7.85 per hour. The London Living Wage is currently £9.15 per hour.

Paying the London Living Wage is not only morally right, but makes good business sense too. There are now over 2,200 employees working for companies with contracts from the GLA who are benefiting from the London Living Wage.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

Even Boris doesn't view this as unpalatable, it's just that all these years employers have been claiming it would bankrupt the country and also cost jobs. That seems to have changed. For productivity to change, workers need to see that there is a future for them. Otherwise, why bother? They can surely get more on benefits? The government's argument seems to be that benefits are far too attractive!

An inconvenient truth for the government is that sadly, working for a living, in many cases, isn't not only not attractive, but also not viable. When you are lucky enough to leave benefits behind and get a job, you are pushed towards a financial cliff of around a £300 to £600 shortfall while you have your benefit stopped and you wait for your first salary. Looking at it from a coalition government perspective, the best plan is to cut social benefits on the pretext that these are too high. It doesn't occur that salaries and wages might be too low.

Just as we think we're hearing a new spring of worker appreciation from Boris, winter draws on from the CBI.

Labour’s rather modest commitment to raising the national minimum wage (NMW) to £8 per hour by 2020 should it win the next general election, has been condemned by business groups like the CBI.

This is at the same time where bankers are given millions of pounds in bonuses to deliver a bank from 2011 to 2012 with no significant improvement whatever. The Libor scandal has further undermined trust in banks. Barclays has been singled out for fiddling the Libor rate to increase its profits. 

The deputy governor of the Bank of England went so far to call the Libor market a "cesspit" which seems to imply that Barclays is not the only bank "at it!" These same people who line their own pockets also seem bent on denying hard working people of the chance of earning decent money for extra effort, These bonus laden bankers, who often also get their income tax paid for them as well, seem oblivious to the thought of even 'setting a moral example'. 

Contrast this to families who have had their salaries frozen for 5 years, it is clear that 'setting a moral example' is something that the low paid, hard working people alone must comply with.

A little bit less 'we're all in this together' then?

Google, Starbucks and Amazon avoid paying any UK tax at all, due to fancy fiscal footwork. Starbucks alone paid £20 million back to the UK government in 2012. So out of their $13 billion revenue they will get to keep $12.9 billion. We Brits really drive a hard bargain!

Suppose the Chancellor succeeds in taxing all these companies' profits at just 10% each? (Just under half of the income tax % of someone earning £25,000 per year).

That's still a lot of new hospitals and schools.Also libraries we could re-open (that the Coalition government closed from 2010 onwards).

Wouldn't the government be doing us all a favour as tax payers if they helped the poor keep more of their income? Not enough income for poor people means that we force them to choose the rip-off pay day loan companies that are unbelievably allowed to advertise on ITV with interest rates of 1700% APR. These legal loan sharks, suck any benefit that the government may have given them. 

The government could also do the community a power of good by: 

• injecting cash into development grants for licenced Credit Unions.
• taking away the licences of all payday loan companies who charge above 40% APR.

If it sticks in the craw of this coalition government that they're actually giving a helping hand to low paid, hard working people, then they could at least console themselves that it would actually do the demand-starved businesses in this country a big favour. 

Consider:

Britain should move toward being a fair and equal opportunity society  

'A fair days' pay for a fair days' work'.

Surely, if we did that, won't we all be better off in the end?

Happiness

Our government wants to know if we’re happy.

This is refreshing news.

I can’t recall any previous government before asking us this question. Our governments seem to be permanently locked into a continuous battle of capital versus labour. Occasionally, they say they've seen a "third way" - but I notice that it's still all rates of mortgages, unemployment that figure in their election leaflets, defining their successes. So it's not suprising that we’re still left with the same old questions. We still have a society that bases itself on citizens being enriched by hard currency, alone and not being happy, after all.

“Are we happy?”

“Is being happy what we’re supposed to be here for?”

“Are we supposed to be happy?”

We, in the west, are pretty sold on the idea, that happiness isn’t about money. I’m not at all sure about that. As someone who’s never had much money, I can tell you that there is little happiness in being poor. I have been happy, in spite of being poor. If I suddenly became rich, I predict that I would use money to free myself and those who I love, from the stress and worry that goes with not having enough money to pay the bills.

We babyboomers were not poor in a sense that our parent’s generation understood. Being poor, these days, is often a very relative state. Our parents did not have enough money to buy enough food. Actually, pretty well all parents in those days were poor. Our generation feels deprived when we can’t send our kids to school in the same trainers. So we’re aware of a bigger rich/poor gap. The pain we feel is not because we don’t have the same, it’s because we are made to feel excluded because we’re told we have failed to have the same.

If our society were more “poor-friendly” we would feel no pain about not having the same material wealth and things as our richer peers. We would simply be living different lives and we wouldn’t be feeling that our lives were somehow “inferior” just because we were poor.

Being a socialist, I am much more inclined to believe that if we were brave enough to try for a much more equal society, not only poorer people would be happier, but rich people would be too. Poor families can often be very creative when it comes to being happy. An evening with a box full of clothes, where people can dress up as a pirate or a policeman can be sometimes surprisingly wonderful. We are truly playing.

That's not to say that I wouldn’t turn my nose up at the latest Nintendo Wii, Playsation or X-Box, but neither would I turn my nose up at the box full of pirate costumes either. Or a game of "shove ha'penny".

Consider these quotes about happiness:

“Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.”

Groucho Marx

“The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.”

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The surprising thing is that each of those quotes could’ve been written by the other author. And yet, how differently we view Groucho Marx from Tenzin Gyatso the,14th Dalai Lama. We appear to be very much in unison about what happiness really is.

I can bear this wisdom out personally.

"Have no friends not equal to yourself."

Confucious (551 - 497 BC) Chinese philosopher.

Nothing is more miserable than when you don’t feel equal to someone who you’re trying to be friends with.

My life has been very varied. I have probably done it all, compared to a lot of folk. I have been married, and now, I am single again. My single life is not spent in miserable isolation, which is what many people have wondered about, when I tell them about my singleness. Perhaps I am happy being single and living alone, with no intention to become part of a couple again, precisely because I have had experience of being married. I have, like my mother, spent most of my life, living a life where I am often alone, so emotionally, that I am used to it and now have the emotional intelligence to actually relish my aloneness.

As an atheist, my idea of happiness is not seeing this life as a prelude to a better life to come. Suppose there isn't one? Wouldn't we feel cheated about.... Oh, I suppose we wouldn't know whether or not we had lived our lives not in a way that we could have chosen, had we known what would be in store for us, if you see what I mean?

A terminally ill patient usually lives life to the full. Somehow a mental, emotional focus, that eludes many of us, takes over. They do say live your day as though it were your last, don't they?

Aloneness is not interchangeable with unhappiness. It’s simply a different way of living. I found that out from a friend who is truly inspiring on lone living at its best. She packs her art, her love of creating it, learning all about history and making it her business to know about the fascinating city she lives in. Learning and the excitement you feel as it evolves you, really rocks her world. You could say that she is living life to the full, as though it were her last day.

Happiness is universal. The pathways to it are myriad. Mine is music, writing and astronomy. One never really knows why we are here. Created, evolved, sent here, who knows? It's a fair bet that while we are here, the pursuit of happiness is probably a pretty damn good shot at guessing the right reason as to why we're here. And even if that's the correct reason, well, who cares?

The government may well define happiness in a completely different way to me. So now, if the government really are serious about wanting to know whether I'm happy, what do I put on the flippin' form?