It used to be a cult.
But now it’s a full-
blown religion
The Cafe 2
Colin Stewart and
John Cameron
The Cafe
I can tell you why there is no modern picture of distraining for rent (6 April). It is because one man, unaided by the great and the good, or even by the wee and the bad, had warrant sales stopped. His name is Tommy Sheridan and he’s in jail. Can you help us not to forget him by printing this?
Ian Hamilton QC
Behind the distress in Wilkie’s painting (6 April) of 1815 is an economic system whose corruption was exposed by the classical economist David Ricardo in exactly the same year, 1815, in his famous ‘Essay on Profit’ (www.socserv.
mcmaster.ca).
Ricardo’s theory of rent, there explained, showed that, in Adam Smith’s words: ‘landlords love to reap where they never sowed’. His conclusion was that the Corn Laws (which favoured the landlord class at the expense of the workers) should be repealed, and that land rents (both on farm and urban land) are the most natural, efficient and equitable of all potential sources of state (rather than private) revenue, whereas taxes on our labour are the most unjust.
Roger Sandilands
One of the reasons that artists don’t paint social commentary is that it’s unlikely to sell. Artists need to make a living. But art should challenge and ask questions, it should tell it how it is. It’s a challenge not just to make art for art’s sake and to make art that is not just bland and mindless or pretty, like much of the media out there today. At least for some artists it is!
I think it was the great Ben Shahn, a US political artist, who said that in times of trouble, poverty and strife, ‘artists revert to painting flowers’…it seems he was right.
Edinburgh in particular is incredibly conservative when it comes to art galleries and the kind of work they exhibit. There are many rich folks here who will only buy pretty art, or art by the well-known names. I expect that art schools are partly responsible and the emphasis is on selling work these days.
Heather Wilson
Are we all about to
become the
walking wounded?
Alf Young
Ed Balls called it Black Wednesday. The shadow chancellor was talking about the start of another tax year yesterday and the impact a host of new tax and benefit changes will have on the living standards of millions of British families. The coalition insists that, on average, only the richest 20% of families will really feel the pain. The other 80%, again on average, will gain a little.
Balls cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies in his defence, suggesting a family with two kids on just £18,000 a year will lose out to the tune of £1,560 a year. That calculation includes the impact of January’s rise in VAT to 20%. The coalition’s claim of an 20:80 split in where the pain will fall does not.
However, just how Black Wednesday, the 6th of April 2011, actually turns out to be for any of us will not be determined by think tank number-crunching or political claim and counter-claim. Given the byzantine complexity of Britain’s tax and benefit system and the sweeping variety of individual family circumstances across these islands, the era of austerity which really got into its stride yesterday will be coloured, most of all, by how we each feel about it after it has hit us.
Another new IFS report suggests that, since the start of the 60s, the median British household has got used to its real income growing by around 5% every three years. But since the banking crash and the recession that followed, between 2008 and 2011, that median household income has contracted by 1.6%. From yesterday onwards, if we factor in not just the tax and benefit changes or the VAT rise, but higher prices for everything from fuel to food, frozen wage packets, lost jobs and squeezed public services, real household spending power will almost certainly contract even more.
That IFS study suggests we could be heading back to the 1970s. The governor of the Bank of England has ventured we could be experiencing the most sustained squeeze on our living standards since the 1920s. Unsurprisingly many heavily-indebted households are spending less in the shops. More and more leading retail voices are predicting very hard times over the next two years. Some are even predicting a protracted retail recession.
The fashion chain All Saints, which fills its windows with arrays of redundant industrial sewing machines, has until the end of this week to find a new injection of working capital or face administration. At the end of 1970s the closure of the sprawling Singer plant in Clydebank was one of the early signals of Scotland’s deindustrialisation.
Three decades on might the lights going out behind silent sewing machines in an imposing fashion store in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street (that started life as a bank incidentally) signal a comparable spasm in our current patterns of consumption and blow a hole in the principal engine of gross domestic product in our post-industrial economy?
A U-turn on selling off state-owned forests has been followed by a panic re-think on radical NHS reform south of the border. A hurried defence review has left our armed forces struggling to deliver political choices in Libya.
